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by blasteye 4277 days ago
Everyone keeps citing the netflix openconnect initiative. But did netflix also offer to pay the co-location fees to place their servers in the ISPs datacenters?

ISPs already allow businesses to co-locate servers, netflix could have done the same. But it'd have to at least pay colocation fees + bandwidth fees.
2 comments
kbenson 4277 days ago
I think you misunderstand what the openconnect initiative does. It both reduces costs for ISPs and speeds delivery of content to end users. The ISPs no longer have to pay for the extra upstream bandwidth and network equipment to handle that load. The amount saved through that vastly dwarfs whatever small colocation fees would be gained if they charged. If Netflix is accounting for a significant portion of the traffic on the internet, then it's accounting for a significant amount of traffic that ISPs must handle, and that's a large amount of their overhead.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix will/does pay some amount to colocate in some instances. The economics in some instances may cause the amount paid to be less than the cost of the CDN traffic.

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opendais 4277 days ago
> ISPs already allow businesses to co-locate servers, netflix could have done the same. But it'd have to at least pay colocation fees + bandwidth fees.

You are ignoring the fact it is offering this to save the ISPs money and improve the quality of the service.

Its cheaper for the ISPs to put an openconnect box inside their network in the LA area than it is to pay for more networking equipment.

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rhino369 4277 days ago
Not if it means that they have to host everyone's content for free. And if you think they should only host the big guys for free, then how is that not discrimination?
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opendais 4277 days ago
You are making an invalid analogy, at best.

ISPs are expected to provide sufficient capacity at peering points with other networks to provide reasonable quality delivery to their customers.

How they handle that without demanding special privileges (as ISPs are in Netflix's case by holding traffic hostage until they are paid more money) is their buisness.

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