Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by scoon1329 3099 days ago
The issue is more complex than just a bigger pipe.

As a site owner, you pay a service provider (or cloud hosting service or whatever) to offer you a certain amount of bandwidth to host your site.

The problem comes when other ISP's implement their fast lanes and traffic from your site doesn't get equal priority to traffic from another site who has paid that specific ISP to prioritise their traffic when serving their customers.

So you end up having to pay multiple ISP's to prioritise your traffic on their networks. Your site could appear slow even if you've paid your own service provider for a high bandwidth.

2 comments

That's also not correct. If you, as the site owner, are still talking about ISPs or cloud hosting you are someone who is riding a bicycle on a shoulder of I-95 next to semis doing 80mph in 65 zones. You are, frankly, irrelevant. Also you do want to make sure that those semis use <blah>-bypass instead of clogging your highway.

The real issue is that we allow those ISPs to determine which semis are allowed to use a bypass. Public's ( even technologically advanced public's ) mixing of the two issues is why NN fight would continue to be lost.

So, I guess, my question still stands, right? I'm assuming this bypass costs money for the ISPs to provide. Why is it evil for them to charge people to use it?
I was responding to my parent, not your comment.

To address your point, I do not see an issue for ISPs charging for PNIs as long as those charges are uniform. If I, JoesFlix, have 100Gbit/sec traffic to Comcast and Comcast says "In order to access EP-Bypass, traffic has to come from AS that has more than 90Gbit/sec traffic to us" then Comcast should not be allowed to prevent me from accessing EP-Bypass. Congestion is bad for business. Sane PNI rules are easy:

0. there's some access fee ( typically it is actually - you must show up in X places - how you get there is your cost )

1. we get even number of PNIs.

2. i order and pay for half

3. you order and pay for half

Thank you for explaining your concerns in a civil way. So this is a hypothetical problem or something that's manifested in the past but regulation then stopped?