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That's Netflix paying Comcast directly, not Cogent giving Comcast the few grand to upgrade the link that they were purposefully not upgrading to force Netflix into paying.

EDIT: Also worth noting that Netflix has to pay every month (which is what Comcast wants) rather than Cogent just giving them $10k once for new hardware (not as delicious as lots more money!)

It's not just the hardware upgrade, the peering agreement is only free when each side sends the same amount of data. Netflix is sending a lot more than it's receiving, in which case their ISP needs to pay for peering.

Edit: I'm just explaining why a hardware upgrade was besides the points that were being made. These are the facts regardless of who you think is in the right. The argument was over bandwidth usage, not hardware upgrades. Is anyone disagreeing with that?

[0] https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/just-what-does-it-mean...

chimeracoder 4103 days ago

> Netflix is sending a lot more than it's receiving, in which case their ISP needs to pay for peering.

All Internet traffic has more download than upload (for the end-consumer). This is literally why ISPs offer faster download speeds in end-consumer packages than upload speeds - they know that consumers will need to download more than they upload.

In vector calculus, this is known as divergence. Traffic on the highway has divergence of 0, meaning that if you draw a closed loop of any shape, over the course of a day/week, the number of cars crossing that loop in both directions (in/out) will be the same.[0][1] Internet traffic does not have zero divergence, because bits are interchangeable and easy to create, destroy, and copy (whereas cars and humans are not).

Comcast isn't dumb. They know this is the way the Internet works. They just also know that it's more profitable to pretend they don't and extort money based on a false definition of "equality".

[1] It's not exactly the same, due to births, deaths, and migration, but you get the idea.

>All Internet traffic has more download than upload (for the end-consumer). This is literally why ISPs offer faster download speeds in end-consumer packages than upload speeds - they know that consumers will need to download more than they upload.

Yes, but they also have commercial customers that send out lots of data. Netflix is an outlier all by itself, outweighing the connection.

> Yes, but they also have commercial customers that send out lots of data.

Who?

From what I can tell even their commercial offerings are heavily asymmetric to downloading: http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/plans...

Download / Upload (in Mbps)

16 / 3

50 / 10

75 / 15

100 / 20

150 / 20

So who are these companies that use Comcast to send a lot?

Netflix is only sending the data at the request of Comcast's customers. Comcast is the company which created an asymmetric network such that their customers can request far, far more data than they are able to send. They are reaping the rewards of that decision. It hardly seems reasonable to expect that all the companies that Comcast peers with to have data flowing in equal amounts both ways since the design of Comcast's network explicitly prohibits this.

Trying to boil this down to "Netflix is sending a lot more than it's receiving" is to completely ignore WHY this is happening and really makes the debate useless. Symmetric (or nearly symmetric) peering agreements made sense when everyone had symmetric connections like modems, ISDN, T1, T3, etc.

When the majority of connections are not symmetric, it makes no sense at all.

Again, remember that Netflix isn't DOSing Comcast. Any packets that Netflix sends to Comcast's network was at the request of one of Comcast's (and Netflix's!) customers.

Why aren't the customers that send less data than they receive balanced out by those that send more than they receive? For every byte being sent, there's someone on both sides, so an ISP serving a large enough area should balance out. Except with huge outliers like Netflix.

tzs 4103 days ago

Netflix is not an outlier when it comes to asymmetrical traffic. The typical Comcast customer receives from Google far more data than they send to Google. They receive far more data from Amazon than they send to Amazon. Same for their interaction with Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, the bank, their email provider, their gaming guild forum, and so on. About the only time they might be sending as much as they receive is when they are using the internet for a voice or video chat.

kevin_thibedeau 4103 days ago

Uh no. Comcast's customers are requesting more traffic than they send. That is how residential asymmetric ISP services are specifically designed to be used. Netflix isn't the bogey man just because they offer a service consumers want and have already paid their ISP to deliver. If Netflix was split into 1000 smaller VOD services streaming the same traffic volume who would Comcast blame for having to shoulder the same burden?

>If Netflix was split into 1000 smaller VOD services streaming the same traffic volume who would Comcast blame for having to shoulder the same burden?

In that case many of those would be Comcast customers, and peering would end up equal.

Netflix has a problem because it's an outlier. I'd like to see the chart without Netflix and see if comcast still receives more than it sends then.

> In that case many of those would be Comcast customers, and peering would end up equal.

NOT HARDLY!

They would mostly be customers of small datacenters in various places all around the country, and thus, customers of Cogent and Level3.

Datacenters generally go for tier1 bandwidth, not consumer ISP bandwidth.

Look at the plans that they offer on their website. The fastest upload I can find is 20Mbps for $200/mo. http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/plans...

That's $10/meg which is A LOT.

Three years ago if you were willing to buy in bulk, you could get bandwidth for as low as $0.65/meg as this HN user points out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3892854 Based on his comments I suspect that you could get it for less than $0.50/meg today, maybe less than $0.25/meg.

Sure looks like Comcast wanting to have its cake and eat it too.

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/feamster/why-your-netflix...

skylan_q 4103 days ago

Nick responds directly to that graph: