Two Major ISPs Are Suffering Outages, Making the Internet Really Slow Right Now (slate.com)

Freshly Exhumed writes: Two major backbone internet service providers -- Level 3 and Cogent -- appear to be suffering from massive outages and downgraded service, according to ISP monitoring service Downdetector. Users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. are apparently being hit the hardest. Comcast is also said to be affected to a lesser degree. "Backbone internet service providers work directly with large internet platforms like Netflix to deliver large amounts of data across networks, and also work behind the scenes of consumer-facing ISPs," reports Slate. "Since the internet is an interconnected mess of wires, disruptions with Level 3 and Cogent could impact service for Comcast and Verizon users in turn."

Comments

Re:Unbalance Peering

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with NN, if there's a large imbalance in peering data then some money should change hands. It's up to the peering contract the parties agreed to.

Re:Care to clarify. I don't think this makes sense

[Rockoon]

Thats today. Thats not 10 years ago. Thats not 5 years ago.

NetFlix continually shopped around for the cheapest ISP and then had streaming issues which it pretender were not the result of going with the cheapest ISP. When Cogent was dumping more data on Level 3 due to NetFlix than vise-versa, a peering dispute ensued because Cogent no longer qualified for settlement free peering. Level 3 refused to upgrade the interlinks and occasionally shut them off entirely. Then NetFlix moved over to Level 3 and the shoe was on the other foot, now Level 3 was demanding settlement free peering. Cogent refused to upgrade the interlinks,

A few years later and Level 3 was again demanding settlement free peering, but from Comcast and Verizon and so on that time. Level didnt qualify for settlement free peering with ANYBODY any longer, so NOBODY was upgrading their interlinks with Level 3 because Level 3 was already taking advantage and would be taking even bigger advantage if the interlinks were upgraded.

Through all of this, the net neutrality fucks were crying that NetFlix was being "throttled" when the reality was that NetFlix went with the cheapest ISP, an ISP that wouldnt itself pay to deliver the data it promised to deliver (which explains why they were cheapest) at the rates that were necessary. The net neutrality fucks have been sheep for big corporations looking to fuck over their competitors this whole fucking time.