Comcast, Level3 and You

35 points by wavesound 15 years ago | 16 comments

rbranson 15 years ago |

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.

patrickgzill 15 years ago | |

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.

tptacek 15 years ago | |

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?

rbranson 15 years ago | | |

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.

wmf 15 years ago | | |

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.

tptacek 15 years ago |

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

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

snsr 15 years ago | |

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.