Yes they are -- content providers aren't getting their connections to the Internet for free (and if they are, how can I get me some of that?).
If the ISPs are directly peering with the content provider at some IX, the content provider gets what amounts to a free ride to
Maybe I wasn't clear. Traffic is moving away from "transit" to direct peering at private exchanges in many cases. Since most exchanges are "flat rate" and aren't all that expensive, it is "practically" free. For example, if I have a 10G connection to an exchange (say Equinix IX, or DEIX in Germany, or LINX in the UK, or PARIX in France, or INIX in Ireland among other) it doesn't cost me any more to send 1G than it does to send 5G of traffic. So if something happens that increases the bandwidth utilization, my monthly cost does not change until I have to change to higher capacity media and that is a step change. the
end user.
Say wha? ISPs don't *have* to peer at an IX; if they think that it's cheaper to buy transit from someone than it is to peer, they're more than capable of doing so.
Transit would have to get extremely cheap to compete with exchange peering. I don't see it getting that low any time soon.
The customer's requesting this traffic, therefore the customer needs a bigger pipe, therefore the customer pays more.
The problem is that maybe the customer is doing nothing different than they have always done. They didn't request more bandwidth. The product they have always used now consumes more bandwidth through no fault of their own. It would be as if you regularly ordered some product every month and the product keeps getting heavier and heavier and the shipping costs go up until the weight is higher than the carrier will ship. You are ordering the same thing you always did, you didn't ask for it to be heavier, the producer decided to make it heavier. But that is not a perfect analogy because a consumer pays a flat monthly "shipping fee" for Internet traffic. The problem comes in when the content providers make it "heavier" or higher bandwidth utilization beyond the control of the customer. Now the customer's pipe is saturated and they aren't doing anything different than what they did before. Or maybe some new product is released that is an out and out bandwidth hog. MOST people using consumer Internet have no idea of things like that nor should they need to. All they know is that now their Internet performs like crap and their ISP wants more money to make it work better. They might feel they have been ripped off. As time goes by, their Internet performs worse and worse, they begin to blame their network provider for that, not the content provider who produces a product that consumes increasing amounts of bandwidth as time goes by. Consider, for example, the number of sites that have streaming media of some sort that begins to play as soon as you land on the page.
- Matt