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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."
"Making the Internet Really Slow Right Now "
Nice internet you had here, but if you'd pay us just 10 bucks more, nothing bad would ever happen to it, capisce?
I think it's good that such information was included. While the readership of the early-2000s era Slashdot probably knows what a backbone provider is, there's a good portion of the late-2017 Slashdot readership that probably is not aware.
Thanks to the rise of the cloud, as well as a decrease in the running of personal/independent web sites thanks to consolidation around platforms like Facebook and Twitter, many computer professionals today don't know much about network architecture, or even what in the past we would have considered to be the most basic elements of computer networking.
While 15 years ago it was routine for us to set up our own routers, even to the point of stringing and crimping our own cables, there's a whole generation of professionals who doesn't have that experience. All they've ever known is wireless networking. Cloud platforms like AWS completely insulate them from anything more complex than whitelisting a TCP or UDP port.
A good example of this lack of understanding with regards to networking is visible in much of the net neutrality discussion here. There are unfortunately too many people who don't understand the 7 layer OSI model of networking. They say that net neutrality is important for levels 1 to 3, but then don't think that it should apply to levels 4 through 7.
These people with limited knowledge of networking think it's wrong when telecom providers handle IP packets differently based on the content, but they refuse to apply that same standard to higher-level networking concepts like social media comments or social media accounts. They cry foul when telecom providers treat packets differently, but these same people are perfectly fine with anti-neutral actions like comments being hidden/deleted, or worse, users being banned, even when these comments or users are perfectly legal.
Instead of supporting net neutrality, these people with limited understanding of networking actually support net partiality! They only want 43% of the OSI layers to be treated with neutrality, instead of 100% of the layers like true supporters of net neutrality want.
So it's good when the editors here explain basic concepts. There are a lot of people here who have severely limited understanding of even the most basic aspects of computer networking.
This is just inpreparation for the new slow and fast lanes of the Republican internet.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I run a small ISP that uses Cogent as my primary upstream provider. Cogent and Verizon have been fighting literally for years over "unbalanced peering". Meaning, Verizon was throwing a fit because a majority of Cogent's traffic comes from Netflix and Verizon wanted some pay-ola to balance the peering. When Net Neutrality was in place, Verizon was forced to allow traffic.... but now that our friend Pai has removed that requirement, any upstream provider is free to extort any amount they want to restore traffic.
I am as pro net neutrality as one could be, but this has nothing to do with net neutrality. Two Tier 1 providers decided to no longer have a peering agreement. Well, one of them decided they want something and the other didn't budge, so their interconnections have been shut down. That's like you switching from cable to DSL: You would expect to have a longer (and possibly congested) path to reach other cable customers. Traffic between Level3 customers and Cogent customers now takes a longer route, and since those two are some of the largest ISPs in the world, the other routes are probably not prepared to carry that much traffic. That's just how networking works. Net neutrality rules only affect what you can do on network links. It does not prescribe what links you must have.
Exactly but not quite.
Comcast's customers pay Comcast to access internet. In part, some Comcast's customers are particularly interested to access Netflix. Comcast's top order of business as an ISP should be to deliver the traffic requested (Netflix or otherwise), and already paid for, by their customers in the fastest way possible. Whether Comcast would buy bandwidth from a Tier 1 network that will transit Netflix traffic to them, build private peering with Netflix and pay for the dark fiber themselves (from their customer's subscription fees) and even provide Netflix with hardware (e.g. SFPs switches and routers that will be in the Netflix data center) or host Netflix server locally in the Comcast's data centers, free of charge to Netflix, thus effectively paying Netlifx in covering the tab for power, rackspace and cooling from the subscription fees of Comcast's customers, an ISP (Comcast) has the obligation to deliver the traffic its subscribers have already paid for. Otherwise, in a free market customers will switch to an ISP that have properly assured that the traffic their customers request is delivered with the proper quality.
Sadly, US is not a free market. It' funny the best internet service these days can be found in Eastern Europe.
Netflix on their end collect subscription fees from the ISPs customers. Netflix should use these fees to cover their server and content cost and make every effort possible to deliver the traffic originating in their servers to the nearest peering/border point in the direction of the customer who has asked for it. The ISP on the other end of said peering should make every possible effort to deliver that traffic to the subscriber who requested it and paid for, by maintaining the necessary peering/upsteam connections and paying the associated fees for those (e.g. dark fiber, routers, switches, datacenter interconnects, etc).