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Internet Transit Provider Claims ISPs Deliberately Allow Port Congestion
An anonymous reader writes "Level 3, an internet transit provider, claimed in a recent blog post that six ISPs that it regularly does business with have refused to de-congest most of their interconnect ports. 'Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity.' Five of the six ISPs that Level 3 refers to are in the U.S., and one is in Europe. Not surprisingly, 'the companies with the congested peering interconnects also happen to rank dead last in customer satisfaction across all industries in the U.S. Not only dead last, but by a massive statistical margin of almost three standard deviations.' Ars Technica reports that ISPs have also demanded that transit providers like Level 3 pay for access to their networks in the same manner as fringe service providers like Netflix."
Is just to cut the connection to those ISPs and see how long they will be around.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Sounds like its an ad targeted just at you. There isn't anyone else here gets their jollies from that sort of thing.
Besides..who see's ads on this site anyways?
Why would the ISPs do this? They have no incentive. The correlation with customer service is a good thing to note, too. The American people are being bent over a barrel on this.
ISP's like Comcast will do this with mathematical certainty....unless we regulate it.
They barely attempt to cover it up now...this is due to the fact that they are a publicly held corporation
Thank you Dave Raggett
Doesn't appeal to me. I only get off on Ewok porn.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Level 3 has been awesome, but the ISP's now have national footprints and transit prices are dropping fast. Verizon and AT&T have it because of the wireless business. Comcast will be a national network once they buy time warner.
figure that as transit prices drop L3 and Cogent have to carry more and more data to pay the bills but they don't have enough money left to upgrade the links and want the ISP's to upgrade them. maybe the ISP's are being dicks and trying to run L3 and Cogent out of business by denying them more links and then taking their business like what happened with netflix
at this level there is no more need of transit providers as more and more content sellers will connect directly to the ISP's. so L3 and Cogent are crying network neutrality to save their business
So, just to make it clear up front... Level3 is a Tier1 provider. Basically they are an ISP to the consumer ISPs. This is how your ISP connects to the internet (that's an over simplification but it will serve our purposes here) There are other Tier1 networks that the ISPs can connect to.
The point to these peering agreements is that Netflix and other companies like them make agreements with the ISPs to elevate congestion. So Google (random example) goes to AT&T (another random example) and says "We want to sign a peering agreement with you. We'd like to use Level3 for 2 years." and if AT&T agrees they do the same. So now both companies know there will be 10gig of traffic coming at them for 2 years and they can sign a reciprocal contract with Level3. This is standard
What Netflix does that angers pretty much every ISP on the planet is that they refuse to negotiate on these agreements at all. Instead they show up and say "We're going to use Level3, and we're not going to tell you for how long. Here's a long list of conditions that may cause us to switch without notice" so the ISP is stuck not knowing how long of a contract to sign and end up losing a lot of money when Netflix switches without notice.
The Tier1 providers love this. There's nothing better if you're a network provider than a customer locked into a contract they can't get out of stuck paying for bandwidth they aren't using.
The ISPs in question are likely in negotiation with Level3 on contracts. Level3 has been using the Netflix situation to their advantage. I suspect that this blog post by their VP is just an attempt to push the issue and get them to sign deals more lucrative for level3.
Not saying the ISPs aren't sucking. But this guys words need to be taken with a grain of salt. He's not out trying to help the consumer.
I just spent three weeks in the U.S.
The internet service was like being in a third-world country, but no one would believe it if you told them.
Peering agreements are established between different networks to further the common interests of both network providers.
For example - Cogent and Verizon reach a peering agreement of 100 megabit. This is a dedicated symmetrical connection between the two companies. They do this because in theory it is cheaper to swap data directly rather then pay a 3rd party to transmit the data between the two networks.
Now what happens when Cogent goes and sells a bunch of cheap bandwidth to various providers like Netflix and begins flooding relatively one way traffic onto Verizon's network? Well they saturated the 100 megabit connection in one direction. Verizon who isn't anywhere close to the saturation point on their side says hey if you want more bandwidth you have to pay for it because we're not using anywhere near what you are and these agreements are supposed to be fairly equal with respect to traffic flows.
Level 3 and Cogent are both guilty of selling cheap bandwidth to internet companies who mostly only send traffic one way. Video, Music, etc... You can't expect the other side of the peer to just keep expanding the circuit to accommodate your horrible business model.
I'm not a huge fan of any of these companies Verizon, Comcast, Level 3 or Cogent but Level 3 and Cogent are both in the wrong given their current agreements and since they can't reach a deal in private they are parading this out in public and trying to make a spectacle.
Peering agreements are between two organizations, not between two organizations with a tier-1 between them. Netflix's peering agreement was not through level-1, it was direct between comcast and netflix. Tier-1 providers are the intermediary between non-peering entities, and tier-1 providers peer with those entities.
>providers are FORBIDDEN to upgrade any portion of their networks to IPv6 without NSA direct approval.
Source? The signal you're picking up through your tinfoil hat doesn't count.
First, let me be clear -- I'm not a big fan of this idea, but after looking at the problem from multiple angles this idea keeps coming up as the best way to spur competition and end the debate on network neutrality.
A few steps to stop this greed from happening, hopefully:
a) A clear, concise Bill of Internet Rights.
-- This must be done in order to alleviate a lot of the crap going on now. There should be terms that explicitly disallow government agencies from piping internet traffic through their data centers for "analysis" of anything WITHOUT A NON-SECRET COURT ORDER. If it can't stand up the light of day, it doesn't fit with principles this country was founded upon and which hundreds of thousands of men and women have died to uphold. Stop being assholes and running roughshod over the Constitution.
-- This must be done to guarantee privacy. As much as can be, anyway.
-- This must be done to guarantee that all data is treated equally with the obvious need for quality assurance. No more congesting nodes, no more content owner also owns the delivery network so it can shutout competition, no more "you pay us, again, for the bandwidth that our customer who requested your info has already paid for."
b) Nationalize the Distribution Lines
-- All copper, fiber, interconnects, and so on are nationalized.
-- A plan is put into place to guarantee (almost) everyone in the United States good data speeds (10mb/s up and down - minimum) by adding more and more fiber. I say (almost) because there are some VERY remote places where people live and it will take time (plus more money) to reach them. If 90% of the population can be served, including rural areas, then that would be great.
-- Everyone who wishes to be an ISP pays THE SAME per connection. Yes, that would mean someone in Small Town, Iowa costs the same as someone in New York to connect to the internet. The overhead of the ISP will determine what $XX.xx is added to the government mandated $YY.yy and here's the rub - customer service comes back to the forefront and actually means something because the Public will know what the $YY.yy is. Competition to gain and keep customers based on price alone should vanish as value-added services and real customer service return to the industry.
-- We have a glut of workers needing work. Teach them to lay fiber optic cable and copper if needed. Put them to work moving the United States back to the top of the chart in broadband/internet access. In this day and age it is a necessity, not a luxury. Easily as ubiquitous today as the telephone and mail were in their days.
I'm probably missing a massive hole in my theory (greed being at the top of that list), but if this was done it would foster intense competition and new ideas as one would not be held back by thinking "I will get blocked out by Company A because they have a grip on distribution of a similar idea." Freedom from the so-called content creators of today locking down sections of the internet or using their power to double and triple-dip the pockets of consumers and competitors.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Yesterday, the net neutrality petition passed the halfway mark, with 18 days left to go. The FCC request for comments is still live and looking for your feedback, and Mozilla has an alternative in the offing.
Keep the pressure on, keep posting these things on your social networks, keep telling your friends. The only thing less effective than telling the government what we want is not telling them what we want. It is a double edged sword; either they do as we say, or we get one more bit of documentation to support reforming the government.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Because I get real tired of hearing stuff like this completely context free.
Where were you? What kind of net connection did you have? Where are you from? What kind of net connection do you have there? What kind of latency do you see? What kind of download speeds do you get from large download providers? What is your packet loss like? Etc, etc.
Reason I say that is because I live in the US and if my Internet is "like being in a third-world country" then we've reached the point where the third-world is connected pretty well and I'd love to know what you think is good.
I have 150/20mbps cable Internet. Speedtests bear that out, the connection has the backhaul to support that speed. I get those kind of speeds to another ISP/server about 350 miles away, and get close to them (120ish) to one across the entire nation (1700 miles away). Steam downloads go at 17-18MBytes/sec. Latency is very low, the biggest part being the first hop going from Ethernet to HFC to the CMTS, which is like 6-8ms. My ISP is pretty well peered so latency stays low, around under 100ms to pretty much all of the US (remember the US is larger then western Europe) and usually 30ms or so to things in my geographic region. Packet loss is more or less non-existent, less than 0.01% normally.
Then of course there's work. Right now I see 338mbits down 429mbits up, again to a test server in another state (350 miles away or so) and on a different ISP. Even that is as much their limit as ours, realistically we have more speed.
So what, precisely, is third world about my connection? What am I lacking that is so much better in your country?
Because in general, I'm calling bullshit. I've actually traveled a fair bit, and I find that the Internet elsewhere is not nearly as amazing as advertised by uninformed geeks on Slashdot. I find I have it pretty good at home, that it is rare anyone can compete.
Of course the US is pretty big, and pretty varied. You could tuck all of western Europe inside it and still have room to spare for a number of other nations. So it might not be that huge a surprise to find out that it varies quite a bit, and what is true in one place is not true the whole country through.