[msandford]

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!)

[ikeboy]

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?

[chimeracoder]

> 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".

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

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

[ikeboy]

>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.

[msandford]

> 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?

[wmf]

That's business cable, but Comcast also has business fiber that's symmetric up to 10 Gbps. http://business.comcast.com/ethernet/products/dedicated-inte...

[ikeboy]

That's not for businesses running websites, that's for using the internet in a business. http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/web-h... is relevant, although it doesn't give speeds. But presumably anyone who buys that is sending more data out of comcast than they are receiving.

And as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'd like to see a chart of data in and out excluding Netflix and large companies. If the problem only affects them or other large companies (like Youtube, Apple, Microsoft, etc, which all pay for direct connections), but not small websites, then I think that would support my argument.

[msandford]

The plans listed on that page are:

Storage / Transfer / Price

10MB / 100MB / Free

300GB / Unlimited / $20

400GB / Unlimited / $40

500GB / Unlimited / $80

You must realize that these are absolutely NOT true commercial offerings. They don't even list what your commit bandwidth is!

Also you can't run your own applications there! Do you really think Netflix runs off of a shared server like this? They're a HUGE AWS customer running many thousands of VMs. How do you access control things, how do you deploy your code, how do you do basically ANYTHING with this offering from Comcast? I suspect that you don't.

Here are some legitimate commercial offerings: http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated

If you notice, they have a page dedicated to their network. What familiar names do we find on this page? Cogent and Level3! http://www.hostgator.com/network

Notice that there is no mention ANYWHERE of ANY COMPANY that might even a LITTLE BIT be considered a consumer ISP. Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, etc, none of them are mentioned.

[msandford]

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.

[ikeboy]

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]

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.

[ikeboy]

But some of those sites are going to be Comcast customers, who serve customers from other places.

I'm not saying that an average consumer is sending as much as they receive, but Comcast doesn't only have consumers, they also serve websites. That should balance out for small websites in and out of their network.

[kevin_thibedeau]

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?

[ikeboy]

>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.

[msandford]

> 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.

[ikeboy]

Let me ask you something else. How large should a company need to be to get free connections to last mile ISPs? If any company could do it, then instead of paying for hosting or internet, I'd just pay for one computer and hook it up directly to the ISP. That isn't possible for every website.

Why should Netflix be able to do that and not smaller sites?

[dpark]

I think you've misunderstood the scenario at play. Netflix did not want to connect to Comcast for free. Netflix did not want to connect directly to Comcast at all. They wanted to connect to their own ISPs, and they were paying to do so. Comcast didn't want to upgrade the peering links to Netflix's ISPs, though, because they'd then lose their leverage over Netflix. Comcast's refusal to upgrade peering links effectively forced Netflix to connect directly to Comcast.

Comcast sells asymmetric connectivity that's skewed as far as 10:1 download vs upload. And then they claim that peering should be symmetric as if they aren't a huge contributor to the asymmetry.

[msandford]

While we're asking each other silly questions, let me ask you this: if my ISP says that they're providing me with "internet access" but actually only provides me with "most of the internet minus a few people we'd like to shake-down access", this is OK?