Comcast, Level3 and You | Hacker News Reader

Comcast, Level3 and You

voxel.net

35 pointswavesound16 comments

This guy is spot on. He actually understands the history and architecture of the Internet, as well as the business and technical reasons for peering.

To summarize his post: Comcast has essential grown to the point where they can demand payment from content providers to peer with their network, otherwise their customer's traffic travels over intentionally congested paid links through their upstream provider, Tata. This sucks because it disrupts the natural order of the Internet being essentially a "joint venture" between private companies that operate the component networks that make up the Internet.

On the other hand, if the crux of the complaint is, "we asked Comcast for 20+ interconnection ports, and they only gave us 6 for free", it's hard to feel like this is simply Comcast being abusive.

I love this story. It's so complicated! Did you follow the links about how L3 did roughly the same thing to Cogent last year?

I see it more as "If Comcast doesn't connect these ports to us, we're just going to have to send the traffic either through our existing congested ports or Tata's congested ports, which is worse for everyone". It's really not clear to me what the right solution to this is.

That's absolutely true, but what if, at the end of the day: L3 walked up to Comcast and said, "please give us 20+ additional ports for free", and what everyone is up in arms about is that Comcast said "no, not for free we won't". They're Comcast's ports!

Perhaps Level 3 should have let the existing ports congest and waited for Comcast to ask for more capacity. It seems like Level 3 is being penalized for trying to proactively expand bandwidth capacity to meet anticipated demand.

Pretty much. Where does the logic here end? Which companies have the prerogative to come up to Comcast and ask for free ports? ISPs? What about ISPs that are acting as agents for individual companies? If that's fine, why not cut out the middleman? Can the next super-popular video site just ask Comcast for ports directly?

I have no opinion about this stuff, I just think it's really interesting.

It costs them both money though. I doubt L3 gets a significantly better price on switch gear than Comcast does. Let's be serious though... peering itself is dirt ass cheap. Comcast's attitude should be to deliver the best experience to their users whom are the reason they can even turn the lights on. Peering with L3 ensures Netflix streams are delivered with decent service levels, which satisfies their customers. If Comcast has to build out extra capacity to shuttle Netflix streams from the network borders to their customers' homes, that's Comcast's problem, not L3s. The same rules should apply to L3 though, if indeed they are screwing Cogent on the other end.

Everyone has cooperated amazingly well thus far, and these few greedy fucks are starting to turn something that has never been an issue before into a big deal. Ultimately it will probably culminate in fucking us all with some kind of draconian FCC regulation and/or ridiculous network issues that will drive prices up.

Doesn't this ultimately mean that bandwidth for content providers should be free? After all, the reason Comcast "should" add this capacity is to satisfy demand for Netflix content. L3 is just acting as their agent. Is it the case that then that the next Netflix should just be able to demand bandwidth directly from Comcast?

Supposedly Google is already there, although I suspect it's more like offering than demanding. 6% of Internet traffic is from Google, and you can either pay someone to send that to you or you can receive it directly from Google without payment. Note that Google is not really getting anything for free since they have to carry the traffic over the GBone to each ISP.

It's not "free" though. It's just a switch port to Comcast. It costs Comcast almost nothing. They still have to deliver the content anyway. At the tier 1 level, the Internet has always worked as a "you pay the cost for transferring packets on your own network" basis. It'd be one thing if Comcast was trying to charge L3 for carrying traffic to other networks, but Comcast is trying to extort fees for carrying packets on it's own network to it's own customers. That's messed up.

Comcast's customers already pay AT LEAST $0.18/GB, but it's more around _NINETY CENTS_ a gigabyte, considering most of their customers pay around $45/mo and use less than 50GB of bandwidth per month.

Comcast disagrees on how much that port costs. I haven't done anything close to backbone-y stuff since 1996, but back then, the equivalent port wasn't cheap.

But that's besides the point. I keep asking this question:

Stipulate that L3 isn't actually an ISP in this scenario (whether you agree or not). They're instead an agent for Netflix; they are literally Netflix's outsourced network infrastructure.

If it is the case that Comcast should reasonably be expected to give L3/Netflix a free interconnect...

... then for whom shouldn't that be expected? Why are YC companies paying for bandwidth? Because, as I understand it, they do pay for bandwidth; significantly.

A gigabit ethernet switch port in even the most expensive scenario I can think of would be about $1000. In 1996 it was all FDDI and HSSI ports, which were an order of magnitude more expensive than GigE equipment is these days.

There is very much a precedent for the scenario you describe: Comcast has direct peering agreements with Google. While I can't presume to know if it's settlement-free, I'm almost certain it is. Google's business model, especially YouTube, depends on it.

Your conclusion is a little off kilter. Peering is cheap because they do these types of interconnects in these carrier hotels, and as we all know, running a Cat5 cable through a building is cheap. However, space in these carrier hotels is absurdly expensive because of the demand. This is fine if you just have a few racks of equipment and ship all the packets out over WAN links to your datacenters, which is pretty much the status quo. Not just any average joe is going to be able to setup shop in these places.

YC companies pay for bandwidth because it's cheaper to do that then it is to build out a network. It's the same reason they don't build datacenters, own office space, etc. Most don't even own or operate dedicated servers anymore. Peering works at certain levels of network scale, but below that, somewhat pointless from a business/financial perspective.

Check out SoftLayer's peering page: http://www.softlayer.com/network/peering If peering was as expensive and as uncommon as Comcast claims, why would SoftLayer need a special page for it?

I think it's more about costs than expectations. Peering has high fixed costs (for both sides) — with transit one contract gets you access to the whole Internet but for peering you have to negotiate and configure stuff for each peer. If one content provider is sending gigabits of traffic to one ISP, they can probably both save money by connecting directly. Besides Justin.tv, I don't know of any YC companies that are that large.

Here's a detailed analysis of the business case: http://drpeering.net/white-papers/A-Business-Case-For-Peerin...

I just discovered a similar old discussion about YouTube: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=573281

The issue for me as a Comcast subscriber is, "WTF am I paying for then?"

Silly me, I thought that paying Comcast and having them provide me a decent quality service was what their high-speed Internet offering was about; instead, I am just a pawn whose traffic can be shunted off to a deliberately-congested, crappy connection, then held hostage to force other companies to pay up for the access I am already paying for.

This is an awesome post. Here's an accompanying awesome NANOG message:

http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Nov/1058

Thanks for the link; that's the most succinct breakdown of the neutrality situation I've read to date. Still working my way through the thread.

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