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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the opposite of what you are talking about - there is no preference being provided for Netflix traffic. There is no charge going to the customer for access to Netflix.

This is simply the case of a provider, discovering that Cogent provides poor transit services, realizes that you actually have to pay in order to get good Internet peering. This has always been the case on the Internet.

As long as Comcast treats all traffic the same regardless of source, destination, packet type, etc.. I'm fine with their behavior here.

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According to the article, "the average speeds of Netflix's prime-time streams to Comcast subscribers had dropped 27% since October"

I guess the question is, did all other traffic see the same drop? And what changes in their network would cause this?

Exactly - was it the case that ALL cogent traffic being blocked - from everything that I've read, it was. Cogent's circuits were just overloaded. They had sold transit to Netflix that they were unable to provide.

Netflix customers, in this situation, can point their fingers at Netflix (who, in turn, can point them at Cogent).

If Cogent provided 1 Gigabit of transit to Netflix, but didn't have circuits with which to connect Netflix to their customers, well, It will be interesting to see what kind of Liquidated Damages Netflix wrote into their contract with Cogent. Maybe it will be enough to pay their peering fees with Comcast.

Why should Comcast provide transit at a a reasonable price to Cogent when Cogent hosts data that competes with Comcast's own services? Their uneven traffic argument is a relic of the telephone era -- Comcast's customers pay them for 20 Mbps of bandwidth to services they want, but what they get is just 20 Mbps to speedtest.net. It should be on Comcast to ensure their network can get their customers the data they want.

> It should be on Comcast to ensure their network can get their customers the data they want.

In your opinion why doesn't the same responsibility apply to Cogent?

Sonic and Google Fiber manage it fine. This is clearly a case of Comcast trying to get paid from both ends and screwing their customer with poor access to the services they want in the meantime, which conveniently nudges their customers to their own competing services.

>It should be on Comcast to ensure their network can get their customers the data they want.

I agree in spirit, but how do you make the distinction? If Cogent has poor connectivity to the wider Internet, is it on Comcast to fix that?

Cogent has been trying to upgrade their connection to Comcast and Comcast has been stalling working with Cogent for months. It's pretty clear cut in this case. A rule when the CDN and the ISP already have a direct connection is not overly unreasonable. Comcast customers are requesting a large amount of data from Cogent, Cogent tries to work with Comcast to improve the existing connection, Comcast refuses.

Verizon customers have had an ongoing similar issue, also with Cogent peering. As I've stated in comments past, I had to threaten to cancel our business FIOS plan because, with 50% packet loss, the route to one of our colocation facilities was effectively unusable.

Actually yes, anecdotally. I have a dedicated server in a DC and Comcast at home, and my SCP speeds went down over the last few months to the extent that I had to move DCs to another with no Cogent.

Tata is also spectacularly bad with Comcast.

What if, say, ISP1 and ISP2 both have shitty performance of netflix and then netflix pay for ISP1 to make it better. They do not pay ISP2. So, essentially netflix is available only for ISP1 and not ISP2. That sounds like that the parent comment is saying and what could happen here.

Why would Netflix want to do that?

Because maybe ISP2 wants more money, or Netflix can't afford to pay everyone off.

ISP2 will see their netflix-using customers leaving for ISP1 in droves if that's the case.

What if ISP2's customers don't have access to ISP1? Given the state of our broadband infrastructure that's MORE than likely.

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