This is very dangerous and I don't understand how logicaly thinking men can not see that.


If its bits and bytes, come out and say it. Do not tell me what I can and cant use my connection for. It is none of your business, either charge me with extra bandwith, even peek bandwith or **** off. I WANT THE COSTS, not your judgment.


None of this adds up, and I feel that Karl is working backwards to fit this into his past argument, without looking at the big picture. Again if this was simply about bandwith this crap should have hit the fan with youtube long ago.


Please people use your heads and don't let these jerks target their competition under the guise of bandwith. Just charge people for the bandwith. They will give you the one finger salute and go to anothre provider, and YES there are other providers that don't dont pull this crap. In fact, all the one that dont throttle and are unlimited here, are the ones that do not offer TV services. The ones that do offer TV services offer video on demand, if you are a cable subscriber.


The internet is the only segment of technlogy that does not keep up at the pace of technology, at least not in North America. Our networks are joke compared to what they have in Asia and Europe. With the amount of internet commerce here, you would think corporations would be doing their best not to stiffle the golden goose.

I bet you while you guys talk about how NETFLIX cant succeed in NA, the rest of the world will be enjoying streaming for genarations... only when you compare the infrastructures built and the regulations proposed will you ralize that you got a raw deal.

The word "unlimited" as it applies to Internet service does not refer to data but rather time. Remember services like AOL and CompuServe? They billed by the minute. For every minute you used their service you were charged a set rate. Dial-up ISP's started "unlimited" plans where one could sit in front of the computer and use the service for an unlimited amount of time. The bill was fixed to a monthly fee and the time one could use the service was virtually unlimited. A dial-up ISP could oversubscribe by a ratio of something like 9 users to 1 modem and normally be ok. When I worked for an ISP I would check to make sure connected users were actually doing something and not just sitting there idle. If we determined a user was connecting to a modem and not doing anything, such as using a script with a Linux box to stay connected, we would send them a friendly reminder and explain that "unlimited" meant unlimited attended access.

The same terminology applies to broadband connections. Unlimited does not mean you can get all the data you want 24x7. The only connections that guarantee that are dedicated lines from a TELCO, like a T-1, that cost upwards of $1200 per month. Broadband ISP's have bandwidth to sell as a business line for around $200/month but they are still oversubscribed and always will be. The only way to offer an "always connected" line for around $30/month is to oversubscribe. Bandwidth is not cheap. It is very expensive and finite. When it is maxed out the capital costs to increase it are enormous.

ISP's are not using the term unlimited in a deceptive way. Pay careful attention to the wording in their commercials. They will say something to the effect of "always connected" i.e. you don't have to do something to get on the Internet because its always there. They never say you can download all the data you want.

Quote:

If its bits and bytes, come out and say it. Do not tell me what I can and cant use my connection for. It is none of your business, either charge me with extra bandwith, even peek bandwith or **** off. I WANT THE COSTS, not your judgment.

No1, you're the one who's inventing things.

Quote:

None of this adds up, and I feel that Karl is working backwards to fit this into his past argument, without looking at the big picture. Again if this was simply about bandwith this crap should have hit the fan with youtube long ago.

No, Karl ran an Internet business and understands exactly how this works and how various providers behave.

The difference is that Youtube tends to be bursty. That is, you watch a Youtube then you're done, and they're usually short. 2-3 minutes, maybe 10. And further, most are low-resolution and low-bandwidth on-balance compared to a streaming movie.

And Youtube HAS caused problems. It's just not as serious as Netflix and similar that allow someone to have multiple devices on an account and then hammer you with 1.5mbps streams for two hours per device at the same time during peak usage hours.

Simply put, none of the consumer ISP offerings at present are built for this. Can they handle it? Well, depends. If the providers stick cache machines at the entry points to the last-mile folks and pay to put them there and pull the interchange circuits (or pay for the colo space) then sure, they probably can.

But it sounds like LVLT wasn't doing that and said "nuts" to Comcast on doing it, trying to offload some of the longhaul movement and switching cost onto Comcast. Comcast properly said "you're putting more than you're getting, and thus in our estimation you're receiving 5x as much benefit from this peering arrangement as we are. Pay up!"

This is NOT a new issue and the spin coming from LVLT is ridiculous. Been there, seen this, dealt with it many times. If and only if I can make an argument that my value proposition is symmetrical then I get peering at no cost. If I can't, then I get to pay for transport.

That's what this is about at the core.

i am not a "it's all free" person.

however, the internet is supposed to be open and "free"...."free" in the sense that we are able to use it however we want to. We should simply pay the costs needed and be done with it.

The problem now is that Comcast is in charge of the internet for most folks, and they're watching a company that is in direct competition to their TV product line essentially beat them up.


The easiest way to make the problem go away is to spin off Comcast. 1 internet company, and 1 TV company. Otherwise, they're going to flex their internet advantage to help prop up their TV service.

Though quite a bit of the legacy infrastructure Karl has already been paid for a couple times over, certainly in regards to twisted pairs. I don't deny throughput costs SOMETHING, its simply a matter of HOW MUCH.

The price per GB under monopoly is simply begging for .gov regulation, imo.

Bull****.

Bandwith keeps getting cheaper. Sorry, I was involved with ISPs too, love my BSD, but the field is not what it used to be. The prices of GBs are dropping everywher in the world except here. It is not the same business it was 2 years ago much less 5 years ago.


One day you will pay as much for a GB as you do for your medical system. The quality of service will be superb, but your outlay will be 20 times what the rest of the world pays... and you will stop and scratch and ask why.


Seems to be possible everywhere but North America, you guys should open your eyes.


Karl you tube is flooding the NET with HD content, if you do not see that, I dont know what to tell you (bursty?).

You want to stream video over 3,000 miles you're going to pay for it.

The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it. You sure as **** don't when you think you can have that for $8/month "all you can eat" on a half-dozen devices at once!

Well, no you can't. Netflix can't deliver that in point of fact to any material percentage of its customers. If 1/50th of the people actually use it and the other 49 are minor or never-use customers, then it works. If 50% use it like that then they're ****ed.

What happened here is that they moved traffic from Akamai, which was pulling private lines into and/or buying colo space with ISPs at their own expense (to avoid being charged for transport) and was billing that back to Netflix over to Level 3, which was not doing that. This "saved" Netflix lots of money as LVLT agreed to do the distribution for much less money than Akamai was charging.

Level 3 thought they would just shove the bits down a peering connection and force Comcast to carry it on their long haul and regional network at their expense. In short, Netflix tried to poach on Comcast's buildout and got caught.

This is NOT a new problem and is EXACTLY as I expected would happen. This sort of **** is intolerable but it's the only way you can have an $8/month "all you care to eat" streaming video service - you have to steal the bandwidth from someone, because whether you pay for long haul or you pay for colo centers near the terminal ends when you run the numbers you can't make them work at $8/month.

I think the real proponents of "Net Neutrality" have fooled plenty of people. What they're really fighting for is "Bandwidth Neutrality". But if they were to try to sell it that way then they'd lose.

I travel a lot for work. In the past I've had a lot of problems at any Holiday Inn as the internet would be at a crawl from 7pm til 2am. On my current gig about the only viable in-town option is a Holiday Inn and this made me shudder because I had decided "never again" on Holiday Inn. I haven't had one single internet issue at this place after 40+ nights. Why? Because their hotel manager has a monitor window at the front desk computer that watches the overall hotel bandwidth use and sorts the connections by the amount of bandwidth they're taking up. Anytime the throughput is over 90% for over a minute he shuts off the highest-hogging connection and whoever is using this bandwidth has to reconnect. He has no idea what room/application is hogging the bandwidth. Nobody ever complains.

I bet if Karl ever started getting real grief from his ISP over his outbound bandwidth that Karl would get rid of videos, images, and just about everything except plain text. You can run dozens of plain text forums like this with all the users/posts/views on the same bandwidth it takes to run ONE streaming high-quality video.

I just calculated that a 2 hour video streaming at 1.5mbps uses the equivalent bandwidth of 9,642,857 Twitter messages of 140 bytes in length each. Let's assume that the HTTP request overhead is 5x as much for these twitters then you still can get around a million twitters in for each hour of video streaming.

Gen writes: The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it.

This should be no surprise. Anyone ever looked at the federal budget?

Look, I can run the forum and Ticker from my home connection with images off forever.

With images on it takes a lot more.

The VIDEO SERVER, which is accessed only by gold donors, consumes more bandwidth than BOTH OF THE REST COMBINED, yet it serves less than 10% of the user population.

Gold donorship was put in because there's no way for me to pay the bill for bandwidth without it for those high-bandwidth things.

what is the business model difference between a European/Asian telco who offers (real) avg downstream speeds of 50-75 mb/s, upstream speeds of 7-9 mb/s on a 24/7 basis for about $60 per month (unlimited data, and includes cable tv), and Comcast?
(the same providers do 18-25 mb/s downstream via the regular phone lines for about $40 per month).

Is it that these telcos sank the costs (and most went broke some years ago) already, own the end to end, or why the big difference? Pricing models instead of cost modes?

Likely density and buildout/regulatory costs Snow.

I need to look into this. You've got large distances (Norway, for instance is 1,100 miles), labor is significantly more expensive and the industry is de-regulated i.e., without govvie subsidies (unlike the old days, except Singtel and others which indirectly are tax sponsored). It could be the telcos are over leveraged building these fast networks.

Now, the Huffington Post is carrying it as a front page story.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/29....

If the per user bandwidth requirements were going up and the connections were spread out over a broad group of free services, this would not be a problem. The ISPs would adjust their infrastructure and pricing to compensate without much drama.

The issue here is common to many industries today. If you see anybody else making money, you should try to take a piece of it. Or even enough of it to put the other company out of business.

If I can sell a service at a profit but I see that you offer a service that can't be delivered without my service, then I am your new partner and I am entitled to as much of your profits as I can get away with.

Sure, in a strictly capitalist economy, this is expected and even encouraged. But when the gateway service is a monopoly it changes a bit and looks more like leeching.

I don't see this as a bandwidth problem. There are several technological fixes that are not being implemented because the problems are not big enough to need them. This is an opportunism problem.

Yes, Comcast is trying to save expansion costs but that is the nature of the business that Comcast is in. They are just looking at other company's profits and trying to leech off them.

No, the technology solution is for LVLT to stick hardware in a Comcast Colo and serve from there, or pull lines at its expensive into Comcast's regional hubs.

They think they should be able to dump traffic at a peering point where they were paid carriage but have nothing coming back on the other side.

It's an old problem and LVLT is, in my opinion, lying about what's going on. They took the business from AKAM as they were cheaper - well, now we know how they got to be cheaper.

NFLX shows as Easy to Borrow on thinkorswim

If your tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails.

That may be ONE solution and today it may be the best technological solution but technology is changing fast. Last year you needed a PC or dedicated media server to play video. Today ethernet and video processors are incorporated into most TVs and DVD players. How long before a few hundred gigabytes and P2P technology is trivially included in TVs and DVD players as just another "app" on the menu?

If Comcast and the rest of the ISPs can't kill NetFlix by next year, I don't think they will be able to. The NetFlix bandwidth requirements will be able to disappear into the noise.

It's too bad they couldn't encode the video on a thin sheet of plastic and employ some sort of in-home reader device that you could connect to the television. I'm sure they could then mail a few of those right to your door several times a month for pennies. That would be a really great system.

I found this on the NANOG mailing list..this sheds some new light ont he situation:

Having been involved with a few peering spats in the past I know
what is said publically rarely matches the reality behind the scenes.
In this particular case my spidy sense tells me there is absolutely
something interesting behind the scenes, but the question is what.

I'd never really paid attention to how Netflix delivers its content.
It's obviously a lot of bandwidth, and likely part of the issue
here so I thought I would investigate.

Apparently Akamai has been the primary Netflix streaming source
since March. LimeLight Networks has been a secondary provider, and
it would appear those two make up the vast majority of Netflix's
actual streaming traffic. I can't tell if Netflix does any streaming
out of their own ASN, but if they do it appears to be minor.

Here's a reference from the business side of things:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/20....

This is also part of the reason I went back to the very first message in
this thread to reply:

In a message written on Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 05:28:18PM -0500, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
> > <http://www.marketwatch.com/story/level-3....
> >
> > I understand that politics is off-topic, but this policy affects operational aspects of the 'Net.
Patrick works for Akamai, it seems likely he might know more about
what is going on. Likely he can't discuss the details, but wanted
to seed a discussion. I'd say that worked well.

I happen to be a Comcast cable modem customer. Gooling for people
who had issues getting to Netflix streaming turned up plenty of
forum posts with traceroutes to Netflix servers on Akamai and
Limelight. I did traceroutes to about 20 of them from my cable
modem, and it's clear Comcast and Akamai and Comcast and Limelight
are interconnected quite well. Akamai does not sell IP Transit,
and I'm thinking it is extremely unlikely that Comcast is buying
transit from Limelight. I will thus conclude that these are either
peering relationships, or that they have cut some sort of special
"CDN Interconnect" deal with Comcast.

But what about Level 3? One of my friends I was chatting with on AIM
said they thought Comcast was a Level 3 customer, at least at one time.
Google to the rescue again.

Level 3 provides fiber to Comcast (20 year deal in 2004):
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/....

Level 3 provides voice services/support to Comcast:
http://cable.tmcnet.com/news/2005/jul/11....

Perhaps the most interesting though is looking up an IP on Comcast's
local network here in my city in L3's looking glass:
http://lg.level3.net/bgp/bgp.cgi?site=sj....

Slightly reformatting for your viewing pleasure, along with my comments:

Community: North_America
Lclprf_100
Level3_Customer # Level 3 thinks they are a customer
United_States
San_Jose
EU_Suppress_to_Peers
Suppress_to_AS174 # Cogent
Suppress_to_AS1239 # Sprint
Suppress_to_AS1280 # ISC
Suppress_to_AS1299 # Telia
Suppress_to_AS1668 # AOL
Suppress_to_AS2828 # XO
Suppress_to_AS2914 # NTT
Suppress_to_AS3257 # TiNet
Suppress_to_AS3320 # DTAG
Suppress_to_AS3549 # GBLX
Suppress_to_AS3561 # Savvis
Suppress_to_AS3786 # LG DACOM
Suppress_to_AS4637 # Reach
Suppress_to_AS5511 # OpenTransit
Suppress_to_AS6453 # Tata
Suppress_to_AS6461 # AboveNet
Suppress_to_AS6762 # Seabone
Suppress_to_AS7018 # AT&T
Suppress_to_AS7132 # AT&T (ex SBC)

So it would appear Comcast is a transit customer of Level 3 (along with
buying a lot of other services from them). I'm going to speculate that
the list of supressed ASN's are peers of both Level 3 and Comcast, and
Comcast is going that so those peers can't send some traffic through
Level 3 in attempt to game the ratios on their direct connections to
Comcast.

Now a more interesting picture emerges. Let me emphasize that this is
AN EDUCATED GUESS on my part, and I can't prove any of it.

Level 3 starts talking to Netflix, and offers them a sweetheart deal to
move traffic from Akamai to Level 3. Part of the reason they are
willing to go so low on the price to Netflix is they will get to double
dip by charging Netflix for the bits and charging Comcast for the bits,
since Comcast is a customer! But wait, they also get to triple dip,
they provide the long haul fiber to Comcast, so when Comcast needs more
capacity to get to the peering points to move the traffic that money
also goes back to Level 3! Patrick, from Akamai, is unhappy at losing
all the business, and/or bemused at the ruckus this will cause and
chooses to kick the hornets nest on NANOG.

One last thing, before we do some careful word parsing. CDN's like
Akamai and LimeLight want to be close to the end user, and the
networks with end users want them to be close to the end user. It
doesn't make sense to haul the bits across the country for any party
involved. Akamai does this by locating clusters inside providers
networks, LimeLight does it by provisioning bandwidth from their
data centers directly to distribution points on eyeball networks.

So let's go back and look at the public statements now:

Level 3 said:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/level-3....
-2010-11-29?reflink=MW_news_stmp

"On November 19, 2010, Comcast informed Level 3 that, for the first
time, it will demand a recurring fee from Level 3 to transmit Internet
online movies and other content to Comcast's customers who request such
content."

Comcast said:
http://blog.comcast.com/2010/11/comcast-....

"Comcast has long established and mutually acceptable commercial
arrangements with Level 3's Content Delivery Network (CDN) competitors
in delivering the same types of traffic to our customers. Comcast
offered Level 3 the same terms it offers to Level 3's CDN competitors
for the same traffic."

You can make both of these statements make sense if the real situation
is that Comcast told Level 3 they needed to act like a CDN if they were
going to host Netflix. Rather than having Comcast pay as a customer,
they needed to show up in various Comcast distribution centers around
the country where they could drop traffic off "locally". To Comcast
this is the same deal other CDN's get, it matches their statement. To
Level 3, this means paying a fee for bandwidth to these locations, and
being that they are Comcast locations it may even mean colocation fees
or other charges directly to Comcast. Comcast said if you're not going
to show up and do things like the CDN players then we're going to hold
you to a reasonable peering policy, like we would anyone else making us
run the bits the old way.

The most interesting thing to me about all of this is these companies
clearly had a close relationship, fiber, voice, and IP transit all on
long term deals. If my speculation is right I'm a bit surprised Level 3
would choose to***** off such a long term large customer by bringing
Netflix to the party like this, which is one of the reasons I doubt my
speculation a bit.

But, to bring things full circle, neither of the public statements tell
the whole story here. They each tell one small nugget, the nugget that
side wants the press to run with so they can score political points.

Business is messy, and as I've said throughout this thread this isn't
about peering policies or ratios, there are deeper business interests
on both sides. This article:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/level-3....

Suggests Level 3 is adding 2.9 Terabits of capacity just for Netflix.
I'm sure a lot of that is going to Comcast users, since they are the
largest residential broadband ISP.

Messy. Very messy.

-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

Yep.

I suspect that's basically right, which matches what I said originally. LVLT has been playing "more-or-less peer" but things changed with the Netflix deal.

Incidentally, the suppress statements imply that Comcast is more of a peer than a transit customer, although that's not certain. For operational reasons they may announce the whole table they have but suppress, but in general I wouldn't do that if I was a transit customer - I'd suppress nothing at the transit side and do it on my end, because if I'm buying transport and one of my peers goes down for some reason I will use the transport I'm already buying as part of my failure management.

Comcast wants the traffic dropped (at LVLT's expense!) at their local distribution hubs. Perfectly reasonable, and what AKAM does. But not what LVLT had as a former business model with Comcast!

So we get a dick-waving contest.

NOT SURPRISING, and like I said, I've seen this movie before.... (that's what I get for running an ISP)

thought it well confirmed your original premise Karl..:)

BTW our entries are "still out there"....

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Snowman: a lot of European ISPs use traffic controllers in their networks, that limits traffic to newsnet servers and other locations used for high bw applications such as DVD downloads and the like. There seem to be a lot of ways to limit or discourage traffic without violating contracts or net neutrality. I am a little surprised that Comcast went so public with this, I suppose it is technically quite easy to silently suppress streaming traffic including Netflix in such a way that it becomes a lot less useable.

Dvanderp: thanks for the info. There are a few non-US telco's who want to make a play in the U.S. and are loaded.