[monocasa]

> Comcast claimed that the agreement's settlement-free status depended on maintenance of a roughly equal exchange ratio - traffic in from Cogent to Comcast should be appropriately balanced with traffic out from Comcast over Cogent.

Eh, Comcast was being extremely disingenuous, trying to act like a Tier 1 ISP.

For Tier 1s like Cogent, they expect to more or less equally peer. Ie. BGP routes and the physical routers themselves should be setup so that a main, backbone style ISP would receive about as many bytes on an individual connection as they transmit. This makes sense for backbone ISPs, or else they end up in the situation where an ISP is essentially using another ISP's infrastructure to route their own customer's traffic in an unfair way.

Comcast was trying to make the argument that Netflix was unduly routing traffic unto Comcast's network... but all of that traffic were packets that had been specifically requested by Comcast customers. It's not Cogent's fault that Comcast's customers have asymmetric traffic patterns.

[cheald]

I do agree that Comcast was stretching the argument, but I'm pretty convinced that it was to try to gain business leverage against Cogent, rather than to try to justify jacking up prices for their customers who watched Netflix. I'm not arguing that Comcast's actions were particularly noble or righteous, but rather, that they were fighting with Cogent, not with Netflix.

> Comcast was trying to make the argument that Netflix was unduly routing traffic unto Comcast's network... but all of that traffic were packets that had been specifically requested by Comcast customers. It's not Cogent's fault that Comcast's customers have asymmetric traffic patterns.

Comcast was arguing that Cogent was unduly routing traffic onto Comcast's network (the majority of which happened to be Netflix traffic). You're certainly right that it's not Cogent's fault that Comcast's customers have asymmetric traffic patterns, but it is Cogent's fault that they've been historically abusive to their peers on the pretext of the traditional agreements built around symmetric exchange. I think that Comcast just got fed up with Cogent throwing its weight around and saw an opportunity in Netflix's huge amounts of traffic to force Cogent into terms more favorable to Comcast.

(It's pretty clear that Comcast won that round, IMO - but the loser was Cogent, not Netflix.)