Reply to post: Re: Paid twice

Netflix shows South Korea a rerun of 'We Won't Pay Your Telcos For Bandwidth'

rg287

Re: Paid twice

Nope.

The customer is paying their ISP for a service - namely to internetwork them to every other network on the planet, whether via peering or through use of paid transit. The ISP has no financial relationship with content providers. If they want Netflix to pay for their traffic, will they want to bill me - or my hosting provider - for the privilege of letting their customers see my blog?

In Europe and much of the developed world, networks meet at neutral IXPs and peer away the bulk of their traffic direct to the target network - whether that be FAANG or others - such as locally-relevant networks like JANET, etc. This is a friendly and collaborative approach - my users want what you have, and you want to get your data to my users. We all peer and everybody is happy.

Anything they can't lose locally, they shift through paid transit.

In the US - and apparently South Korea - the approach has been to simply buy transit. That gets expensive when you're trying to shift Tb/s from the likes of Netflix. The obvious thing to do would be to peer privately - which costs a little money in Data-Centre interconnects1 but is far cheaper per Gb.

However, instead of developing the best technical solution and giving their users a good experience the matter is taken from the hands of engineers and becomes a matter of policy/manglement. The beancounters see an opportunity to rinse the content providers by charging for the privilege of peering with them and collecting at both ends.

Note that this tends to happen most in countries with broad monopolies and poor consumer protections. In the UK for instance, whilst most traffic is going over OpenReach's wires, the IP layer is handled by the tenant ISP. If ISP A decides to be stroppy and throttle Netflix, customers will simply move to ISP B who are openly peering and providing a high quality service.

The one and sole issue I might take with Netflix is the hosting of OpenConnect boxes, where the ISP is providing rack-space and power on the basis that it's cheaper than provisioning the equivalent peering capacity or buying transit. But then Netflix is providing the hardware free of charge, so that's for networks to do their own ROI calculations.

1. Again, in the civilised world, getting a DC interconnect between racks is usually a one-off provisioning fee. £300 for some fibre pairs over which you can shove 10/40/100Gb/s in perpetuity is a bargain. In the Land of the Free(dom Fries)TM you can expect a monthly fee for the privilege of having an interconnect just... sitting there... and for the DC not to come and take at away again.

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