said by norm:I generally see Level 3 but sometimes see Telia or LLNW. It's awfully sad that Level 3 and Verizon links are becoming overly saturated. It disrupts a lot of other things.
Coming from the tech side myself, I honestly see both sides to this. As a business, when verizon enters into a peering agreement with another Tier1 (All Tier1 providers peer with every other Tier1 provider), the relationship has to be symmetrical as far as traffic is concerned. If traffic is not symmetrical, it means one provider is overselling and sending too much traffic which throws off the balance. Before video streaming became so much of the traffic, this worked out fine. Cogent is selling bw so cheap to customers, they're all signing up with them really fast but they're peering partners don't see any of that revenue but every 10gb peering port they bring up DOES cost them something.
So from verizon as a business, it costs them to add more peering ports to receive this huge influx of traffic but they see no revenue from it where cogent is getting all the revenue, so Verizon wants cogent to start paying them for the traffic because it's not a balanced agreement - which is where we're at now.
And it's not just verizon customers seeing this, comcast and several others are starting to have the same issues. Basically any customers going through a Tier1 ISP will start seeing these issues crop up with video streaming as more and more of the peering points between these providers get saturated.
My honest opinion, I do think cogent and other providers do need to start paying their peering providers if the traffic is not balanced out, it only makes sense. But in the end, it's the customers that are going to feel the effects until something between the various companies get worked out that has the effect of bringing up more connections on the back end of the network to ease the strain.
