https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/peering/
The actual bandwidth is significant though, even compared to something like YouTube
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/these-graphs-show-the-impa...
[0] https://qz.com/688033/netflix-launched-this-handy-speed-test...
You could argue then that Comcast wasn't upgrading their saturated transit links, which they weren't with Level 3, but to assume that every single ISP should provide free pipes to companies is absurd.
Comcast threatened to throttle customers' bandwidth, refusing to deliver the speeds they had promised. The data was available to Comcast, customers had paid for the service of delivering that data, but Comcast wouldn't provide the full service they had sold unless Netflix paid them more.
The deeper issue is that Comcast is lying to their customers, promising them more bandwidth than they are able to deliver, so when Comcast's customers wanted to use all the bandwidth they bought to watch Netflix, Comcast couldn't afford to honor their promises.
But Comcast has a monopoly in the markets they serve, while Netflix exists in a competitive market, so Comcast got away with it.
If you know of any ISP that would give me 100+ Gbps connectivity for my business, please let me know as I'd love to eliminate my bandwidth costs.
I thought we moved past that model after AOL
Why does one end of this example have to pay both ISPs in your view?
Take for example, if say Verizon decided to charge more for bandwidth to Netflix... if Netflix said "no" and went with another provider, then Verizon's customer's would suffer from worse access times to Netflix.
Verizon has the advantage in that they have a huge customer base that no one wants to piss off Verizon. So it cuts both ways. Bandwidth becomes not a cost at this scale, but instead a moat.
ISPs would have been more than happy to show the middle finger to the WFH engineers, but not to the binge-watching masses.
Couldn't agree more.
We see the opposite when it comes to broadband monopolies: "barely good enough" DSL infrastructure, congested HFC, and adversarial relationships w.r.t. subscriber privacy and experience.
When it became worthwhile to invest in not just peering but also last-mile because poor Netflix/YouTube/Disney+/etc performance was a reason for users to churn away, they invested.
This isn't to say that this is all "perfect" for consumers either, but this tension has only been good for consumers vs. what we had in the 90's and early-mid 00's.
I have been spoiled with symmetric 1Gbps up and down fiber for a few years, and using the internet is like turning on the electric or gas or water, you do not ever have to think about it.
I heard they are paying something between $0.20 (eu/us) to $10 (exotic) per TB based on the region of the world where the traffic is coming from
Amazon and most Cloud providers do overcharge for b/w. You can buy a OVH/Hetzner type box with a guaranteed un-metered 1 Gbps public bandwidth for ~ $120/month easily, which if fully utilized is equivalent 325TB / month or $3-4/TB, completely ignoring the 8/16 core bare metal server and attached storage you also get. This is SMB/ self-service prices, you can get much deals with basic negotiating and getting into a contract with a DC.
One thing to remember though not all bandwidth are equal, CSPs like AWS provide a lot of features such as very elastic scale up on-demand, a lot of protection up to L4 and advanced SDN under the hood to make sure your VMs can leverage the b/w, that is computationally expensive and costly.
The inbound data stream to fill the cache of the appliance is rate limited and time limited - see https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600356180... The actual inbound data to the appliance will be higher than the fill because not everything is cached.
The outbound stream from the appliance serves consumers. In New Zealand for example, Netflix has 40Gbps of connectivity to a peering exchange in Auckland. https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/97
So although total Netflix bandwidth to consumers is massive, it has little in common with the bandwidth you pay for at Amazon.
Disclaimer: I am not a network engineer.
They're likely paying even less. $0.20/TB ($0.0002/GB) is aggressive but at their scale, connectivity and per-machine throughput, it's lower still.
A few points to take home:
- They [Netflix, YT, etc] model cost by Mbps - that is, the cost to deliver traffic at a given peak. You have to provision for peaks, or take a reliability/quality of experience hit, and for on-demand video your peaks at usually 2x your average.
- This can effectively be "converted" into a $/TB rate but that's an abstraction, and not a productive way to model. Serving (e.g.) 1000PB (1EB) into a geography at a peak of 3Tbps per day is much cheaper than serving it at a peak of 15Tbps.
- Netflix, more so than most others, benefits from having a "fixed" corpus at any given moment. Their library is huge, but (unlike YouTube) users aren't uploading content, they aren't doing live streaming or sports events, etc - and thus can intelligently place content to reduce the need to cache fill their appliances. Cheaper to cache fill if you can trickle most of it during the troughs as you don't need a big a backbone, peering links, etc. to do so.
- This means that Netflix (rightfully!) puts a lot of effort into per-machine throughput, because they want to get as much user-facing throughput as possible from the given (space, power, cost) of a single box. That density is also attractive to ISPs, as it means that every "1RU of space" they give Netflix has a better ROI in terms of network cost reductions vs. others, esp. when combined with the fact that "Netflix works great" is an attractive selling point for users.