[shoxty]

This peering issue has affected me a lot. I watch a lot of gaming streams online and during peek hours Twitch.tv has becomes unusable. During a major tournament this is very unfortunate. Another example of this peering dispute affecting me is with the game League of Legends.

Almost everyone who is on Comcast (myself included) during peek times experiences lag that makes the game unplayable. Your character "skates" along the map and usually when it buffers and catches up to you you'll find yourself dead. My friends and I got together to play over the weekend and ended up having to stop due to the lag.

Heres a thread where the guys at Riot are trying to identify the issue. It wasn't until 7/22 that they identified the problem everyone has been having was due to a peering dispute between Verizon and other vendors. To fix the problem they are having to make changes with their provider to route traffic to bypass problematic junctions.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=3521364

Its been very eye opening to me. I have a 50mb connection and I always thought that as long as I had a faster connection I wouldn't have lag issues. It was disappointing to learn that regardless of your connection you can still be throttled by ISPs and their vendors.

[cpncrunch]

Can you not change to a better ISP? It's ridiculous to be paying good money for high speed internet if your ISP can't handle the load. I've been using shaw.ca for years with zero problems since they upgraded their network to fibre, and we have two other pretty decent providers to choose from as well.

I'm sure you must have a decent ISP somewhere down in the states. If not, perhaps you just need to wait for google to do it.

[shoxty]

The way I understand it is that my internet traffic is like a little dog that wants to get from my yard to Netflix's yard to play. To do that, the poor pup has to cross 6 other yards to get there. Some of the yards are nice and friendly with pretty flowers to sniff along the way.

Other yards are owned by mean people that don't want to let the dog through unless it's owner (your ISP) pays them more money. If the owner doesn't pay more money, the mean yard owners will make the pup sit there and wait for a long time until they say it's okay to go (LAG).

And sometimes, the mean owner have so many dogs waiting in his yard, he decides to throw them into the street, where they are never seen nor heard from again (packet loss).

Most people could definitely change ISPs and avoid the troublesome vendors their ISP is currently peered with but I live in a town (low population) and unfortunately Comcast is about as good as it gets.

One way to get around it is to route my traffic through a proxy to bypass the troublesome vendors but that would degrade my bitrate which is frustrating since what I really want is to just get what I am paying for 50/mb and wish the internet providers would just work it out.

[cpncrunch]

No, that's not (always) true. My ISP's traffic goes directly from their network to Google.

According to the article Comcast are trying to charge Google for letting Comcast's customers watch youtube, which is a weird and evil way to do business. I think it basically boils down to Comcast being a really shitty ISP and you (unfortunately) not having much choice.

The irony here is that Comcast is a 10x larger company than Shaw, so perhaps it's just a case of Comcast throwing their weight around and basically resorting to extortion.

[shoxty]

:(