Level3: Verizon Intentionally Causing Netflix Congestion

I think the crazy comment was in reference to your suggestion that Verizon is somehow going to lose its franchises.

And I'm assuming that limit hasn't been reached yet. If you want to save money on pay TV by using Netflix, you'll pay for it with your ISP. Consumers will pay one way or another, it's just a matter of where the money is going.

Comcast relies on Tier 1 providers to connect to all places around the globe. Level 3 relies on Comcast only to connect to Comcast's customers. I don't see it as the same.

Comcast has an overwhelming number of customers that only have a small fraction of their capable download capacity for their uploads. It does not make sense to expect any type of balanced trade between Comcast and a Tier 1 provider. Comcast's service is completely unbalanced and promoted and sold as a delivery mechanism first.

"We don't like HOW you sell your (highly desirable) product so we'll just take it"?

and You wonder why your idea gets little traction from the administration, congress, the courts, or the mainstream American people?

Netflix is a much better value to many consumers when compared to what is offered by their local TV provider. Customer satisfaction is very telling. Look at major sports viewer ratings. The trend is that they are all decreasing across the board. Seems like many cable TV customers are simply dropping to a lower performance package with less content as prices keep going up. They are paying all they can now, and are just losing content to keep the costs the same.

I'd also suggest that the sending end is playing games as well. This isn't a black or white issue and no single entity is solely at fault.

Which ones besides Level 3 and Cogent?

And its hopeful "free" CDN that it's trying to build out, called OpenConnect.

Would this not affect all Verizon customers?

Or, as you suggest, they're satisfied with Netflix and "cutting the cord". Pay TV (including Netflix) and Internet access prices will continue to rise and consumers will continue paying for them. What will change is where the money shifts around between the two.

Depending on peering points, from my post:

Level 3, Cogent, XO, Tata, Zayo, and NTT. I wouldn't be surprised if they use other providers as well.

As do all ISPs. The Internet is a network of autonomous networks. Similarly, Comcast relies on Level 3 to reach any single homed Level 3 customers and Level 3 relies on Cogent to reach Cogent customers, etc, etc. Take a look at their routing and interconnectivity and you will see a lot of similarities. Putting "labels" on these ISPs is technically incorrect.That is the perception of those that don't look a layer beyond broadband. Comcast is a wholesale transit providers with some of the largest content sources on the Internet. Also Level 3 and other Tier 1s have many small broadband providers as transit customers, enterprises and universities to balance out their traffic.

There is far more to these traffic flows and complex relationships than the rhetoric that is being presented

And all of those transit links into Verizon's network are congested?

Depending on the peering point, yes. Also, I find that anything using Amazon's AWS East (which Netflix does NOT use for streaming, only its interface) is slow in the evenings. I drop from 80~mbit to 2.5mbit on a regular basis. Weekends are generally 1mbit.

I would say transit and last mile have separate roles still even though both are needed to get bits to the consumer. I see your confusion as Verizon does have a stake in the transit industry, but it is a separate business. What we have here is Netflix, Youtube, etc using freedom of choice and choosing other transit providers and Verizon not accepting enough traffic into that last mile because they are not buying Verizon's separate transit product. Leave transit relationships out of this. Level3/Cogent provides this to Verizon's last mile network in this case. Seems many companies that don't sell transit, but just last mile, don't have this issue. Coincidence?

ISPs need not be obligated to house Netflix's equipment, but should be obligated to make the best effort to deliver traffic requested by paying customers. Whether this CDN will be a tool in helping them in this mission or be more cost effective should be left up to the engineers, not corporate policies. Either way, they need to have sufficient links to deliver a satisfactory customer experience, regardless of which website people use.

Network labels are incomplete and inaccurate. All of these networks have peering, transit, backbone, metro, access and wholesale. The economic two sided market they work in is complex, but works (it is actually an N-sided market if you are an economist). Transit prices have gone down every year... there are incentives to localize traffic and build efficient content/delivery with CDN technology... more advanced codec's, etc.

It is not as simple as ISP A is different than ISP B so ISP A should be able to resell ISP B's network in an unlimited fashion without any reciprocity. How do you explain the Cogent vs. Level 3 issue I mentioned above

Easy, Tier 1 backbones often use settlement-free peering, sort of a barter system wth an agreement where each network handles equal traffic within a specified threshold from each other as form of payment. This has been around since the beginning of the internet. Disputes arise in the event of an imbalance of traffic beyond these thresholds. The criteria required for such agreements pretty much limits it to such backbones(complex but Wikipedia has a good article on this). Verizon may own a Tier 1 backbone but that is not their last mile. If Verizon somehow entered into such an agreement, I could argue Verizon scams the system by limiting customer upload speeds to get paid. If this applied to last mile, think TWC and other last mile providers with even worse upload speeds. Level 3 would be paying them through the nose. So obviously, this is not the business model used. In fact, last mile pays for access much the same way hosting companies do.

I keep going back to these labels are not technically accurate and do not support the argument. The economics of the network do not change with a label. All networks have access. They either have last mile networks or last mile networks as customers.

The reality is all of these networks (regardless of legacy and out of date labels like Tier 1) have historically operated in a trade balance of having a blend of both content and eyeball customers and in turn the costs and revenues to support each.

The other reality is a network that carries the traffic the longest (typically - but not always - the receiver of traffic) has the largest "bit mile" cost. If a network primarily sells to large content or CDNs and then just hands it to another ISP in the same facility, or builds a CDN and again just hands it to another ISP, their bit mile cost is measured in meters vs miles. It is like building tollbooths and putting them in front of other people's highways without reciprocity.

This is what Cogent did to Level 3 and to some extent what Level 3 is doing to Verizon.

But the fact remains despite Level 3 carrying it further, they seem happy to keep their link up to snuff. I don't see them disputing and choking Verizon. Perhaps maybe Verizon needs to diversify their connection points with them, resulting in the traffic being carried more locally. Surely Verizon has enough geographic presence to do this if it makes financial sense and engineering sense for them.

You are missing the point:

When Level 3 was carrying it further (Cogent v. Level 3), they were very upset about it and got Cogent to pay for the capacity.

When Level 3 is handing it off (Level 3 v. Verizon), they are now taking Cogent's position about getting unlimited imbalance of trade for free.

Hate to bring up last mile again but how can there ever be a balance in this case when Verizons caps the bits per second customers can send assymmetricly and prohibits servers(much of Level 3's direct customers in their ToS for residential, the majority of Verizon's customers? This is the general terms for last mile providers, unless you are lucky enough to have your last mile be Google Fiber or a few others. I know for sure these are Verizon's terms, as an unhappy former customer.

Good comparison, so instead of Verizon carrying that traffic to its end users, Level 3 should send the traffic first to another tier 1, then that tier 1 can hand the traffic off to Verizon to get to the Verizon customers.

Maybe Level 3 can hand it to cogent or tata first, havent seen any issues with those providers trying to get to ISP end users.

/sarcasm

And we have come full circle. Again see Cogent vs Level 3.

Because Verizon has a blend of residential and content and commercial customers.... similar to Level 3 that has a blend of residential ISPs, universities and content customers.

The problem happens when one party exploits that relationship or the traffic they carry is shifted in ways (outside their control) which causes these problems

Riight.

My taxes already go to the government which has built a redundant fiber service, that has run past our front door for the past decade, but only the elites are permitted access.

Meanwhile, the duopoly continues to invest in their plant, and offers greater speeds for less money each successive year, while I am assaulted with new and higher taxes.

It very much was.

Level 3 should (and most likely is) working with both their customer and their peer to address the issue. This is standard practice, but takes time.

What can happen now... and usually does happen real time with CDNs that have customer SLAs, is the traffic originators can balance loads across other available paths (including other ISPs). See "Best Practices on Running a Massive CDN"

I don't see much traffic carried by Verizon on traceroutes from several ISPs outside Verizon. Even with Verizon, I usually see Cogent, Level 3, etc handing it back to Verizon then to me. Other ISPs rely heavily on Tier 1 to get it back to me. But still the relationship appears mostly to bring traffic that I, the customer request back to me. It just seems Verizon takes it at their routers ASAP because they have the netwok and it saves them transit $$$$ which is fine. But again, most direct customers of Verizon are limited in what they can send but are free to recieve data, causing such an imbalance. Last direct consumer ISP peers I remember for Level3 were dial up lol, which if you think about it, is closer to symmetrical than most modern US broadband connections. But yet can't think of many major hosts that route directly through Verizon in my years of traceroutes. Except when I was a customer but then usually it was a handoff to Level 3 and such then handed off to Verizon for the trip back to me. TWC was doing the same thing with tbone.rr.com while a TWC customer. Yet not many server hosts use them as a backbone. So how can Verizon achieve symmetry in sent traffic bit mile for bit mile with this difference in majority business clients and this model of routing traffic? Which I don't mind because I like the idea of traffic staying within my own ISP as much as possible, long as I get a decent connection quality.

The problem is the captive customer base that these ISPs can use to extort additional payment for the same services that should have already been paid for already. Where is Level 3 getting away with this behavior? They most likely have competition that their customers can choose from if they attempted to purposely allow peering points to become congested.

They want you do buy pay tv even though it's 10 times or more the price of Netflix. Sickos.