On 2010-12-15-12:15:47, Kevin Neal <kevin@safelink.net> wrote:
Also assuming the backbone and distribution upgrades required between their data centers and their customers costs nothing. It's not free to get bandwidth from Point A (port with TATA) to Point B (Customer).
I don't see how this point, however valid, should factor into the discussion. Missing from this thread is that Comcast's topology and economics for hauling bits between a neutral collocation facility and broadband subscriber are the _same_ whether they ingest traffic by way of a settlement-free peer, customer, or paid transit connection. Speaking to Richard's earlier observations, we too have run into issues attempting to deliver content by way of Comcast's Tata transit, dating back to July of this year. (It's possible the issues might have begun sooner, however this is as far back as our analytics go. I've actually been spending some time documenting how we've been measuring this loss, and how folk might measure it on their production infrastructure utilizing policy routing, routing-instances, and the like -- any interested content folk are welcome to contact me off-list. Suffice it to say, configs are the easy part, the hard part is building a statistically valid sample set without degrading connectivity for paying customers...) Whatever the cause, five months should be ample time to turn up some additional transit capacity or otherwise work around the issues; we're talking commodity transit ports in neutral facilities, such as Equinix sites, after all. What we have here is Comcast holding its users captive, plain and simple. They have established an ecosystem where, to reach them, one must pay to play, otherwise there's a good chance that packets are discarded. Alternate paths simply aren't there, given the no-export communities deployed. As it stands, I could multi-home to NTT, Telia, Tata, and XO, and still get stuck with no good paths to Comcast. While this has happened before (see: DTAG, FT, ...), this is probably the first we've seen it occur in the United States, at scale. Folk in content/hosting should find this all more than a little bit scary. -a