On 11/29/2010 15:24, Phil Bedard wrote:
Is L3 hosting content for Netflix? Netflix has become a large source of traffic going to end users. L3 likely could have held out on this one if the content they were hosting is valuable enough to Comcast's customers, but maybe what Comcast was asking for wasn't much in the grand scheme of things.
Obviously someone has to pay for the access infrastructure and Comcast would much rather get the content provider to pay for it versus passing it along to their customers. I think they probably just took a stab and L3 complied.
My take on this is that settlement free peering only remains free as long as it is beneficial to both sides, i.e. equal amounts of traffic exchanged. If it becomes wildly lopsided in one direction, then it becomes more like paying for transit. Perhaps this is the "cost" of acquisitions and mergers, like acquiring a CDN product that dramatically screws with your peering ratios. ~Seth