Posted on 05/06/2014 8:34:38 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
If you’re the customer of a major American internet provider, you might have been noticing it’s not very reliable lately. If so, there’s a pretty good chance that a graph like this is the reason:
These graphs comes from Level 3, one of the world’s largest providers of “transit,” or long-distance internet connectivity. The graph on the left shows the level of congestion between Level 3 and a large American ISP in the Dallas area. In the middle of the night, the connection is less than half-full and everything works fine. But during peak hours, the connection is saturated. That produces the graph on the right, which shows the packet loss rate. When the loss rate is high, thousands of Dallas-area consumers are having difficulty using bandwidth-heavy applications like Netflix, Skype, or YouTube (though to be clear, Level 3 doesn’t say what specific kind of traffic was being carried over this link).
This isn’t how these graphs are supposed to look. Level 3 swaps traffic with 51 other large networks, known as peers. For 45 of those networks, the utilization graph looks more like this:
The graph on the left shows that there is enough capacity to handle demand even during peak hours. As a result, you get the graph at the right, which shows no problems with dropped packets.
So what’s going on? Level 3 says the six bandwidth providers with congested links are all “large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market.” One of them is in Europe, and the other five are in the United States.
Level 3 says its links to these customers suffer from “congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content.”
The basic problem is those six broadband providers want Level 3 to pay them to deliver traffic. Level 3 believes that’s unreasonable. After all, the ISPs’ own customers have already paid these ISPs to deliver the traffic to them. And the long-standing norm on the internet is that endpoint ISPs pay intermediaries, not the other way around. Level 3 notes that “in countries or markets where consumers have multiple broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers.” In short, broadband providers that face serious competition don’t engage in this kind of brinksmanship.
Unfortunately, most parts of the US suffer from a severe lack of broadband competition. And the leading ISPs in some of these markets appear to view network congestion not as a technical problem to be solved so much as an opportunity to gain leverage in negotiations with other networks.
Netflix has been forced to cut private deals with ISPs. Is that undermining net neutrality?
In February, Netflix agreed to pay Comcast to ensure that its videos would play smoothly for Comcast customers. The company signed a similar deal with Verizon in April. Netflix signed these deals because its customers had been experiencing declining speeds for several months beforehand. Netflix realized it would be at a competitive disadvantage if it didn’t pay for speedier service. After its payment to Comcast, Netflix’s customers experienced a 67 percent improvement in their average connection speed.
Netflix has accused Comcast of deliberately provoking the crisis by refusing to upgrade its network to accommodate Netflix traffic, leaving Netflix with little choice but to pay a “toll.” That might sound like a classic network neutrality violation. But surprisingly, leading network neutrality proposals wouldn’t affect this kind of agreement at all.
That’s because Comcast wasn’t technically offering Netflix a “fast lane” on an existing connection. Instead, Netflix paid Comcast to accept a whole new connection. The terms of these agreements, known as “peering,” have always been negotiated in an unregulated market, and network neutrality regulations don’t apply to them.
In theory, Netflix’s deal with Comcast doesn’t violate network neutrality because everyone on this new pipe (e.g. only Netflix) is treated the same, just as everyone on the old, overloaded pipe gets equal treatment. But it’s hard to see any practical difference between the kind of “fast lane” agreement network neutrality supporters have campaigned against and Netflix paying Comcast for a faster connection.
So why hasn’t interconnection been a bigger part of the network neutrality debate? Until recently, it was unheard of for a residential broadband provider like Comcast to demand payment to deliver traffic to its own customers. Traditionally, residential broadband companies would accept traffic from the largest global “backbone” networks such as Level 3 for free. So anyone could reach Comcast customers by routing their traffic through a third network. That limited Comcast’s leverage.
But recently, the negotiating position of backbone providers has weakened while the position of the largest residential ISPs — especially Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T — has gotten stronger. As a consequence, the network neutrality debate will be increasingly linked to the debate over interconnection. Refusing to upgrade a slow link to a company is functionally equivalent to configuring an Internet router to put the company’s packets in a virtual slow lane. Regulations that try to protect net neutrality without regulating the terms of interconnection are going to be increasingly ineffective.
I am experiencing this
Name names
Capacity costs money to build. Are the people using it paying for it, or is the cost being spread over all users including the low-bandwidth email users?
My personal opinion - use should be metered like electricity or gas - if you use a lot, you pay a lot. If you use a little, you pay a little. That way, the expenses are allocated properly.
Second the motion. I saw Comcast. And?
Oh my gosh! You sound like one of those filthy capitalists. The internet is a right, like free healthcare, abortions on demand, lifelong terms in office for politicians where they become millionaires.
There are no service levels on the Internet because those who need them for the conduct of their business are not allowed to pay extra for it and the ISP's are not allowed to offer it for sale.
If they could the tradition telephone and cable TV business would be dead overnight.
/johnny
I’ve definitely been getting more error messages lately. (The can’t connect to server type.)
- if you use a lot, you pay a lot. If you use a little, you pay a little.”
No, no you have that all wrong. In the new society those that can afford to pay a lot will be expected to do so so that those that don’t pay a lot can use a lot, too. /s/
The internet is a standard. You comply or you don’t. Telcos get paid by their customers for the bandwidth. The customers use the telco to access content, and the telcos cry that they don’t make enough. THE CUSTOMERS ARE PAYING FOR THE BANDWIDTH. It’s nothing more than the telcos complaining that they need to get payed for the info coming and going, it’s a shift from what has been done to date. It’s a shift from how the internet has existed to date. It’s the telcos trying to squeeze every last penny out of the internet, nothing more.
I’ll make you a deal, I’ll stop talking about net neutrality, if you start pushing against the monopolies in the internet industry. Are monopolies in line with you capitalist ideals? Why complain about Net neutrality, but not about monopolies?
Give people the choice, and some can pick to get shafted by these new consumer restrictions, and others can choose a telco that does things the way it’s always been done. Then let the market decide. Oh that’s right, we can’t, so we have the monopolies shafting customers by charging more and delivering less.
Pro-capitalism my hairy arse.
If you go to the Google Fiber map of the Kansas City area, there's a great big empty where Overland Park is, and Google has announced that there are no plans to install their high speed service in Overland Park. I've sent an email to the Overland Park city council saying if they pull the same crap with AT&T and their new high speed that AT&T is planning on bringing to the KC area, I will need to think about moving to another city.
Mark
The Monopolies are state sanctioned and dictated.
Even cooks know that.
/johnny
You forgot free smart phones for Holder’s people.
Bravo SengirV!!!!
In the vast majority of the country there is only 1 choice a person has if they want high-speed internet. In part of the country a person is lucky if they have 2-3 choices.
But telco’s are a strange animal. In the front door they compete for customers but in the back door they are friends and partners. Yes AT$T, Veri$ion, Comca$t & Time-Warner all have agreements on the backend about how much each will pay the other to leverage their networks and even how those networks will be operated.
MONOPOLIES, especially ones that lease government owned (aka owned by you and I) airwaves, do need oversight and regulation.
We have all discovered that in the 1980’s $3 a minute long distance rates were a scam. How much money did the telco’s steal from your parent’s back then? Long Distance eventually became “commoditized”. The Telco’s learned their lesson from that disaster. Mobile phone service and internet should go the way of Long-Distance... But that doesn’t happen. WHY not?
“Oh my gosh! You sound like one of those filthy capitalists. The internet is a right, like free healthcare, abortions on demand, lifelong terms in office for politicians where they become millionaires.”
Then explain to us why COMCAST is not cheating on the standard agreement by attempting to be paid twice for providing the same service as everyone else by using their government granted monopoly to fund the Democrats and Obama to maintain and extend that monopoly for political control.
I’m paying for 20 Mbps speed from AT&T. The other night watching an Amazon prime flick, the speed dropped from from 20 to 1.5 several times. It made the movie almost unwatchable as it stopped repeatedly.
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