Comcast, Level3 and You(voxel.net) |
Comcast, Level3 and You(voxel.net) |
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.
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.
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?
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.
I have no opinion about this stuff, I just think it's really interesting.
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.
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.
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?
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