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by aroch 4153 days ago
The cynic in me wonders if this is blog post was written solely to serve as positive PR for Verizon in the face of their horrible transit/peering infrastructure management (ie. letting links run hot so they can charge transit providers more money for each increase in commit or letting peering ports run very hot because they don't want to spend the few thousand to add another 10G because they'd rather be paid for transit) before the FCC vote.

Edgecast is owned by Verizon, so cynical-me is having a hard time believing this is not a plant.
6 comments
shdon 4153 days ago
No company is all bad. I'm sure there are plenty of techs at Verizon and its subsidiaries that are just trying to do the best job they possibly can and are excited and rightfully proud to diagnose and fix such a problem. Looks like they did some good detective work and deserve the bragging rights.

We see similar posts pop up once in a while with other such situations (CloudFlare springs to mind). It just happens to be Verizon in this case.

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PhantomGremlin 4152 days ago
> No company is all bad.

I think there are a few that are. I see very little good in a company like Philip Morris. They manufacture a delivery system for an addictive drug that, as a side effect, results in countless cancer deaths.

I couldn't possibly see myself working for a company like that.

OTOH under the right circumstances I'd work for Verizon. Their evil is venial compared to merchants of death. But a man's gotta eat, and that's why we prostitute ourselves out to these evil behemoths. And why we rationalize that we're "just trying to do the best job we possibly can".

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rayiner 4153 days ago
If we injected politics into every tech article, there would be no tech articles here. Article on how Graph Search works under the hood? "But did you know Facebook makes their money peddling consumerism to kids?" Etc. At the end of the day, the technology involved in flinging all those terabits of Facebook/Twitter/Netflix content around the aether is legitimately interesting, whatever the FCC vote may be.
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beachstartup 4153 days ago
... dude, it's a company blog post. they're writing about what they do in their noc. it's basic SEO and marketing, not some telco conspiracy.
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dredmorbius 4153 days ago
Given the "being good stewards of the Internet" headline: yeah, total submarine.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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PhantomGremlin 4152 days ago
You're not the only cynic on HN. When I read this I immediately thought of the somewhat different "infrastructure management" that occurred when Verizon extorted Netflix a while ago.

That blog post would have been written something like this:

Verizon: Those sure are nice packets you're asking us to deliver to our mutual customers. It'd be a shame if something happened to them at the interface between our networks.

Netflix: Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Thank you for bending us over and screwing us. Here, take some of our money. Please make the pain stop.

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jacquesm 4153 days ago
They're quite up-front about edgecast being owned by verizon (see large logo at the top left of the page) and the lead sentence.

This is a pretty good write-up of what happens behind the scenes when debugging a network issue.

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