Why Your Netflix Traffic Is Slow and Why the FCC Won’t Necessarily Make It Fast (opens in new tab)

Cogent publicly offered to pay for both sides of the peering upgrades in order to fix their congestion problem.

http://www.cogentco.com/en/news/press-releases/631-cogent-of...

Pretty sure Comcast didn't take them up on the offer. Doing so would have fixed the issue and Netflix wouldn't be writing checks to Comcast now.

> And, while it is also worth considering whether the impending merger between Comcast and Time Warner cable might exacerbate the current situation, I predict that this is unlikely. In general, as one access ISP gains more market share, a content provider such as Netflix depends on connectivity to that ISP even more, potentially extracting increasingly higher prices for interconnection. In the specific case of Comcast and Time Warner, it is difficult to predict exactly how much additional leverage this will create, but as it turns out, these two ISPs are already in markets where they are not competing with one another, so this specific merger is unlikely to dramatically change the current situation.

I'm having trouble with this logic. Increased leverage over content providers seems like it would exactly exacerbate this situation.

This is why the Net Neutrality ruling was not a big step forward.

The right way to solve the internet problem is "unbundling"; that is, the people who own the last mile lease it out to companies that sell you internet, video and other services. If Comcast customers were getting a bad netflix experience they could switch to an ISP that gives a good one.

>Thus, we will certainly see ISPs continue to use prioritization to manage congestion—prioritization is, in fact, a necessary tool for managing limited resources such as bandwidth.

Bandwidth may very well be a limited resource in some cases but the dispute between Comcast and Netflix is not one of them. The Comcast network has the bandwidth available to serve the customers (since not all sites are congested) and Netflix is willing to peer for free wherever they want them to, so the slowdown is completely artificial and Comcast generated.

I have always felt that this issue has been overcomplicated. It seems what this really stems from is the classic ISP business model. From a pure network design standpoint, nearly every network has an uplink that is not large enough to sustain simultaneous high usage from most, or all, of its devices. Your classic endpoint data closet example would be a 48-port switch with 1Gbps access ports, and a 10-20Gbps uplink.

This problem seems much worse in the ISP world. Many years ago, ISPs could easily oversell their connection. Realistically only worrying about the small percentage of extreme users downloading high volumes of data via Usenet, BitTorrent, or other file sharing services. Life for an ISP was probably pretty great.

Now, with the sheer number of households streaming video, it seems to be apparent that ISPs are drastically overselling their connections. It does not even make logical sense to blame a single service if an ISPs upstream connection is saturated. If the ISP did not oversubscribe their connections at such ridiculous rates, this would not be an issue. Why does it matter that a single service is causing the largest portion of the traffic congestion?

Netflix recommends a 5Mbps connection to stream HD video. Most all devices today would stream at HD quality, if possible. How is it that an ISP such as Comcast doesn’t have the uplink capacity to sustain many users at a mere 5Mbps? I find it absurd that multiple ISPs are overselling their connection to the point where a speed of 1/7 of the average connection in the USA is too much of a strain. It really seems that the level of oversubscription is equivalent to having a data closet with a 48-port 100Mbps switch uplinked at 2Gbps . The whole situation just stinks of pure greed.

>In the specific case of Comcast and Time Warner, it is difficult to predict exactly how much additional leverage this will create, but as it turns out, these two ISPs are already in markets where they are not competing with one another, so this specific merger is unlikely to dramatically change the current situation.

This does not follow. A larger ISP with more market share, regardless of the state of the competition, can extract larger peering agreements. So this merge would absolutely make the current situation for Netflix worse and other peering agreements more expensive.

It's refreshing to see more writing popping up from people that 'get' it. It's a shame that most of it is after people spent a decade campaigning for the wrong thing.

  Comcast claims that Netflix was sending traffic at such 
  high volumes as to intentionally congest the links 
  between different transit ISPs and Comcast, essentially 
  taking a page from Norton’s “peering playbook” and 
  forcing Comcast and its peers (i.e., the transit 
  providers, Cogent, Level 3, Tata, and others) to upgrade 
  capacity one-by-one, before sending traffic down a 
  different path, congesting that, and forcing an upgrade.

>Resolving the dispute: Paid peering (March 2014). Both sides of this argument are reasonable and plausible—this is a classic “peering dispute”

Both sides of this argument are reasonable and plausible?

Are you kidding me? If Netflix was intentionally shaping their traffic to disrupt Comcast, how is that not a denial of service attack? That sounds like a criminal accusation more than a bargaining position.

If Netflix actually was doing that, shouldn't comcast be sueing rather than asking for money for a peering arrangement?

also, and this is more to my own ignorance than it is to a counterpoint. I thought peering arrangements were things that happened between ISPs. Netflix is a customer of an ISP.

Last I checked it was the consumer ISPs that were stalling with peering upgrades according to multiple transit providers

http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/verizons-accidental-mea...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264381

The transit providers have pretty much all agreed with Netflix's side of the story to the best of my knowledge. For example:

http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-m...

With Comcast, it's almost obvious that the net neutrality won't change this because Comcast was already operating under net neutrality requirements. To win approval of its NBC merger, Comcast agreed to be bound by net neutrality requirements until 2018. When Verizon won its lawsuit to strike down the FCC's 2010 rules that did not change this. Comcast remained bound by its agreement.

If your ISP wanted to give you good service they could also add a few Netflix OCAs to their rack[1]. Opening up the last mile could allow the competition to use this technique to improve service while using Comcast's (or Verizon's...) network for all of the data.

[1]http://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-15925...

I tried explaining this to people before the FCC stuff passed, but they just insisted that evil comcast was slowing down netflix streams.

Yet again, someone fails to understand that this is Comcast abusing their (effective) monopoly to extract additional money via double-paying.

First I pay for internet access. 50Mbps "theoretical max" but it's fairly reasonable to expect to get say 10% of that most of the time.

Then Netflix has to pay again, in order for me to get the internet traffic that I requested. If Netflix doesn't pay, then Comcast schedules upgrades more slowly than they normally would such that my Netflix experience is degraded. They're not reducing capacity, they're just growing capacity in some areas much, much more slowly than in the rest. To get extra cash.

Meanwhile the community is trying to create a beneficial framework for all:

http://www.open-ix.org/

I'm having significant difficulties with this paragraph:

"Comcast claims that Netflix was sending traffic at such high volumes as to intentionally congest the links between different transit ISPs and Comcast, essentially taking a page from Norton’s “peering playbook” and forcing Comcast and its peers (i.e., the transit providers, Cogent, Level 3, Tata, and others) to upgrade capacity one-by-one, before sending traffic down a different path, congesting that, and forcing an upgrade. Their position was that Netflix was sending more traffic through these transit providers than the transit providers could handle, and thus that Netflix or their transit providers should pay to connect to Comcast directly. Comcast also implies that certain transit providers such as Cogent are likely the source of congested paths, a claim that has been explored but not yet conclusively proved one way or the other, owing to the difficulty of locating these points of congestion (more on that in a future post)."

Now, peering negotiations are an ugly, unpleasant activity that I'm quite happy never to have been a part of. But I don't find this particular claim to be "reasonable and plausible", in the author's words. Where is the congestion?

* Inside Netflix? Nope.

* Between Netflix and their transit providers? Seems unlikely; Netflix is paying them, after all. Such congestion would effect many of Netflix's customers and be against Netflix's interests.

* In the transit providers? Possibly, but again, Netflix is paying them. Further, Netflix connecting directly to Comcast is the first thing Netflix would do, if the transit providers were trying to squeeze more money out of them.

* Between the transit providers and Comcast? That seems to me to be the most likely interpretation of that paragraph. But if Netflix is doing this intentionally; say, by directing 90% of their traffic to Comcast customers through Tata, those customers are most likely to be unhappy with Netflix, not Comcast---any traffic from a customer out that doesn't go through Tata is fine, so they wouldn't likely perceive any problems with anything but Netflix. Further, that seems to contradict the statement that "[customers] routinely experienced high latency to many Internet destinations every evening during 'prime time'". And if the congestion is not hitting one specific transit provider, then the idea that it is intentional on Netflix's part is silly and Comcast's peering relationships are simply inadequate for the traffic its customers are using.

* Inside Comcast? Well, I could see almost anyone wanting to have an unrelated third-party pay for their infrastructure upgrades, but....

Then, there's this: "The best technical solution (and what ultimately happened) is that Netflix and Comcast should interconnect directly." The best technical solution? The best technical solution? (Here's a hint: a fully-connected network is not a good technical solution.)

But the ultimate problem here is: "This is where market leverage comes into play: Because most consumers do not have choice in broadband Internet providers, Comcast arguably (and, empirically speaking, as well) has more market leverage: They can afford to ask Netflix to pay for that direct link—a common Internet business relationship called paid peering—because they have more market power."

Comcast has more market power because it is a monopoly and the problem with monopolies is precisely that they use their market power to squeeze money out of counter-parties.

As an aside, I find Feamster's comment reply, "What is false in Oliver’s presentation (and many of the claims in the popular press) is his claim about what causes* that slowdown. The cause of the slowdown is congestion, not intentional throttling,*" to be simply disingenuous. What exactly is the difference between intentional throttling and intentionally introducing congestion by not upgrading inadequate peering relationships?