On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 11:15:14AM -0600, Benson Schliesser wrote:
I have no direct knowledge of the situation, but my guess: I suspect the proposal was along the lines of longest-path / best-exit routing by Level(3). In other words, if L(3) carries the traffic (most of the way) to the customer, then Comcast has no complaint--the costs can be more fairly distributed. The "modest investment" is probably in tools to evaluate traffic and routing metrics, to make this work. This isn't really *new* to the peering community, but it isn't normal either.
Nah, you're still thinking about this like it was a classic peering dispute over ratios, when nothing could be further from the truth. First off, by the very nature of a CDN, all of the Netflix/etc traffic is going to be delivered to the best exit on the long-haul network already. Second, Comcast is a FULL TRANSIT CUSTOMER of Level 3. Typically the customer gets to dictate the handoff point to the provider, by either 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. -- 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)