In a message written on Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 09:24:47PM -0600, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
I never said otherwise. The PR is pretty clear: Level 3 says that Comcast, their TRANSIT CUSTOMER, demanded that Level 3 pay them because of a ratio imbalance. Level 3, not wanting to cause massive disruptions to their other customers who would then no longer be able to reach Comcast (or depending on your point of view, because of an extreme lack of testicular fortitude), complied, and then put out a PR whining about it.
I'm not privy to the deal, but I will point out as reported it makes no sense, so there is something else going on here. This is where both sids are hiding the real truth. I suspect it's one of two scenarios: - Comcast demanded a lower price from Level 3, which Level 3 has spun as paying Comcast a monthly fee. - Comcast said they would do settlment free peering with Level 3, in addition to, or in place of transit. Level 3 is spinning the cost of turning this up as paying Comcast a fee. I suspect we'll not know what terms were offered for many years.
In some ways it IS a net neutrality issue. Comcast is effectively "too big" to turn off, and has used the threat of disruption to it's massive customer base to bully a transit provider into paying its customer for the right to deliver service. Comcast has made it quite clear that their goal is to charge content companies for access to their customers, which if I'm not mistaken is what the whole net neutrality thing (at least originally) was all about. :)
Yes and no. First off, network neutrality is a vaguely defined term, so I'm not going to use it. Rather I'm going to say I think many people agree there is a concept that when it comes to traffic between providers there should be roughly similar terms for all players. Comcast shouldn't give Netflix a sweetheart deal while making Youtube pay through the nose. The problem is that many of the folks want to conflate the ability to be treated equal, with the ability to do whatever they want. For instance, consider these "equivilent" interconnect models: 1 GE in 100 cities. 10 GE in 10 cities. 100 GE in 1 city. All of these could support a 70G traffic flow between networks, but the costs to provision all three in ports, backbone, and mangement are wildly different. If two networks have 70G of traffic does network neutrailty mean one can demand 1GE in 100 cities, and the other can get a single 100GE in 1 city and the person on the other end has to deal with both like it or not?
The funny part is that Level 3 was clearly ill prepared for the PR war, whereas Comcast, being the first mover (if not the first PR issuer), was well prepared.
Really? I just checked google news again, and the first statement I can find by either side was a Level 3 submission to business wire: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/level-3-communications-issues-statement-con... If you can find a Comcast story before that I'd love to read it.
What I wonder is why Netflix and Comcast are letting middle men like Level 3 and Akamai jerk both of them around. These two folks need to get together and deal with each other, cutting out the middle man....
Netflix is a Comcast customer too (again well established publicly and easily provable via the global routing table), but they don't run their own server infrastructure, and Comcast doesn't offer a CDN service...
Right, Netflix is a Comcast customer for www.netfix.com, e.g. the web site where you select movies. No streaming comes from that source as far as I can tell, so it's really a sort of red herring in this discussion. I realize Netflix is chosing to outsource their streaming, but there's no reason they can't outsouce the running of the servers while controlling a direct IP relationship with Comcast, if they don't want to run the servers in house.
The reality is that Level 3 offered Netflix a cut-throat price on CDN service to steal the business from Akamai, probably only made possible by the double dipping mentioned above. They were already in for a world of hurt based on their CDN infrastructure investment and the revenue they were able to extract from it, this certainly isn't going to help things. :)
I feel you undercut your network neutrality argument right here, because you make an argument that this is just two competitive businesses trying to get a leg up on each other. You can't have the fairness part of network neutrality and try and stab each other in the back at every step. To be clear, I don't think either Level 3 or Comcast is in the right here, or well, really in the wrong. It's easy to make both arguments: Level 3: They have been our customer for a long time, and now want a lower price, or a fee, or to convert to peering just because we added a customer, how is that fair? Comcast: These guys cut a deal to move 10's of Gigabits of traffic from entering our network at one point to entering at different locations far away, and then gave us ~45 days notice that we just have to suck it up and deal with it. How is that fair? But it is business, as much as us technical folks like to think about peering in technical terms, of how to move traffic between two networks and share costs all of the top 20-30 networks treat peering as a weapon. They weild it to force other networks to connect where they want and how they want. It's a continuous game of brinksmanship and screwing each other, typically done in private. Neither Level 3 nor Comcast here are interested in the fairness of network neutraility, or even interested in helping their customers. They are interested in hurting their "competitors" and boosting their own bottom line. I bet the cash spent on lawyers and lobbiests taking this to the FCC on both sides could pay for enough backbone bandwidth and router ports to make this problem go away on both sides many times over. If they really cared about the customers experience and good network performance they would put away the press release swords, the various VP and CxO's egos, and come up with a solution. That will never happen. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/