[jerkstate]

There used to be a time when content companies needed to carefully select their network transit partners in order to make sure the bits their customers were paying them for had the best chance of reaching them (see: the existence of the CDN industry). It seems that those times are over, and the internet will be legislated to be 100% reliable and capacious..

[jachee]

I don't think the internet should be any less-regulated than the power industry.

Westinghouse (e.g.) can't charge me more for power to run GE (e.g.) appliances. Comcast (e.g.) shouldn't be able to extort customers for access to (e.g.) Netflix.

[jerkstate]

False analogy. Westinghouse can either make their own power or buy it as a fungible commodity from anyone else who does. Comcast can't make Netflix packets.

[DiThi]

CDNs are definitely still a thing. Not so much because of "chance of reaching", but because you can't change the speed of light, and having the content closer to the clients is both faster and cheaper.

[jerkstate]

Given perfect reliability, faster (lower latency) doesn’t matter for streaming video because all of the traffic is pipelined (even for live, encoding lag would dominate the few hundred ms maximum delay from light speed). And the user already paid their ISP for the bandwidth, so why would distance factor into the cost?

[DiThi]

The user paid for internet access, but streaming video services pay too. The more distance there is, the more effort may be required to guarantee some minimum speed, and in some cases may not even be possible. Internet sea cables are not unlimited. Net Neutrality means you treat packets equally[0], not that you can put an unlimited amount of them.

But if the user can get a faster speed through a VPN than without (as it has happened with Netflix vs Verizon), the tubes are NOT the limit, but a clear violation of Net Neutrality.

[0] As in: if shaping is done, you don't look at the source, destination or content.

[jerkstate]

An end-user ISP is going to have a lot of different pipes for a lot of different transit providers, which are going to have unequal utilization and different data. Internet bandwidth is not fungible in the way that, say, electricity is.

Each network provider that the packet is passed thru inspects the destination address in order to determine which pipe to send it on to get it closer to its destination. If that pipe is congested, the packet can't turn around and find another route. It has to be dropped and retransmitted. This is true for streaming video packets as well as others like email, video game, etc (although most video games use UDP which cannot retransmit, if it's dropped, the game jitters)

So if I'm an ISP downstream from a congested pipe that happens to be transiting a lot of streaming video, I know that all of the users of that pipe who are not streaming video are having a bad experience - slow text web page loads, jittery video games, garbled voip calls, etc. So what I can do is selectively drop some of packets from the video streams (I can tell which ones the heavy users are if I record the source IP and count the # of packets per stream), and those streams will generally gracefully downgrade to the next lower streaming quality. This relieves the inbound congestion because the sender stops sending as much data to users downstream of me, and allows my other customers to play video games without lag, make voip calls, load web sites without long delays, etc.

So clearly the pipe needs to be upgraded, the question is, who should pay to have that pipe upgraded? That's between the ISP and the transit partner, they have peering agreements to determine how that cost is shared. I think it's important to look into who failed to live up to their contractual obligation to shoulder the shared costs.

BTW - going thru a VPN on Verizon just means that the traffic is getting to the customer through a different upstream provider than the one that BGP specifies because it originates from a different network, one that isn't as congested as the BGP route from Netflix. You would need to look at a traceroute to figure it out.

[comex]

In Comcast’s case, the congested pipe was just the connection between Level3’s network and Comcast's. Level3 and Comcast had an existing settlement-free peering agreement (no money paid in either direction), and Level3 wanted to keep it that way, but Comcast wanted to start charging Level3, arguing that it was sending it far more traffic than it was receiving. Level3 argued that it shouldn’t have to pay because (most of) that traffic had been requested by Comcast customers in the first place.

Also:

> [Level3] tells me that it actually offered to give the necessary hardware to Comcast (at around $50,000 per port) and that it offered to do "cold-potato" routing deep into Comcast's network, dropping off streaming traffic near the customers who requested it, for instance.

source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/12/comcastlevel3

[jerkstate]

Thanks, that article completely illustrates what I'm talking about.

> Who paid for the delivery of all this on-net traffic, then? The customers. In Level 3's case, this means that CDN customers like Netflix would pay Level 3, while Comcast's cable modem subscribers would pay Comcast. Very simple, very clean, and according to Level 3 now, this is the way the Internet should be connected.

> But after winning the Netflix deal this autumn, Level 3 suddenly wanted to pass far more traffic over its links with Comcast. Comcast balked; Level 3 suddenly looked less like a transit vendor and more like a CDN.

You are correct that they had an existing settlement-free peering agreement. But that agreement had traffic ratio requirements which Level3 broke because of its Netflix contract. So they can offer whatever else in the world that they want to seem like "nice guys" - free routers or cold potato routing or whatever. But Comcast is not obligated to allow Level3 to break the terms of their agreement so Level3 can make tons of money off Netflix at Comcast's expense.

[bifrost]

CDNs are a neccesity for latency and distribution, little of it has to do with your origin provider's quality. There are still some pretty terrible providers out there, some of them are HUGE and have hundreds of thousands of satisfied customers.