Slashdot Mirror
Level 3 Wants To Make Peering a Net Neutrality Issue
New submitter thule writes "A story at Gigaom talks about how Level 3 is trying to pull peering into the net neutrality issue. Regulating peering could hamper how the Internet is interconnected, potentially turning it into a bureaucratic mess. Should peering be regulated?"
Reader raque points out that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is banging the net neutrality drum, too:
"Some major ISPs, like Cablevision, already practice strong net neutrality and for their broadband subscribers, the quality of Netflix and other streaming services is outstanding. But on other big ISPs, due to a lack of sufficient interconnectivity, Netflix performance has been constrained, subjecting consumers who pay a lot of money for high-speed Internet to high buffering rates, long wait times and poor video quality. ... Once Netflix agrees to pay the ISP interconnection fees, however, sufficient capacity is made available and high quality service for consumers is restored. If this kind of leverage is effective against Netflix, which is pretty large, imagine the plight of smaller services today and in the future. Roughly the same arbitrary tax is demanded from the intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3, who supply millions of websites with connectivity, leading to a poor consumer experience."
It's not like any local government entity grants them monopo... Oh wait!
"The Market" is thrown out the window when one has only two or three choices for an internet connection.
I have the choice of high speed cable via Time Warner, DSL via ATT, or satellite via Houges net. Lets see here, fast, slow, and slower! There is no real choice for the market to make, as the city makes the choice based on what cable, and phone provider gives them the right bid to lay the lines.
On the peering issue, network owners have a right to charge for a peering connection. However, it would be in the best interest of the companies in question to provide the best service to the customers... if there was any competition.
42 69 6C 6C 20 47 61 74 65 73 20 69 73 20 61 20 77 68 6F 72 65 21
Lemme guess: blocking copypasta shit like this is NOT a feature in slashdot beta.
Who's going to pay for it? The people who pay for internet... maybe? What else should they be doing with $75/month that people pay for internet?
The way traffic is currently handled is ridiculous. As it stands a Verizon subscriber makes a request to Netflix to send data. Netflix then pays Cogent to send the data who then pays Verizon to receive the data that Verizon requested in the first place! That's like me charging the post office to deliver a package I ordered from Amazon.
Let's call a duck a duck, shall we? All this "Netflix throttling" and other shady dealings of the ISPs controlling what content customers can view, reasonably, on the connections those customers are paying for, is nothing more than service theft.
Maybe we can put this whole net neutrality debate to bed with one good class action lawsuit, on behalf of all customers of ISPs who commit this type of service theft.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Since the beginning of peering, the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge. If one direction generates more traffic than the other, the source pays for the asymmetry. If you give me 200 GB per minute average, and I give you 100 KB per minute average, you have to pay me for the traffic you are giving to me to deliver to my customers.
Streaming video has this problem - it's all one way. Peering should cost video streaming sources. The RATE charged has to be reasonable, but they don't get free peering.
as the city makes the choice based on what cable, and phone provider gives them the right bid to lay the lines.
Franchise fees are not a "bid", they are a contractually negotiated fee for using city rights of way. Once a fee is negotiated, it would be hard for a city to say "your fee will be higher" to a second company, since they've set the price for access.
What prevents a second cable system from overbuilding the first is not the franchise fee, it is the lower return on investment from having to compete with the existing system. No business would want to invest heavily in physical plant when there would be little profit in doing so. Their fixed costs would not be recouped by the sales, much less the incremental costs.
It's not like a grocery store where the fixed costs are relatively low to find and outfit a building and have the customer come to you. Cable requires the "grocery store" to go to the customer where he is, and simply lowering prices until the customers stop going to the competitor and start coming to you won't work. It is not economically viable to build the system as you get customers. The turn-on time would be long.
I understand you probably don't work with this type/scale of equipment/network on a regular basis, but the fact is $10k *is* extremely cheap. It's also probably a bit of a bogus number, or at least incorporates a whole lot of stuff beyond the actual connection (not just the cost of the optics, but some of the cost of the blade/chassis, and cost of power and rack space over an X year period, etc). The optics themselves are pretty cheap now - probably no more than $800/side, and with the scale of the large operators it's a good bet they're paying $500/ea for 10g SFPs. Believe me, a network operator of this size sneezes 10g optics without thinking about it - their on-site guys probably play dominoes with the spares.
A little fun math: Let's say for the sake of easy math that the average customer pays $42/month for broadband, or $500/year. Let's say the average lifecycle of a 10g optical link and the associated routers is 3 years, and the single cross-connect costs $10k, spread across those 3 years, for a cost of approximately $3500/yr. So, ignoring the cost of the last-mile infrastructure (partly because the vast majority is in place and has probably been paid off for years), the cable company would have to add 7 customers to pay for each new cross-connect. Again using nice round decimal numbers for the sake of easy math, at a cap of 50mbps per subscriber, you could have 200 customers fully saturating their links before you would saturate the 10gbps cross-connect, assuming ALL customer traffic was being routed that way. So if your first 7 customers paid for the cross-connect, and we're talking about 3-year equipment lifecycles, that leaves just shy of $290k for the ISP to spend on their other infrastructure and overhead.
Summary: I think they'll be just fine, and not need to raise your fees (they probably will raise them anyway, but that's an entirely different discussion).
I THE !@#$ COMCAST CUSTOMER AM PAYING FOR THAT DELIVERY
So !@#$ give it to me, or let me have the fun of bashing the Comcast CEO's head repeatedly with a nerf baseball bat.
And yes, I am yelling slashdot, because I'm pissed and sick and tired of it. And my congressmen are dickheads.
(Sorry, a properly grammatical title would not fit in the space allotted)
Netflix & Level 3 Only Telling Half The Story, Won’t Detail What Changes They Want To Net Neutrality
In a fairly deep and interesting article over at StreamingMedia.com, Dan Rayburn argues that there is more to the story here and that neither Netflix nor Level 3 are giving us their proposed solutions. He goes through both the Netflix and the Level3 blog posts, taking them apart very carefully.
It is not a network neutrality problem, but rather a business problem. Worthwhile read.
WTF are you talking about? Level 3 is complaining because they are now being extorted by ISPs who are trying to double-dip and charge them hefty fees for peering agreements. This was not a problem when net neutrality regulations were in place, but after Verizon won their case over net neutrality, it took Comcast only five weeks to go on a rampage and start extorting fees from other providers. So this is exactly what you get when you DON'T have net neutrality and you DON'T have regulation.
It's not great for companies like Level 3 because they are the ones being extorted. The current lack of regulation is great for companies like Comcast who are threatening to throttle connections of their own users if content providers don't pay Comcast an extortion fee. Again, it only took five weeks of the regulations being removed before Comcast started pulling this shit. It may be time for you to admit that moderate and sensible regulation is not a bad thing.
I'll freely agree that too much regulation is a problem. But too little is also a problem in a non-free market, and telecom in general is almost as non-free as it gets (bettered only by electric, water, sewer, etc.) Since there's not enough competition to force a given broadband provider to not gouge their customers and partners, we (as a society) either have to use regulation or settle for getting gouged.
I say as a society because an individual does have the option (however unpalatable it is) to simply do without internet; "take it or leave it". But that's becoming less and less of a viable solution as more and more of our day to day interactions with each other, with companies, and with government move to the internet. If improvement only happens after substantial numbers quit and quitting is infeasible, then nothing will ever improve.
Of course, I believe it is possible to have an amount of regulation which is neither too much nor too little, though it's harder to maintain that balance as the bureaucratic empires grow and harden. If you don't feel that such a sweet spot is possible, then I can see how less regulation would be preferable to more. But in that case we need to drop this districted monopoly system too, so we can actually hope for some competitors.