http://www.cogentco.com/en/news/press-releases/631-cogent-of...
Pretty sure Comcast didn't take them up on the offer. Doing so would have fixed the issue and Netflix wouldn't be writing checks to Comcast now.
http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious...
EDIT: Also worth noting that Netflix has to pay every month (which is what Comcast wants) rather than Cogent just giving them $10k once for new hardware (not as delicious as lots more money!)
Edit: I'm just explaining why a hardware upgrade was besides the points that were being made. These are the facts regardless of who you think is in the right. The argument was over bandwidth usage, not hardware upgrades. Is anyone disagreeing with that?
Trying to boil this down to "Netflix is sending a lot more than it's receiving" is to completely ignore WHY this is happening and really makes the debate useless. Symmetric (or nearly symmetric) peering agreements made sense when everyone had symmetric connections like modems, ISDN, T1, T3, etc.
When the majority of connections are not symmetric, it makes no sense at all.
Again, remember that Netflix isn't DOSing Comcast. Any packets that Netflix sends to Comcast's network was at the request of one of Comcast's (and Netflix's!) customers.
I'm not saying that an average consumer is sending as much as they receive, but Comcast doesn't only have consumers, they also serve websites. That should balance out for small websites in and out of their network.
In that case many of those would be Comcast customers, and peering would end up equal.
Netflix has a problem because it's an outlier. I'd like to see the chart without Netflix and see if comcast still receives more than it sends then.
NOT HARDLY!
They would mostly be customers of small datacenters in various places all around the country, and thus, customers of Cogent and Level3.
Datacenters generally go for tier1 bandwidth, not consumer ISP bandwidth.
Look at the plans that they offer on their website. The fastest upload I can find is 20Mbps for $200/mo. http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/plans...
That's $10/meg which is A LOT.
Three years ago if you were willing to buy in bulk, you could get bandwidth for as low as $0.65/meg as this HN user points out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3892854 Based on his comments I suspect that you could get it for less than $0.50/meg today, maybe less than $0.25/meg.
Sure looks like Comcast wanting to have its cake and eat it too.
Why should Netflix be able to do that and not smaller sites?
And my question was serious. If you think that what Netflix was asking for should be given as a matter of principle, then it shouldn't matter how large they are, and absolutely every website should never have to pay for bandwidth again. What exactly am I missing?
When a Comcast customer uses their Comcast internet connection to use Netflix, or Google, or HN, or any other site, it is that customer who is using Comcast's bandwidth. It is not Netflix, Google, or HN using it.
And Netflix has its own CDN, which wants to connect directly to last-mile ISPs. In that setup, they aren't paying anyone other than the end ISP.
>When a Comcast customer uses their Comcast internet connection to use Netflix, or Google, or HN, or any other site, it is that customer who is using Comcast's bandwidth. It is not Netflix, Google, or HN using it.
This is pointless semantics. If I send you something, we can either call it me using the bandwidth, or you using it. Doesn't change my point here.
And why shouldn't it be free? I, the Comcast customer, requested this data. Why should Netflix have to pay for the last mile when that's what I pay for already?
Why does Comcast get to charge for both ends of the pipe when they only own one side?
The data was paid for by Comcast's customers. I pay Comcast for the service of transport of packets from my network to the internet, and from the internet to my network. That's the whole point of an ISP.
Not really. If I mail something to you, I pay the postage. That's how mail works.
When I connect to the internet, if I request something from you, we both pay our respective ISPs to make it happen. That's how the internet works. And the limit to connection speed has historically always been the last mile on one side or the other.
So what Comcast did is pushed the congestion from the last mile to a peering point by purposefully not upgrading the peering point. And predictably, what happened is that the last mile wasn't the limiting factor anymore. According to 20-30 years of internet history, that's breaking the internet. Maybe not Comcast's contract with their customers (since they can unilaterally change that at any time) but definitely in terms of expectations.
That would be like gas stations suddenly advertising the pre-tax price on their signs only once you're done pumping $30 worth of gas they charge your card for $40 because of the taxes. Might not be explicitly illegal since so many other products are advertised on the pre-tax price. But it would be breaking with decades of convention. People might get really pissed as a result.
Sadly few of us have options to get internet aside from Comcast, where as in the gas station scenario we could easily stop patronizing BP or Texaco or Shell or whoever. That also gets people riled up. And rightly so!
Comcast sells asymmetric connectivity that's skewed as far as 10:1 download vs upload. And then they claim that peering should be symmetric as if they aren't a huge contributor to the asymmetry.
All Internet traffic has more download than upload (for the end-consumer). This is literally why ISPs offer faster download speeds in end-consumer packages than upload speeds - they know that consumers will need to download more than they upload.
In vector calculus, this is known as divergence. Traffic on the highway has divergence of 0, meaning that if you draw a closed loop of any shape, over the course of a day/week, the number of cars crossing that loop in both directions (in/out) will be the same.[0][1] Internet traffic does not have zero divergence, because bits are interchangeable and easy to create, destroy, and copy (whereas cars and humans are not).
Comcast isn't dumb. They know this is the way the Internet works. They just also know that it's more profitable to pretend they don't and extort money based on a false definition of "equality".
[0] https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/just-what-does-it-mean...
[1] It's not exactly the same, due to births, deaths, and migration, but you get the idea.
Yes, but they also have commercial customers that send out lots of data. Netflix is an outlier all by itself, outweighing the connection.
Who?
From what I can tell even their commercial offerings are heavily asymmetric to downloading: http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/plans...
Download / Upload (in Mbps)
16 / 3
50 / 10
75 / 15
100 / 20
150 / 20
So who are these companies that use Comcast to send a lot?
And as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'd like to see a chart of data in and out excluding Netflix and large companies. If the problem only affects them or other large companies (like Youtube, Apple, Microsoft, etc, which all pay for direct connections), but not small websites, then I think that would support my argument.
Storage / Transfer / Price
10MB / 100MB / Free
300GB / Unlimited / $20
400GB / Unlimited / $40
500GB / Unlimited / $80
You must realize that these are absolutely NOT true commercial offerings. They don't even list what your commit bandwidth is!
Also you can't run your own applications there! Do you really think Netflix runs off of a shared server like this? They're a HUGE AWS customer running many thousands of VMs. How do you access control things, how do you deploy your code, how do you do basically ANYTHING with this offering from Comcast? I suspect that you don't.
Here are some legitimate commercial offerings: http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated
If you notice, they have a page dedicated to their network. What familiar names do we find on this page? Cogent and Level3! http://www.hostgator.com/network
Notice that there is no mention ANYWHERE of ANY COMPANY that might even a LITTLE BIT be considered a consumer ISP. Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, etc, none of them are mentioned.
From the page:
>We utilize a wide array of network carriers including Level 3, nLayer, Comcast, Cogent Communications, and Hurricane Electric.
Take that back?
I think it is telling, however, that Comcast's logo isn't anywhere on the bottom of the page with all their partner logos. And I think it is also telling that it's only Comcast and not all the consumer ISPs.
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/feamster/why-your-netflix...