On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> wrote:
advertising MEDs, or by sending inconsistent routes. The fact that the existing Level3/Comcast routing DOESN'T make Level 3 haul all of the bits to the best exit mean it's highly likely that Comcast agreeing to haul the bits was part of their commercial transit agreement, probably in exchange for lower transit prices.
It's worth asking why Comcast did not accept Level3's suggestion that they use MED as a face-saving maneuver, which would have allowed both sides to declare victory. A) Comcast may already have the contractual right to use MED but chooses not to. I agree with you that this is unlikely, not for pure reasons of economics, but because Comcast has some of the same set of motives not to send MED to their transit provider as every other network: prefix aggregation, quality control, and ego. I'll discount geography, marketing, and inability to calculate useful MED values. For argument's sake, let's say they currently can start sending MEDs to Level3 whenever they want. This being the case, Level3's "offer" would have amounted to Level3 telling Comcast upper management that Comcast's engineering people are leaving a huge amount of money on the table, that Level3 is far more cost-effective at running its long-haul network than Comcast, and that they should leave the big networking to the big boys. Comcast management could either react badly to this, or go back to their network folks and ask why they can't be as cost-effective as Level3. B) Comcast may not be able to use MED today. In this case, management may be asking themselves why. An essentially similar scenario can play out; they can either react badly to Level3, or ask their own staff why they are wasting money. C) Comcast doesn't care about MED or the actual cost of doing business. They are boldly moving towards a future that is opposite the one "net neutrality" folks advocate, one that looks like my "Comcast Motive #3." D) Comcast does not think that beginning to use MED (whether currently enabled or not) is enough to satisfy the federal regulators and legislators who are now taking interest in this game of interconnection brinkmanship, involving 17 million households, between a major IP carrier delivering traffic from everyone including a household name like Netflix, and a major cable company that is waiting for government approval to purchase NBC. They feel they must demand something very concrete to demonstrate that they are looking out for consumers' best interest, which means they must make Level3 and/or Netflix look like the bad guy. E) Comcast thinks that a system of accounting for the cost of bearing traffic and dividing it among the involved parties will actually be good for their business, because they can over-build their infrastructure as much as they like, perhaps even improving quality for end-users, and only have to pay for about half of it. The cost of being inefficient, stupid, or committing purchasing or forecasting errors drops by half. This looks very much like my "Comcast Motive #1." E1) Comcast may also know a thing or two about Hollywood Accounting. If you do not understand this reference, simply look it up on Wikipedia. It suffices to say that cost/revenue sharing agreements of this nature can be manipulated in gross ways to the advantage of the party doing the bulk of the book-keeping. F) Management has the same case of ego-driven decision-making that their technical staff have demonstrated. I find this unlikely but still possible. We all know this has been the case at the CEO level in some major interconnection disputes of the past. I believe this outlines the reasonable scenarios for Comcast avoiding a face-saving maneuver with Level3. -- Jeff S Wheeler <jsw@inconcepts.biz> Sr Network Operator / Innovative Network Concepts