Hacker News Reader

Comment by eck | Hacker News Reader

> 30. But this Order does not apply the open Internet rules to interconnection.

TLDR: Relax, Comcast. You can still intentionally let all your transit ports saturate every evening so Netflix will blow unless they pay you to peer. Which is what you really wanted to do.

View on HN

But Netflix (or their service provider) probably should be paying to peer. The problem is that Comcast is also in the media game so they have an incentive to use the peering as leverage against a competitor. An ISP should be able to make technical decisions on how they connect to other networks. Unfortunately the big oligopo-ISPs make those technical decisions based on desires other than having an optimal network.

excellent point and a reason why, despite my libertarian leanings, i am happy to see regulation here.

My point is that they ban explicit prioritization yet ISPs can achieve the exact same result through network topology. It's a huge loophole.

Put another way, if I pay Comcast for XX mbps, it should be possible for some company to send me data at XX mbps without paying Comcast. Otherwise what exactly am I paying for?

One solution would be to force last-mile ISPs to designate a location for each customer (for example "all Manhattan subscribers => 60 Hudson St") where Netflix etc could peer without settlement only with those customers. Comcast doesn't have to carry Netflix's traffic across the country, just from the nearest IX to the customer. If the customer monthly fees don't cover that, what exactly are they paying for? Any VOD offerings from Comcast would be required to routed through the same points, without routing preference over 3rd party traffic like Netflix.

In some sense, that would be a light version of forced cable leasing, since instead of movies, a service could offer a vpn/tunnel to general internet access with better transit provisioning than the last-mile ISP.

I'm not sure they've even banned explicit prioritization. I've only seen where they ban paid prioritization. They seem to have left it to be decided on a case-by-case basis what to do about claimed good-faith "reasonable network management" practices that have nasty side effects.

I see your point but have you considered that Comcast is the only one who controls the last mile routing to any specific customer? By definition that is why the route is called "last mile." Since Comcast controls the ingress to every household subscribed to it, it also controls the traffic rate and can throttle it if need be. However, if Comcast wants its argument to hold that throttling protects network congestion, then it must also throttle the source of the ingress traffic. Otherwise it's just barricading traffic from its destination, ultimately creating a bottleneck that solves no problem.

OK, I want to send you XX mbps and you want to receive it. You pay Comcast. Am I now entitled to a free connection?

It seems that the real complication is the Comcast has such a huge marketshare that they don't need to be competitive on peering. Whereas if they had real competition, then subscribers would drop Comcast and go with an ISP that peers better.

In that situation Comcast has two choices: they can receive that traffic via free peering or they can buy transit to receive it.

Cool, so you buy 1Gbps from Comcast. Then request 1Gbps from 10 different networks, each day, for a month. So you're saying Comcast should setup free peering on the order of 300Gbps just to service you?

And buying transit is even cooler! Let's do this, you go signup for 1Mbps from Comcast, then I'll put a server on my own ISP and you can go force Comcast to buy from me. I charge $1000/Kbps.

There are many ISPs that offer transit, so Comcast can choose which one(s) to buy from.

The Comcast/Netflix intentional congestion thing actually happened and caused actual harm, so I'm not sure why you're responding with trolling.

I know. So why is Comcast obligated to connect to discount ISPs like Cogent? Just because Netflix decided to buy connectivity from them? What's stopping Netflix from buying connectivity from MyISP (who only has a single FastE connection to L3), then demanding Comcast peer or pay with me? What's so special about Cogent, or HE?

I don't think Comcast should be obligated to connect to any particular ISP. But every ISP along the chain needs to provision enough capacity that there isn't congestion.

> I want to send you XX mbps and you want to receive it. You pay Comcast. Am I now entitled to a free connection?

Yes, provided you deliver it to the designated IX for my location and pay whatever applicable meet-me-room fees. Realistically only CDNs are going to do that for the O(100s) of locations in the country.

The alternative is to "negotiate" with Comcast. Since your BATNA is losing access to a huge fraction of Internet subscribers, Comcast is going to calculate your business's profit per megabyte and demand 90% of that. They know what Netflix costs. They know how much bandwidth the average Netflix customer uses.

A peer connection in the same city as the subscriber is literally the cheapest traffic for Comcast's network to handle. If their rates don't cover bandwidth to that, they should raise their rates.

I'm pro "net neutrality" in principle, but I'm genuinely curious how we expect to achieve true "net neutrality" given how the internet works. Obviously the internet is not a fully connected network, and we don't have infinite bandwidth.

Could an ISP could decide to only peer with networks that happen to throttle Netflix, for example? Do we expect the government to force every ISP to peer with any network that wishes to peer with them, for free? Maybe at the "market" rate?

Now that the FCC is grading ISPs on packet loss, intentional congestion isn't going to work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com