[MiguelHudnandez]

It's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1].

Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic.

This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware.

[1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines

[exelius]

I wouldn't be so sure there's no money changing hands. One of the sides caved; and it was probably Netflix. The amount of money the ISPs were asking for from Netflix was not outrageous; the ISPs were more worried about the precedent that providing free interconnects might set. Give one to Netflix for free, and Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft all think they're entitled to one too.

Strategically, Netflix was holding a far weaker hand because the ISPs had no reason to give in since their brand perception was already so bad. I mean really, is it possible to hate Comcast more than most people already do?

[unabridged]

> is it possible to hate Comcast more than most people already do?

Yes. Right now the average person only hates Comcast because its a monthly bill, it increases frequently, and there is not much competition, they don't yet hate Comcast for the technical reasons "internet" people do.

But if Comcast starts making Netflix, YouTube, etc not work correctly and starts affecting the average American's daily life it will become a political issue. Congressmen will start seriously discussing turning the internet into a utility.

[bifrost]

> Congressmen will start seriously discussing turning the internet into a utility.

They have already done this, it should be opposed. You don't want people who can't balance a checkbook and think that the internet is a "series of tubes" deciding how you get internet access. The PUC/FCC rules and tarrifs are already a byzantine nightmare.

[exelius]

> Congressmen will start seriously discussing turning the internet into a utility.

I loled. Congress has a lot more important problems on its plate than this (social security, immigration, health care, etc.) On this issue they're just going to do what ever their friendly telecom lobbyist tells them to do.

[sp332]

Most boxes like "Open Connect" pay to be colocated and connected that way. Netflix insists on free installation.

[ef4]

Not true. Big CDNs have been cutting deals like this for a long time. It's often in a network owner's financial interest to host a node for free, because it saves them so much upstream bandwidth which they would otherwise pay for.

[bifrost]

Most CDN's pay money for this...

[ef4]

That's pretty hard to generalize. I worked at the biggest CDN for many years. They definitely get free traffic in many places. They had a whole team who's job was talking to network owners and saying "look, you paid for X terrabytes of traffic to us last month. We can cut that cost by 100 if you let us install servers inside your network that will cache the popular content locally."

It all depends on relative size. Bigger networks can demand money from smaller networks and/or CDNs. Networks of comparable size can profitably peer with each other without exchanging cash. Comcast may not do it for free, but the national ISP in a smallish developing country sure might.

It's a big dance, and the relationships are constantly changing. Managing it all in software to actually optimize cost and performance is a big part of the secret sauce for a CDN.

[MiguelHudnandez]

Yeah, it's a value proposition. The argument ISPs keep using is that Netflix traffic is costing them too much.

I don't think Netflix should have to engineer a solution to that problem AND pay the ISP for the privilege of saving them tons of money.

If the costs (4U of rack space, networking equipment, and network engineering around privacy/security) are more than the ISP would save, it's an easy decision.

Note that in this case, it does not appear to be the use of an appliance. If that were the case I think we'd see the Netflix content coming from a Comcast IP.

[exelius]

No; no ISP would ever run externally managed equipment inside their network. They would run it in a separate cage with a direct fiber connection to the gateway routers. Rule #1 of network security is that you never run someone else's equipment inside your network; you ALWAYS make them go through a gateway.

Also it's largely semantics where a device like OpenConnect is hosted. Netflix could host it at a datacenter across town with a direct fiber interconnect to the ISP and it would be effectively the same thing. This is how all the big CDNs do it; that way they host equipment once and connect to multiple local ISPs.

[dsl]

> This is how all the big CDNs do it

You have no idea how big CDNs do it. I've personally installed CDN gear into ISP racks. Sometimes you get an uplink into a router, other times you sit on a switch with other gear.

That "direct fiber interconnect" is called private peering and mostly used to fill cache boxes on the providers network.

[exelius]

Large ISPs sure as hell don't do this (maybe they used to; but not in the last 3 years). They have dedicated cages in their datacenters for external gear that sit at the edge of their network.

Regardless, the word on the Netflix-Comcast situation is that Netflix is indeed hosting the hardware at 3rd party datacenters with a dedicated connection to Comcast. Whether you call it an interconnect or private peering is just semantics; it's a pretty common practice in the industry and technologically, it's no different than having a 10gig fiber link within a datacenter.

[nknighthb]

I spent a year in 2007-2008 managing equipment inside Comcast's network while working for a very much not-Comcast company. Even had a Comcast VPN assigned specifically to me complete with RSA fob shipped to me by Comcast. You haven't got the first clue what ISPs do, nor how networks work.

[philp]

> No; no ISP would ever run externally managed equipment inside their network.

You haven't been paying attention to that Edward Snowden fella, have you?

[waps]

Just stating the obvious here, but "Rule #1" obviously doesn't apply to service provider networks, who are specifically built so other people's equipment can be connected on almost every point. Customers on the access layer. Datacenters, colocation and these sorts of boxes on the distribution layer, and peers on the "gateway"/peering layers.

The second paragraph is wrong too, there are much closer relationships possible. They're much deeper than that today, and I would expect in the future to see CDNs much deeper in provider networks.

[achille2]

I always thought that Netflix served everything from AWS. How can they they have their own AS number and peering locations?

[stonemetal]

Netflix's website is hosted from AWS they don't stream moves from it. All the video data comes from a CDN. In the past they have used pretty much all of the major CDNs before creating their own.

[bifrost]

Yeah, you were wrong :)