During Netflix money fight, Cogent’s other big customers suffered too

Cogent prioritized small business traffic over large network users.

Read the whole story

 

[KyleM]

wicketr[/url]":1yd5tgfp]In a world of "net neutrality" Cogent was just as guilty. You can't divide packets into wholesale vs retail unless you are doing exactly what Verizon is proposing with different tiers of access speeds.

I totally disagree. Cogent was doing the best they could given the constraints imposed on them by the 4 ISPs. If cogent transmits the traffic through their network, just to get to the edge router and not have enough capacity with their peer, this is not cogent fault, assuming they were willing to upgrade their connection, which they were.

 

[KyleM]

nweaver[/url]":22hx8u6a]Three important notes:

The problems with Cogent started when they started carrying Netflix. The sudden collapse of Cogent's performance when they started providing transit for Netflix is as telling as the sudden improvement. Arguably, Cogent should never have sold their service to Netflix in the first place: Cogent wasn't capable of reliably doing the job.

The problems with other customers stopped when Cogent turned on quality-of-service markings, creating a slow lane for Netflix and a fast lane for everybody else. But this fast lane/slow lane only applies within Cogent's network, further suggesting this was primarily a Cogent problem.

Cogent knew they had a problem with Netflix traffic right from the start (this traffic congestion was undoubtedly blowing up Cogent's own internal monitoring), but it took months before they actually responded to the problem and implemented the quality-of-service solution.

You have no proof to back any of these statements up. Cogents network did have the capacity to handle the netflix traffic. It is only at the edge where the wholesale traffic was getting dropped due to congestion on the peering links. If cogents internal network was congested, performance with other networks would have been impacted.

I think people generally have a misunderstanding of the role of transit providers. In any sane world, no ISP would ever be able to demand money from transit providers or content providers. The ISPs customers are the ones who are requesting the data, and they are paying for the privilege to do that.

 

[KyleM]

Abhi Beckert[/url]"tv7zf87]

ChickenHawk[/url]"tv7zf87]So packets were going to be dropped because the link was saturated, and they made a judgement call about which packets it was gunna be.

And shockingly, they dropped packets from the "peer" who doesn't pay anything but sends orders of magnitude more data than they receive, instead of about equal which is the definition of "peer".

I don't think you know what you are talking about at all. When Tier 1 providers peer they usually expect similar levels of traffic in each direction. When an ISP peers with a Tier 1 provider, there really is no expectation of balanced traffic. Retail ISP customers always download a lot more than they upload. Requests for a resource are usually many orders of magnitude smaller than the resource themselves, especially when it comes to video. The thing is though, that the ISP customer actually requested that data. It's not cogent just sending a firehose of data, but it is ISP customers who are requesting that data and the ISP refusing to upgrade the connections to handle those requests. This is 100% the ISPs fault and not the transit providers or netflixs fault.

 

[KyleM]

tim305[/url]":bg16lcok]

wiz420[/url]":bg16lcok]

tim305[/url]":bg16lcok]

KyleM[/url]":bg16lcok]

wicketr[/url]":bg16lcok]In a world of "net neutrality" Cogent was just as guilty. You can't divide packets into wholesale vs retail unless you are doing exactly what Verizon is proposing with different tiers of access speeds.

I totally disagree. Cogent was doing the best they could given the constraints imposed on them by the 4 ISPs. If cogent transmits the traffic through their network, just to get to the edge router and not have enough capacity with their peer, this is not cogent fault, assuming they were willing to upgrade their connection, which they were.

But, Cogent is not selling transport to edge routers of other networks. They are selling transport to destination IP addresses. It is up to them to make arrangements to get that traffic delivered. If they can't do it, then they should not accept the traffic. There has never been any rule or understanding that certain networks must carry traffic for free. A lot of networks engage in settlement free peering, but that is purely at their option, as a business decision.

When a residential ISP controls the only route to vast numbers of users, they have tremendous bargaining power in these negotiations and could set exorbitant rates to traverse their network. But, we just haven't seen that. Transit prices, which would include whatever connections fees the major ISP's have been charging, have fallen from $1200/Mbps/month in 1998 to less then a $1/Mbps/month in 2014. It's time we see more of those cost reductions on the content provider side passed on to residential ISP subscribers, or put into building out better residential networks.

We could easily wind up in a place where the ISP toll could exceed the cost of transit. Do you really think that transit is the largest cost to the content providers? I doubt it: The transit market is actually competitive.

But "transit" costs already include the ISP tolls that Comcast, TWC, Verizon and ATT have been collecting pretty much since their inception. And, still they have been dropping 20-30% each year. If we start seeing transit costs going up significantly, then we should start looking at whether ISP tolls are too high. Otherwise, we should let them use those tolls to reduce residential subscriber fees and/or upgrade network capacity. Wow, you know, this might actually stimulate the same kind of capital investments in residential networks that drove down the cost of long haul transit.

There is so much wrong with this that I don't even know where to begin. ISP tolls? Tier 1/Transit providers have connectivity to many networks. ISPs offer internet service to customers to access those many networks. ISPs do not have connections to those networks themselves, so they must PAY transit providers for that connectivity. This only flips around when you have a huge number of customers and a monopoly on those customers. Only then, when the customers have no choice, can the ISPs demand payment from the transit providers for access to their customers. And there is no way that these fees would go to reducing prices for the ISPs customers. Not unless hell itself freezes over.

 

[KyleM]

tim305[/url]":13k3f32i]

Matty[/url]":13k3f32i]

Those who believe Netflix and Cogent should have to pay ISPs to upgrade their networks say the data proves Netflix and Cogent deliberately saturated the networks to force the ISPs into offering a better deal.

Why do we keep hearing this?

They didn't dump traffic on the ISPs. ISP customers were requesting it.

Because Netflix had numerous other CDN and transit providers to choose from, as they had used in the past without problem. They switched to Cogent to save money, and then tried to spin the resulting poor performance into a Net Neutrality issue, which lots of people swallowed hook, line and sinker. See:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/ ... mbers.html

CDNs aren't some magical congestion free solution. Most CDNs use the same transit providers themselves, like cogent and level3. Actually, netflix has offered to provide cache boxes inside the ISP networks for no cost to the ISPs. This would save the ISPs money as they could co-locate the caches near the subscribers reducing internal transit costs, but the ISPs refused this, knowing they could get Cogent/Netflix to pay them and pad their bottom line, rather then just reducing cost.

 

[KyleM]

Richard Bennett[/url]":2z39xo60]If high-priced retail accounts are getting better service than low-priced wholesale accounts, how is that not paid prioritization?

It's not necessarily a bad thing (as long as it's disclosed, which Cogent didn't do), but it's clearly a violation of the net neutrality rules proposed in the past that ban discrimination based on the source, destination, or application type of the packets.

Because this is a competitive transit market, and not last mile connectivity. Also, I don't think there have been rules that say you can discriminate against different types of traffic, as long as all traffic of that type is treated equally. VoIP and HTTP traffic are a lot more latency sensitive than say, streaming video or file downloads. But you can't de-prioritize other peoples VoIP traffic over your streaming video traffic.

 

[KyleM]

tim305[/url]":13yqodr6]

KyleM[/url]":13yqodr6]

tim305[/url]":13yqodr6]

Matty[/url]":13yqodr6]

Those who believe Netflix and Cogent should have to pay ISPs to upgrade their networks say the data proves Netflix and Cogent deliberately saturated the networks to force the ISPs into offering a better deal.

Why do we keep hearing this?

They didn't dump traffic on the ISPs. ISP customers were requesting it.

Because Netflix had numerous other CDN and transit providers to choose from, as they had used in the past without problem. They switched to Cogent to save money, and then tried to spin the resulting poor performance into a Net Neutrality issue, which lots of people swallowed hook, line and sinker. See:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/ ... mbers.html

CDNs aren't some magical congestion free solution. Most CDNs use the same transit providers themselves, like cogent and level3. Actually, netflix has offered to provide cache boxes inside the ISP networks for no cost to the ISPs. This would save the ISPs money as they could co-locate the caches near the subscribers reducing internal transit costs, but the ISPs refused this, knowing they could get Cogent/Netflix to pay them and pad their bottom line, rather then just reducing cost.

Sure, and I will offer to put my servers into ISP networks and make a nice business for myself selling www hosting services with free bandwidth. If you want to send streaming video to all your friends, you don't get a free connection upgrade just because your friends on the same ISP all want to watch it

But if my server is not in the ISP network and it costs the ISP money to have to upgrade their connection and backbone to handle that connection, then it makes financial sense to allow me to put my streaming video server in their network, as it will save them money. This only breaks down when the ISP knows they can cause degraded service unless you pay them more money. If netflix could route their traffic around the consumers ISP, they would, but those ISPs have monopolies in most of the areas they are in, so consumers can't switch to a service that is less sleazy. This all comes down to the last mile monopolies.

 

[KyleM]

WaveRunner[/url]":uorje8kn]

sparkleytone[/url]":uorje8kn]This is relatively straightforward, and this Rayburn character is full of shit.

1. The telcos that owned the last mile to consumers refused to upgrade/add peering ports.
2. Cogent was faced with a choice, in the context of the above, between allowing ALL traffic to be affected equally negatively or manage the network in such a way that the sources of congestion (Netflix, et al) were affected first.
3. Cogent made the correct decision, both for its customers and in light of what was causing the congestion that the aforementioned telcos refused to do anything about.

That's not the issue.. the issue is Netflix and Cogent posting speed tests and then forgetting to mention these inconvenient truths.

Congestion is congestion. If the links are saturated, they should be upgraded, with each party paying their own costs. I have data your customers want, you have customers who want data I have. It's mutually beneficial until one can force the other to pay up.