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Google Fiber: No Charge For Peering, No Fast Lanes
An anonymous reader writes "Addressing the recent controversy over Netflix paying ISPs directly for better data transfer speeds, Google's Director of Network Engineering explains how their Fiber server handles peering. He says, 'Bringing fiber all the way to your home is only one piece of the puzzle. We also partner with content providers (like YouTube, Netflix, and Akamai) to make the rest of your video's journey shorter and faster. (This doesn't involve any deals to prioritize their video 'packets' over others or otherwise discriminate among Internet traffic — we don't do that.) Like other Internet providers, Google Fiber provides the 'last-mile' Internet connection to your home. ... So that your video doesn't get caught up in this possible congestion, we invite content providers to hook up their networks directly to ours. This is called 'peering,' and it gives you a more direct connection to the content that you want. ... We don't make money from peering or colocation; since people usually only stream one video at a time, video traffic doesn't bog down or change the way we manage our network in any meaningful way — so why not help enable it?'"
So what do you make money from if I become a Google Fiber customer? That's what I'm concerned about. If it's just the fair-market cost of the service I'm paying for, then that's fine. If your noble stance hides the fact that you attach yourself to the fiber like a tick to suck value by monitoring my use of the service and selling that information to the highest bidder, then we have a problem.
If your noble stance hides the fact that you attach yourself to the fiber like a tick to suck value by monitoring my use of the service and selling that information to the highest bidder, then we have a problem.
Why do "we" have a problem?
There are plenty of people (including myself) that would happily trade the devil we know (Comcast/Quest/etc) for the unknown of reasonably priced much faster connection speed, which just happens to also give Google some aggregate data.
I'm not really a fan of Google collections - I use their services sparingly for just that reason. But I think the value tradeoff in that case is pretty decent and only Google really has the power to break through local connection monopolies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is Google's hedge against increasingly higher costs for peering and neutrality breaking ISP's, so why would they then turn around and be hypocrites by ruining the very reason they're moving intro infrastucture to begin with?
That said, an affirmation that they're peering neutral just seems like a puff piece for what anyone should already assume.
Does anyone have thoughts on Google spinning this out as a not for profit and make public backbones that are truly ubiquitous and marginalized?
Bye!
The phrase 'Fiber Server' does not appear in the article.
Blame the submitter.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is it sad that we've come so far as to have a company make a press release assuring customers and peering partners, that they will continue to abide by industry practices that have existed for decades?
They list their peering policy as Selective in their peeringdb entry https://www.peeringdb.com/priv.... They should have an open peering policy. Or is only open if you are a interesting content provider?
...even if some party has to pay for it. Google is an ISP so their peering traffic is not equal. It is good for them and their customers to peer with as many popular content providers as possible. Connect eyeballs to content. I keep pointing out that Yahoo! did this years ago with huge success. It was reported that Yahoo! only payed for half of their total bandwidth requirements. That is, only half of their total bandwidth requirements were going over transit. This was years ago. "Fast lanes" are not new.
The difference with Netflix is that they had to pay the ISP for their peering. This is new. Even so, it still may work out for them. The the peering costs may still be cheaper than their transit or using a third party CDN. Like Google Fiber pointed out, peering does not prioritize traffic, it just makes links to networks. If peering is an unfair fastlane, then the Internet has always been "unfair" since peering is an integral part of the Internet.
So why does Netflix have to pay? It is called supply and demand. The market pressures are such that Netflix *wants* to pay to get their data delivered directly. I suppose they could have backed off and stopped using any sort of CDN with peering to ISPs. But then their transit costs would have gone up. I suppose Netflix could have done this and really slammed the ISP's transit connections until *every* customer was complaining about terrible performance. Netflix decided it was less expensive and better for their customers to pay ISP's for peering. Is this fair? As the saying goes, "Life is not fair." Deal with it.
The best way to deal with the situation is for cities to encourage new ISP's to build out last mile connections. Make it easy without a lot of red tape. Phone companies and cable companies will yell and scream, but there is nothing they can do legally. It is up to the city to manage right-of-way so that things don't get messy. So instead of complaining to the FCC, go to your city council and see what can be done to encourage Google Fiber to come to your city.
"One person" may only stream one video at a time, but "people" as a whole may stream thousands or tens of thousands of videos all at the same time, and that's what creates the bottleneck in the peering connection. These same "people" are the "people" who currently stream videos over Comcast et.al. and create the peering bottleneck between Comcast and Level 3.
It is Comcast creating the bottleneck and it is done deliberately. They want you to believe it is Netflix that has the problem but they could have solved it for their entire customer base for ~$30K according to Level 3. And Netflix offered to host their own servers inside of Comcast's network which would eliminate the bottleneck altogether but Comcast refused instead demanding tribute before allowing more Netflix traffic.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
They list their peering policy as Selective in their peeringdb entry https://www.peeringdb.com/priv.... They should have an open peering policy. Or is only open if you are a interesting content provider?
Probably. So what is wrong with that? "Interesting" to Google Fiber would be a content provider that is starting to use up enough transit bandwidth that it makes sense to move them to a peering port. That is always how things have worked on the Internet.
Municipal fiber is the way to go. It would change the world and give the US economy a badly needed shot in the arm.
ISP costs have risen four times faster than inflation. We're on the road to having just two national providers. When that happens, costs will go up even faster.
1) Designate ISPs as common carriers.
2) Break up any ISP that provides content.
3) Take a bow for having brought about the digital revolution part 2.
Unfortunately, our elected jackoffs are too beholden to corporate money to do anything like this. Obama, who was supposed to be the first president who "got" the Internet, turned out to be the worst of the bunch, appointing telecom lobbyist Tom Wheeler has head of the FCC, and they're not poised to put the last nail in the Net Neutrality coffin. Obama is a failed president on that count alone.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"So why does Netflix have to pay?"
Because Netflix competes with Comcast/TWC/AT&T's ka-ching buckets-of-money-spinning video distribution platforms. If Netflix gets popular enough, Comcast is reduced to a dumb internet pipe for $50 a month (profit of $5), not a primarily a video provider ($100+ bills, profits of $20+).
Which is the problem. If Comcast *were* an internet-tube provider (only), they'd generally be pro-peering. They might try to charge Netflix some (they like money), if the market would bear it, but mostly it's to their advantage to peer. However, most of the ISPs in the US are not pure-internet providers, so if Comcast video can use Comcast internet to hamstring Netflix, that's a natural reaction.
Fiber server? huh?
I realize that it's all marketing hooey, but I wish that the director of network engineering for google wouldn't mish mash terminology like that. Keep that for the marketing droids.
Well, we could get all wrapped up in semantics, but let's not, m'kay? The real message is that Google gets it when it comes to making networks run efficiently. They aren't deliberately introducing an artificial scarcity in order to squeeze more revenue out of their "investement". They're selling a service using a 21st century business model, unlike the LEC's who still long for the days when a T1 would fetch $1,200 per month.
But Comcast has oversold its actual capacity creating the disparity and thus responsible for its occurrence. Then going to its customer's other vendors and insisting they pay extra to provide the bandwidth their customers have already paid for.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The price of a T1 hasn't really changed all that much. Due to LEGAL requirements for the SLA associated with a T1, its unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.
Now getting far more than a T1's worth of bandwidth for far less is easy, but thats not a T1 nor does it come with the SLA that will have the provider working at 3am on a Sunday morning to get it back on line as required BY LAW.
Just because you get 1.5mbit of data doesn't mean you're getting an actual T1.
LECs are still the only ones who can offer a T1 for the most part.
If you knew what the terminology you are using actually meant you wouldn't have made such statements.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Uverse maxes as 45 Mbps and requires a minimum of UTP drop. It does not work over "the existing infrastructure" (untwisted pair) unless that infrastructure has recently been upgraded.
The price of a T1 has not changed because it is entirely obsolete. No one sane would want one, and specialty items are expensive.
In places with competitive markets, you can get the SLA you want with the technology you want.
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Dear Google,
If you're reading this, (haha, I know you are!), please, come save me from the Comcast-Time Warner monopoly and their slow as molasses high-speed internet.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
What can you expect from someone whose soul has been killed?
For providers and data demanded by Comcast customers. I also complain about that, but I'm not in a position to get quoted for it. Does that make it less valid a complaint? Keep in mind, every bit Netflix ever sent me was at my request. I am responsible for that traffic. Why is Comcast trying to charge someone else for my choice?
That is a very valid comment, from a consumer's point of view. The answer is not simple, but let me try and simplify it.
Consumer broadband connections are always oversubscribed. This means that for every 100Mbps customer, an ISP will have an X amount of actual bandwidth available. For example, an oversubscribtion rate of 1:25 means that for every 25 100Mbps subscribers, only one 100Mbps link will be provisioned. The reason for this is that building a network is ridiculously expensive, and this is the only way to make it affordable for consumers. Another reason is that very few consumers will actually use the bandwidth. For example, I have a 25Mbps link from Charter. If I look at my stats, I barely used 512kbps on average over a month. However, when I do actually download something, I see that my link is more than what I pay for; I usually get over 30Mbps.
Further down the road, that oversubscription becomes a bit blurred. Most large ISPs have big networks, with multiple entry and exit points. In short, there are two ways in which traffic flows from one network to another: via direct peering, or via a paid transit provider. Direct peering is most of the time handled at an Internet Exchange point. Members will all connect to each other, and peer whenever they come to an agreement. Transit is when I pay a third party to transport my packets to someone else. So, let's say I am Comcast, and I need to transport packets to and from AT&T. If I do not have a peering with AT&T, I will find someone who does. Let's say Level 3 Communications does have a peering agreement with AT&T. I can then pay Level 3 Communications to transport my traffic to AT&T. The path will then become: Comcast Level 3 AT&T.
In this example, interconnect 1 is paid, and interconnect 2 may be paid transit or free peering (from Comcast's perspective, that is irrelevant).
There will be many of these entry and exit points. Today, most of these interconnects are at 10 Gigabit Ethernet speeds. This does mean, that in a lot of cases. the aggregate bandwidth between two networks on the internet is 10Gb. Let's turn back to our example. In this case, it is actually reversed. Comcast has a peering agreement with Level 3, and Netflix pays Level 3 for transit traffic. So what ends up happening is:
Comcast Level 3 Netflix
While "peering" sounds free, it is in fact not. Peering requires network ports and backhaul capacity. If Comcast has 1 10G peering port with Level 3, they only need to haul back 10G to the rest of the network. If Comcast upgrades that to 10G, then not only do they need an additional 10G port, but also the capacity to transport that traffic further downstream. This is regardless of the rest of Comcast's network. They may have (and probably will) have hundreds of other 10G peering points elsewhere, with tons of capacity. That is useless here, since all of a sudden all traffic is centralized to 1 entry point.
Now, from Comcast's point of view, I totally understand their reluctance to invest significantly only to haul back the traffic of Netflix, which then makes a profit off of it. Is it the right thing to do? That's debatable. But to bluntly say that all of a sudden Comcast is the root of all evil, that's a bit too far.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Who runs their own radio network with multiple towers instead of cell phones?
I cannot think of anyone. Even police and emergency services have switched to cell phones, albeit on a dedicated network. A network where 1.5Mbps per tower is woefully insufficient, of course.
Modern cell towers use SyncE.
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