On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 03:39:07PM -0600, Aaron Wendel wrote:
To what end? And who's calling the shots there these days? Comcast has been nothing but shady for the last couple years. Spoofing resets, The L3 issue, etc. What's the speculation on the end game?
I believe Comcast has made clear their position that they feel content providers should be paying them for access to their customers. I've seen them repeatedly state that they feel networks who send them too much traffic are "abusing their network". It isn't a ratios argument in the classic sense, between two peers trying to maintain a fair balance of costs and benefits, it's that they object to ANY content provider being able to deliver to their customers without paying them for access. They do this by trying to enforce ratios which are well beyond what their actual end users are routing, and as in the case of Level 3, they leverage that position to claim that other networks should be paying them under threat of blocking uncongested access to their customers. I would say their short term goal is to make people who currently won't peer with them do so, so they can become transit free. This has been seen time and time again, as they move networks who they want to peer with but who will not peer with them into "congested transit" bucket. A while back it was SAVVIS, now it is Tata, but the pattern is clear and repetitive. Note that this only extends to a certain point though, as in the case of Global Crossing, who they claim is a settlement free peer, but who they have recently started pressuring and intentionally congesting because of ratio imbalances. Their long term goal seems to be to force content networks to pay them for direct transit or on-net connectivity, by removing the available capacity from other paths. If you are a content network, and you can't reach them in a reliable fashion via "The Internet", your only choice may be to buy from Comcast directly. This is obviously not the first time that networks have used this strategy, there are several prominent examples in recent history of others using this exact same technique. But this is definitely one of the worst examples in the US of a major eyeball network using access to their customers (who may have little or no choice in their broadband access) to force other networks to pay them, and IMHO it needs to be called out publicly whenever possible. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)