> Wrong how, Ken?
Just a handful of points, which are not all-inclusive:
1. The Comcast throttling thing was proven to be a different issue.
This happened, not on the ISP side, but on the transport network side.
All wholesale customers were affected.
2. To follow that "delivery truck" metaphor, the ISP is the delivery
truck. What Netflix has done is load up the trucks with tons of
packages and not pay a dime for any of it.
3. Netflix has brokered a deal with the USPS to do exactly what they
are complaining about with the ISPs. In fact, there is an on-going
federal investigation into that one which may end up with criminal
charges.
4. Netflix is paying for the guerrilla marketing methods, such as
these cutesy little videos. You've been had.
5. To follow back on point #2, it costs the ISP about $10 a month PER
USER to just deliver Netflix content alone. Netflix is not footing any
of this bill at all. None.
6. Broadband Internet is NOT a monopoly. Only in some areas, but not
everywhere. There is plenty of competition.
7. Comparing broadband in the USA to highly concentrated places like
Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc., is pretty wrong. What all of
those locations have over the USA is a much higher percentage of the
population that live in multi-tenent dwellings. Large apartment
buildings are served by a single business-grade high-bandwidth fiber
connection and the building is then one giant LAN. That's a much
different situation than in the USA where the majority of the
population lives in locations served by DSL or Cable-Modem
technologies. And then the people who say that even Uganda is better
connected than the USA are even more delusional.
8. Netflix is paying for politicans to support Net Neutrality as
Netflix wants it. Follow the money. They bought off Mr.
Franken/Obama/Boener...
9. The USA does NOT have the most expensive Internet access around.
Far from it. Other than the wireless providers, you rarely have
bandwidth caps, throttling, walled-gardens and per-bit tiered rates
here. When comparing apples to apples, the USA's internet costs for
the typical user is actually pretty good. And the limits on speeds as
compared to the other countries is strictly a geography thing. I've
even seen people state that China has Net Neutrality.
Right.
My own opinion on this one is that if Netflix is involved at all,
you've been had. This whole Net Neutrality argument that they've been
selling is based on lies and convenient misrepresentations of the
truth. Fortunately, over the last two weeks, we've seen a little bit
of a turn on this and the press is starting to figure out just what is
going on. Netflix is one evil entity and having them define Net
Neutrality laws is going to really be a problem. As I work for a major
provider, who has interconnection agreements with every major Internet
entity out there, I see the other side where Netflix has specifically
chosen to hamstring the customer's experience by forcing us to carry
their traffic from absolutely hideous locations through third-party
providers just to make a point. This Comcast thing? That's exactly
what I'm talking about. See below illustration.
Our company has primary edge routers in Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and
New York City. (There are others that I'm not at liberty to talk
about). At each of these locations, we hand off to Cogent, Level3 and
others. In case you wonder "who owns the Internet", it's Cogent,
Level3, Verizon, etc. Netflix pays for a connection to Cogent in, say,
Dallas. Now, what happens with Google and other major players, is that
they also hand off to Cogent, but also have interconnections with the
major ISPs that also are present in these same locations. This means
that, in the case of Google, not one bit of data flows from Google to
our company through Cogent or Level3. In fact, we meet Google at all
the major locations so we have lower latencies and better control over
everything. Life is good. But not with Netflix. Netflix has chosen to
go through one interconnection point and force all their traffic to
flow over third-party providers and in many cases, clear across the
country in order to meet the ISPs.
OK, so back to point 1 above. Cogent was throttling wholesale
customers in favor of their own traffic. This ended up being a setting
error and not intentional. Regardless, it wasn't Cogent, the cable
company, it was Cogent, the Tier-1 backbone provider. These are
actually two entirely different business entities. The Cogent in
question doesn't even do cable-tv.
Netflix was in the process of continuing to establish interconnection
agreements with more and more ISPs, but they saw an opportunity to
seize upon a political issue and jumped right into it. Overnight, they
ceased ALL additional interconnection agreements and then changed
their own routing to move traffic around to bury Cogent's and
Verizon's backbone and slow up the whole thing. They immediately
started blaming everybody for this, when it was Netflix themselves
that caused it. We saw a distinct point where Netflix changed their
routing to move the data delivery to the worse possible point for
everybody. In fact, even those of us who already had interconnects
with Netflix saw the traffic through those interconnections cease
entirely!!! Yes, you read that right. Netflix rerouted traffic AWAY
FROM ALREADY ESTABLISHED INTERCONNECTIONS AND DETOURED THE TRAFFIC
THROUGH LONGEST-PATH ROUTING just to make their point. In a
conversation with one of my counterparts at a major Tier-1 provider,
he said that Netflix literally tried to kill their network by force
routing traffic through one location and then the next night through
another. Of course, when this happens, it causes a cascading network
failure through all the Tier-1s and in one instance they actually had
to kill the connection with Netflix just to save the Internet from
crashing.
You may ask "why would Netflix want to hurt their own customers?" As
long as Netflix is able to successfully blame others, they're doing
just fine.
Meanwhile, those of us major ISPs with established interconnections
with Netflix just shake our heads because there is no traffic flowing
through them. If you are wondering how much one of those
interconnections cost? Oh, about $20,000 in parts and $600 per month
in fiber cross-connect fees in the carrier-hotel. It's not about the
money, it's all about the politics. We spend billions of dollars a
year on our networks. I can approve a $20,000 expenditure myself with
no additional approval.
Can you now see why I'm so ticked at Netflix? They are lying bastards
bent on destroying what works out of their own greed.
A change in Net Neutrality laws, as Franken/Obama/Boener/Netflix wants
it WILL result in a monthly increase of $10 in the USA for broadband
within six months of the passing of any new laws. It must. Without
content abusers, like Netflix, paying the freight, somebody has to and
it will be the consumer. Don't think it will happen? It's already been
planned. If Netflix gets its way, the average cost will go up $10 per
month, either directly, or through tiered bandwidth offerings just
like we have on the wireless side.
Before anybody gets too excited about Mark Cuban's comments, the fact
is that his Audionet/Broadcastdotcom entity did establish
interconnection agreements with everybody possible back in the day, so
he was paying for "fast lanes" as they so existed. I knew Mark back in
those days and was very familiar with his operation before he sold it.
Meanwhile, our existing multiple 10G interconnections with Netflix sit
idle and we have no clue from one day to the next which Tier-1
interconnection in which city is going to get hammered that night by
Netflix traffic. They are playing games with the system and looking
for any and every opportunity to bloody another nose.
Absolute scumbags.
There. I've vented my spleen enough for one day.
AG
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