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Comcast Accused of Congestion By Choice
An anonymous reader writes "A kind soul known as Backdoor Santa has posted graphs purportedly showing traffic through TATA, one of Comcast's transit providers. The graphs of throughput for a day and month, respectively, show that Comcast chooses to run congested links rather than buy more capacity. Keeping their links full may ensure that content providers must pay to colocate within Comcast's network. The graphs also show a traffic ratio far from 1:1, which has implications for the validity of its arguments with Level (3) last month."
Ever wonder what Comcast's connections to the Internet look like? In the tradition of WikiLeaks, someone stumbled upon these graphs of their TATA links. For reference, TATA is the only other IP transit provider to Comcast after Level (3). Comcast is a customer of TATA and pays them to provide them with access to the Internet.
1 day graphs:
Image #1: http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/78/ntoday.gif
Image #1 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/viewimage.php?img=13-224638L&rand=6673&t=gif&m=12&y=2010&srv=img4
Image #2: http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/749/sqnday.gif
Image #2 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image/13-205526L/4331/gif/12/2010/img6/glowfoto
Notice how those graphs flat-line at the top? That's because they're completely full for most of the day. If you were a Comcast customer attempting to stream Netflix via this connection, the movie would be completely unwatchable. This is how Comcast operates: They intentionally run their IP transit links so full that Content Providers have no other choice but to pay them (Comcast) for access. If you don't pay Comcast, your bits wont make it to their destination. Though they wont openly say that to anyone, the content providers who attempt to push bits towards their customers know it. Comcast customers however have no idea that they're being held hostage in order to extort money from content.
Another thing to notice is the ratio of inbound versus outbound. Since Comcast is primarily a broadband access network provider, they're going to have millions of eyeballs (users) downloading content. Comcast claims that a good network maintains a 1:1 with them, but that's simply not possible unless you had Comcast and another broadband access network talking to each other. In the attached graphs you can see the ratio is more along the lines of 5:1, which Comcast was complaining about with Level (3). The reality is that the ratio argument is bogus. Broadband access networks are naturally pull-heavy and it's being used as an excuse to call foul of Level (3) and other content heavy networks. But this shoulnd't surprise anyone, the ratio argument has been used for over a decade by many of the large telephone companies as an excuse to deny peering requests. Guess where most of Comcasts senior network executive people came from? Sprint and AT&T. Welcome to the new monopoly of the 21st century.
If you think the above graph is just a bad day or maybe a one off? Let us look at a 30 day graph...
Image #3: http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/8917/ntomonth.gif
Image #3 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image/13-205958L/4767/gif/12/2010/img6/glowfoto
Comcast needs to be truthful with its customers, regulators and the public in general. The Level (3) incident only highlights the fact that Comcast is pinching content and backbone providers to force them to pay for uncongested access to Comcast customers. Otherwise, there's no way to send traffic to Comcast customers via the other paths on the Internet without hitting congested links.
Remember that this is not TATA's fault, Comcast is a CUSTOMER of TATA. TATA cannot force Comcast to upgrade its links, Comcast elects to simply not purchase enough capacity and lets them run full. When Comcast demanded that Level (3) pay them, the only choice Level (3) had was to give in or have its traffic (such as Netflix) routed via the congested TATA links. If Level (3) didn't agree to pay, that means Netflix and large portions of the Internet
Am utterly shocked that anybody could be so cruel as to suspect a poor innocent cable company of trying to protect their cash-cow video delivery business by deliberately sucking at being an ISP(harder than they do simply by nature, that is) and using their oligopolistic incumbent position to shake down nimbler and more responsive competitors.
Seems like they are intentionally congesting their links to force content providers to pay them extra for prioritisation. Ground rules for net neutrality are needed.. badly.
This is _ONE_ ten gig link. Lets assume they have another 10 gig to level3.
His point is pretty clear: ten gig links are NOT THAT EXPENSIVE. We're not talking about a 100 million dollar expense here, we're talking probably an extra 200k per month per link.
They're intentionally bandwidth starving themselves. I can't see any other explanation, and Backdoor Santa is right.
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The Comcast argument is that they have a peering agreement with L3 (and TATA too) but that is simply not the case. Both L3 and TATA are providers for Comcast.
TFP (The Fucking Post) points out that Comcast runs its terminations with TATA at full capacity for most of the day and concludes that they do so on purpose to force services like Netflix to co-locate with them (= $$$ for Comcast.)
So L3 says to Netflix.. "Hey.. you dont need to be a slave to the Comcast overlord" and Comcasts reponse is to re-brand its business relationship with L3 as a "Peering Agreement."
Many slashdotters bought this bullshit hook, line, and sinker on the last Comcast vs L3 article. They did so because they learned about peering relationships at some point in other slashdot stories and took their 1:1 free peering knowledge and incorrectly applied it to the L3 and Comcast relationship.
L3 is Comcast's internet provider. Comcast's claim is like you claiming that you can charge your ISP because more stuff comes downstream to your LAN than goes upstream from it.
"His name was James Damore."
No, it's more like the construction company is taking forever to finish the road, and by happy chance they also operate the toll booth on the only alternate road.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well, in the past, lots of people have pointed out that Comcast is essentially a monopoly in places, so, it's not like they're competing with anybody.
They simply have no incentive to spend money. They've got all of these customers now, and spending money on infrastructure isn't going to make them any more money, so why do it? Upgrading is just straight cost, and without a benefit to them, why do it?
The very cynical answer is that until they're more or less forced to upgrade, they have no incentive to. They make money by overselling a service -- the closer to maxed out the service is, the more money they make. They don't really care about you, they care about their profits -- they're not gonna spend profits just so some people have a faster connection.
And, they're not going to give up on the revenue of having people co-locate with them, so they're doubly uninterested in fixing their capacity issues.
Welcome to the "free" market, it isn't really about customer choice and value -- it's abut maximizing profits and giving you the least amount of service they can get away with. This is a perfectly logical situation when you look at it from their point of view.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A 100 percent full pipe is an efficient use of their resource.
It also limits the ability of Comcast's customers to use the 6 Mbps downstream burst capacity that Comcast has advertised to them. When an oversold link flat-tops, it's been over-oversold. If Comcast is not capable of bursting at 6 Mbps for the majority of the day, it shouldn't even be advertising 6 Mbps, let alone "PowerBoost".
No, you pay for a high speed connection to the INTERnet and they are providing a high speed connection to their own INTRAnet with a congested gateway to the internet. Then they make money on both ends by charging content providers to get onto the intranet providing their customers with the connection they already paid for in the first place. They get away with it because the consumers are ignorant, the politicians are crooked. The end result is the consumer will be charged more plus the carrier gets greater control of what is on their networks. This decreases competition further eroding what the consumer gets in the end. Eventually maybe it won't even be possible to discuss and make others aware of what is going on. How long until Slashdot for example is inaccessible through Comcast?