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."

Comments

What Level 3 can do

[Z00L00K]

Is just to cut the connection to those ISPs and see how long they will be around.

Re:What Level 3 can do

[jythie]

That would be terribly amusing. I can just imagine what a 'dark day' would do to those ISPs, though I suspect Level 3 has contracts that prevent it, which is sad.

Re:What Level 3 can do

[bill_mcgonigle]

Is just to cut the connection to those ISPs and see how long they will be around.

But why are they peering with them if there are better routes available?

The incentive structure on all these things is wrong. One neat thing the bitcoin network does is to attach a fee to each transaction that occurs (which is due to be reduced to reasonable levels soon - pay attention...).

There's too much turmoil going on in Internet routing with regard to pricing now. Some sort of BGP extension that includes transit cost has to come along to make it all automatic and lowest-cost. It's really not much different than how power producers will bring capacity online when the market demands or when they have excess capacity they need to get rid of. The dam near me has a realtime market price terminal they watch to see when to open the gates, but Internet providers would just automate the whole thing, and then the transit pricing wars would shake out. I wouldn't mind seeing it extended to the last mile either, though with monopoly protection in place there would need to be some very reasonable connection fee floor and controls on fees, since competition can't impose those controls. But one of the ways we encourage lowest-cost is with efficient protocols and there's very little incentive to demand that from the end user right now.

Re:What Level 3 can do

[Bengie]

But why are they peering with them if there are better routes available?

ISPs hold a monopoly on their customers, there is no other way to get to their network.

Re:What Level 3 can do

[Lumpy]

90% of comcast customers are held hostage, they CANT GO ANYWHERE ELSE for internet.
This is what happens when you have a government sponsored and allowed monopoly.

Re:What Level 3 can do

[sjames]

It is a bit karmic. I'm not claiming that L3 are just a great bunch of guys fighting the man or anything.

However, L3 is a Tier 1. They have many massive datacenters for colo as well as an international network. The only thing they don't have is last mile networking.

A fair bit of the internet would either go away or get much more expensive to reach if L3 cut off peering.

Three Weeks in ISP Hell

[fullback]

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.

Dead Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Dead Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. @Charliemopps, that is not how the internet works.

As AC tries to explain:

Netflix _pays_ Level3 for internet access (Level3 is a tier1 so has connectivity to the whole internet). _Pays_ being the important word here
You _pay_ your ISP for internet, and they _pay_ a tier1 for access. From the money you pay. No reason to ask Netflix for money.

The actual situation is more difficult because ISPs and content providers also peer. That is, they connect to each other, and pay each other nothing for the privilege. This makes sense because both parties pay less to their tier1 or transit provider.

Re:L3, Cogent and Others Crying Wolf

[Bengie]

Let me get this strait, Level 3 sells bandwidth of the highest quality to a company, routes it around the world with nearly no congestion, then offers to peer with an ISP for free, meaning that ISP doesn't need to route the data around the world themselves, the ISP refuses because they think the data should be not only handed to them on a silver platter, but also get paid; and you think Level 3 has a "horrible" business model?

Keep Pressing The Public Comment Channels

[Bob9113]

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.