[Touche]

Comcast does transit with many peers, but Netflix doesn't do business with any of them because they want to lower their own costs by cutting out the middlemen.

A peering agreement is free when both sides are accepting traffic for the others, but that's not what is happening in this case. Netflix -> Comcast is one way.

Still waiting for an answer to my previous question, should Comcast delivery my personal website to their customers for free?

[dangrossman]

Netflix never attempted to directly send data one-way to Comcast for free. It paid tens of millions of dollars a year to a transit provider, Cogent, that has a peering agreement with Comcast. It only stopped paying Cogent and started paying Comcast (an estimated $25-50M/year) after Comcast refused to provide adequate connectivity between its customers and Cogent for months, despite their links being maxed out at peak hours. Netflix was becoming a casualty of a long-term contract dispute between Comcast and Cogent over peering fees. Comcast was being greedy, trying to get paid twice for the service its customers already pay it to provide.

[exelius]

Cogent is the bottom of the barrel transit provider. You use Cogent when you have a lot of bits to push and don't particularly care if they're going to get there (seriously, Cogent has like 25% packet loss at peak times.) Most companies use Cogent for overflow; i.e. they purchase enough transit through other providers for 80-90% of peak load, then fill out the rest with Cogent. It's not that Cogent is a terrible company or anything; they just provide an inferior product at an appropriate price point. Cogent wasn't interested in paying Comcast for better service because quality of service is not the product that Cogent provides. Their business model is to take advantage of their free peering status to sell unreliable transit at rock-bottom prices. Again; it's not evil or anything, but when you use Cogent that has to be what you expect.

But Netflix was using them for almost 100% of their traffic delivery. That's insane. There are other transit providers they could have paid more to and gotten better service, but that would have meant higher costs.

The whole irony of this situation is that I've heard rumors that Netflix is paying less per gigabit to Comcast than they paid Cogent while getting better service than they would get from a top-tier provider. If that's true, other companies will be lining up to get a similar deal because they'd just be cutting out the middlemen.

[Touche]

Netflix is attempted to send one-way data right now. That's what their whole campaign is about, shifting their costs onto everyone else. They don't want to go back to paying Cogent, that was much more expensive.

[megaman821]

Where are you getting this info that Netflix didn't want to pay Cogent and Level3?

It seems like Comcast entered a shitty peering arrangement with Cogent and decided not to upgrade the interconnect links in retaliation. Netflix gets caught in the crossfire and ends up having to pay Comcast directly to avoid a few million angry customers. Is there any transit provider that Netflix could have gone with that has enough interconnects with the Comcast network? If not, Netflix is forced to pay whatever price Comcast names for their customers to receive adequate video streams.