Re: NANOG67 - Tipping point of community and sponsor bashing?

[Rick Astley]

I have to agree with Dan in that even if you disagreed with the talk you
have to agree that it probably spawned relevant discussion and reflection
(both on and off list). I would hate to see a move to ideas and discussions
that are chosen simply for offending the fewest people. Another sort of
similar critique aimed at large routing vendors was "Help! My big expensive
router is really expensive" at NANOG 60 in Atlanta. Perhaps the critiques
were seen as more constructive and I don't remember the same backlash after
the talk but I found both talks and various discussions that followed
insightful.

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 4:53 PM, Daniel Golding  wrote:

> Hmm - as far as whether this was a good or bad NANOG presentation...this is
> some of the best discussion I've seen on list in a while. There is a frank
> exchange of views between many different parties. This may result in some
> follow-up presentations at future NANOGs by IXP operators (please!).
>
> Seems that, whether you agree with Dave or not, it was successful. It also
> seems that the IXP operators who came under the most criticism have reacted
> with a lot of professionalism and maturity. Other IXP operators have
> reacted pretty poorly, which is ironic.
>
> Dan
>

Re: Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3) (was: RIP Network Neutrality (was: Wow its been quiet here...

[Rick Astley]

 with Owen Delong on this who said That set of regulations would be
utterly impossible to meaningfully enforce because so much of it depends on
subjective evaluation. and gave some reasons why.
I also think that in order for the government to meaningfully review all
interconnect relationships between companies there would be more legal
scrutiny within companies needing to justify the process, forms would need
to be filed with government for review, some reviewing entity would need to
perform a traffic study potentially needing access to netflow data, and
tier 1 if it would continue to exist would likely require expensive
certification to come with the responsibility and there would need to be
some process for new companies seeking tier 1 status to apply for it. We
would be left with a pile of costs, nothing beneficial gained from it, and
an advantage to companies with more lawyers than engineers.


Broadband is too expensive in the US compared to other places

I have seen this repeated so many times that I assume it's true but I have
never seen anything objective as to why. I can tell you if you look at
population density by country the US is 182nd in the world and the average
broadband speed (based on OOKLA:
http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/) is 30th in the world. South
Korea that is well known for its fast broadband speeds has a density of
505/km vs the US at 32/km. We have about 1/15 of the population density and
about 1/2 the average broadband speed. Hong Kong, Singapore, Netherlands,
Japan, Macau etc. all have more than 10x the population density in the US
so definitely not all countries with fast broadband make for a fair
comparison and there are likely fewer that do. The UK is only beating the
US by 2Mbps but has a population density of 262/km.

So while its a fair assessment that broadband in the US is very bias to
ignore some of the other factors involved. Another mistake I see people
keep making is in comparing the cost of broadband in the US in $USD to
other countries around the world. The cost of broadband in Estonia is only
about $30/month. OMG, I can't believe broadband is cheaper in Estonia! What
people ignore is everything is cheaper in Estonia, the average household
income in Estonia is $14k vs $55k here. By that measure broadband is more
expensive for families there than it is in the US. This is another point
people repeat without bothering to qualify. This would be like my
grandfather comparing the costs of a candy bar from back when he was a kid
to today but ignoring inflation.


Broadband companies are making money hand over fist

This may be true but I have honestly not attempted to index a bunch of
major companies and compare their profit vs revenue so see if broadband
companies are really on the top of the pile as people making this point
imply.  I have to confess to being skeptic that the people making the claim
have done this either.


ad hominem attacks

Inevitable but no, I don't have financial gain in any of this. My stance is
essentially that if ISP's are forced to choose between higher prices,
metered billing, or adopting paid peering then paid peering is the best
solution of those 3 and pushing for legislation prohibiting it only serves
to take what I think is the best solution off the table. Especially in
cases where content providers are monetizing a service sold over the top I
think resistance to this option is a bit stubborn and I'd like to see the
industry solve the dispute without the government taking the opportunity to
land grab for expanded power over the Internet. If they pick just
ratcheting up pricing for unlimited plans in auto pilot as costs rise it
will only harm the Broadband is too expensive in the US compared to other
places numbers and I think people have been pretty clear in their
objection to metered billing. Metered billing would also probably hurt
content providers more than paid peering would so it's the worst option all
around. I read complaints about the way things are handled all the time and
complaining is easy but proposing better solutions is harder.



On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Matthew Petach mpet...@netflight.comwrote:




 On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 8:04 AM, Rick Astley jna...@gmail.com wrote:

 [...]

 The reality is an increasingly directly peered Internet doesn't sit well
 if
 you are in the business of being the middle man. Now if you will, why do
 transit companies themselves charge content companies to deliver bits? How
 is it fair to be in the business of charging companies to receive their
 bits and hand them to a settlement free peer on the hook to deliver them,
 but not fair for content to just bypass the transit company and enter a
 paid peering agreement with the company delivering the bits? In this case
 paid peering is mutually beneficial to both companies involved and is
 typically cheaper for the content company than it would cost to send that
 traffic over transit.


 What you're missing is that the transit provider

Re: Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3) (was: RIP Network Neutrality (was: Wow its been quiet here...

[Rick Astley]

That was an interesting read but it's not the whole story. Skip to the
TL;DR if you'd like but I'll attempt to explain what happened. What he
isn't saying is the roles of the companies involved have changed over the
last 10 years. Mostly gone are the days that content providers and access
networks each just gave a middleman/transit provider money to reach each
other. Content provider has expanded to become content delivery network
and access network has expanded their role to offer transit as well. If
these networks have a large amount of traffic between them and are able to
reach each other in multiple locations nationally what is the technical
reason a 3rd party transit network is required instead of a direct peering
relationship? From a purely technical perspective content and access at
that scale can peer directly cutting out the middle man.

The reality is an increasingly directly peered Internet doesn't sit well if
you are in the business of being the middle man. Now if you will, why do
transit companies themselves charge content companies to deliver bits? How
is it fair to be in the business of charging companies to receive their
bits and hand them to a settlement free peer on the hook to deliver them,
but not fair for content to just bypass the transit company and enter a
paid peering agreement with the company delivering the bits? In this case
paid peering is mutually beneficial to both companies involved and is
typically cheaper for the content company than it would cost to send that
traffic over transit.

What we have is a major shift in the market over the last 10 or so years.
So why are these large nationally connected access networks charging
Level 3 for ports? That's the elephant in the room here and to understand
that you have to go back to where (to my knowledge) this dispute first went
public. The most comprehensive description I have seen to date is the
following Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR1sLLOYxnY

I recommend the video before continuing. Level 3 is really both Level 3
transit and Level 3 CDN. Level 3 has already had a long standing precedent
of justifying the right of an ISP to charge for content delivery. So what
happens when Level 3 greatly expands their content delivery business and
sends traffic to other ISP's over settlement free ports? The large access
networks say hey, content delivery is a billable service, you should know
and they ask Level 3 CDN for compensation. The middleman networks protest
and say Charging for content delivery is only OK if we do it, but not when
you do it! and their justification for this claim is made on the basis
that unlike access networks they a) Have a large network and b) send a full
table of prefixes.

So lets look at the first claim. Are the transit networks large? Yes, but
especially in the case of North American traffic destined for North America
they are typically smaller overall than the largest access networks who
arguably have the lions share of equipment tasked with delivering the bits
beyond just the colo.
The 2nd claim is mostly a strawman and this is why. Middlemen still carry
traffic not destined to directly connected peers but how they bill for it
is largely based on volume of traffic, not the number of prefixes
exchanged. The big content providers and the big access networks make up a
majority of the traffic on the Internet even if they don't make up a
majority of the prefixes.

TL;DR So the reason the ports are maxed out is the market has changed,
access networks have attempted to change peering agreements to match the
existing market conditions but the middleman networks are arguing they
should be exempt from the long standing tradition of charging for content
delivery they themselves helped to establish. Some middleman networks have
responded by refusing payment to access networks for delivery and as a
result, the paths have not been upgraded and remain congested.

End of TL;DR

The next part is (even) more opinion than fact so you are forgiven if you
stop here.  My opinion is this is a peering dispute more than something
that should fall under net neutrality. If content companies sent letters to
middlmen that said In your statements to the public you made the case
that content delivery to ISP's should be settlement free so we have decided
to take your offer and refuse any further payment to you from here forward
how would they handle it? Likely those companies would not only find
themselves congested but depeered.

A bunch of people say charging at both ends is double dipping but really
modern access networks are now at least partly filling the role of transit
as well as last mile delivery. Where content transit and access all
have a presence in the same colo, paying more money to send traffic through
transit first instead of just directly to access because of some dated
definition of what the roles of those companies are supposed to be doesn't
make sense to me. Hijacking NN to attempt to bring litigation 

Re: We hit half-million: The Cidr Report

[Rick Astley]

Security is a layered approach though. I can't recall any server or service
that runs in listening state (and reachable from public address space) that
hasn't had some type of remotely exploitable vulnerability. It's hard to
lean on operating systems and software companies to default services to
off. When you run netstat -a on a lot of operating systems there are too
many things in listening state without a convincing enough reason.

NAT is stateful only out of necessity but after IPv6 a small layer of
security will go away but there is potentially another alternative.
Scanning blocks of IPv6 addresses for valid hosts is mostly a waste of time
but you could do things like looking at server logs or getting IP addresses
of clients you are connected with on P2P networks.
A good way to prevent that is to assign multiple IPv6 addresses to
operating systems as security zones so a source address a browser or P2P
client would use is not the same one with potentially remotely exploitable
services running in listening state.

As a bonus they should probably take it one step further and just place web
browsers and email clients in a dedicated VM sandbox that can be blown out
and recreated in case of infection or persistent browser toolbars and
stuff. So far malware seems to be winning the war so it might be best to
just acknowledge that people are likely to be attacked successfully and
attempt to quarantine it when it happens. It would probably be less
intrusive than trying to force people into restricted user accounts so I
never understood why nobody ever really pushed for this.

Technical users have been running suspect code and links in VM's for a
while now.


On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 1:13 AM, Owen DeLong o...@delong.com wrote:


 On Apr 29, 2014, at 7:54 PM, Jeff Kell jeff-k...@utc.edu wrote:

  On 4/29/2014 2:06 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
  If everyone who had 30+ inaggregable IPv4 prefixes replaced them with 1
 (or even 3) IPv6 prefixes…
 
  As a bonus, we could get rid of NAT, too. ;-)
 
  /me ducks (but you know I had to say it)
 
  Yeah, just when we thought Slammer / Blaster / Nachi / Welchia / etc /
  etc  had been eliminated by process of can't get there from here... we
  expose millions more endpoints...
 
  /me ducks too (but you know *I* had to say it)

 Pretending that endpoints are not exposed to those things with NAT is kind
 of like putting a screen door in front of a bank vault and saying “now safe
 from tornadoes”.

 Owen

What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

[Rick Astley]

Without the actual proposal being published for review its hard to know the
specifics but it appears that it prohibits blocking and last mile tinkering
of traffic (#1). What this means to me is ISP's can't block access to a
specific website like alibaba and demand ransom from subscribers to access
it again. I do not know if this provision would also include prohibiting
intentionally throttling traffic on a home by home basis (#2) and holding
services to the same kind of random is also prohibited but I think this too
would be a far practice to prohibit. Bits are bits.

From the routers article (
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/23/us-usa-fcc-internet-idUSBREA3M1H020140423)
and elsewhere it seems what the proposal does not outlaw is paid
peering
and perhaps use of QoS on networks.

#3 On paid peering:
I think this is where people start to disagree but I don't see what should
be criminal about paid peering agreements. More specifically, I see serious
problems once you outlaw paid peering and then look at the potential
repercussions that would have. Clearly it would not be fair to for only the
largest content providers to be legally mandated as settlement free peers
because that would leave smaller competitors out in the cold. The only fair
way to outlaw paid peering would be to do it across the board for all
companies big and small. This would be everyone from major content
providers to my uncle to sells hand runs a website to sell hand crafted
chairs. This would have major sweeping repercussions for the Internet as we
know it over night.

I think it makes sense to allow companies to work it out as long as the
prices charged aren't unreasonably high based on market prices for data.
This means if 2 ISP's with similar networks want to be settlement free they
can. If ISP's want to charge for transit they can, and if ISP's want to
charge CDN's to deliver data they can. Typically the company with the
disproportional amount of costs of carrying the traffic would charge the
other company but really it should be up to the companies involved to
decide. Based on the post by Tom Wheeler from the FCC (
http://www.fcc.gov/blog/setting-record-straight-fcc-s-open-internet-rules )
it sounds like if this pricing is commercially unreasonable (ie
extortion) they will step in. Again I think this is fair.


#4 On QoS (ie fast lane?):
In some of the articles I skimmed there was a lot of talk about fast lane
traffic but what this sounds like today would be known as QoS and
classification marking that would really only become a factor under
instances of congestion. The tech bloggers and journalists all seems to be
unanimously opposed to this but I admit I am sort of scratching my head at
the outrage over something that has been in prevalent use on many major
networks for several years. I don't see this as the end of the Internet as
we know it that now seems to essentially be popular opinion on the issue.
Numerous businesses are using QoS to protect things like voice traffic and
business critical or emergency traffic from being impacted in a failure
scenario. In modern day hyper converged networks where pretty soon even
mobile voice traffic could be VoIP over a data network prohibiting the use
of all QoS seems irresponsible.

The larger question is, is it fair for ISP's to charge people to be in a
priority other than best effort?  To answer a question with a question,
if an ISP is using a priority other than best effort for some of its own
traffic is it fair if a peer with a competing service is only best effort
delivery? This is sort of akin to Comcast not counting its own video
service against the ~250G/month cap of subscribers but counting off network
traffic against it. In theory if some of an ISP's own services are able to
use higher than best effort priority the same should be available to the
business they are selling service to. If they go completely out of their
way to intentionally congest the network to force people into needing a
higher than best effort classification I would think it should fall into
what the FCC calls commercially unreasonable and thus be considered a
violation. So again, I think this is fair.

I have numbered the items I mentioned from 1-4 being
#1. Blocking
#2. per household (last mile) rate limiting of a service (though rate
limiting at all anywhere should probably be up for discussion so #2.5)
#3. The legality of paid peering
#4. The legality of QoS (unless fast lane is something else I don't
understand).

Feel free to augment the list.

Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

[Rick Astley]

How is this *not* Comcast's problem?  If my users are requesting more
traffic than I banked on, how is it not my responsibility to ensure I have
capacity to handle that?  I have gear; you have gear.  I upgrade or add
ports on my side; you upgrade or add ports on your side.  Am I missing
something?

Sort of yes, it's Comcasts problem to upgrade subscriber lines but if that
point of congestion is the links between Netflix and Comcast then Netflix
would be on the hook to ensure they have enough capacity to Comcast to get
the data at least gets TO the Comcast network. The argument at hand is if
Comcast permitted to charge them for the links to get to their network or
should they be free/settlement free. I think it should be OK to charge for
those links as long as its a fair market rate and the price doesn't
basically amount to extortion. Sadly the numbers are not public so I
couldn't tell you one way or the other aside from I disagree with the
position Netflix seems to be taking that they simply must be free. Once
that traffic is given directly to comcast no other party receives payment
for delivering it so there is no double billing.

This diagram best describes the relationship (ignoring pricing):
http://www.digitalsociety.org/files/gou/free-and-paid-peering.png

Content provider would be Netflix and Comcast would be Broadband ISP 1.




On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 1:56 AM, Hugo Slabbert hslabb...@stargate.cawrote:

 Okay, I'm not as seasoned as a big chunk of this list, but please correct
 me if I'm wrong in finding this article a crock of crap.  With
 Comcast/Netflix being in the mix and by association Cogent in the
 background of that there's obviously room for some heated opinions, but
 here goes anyway...

 A long, long time ago when the Internet was young and few, if any had
 thought
 to make a profit off it, an unofficial system developed among the network
 providers who carried the traffic: You carry my traffic and I'll carry
 yours
 and we don't need money to change hands. This system has collapsed under
 modern realities.

 I wasn't aware that settlement-free peering had collapsed.  Not saying
 it's the only way, but she ain't dead yet.

 Seltzer uses that to set up balanced ratios as the secret sauce that makes
 settlement-free peering viable:
 The old system made sense when the amount of traffic each network was
 sending to the other was roughly equivalent.

 ...and since Netflix sends Comcast more than it gets, therefor Netflix
 needs to buck up:
 Of course Netflix should pay network providers in order to get the huge
 amounts of bandwidth they require in order to reach their customers with
 sufficient quality.

 But this isn't talking about transit; this is about Comcast as an edge
 network in this context and Netflix as a content provider sending to
 Comcast users the traffic that they requested.  Is there really anything
 more nuanced here than:

 1.  Comcast sells connectivity to their end users and sizes their network
 according to an oversubscription ratio they're happy with.  (Nothing wrong
 here; oversubscription is a fact of life).
 2.  Bandwidth-heavy applications like Netflix enter the market.
 3.  Comcast's customers start using these bandwidth-heavy applications and
 suck in more data than Comcast was betting on.
 4.  Comcast has to upgrade connectivity, e.g. at peering points with the
 heavy inbound traffic sources, accordingly in order to satisfy their
 customers' usage.

 How is this *not* Comcast's problem?  If my users are requesting more
 traffic than I banked on, how is it not my responsibility to ensure I have
 capacity to handle that?  I have gear; you have gear.  I upgrade or add
 ports on my side; you upgrade or add ports on your side.  Am I missing
 something?

 Overall it seems like a bad (and very public) precedent  shift towards
 double dipping, and the pay-for-play bits in the bastardized Open
 Internet rules don't help on that front.  Now, Comcast is free to leverage
 their customers as bargaining chips to try to extract payments, and Randy's
 line of encouraging his competitors to do this sort thing seems fitting
 here.  Basically this doesn't harm me directly at this point.  Considering
 the lack of broadband options for large parts of the US, though, it seems
 that end users are getting the short end of the stick without any real
 recourse while that plays out.

 --
 Hugo

 
 From: NANOG nanog-boun...@nanog.org on behalf of Larry Sheldon 
 larryshel...@cox.net
 Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2014 4:58 PM
 To: nanog@nanog.org
 Subject: Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could
 enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

 h/t Suresh Ramasubramanian

 FCC throws in the towel on net neutrality

 http://www.zdnet.com/fcc-throws-in-the-towel-on-net-neutrality-728770/

 Forward!  On to the next windmill, Sancho!
 --
 Requiescas in pace o email   Two identifying characteristics
 

Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

[Rick Astley]

If it were through a switch at the exchange it would be on each of them to
individually upgrade their capacity to it but at the capacities they are at
it they are beyond what would make sense financially to go over an exchange
switch so they would connect directly instead. It's likely more along the
lines of needing several 100G ports as Netflix is over 30% of peak usage
traffic in North America:

Netflix (31.6%) holds its ground as the leading downstream application in
North America and together with YouTube (18.6%) accounts for over 50% of
downstream traffic on fixed networks.  (source
https://www.sandvine.com/trends/global-internet-phenomena/ )

That amount of data is massive scale. I don't see it as double dipping
because each party is buying the pipe they are using. I am buying a 15Mbps
pipe to my home but just because we are communicating over the Internet
doesn't mean the money I am paying covers the cost of your connection too.
You must still buy your own pipe in the same way Netflix would. I covered
this scenario in more detail in my post What Net Neutrality should and
should not cover but if you expand on the assumption that paying for an
internet connection also pays for the direct connection of every party who
you exchange traffic with then you have a scenario where only half the
people connected to the Internet should have to pay at all for their
connection because any scenario where people simply buy their own pipe
would be considered double billing.

The cost for residential broadband is high enough in the US without a
policy like that in place. If there is one policy that would keep poor
families from being able to afford broadband it would be that one.





On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 2:58 AM, Hugo Slabbert hslabb...@stargate.cawrote:


  ...but if that point of congestion is the links between Netflix and
 Comcast...

 Which, from the outside, does appear to have been the case.

  ...then Netflix would be on the hook to ensure they have enough capacity
 to Comcast to get the data at least gets TO the Comcast network.

 Which I don't believe was a problem?  Again, outside looking in, but the
 appearances seemed to indicate that Comcast was refusing to upgrade
 capacity/ports, whereas I didn't see anything indicating that Netflix was
 doing the same.  So:
  I have gear; you have gear.  I upgrade or add ports on my side; you
 upgrade or add ports on your side.


  The argument at hand is if Comcast permitted to charge them for the
 links to get to their network or should they be free/settlement free. I
 think it should be OK to charge for those links as long as its a fair
 market rate and the price doesn't basically amount to extortion.

 Are we talking here about transport between Netflix's POPs and Comcast's?
  I definitely don't expect Comcast to foot the bill for transport between
 the two, and if Netflix was asking for that I'm with you that would be out
 of line.  If there are existing exchange points, though, would it not be
 reasonable to expect each side to up their capacity at those points?


  Once that traffic is given directly to comcast no other party receives
 payment for delivering it so there is no double billing.

 The double-dip reference was to charging both the content provider and
 the ISP's own customer to deliver the same bits.  If the traffic from
 Netflix was via Netflix's transit provider and Comcast then again was
 looking to bill Netflix to accept the traffic, we'd hit double billing.

 I guess that's the question here:  If additional transport directly been
 POPs of the two parties was needed, somebody has to pay for the links.
  Releases around the deal seemed to indicate that the peering was happening
 at IXs (haven't checked this thoroughly), so at that point it would seem
 reasonable for each party to handle their own capacity to the peering
 points and call it even.  No?

 --
 Hugo

 
 From: Rick Astley jna...@gmail.com
 Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2014 11:23 PM
 To: Hugo Slabbert
 Cc: nanog@nanog.org
 Subject: Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could
 enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

 How is this *not* Comcast's problem?  If my users are requesting more
 traffic than I banked on, how is it not my responsibility to ensure I have
 capacity to handle that?  I have gear; you have gear.  I upgrade or add
 ports on my side; you upgrade or add ports on your side.  Am I missing
 something?

 Sort of yes, it's Comcasts problem to upgrade subscriber lines but if that
 point of congestion is the links between Netflix and Comcast then Netflix
 would be on the hook to ensure they have enough capacity to Comcast to get
 the data at least gets TO the Comcast network. The argument at hand is if
 Comcast permitted to charge them for the links to get to their network or
 should they be free/settlement free. I think it should be OK to charge for
 those links as long as its a fair market rate and the price doesn't

Re: What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

[Rick Astley]

I wish you would expand on that to help me understand where you are coming
from but what I pay my ISP for is simply a pipe, I don't know how it would
make sense logically to assume that every entity I communicate with on the
Internet must be able to connect for free because I am covering the tab as
a subscriber. I am not talking about JUST Netflix here as they are a large
company more capable than some smaller ones at buying their own pipes out
to the world. It would be sort of the same concept of my grandmother
calling my cell phone yet we both need to pay for our individual phone
lines to at least reach the carrier tasked with connecting our call. Even
if my grandmother calls a business, that business have phone lines they pay
for. Technically this would be double dipping but it's been the norm for a
very long time.

Now if we will lets talk about where this concept falls apart. Pretend I
run a lemonade stand and my ISP offers to give it free Internet access, how
generous of them! I then meet a businessman from town who is complaining
about what it costs him to connect to the Internet because he has a lot of
equipment that serves data to people all over the place. I see this as an
opportunity to make more money and I say hey, they don't charge me at all
for Internet access I will make you a deal, I will connect your equipment
to them for 1/3 what you are paying today. Good deal says the
businessman. I eagerly ride my bicycle home, pick up my phone, call my ISP
and tell them the news Hey, thanks for the free service but I need you to
upgrade my connection x5 because I decided to do content delivery for the
businesses in town. Oh hell no says my ISP, that was not at all the
agreement, your lemonade stand is still free but if you want us to carry
the extra traffic you have to buy more ports the same as everyone else. I
didn't build a successful lemonade stand because I take being treated like
this sitting down! Our now much larger volume of traffic is slow to the ISP
and they are refusing to upgrade it for free, so I call up the media and
have them run a story about how the ISP is intentionally limiting our
traffic and they simply need to upgrade it for free. People are already
paying for the Internet, if they don't give me my free ride they are double
dipping!

Public opinion is in, that mean ISP should be giving me my free access but
the reality of the situation is perhaps a bit different. My lemonade stand
pulled a coup when it became a content provider and demanded a free ride,
and railroading my ISP for it in the media was probably a dishonest thing
to do. I reluctantly agree to pay them for ports for content I am
delivering but local businessman from my town has tasted blood and he's
not done yet Who else has a lemonade stand with free Internet?! he
proclaims.

I changed some names to protect the Innocent :)


On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Nick B n...@pelagiris.org wrote:

 The current scandal is not about peering, it is last mile ISP double
 dipping.
 Nick
 On Apr 27, 2014 2:05 AM, Rick Astley jna...@gmail.com wrote:

 Without the actual proposal being published for review its hard to know
 the
 specifics but it appears that it prohibits blocking and last mile
 tinkering
 of traffic (#1). What this means to me is ISP's can't block access to a
 specific website like alibaba and demand ransom from subscribers to access
 it again. I do not know if this provision would also include prohibiting
 intentionally throttling traffic on a home by home basis (#2) and holding
 services to the same kind of random is also prohibited but I think this
 too
 would be a far practice to prohibit. Bits are bits.

 From the routers article (

 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/23/us-usa-fcc-internet-idUSBREA3M1H020140423
 )
 and elsewhere it seems what the proposal does not outlaw is paid
 peering
 and perhaps use of QoS on networks.

 #3 On paid peering:
 I think this is where people start to disagree but I don't see what should
 be criminal about paid peering agreements. More specifically, I see
 serious
 problems once you outlaw paid peering and then look at the potential
 repercussions that would have. Clearly it would not be fair to for only
 the
 largest content providers to be legally mandated as settlement free peers
 because that would leave smaller competitors out in the cold. The only
 fair
 way to outlaw paid peering would be to do it across the board for all
 companies big and small. This would be everyone from major content
 providers to my uncle to sells hand runs a website to sell hand crafted
 chairs. This would have major sweeping repercussions for the Internet as
 we
 know it over night.

 I think it makes sense to allow companies to work it out as long as the
 prices charged aren't unreasonably high based on market prices for data.
 This means if 2 ISP's with similar networks want to be settlement free
 they
 can. If ISP's want to charge for transit they can, and if ISP's want to
 charge

Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

[Rick Astley]

Isn't this all predicated that our crappy last mile providers continue
with their crappy last mile

If you think prices for residential broadband are bad now if you passed a
law that says all content providers big and small must have settlement free
access to the Internet paid for by residential subscribers what do you
think it would do to the price of broadband?




On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 10:33 PM, Michael Thomas m...@mtcc.com wrote:

 On 04/27/2014 05:05 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:

 Beyond that, there’s a more subtle argument also going on about whether
 $EYEBALL_PROVIDER can provide favorable network access to $CONTENT_A and
 less favorable network access to $CONTENT_B as a method for encouraging
 subscribers to select $CONTENT_A over $CONTENT_B by affecting the relative
 performance. This becomes much stickier when you face the reality that in
 many places, $EYEBALL_PROVIDER has an effective monopoly as the only player
 choosing to offer services at a useful level of bandwidth/etc. (If that).



 Isn't this all predicated that our crappy last mile providers continue
 with their crappy last mile
 service that is shameful for a supposed first world country?

 Cue up Randy on why this is all such a painful joke.

 Mike

Re: What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

[Rick Astley]

Double-billing Rick. It's just that simple. Paid peering means you're 
deliberately
billing two customers for the same byte

I think this statement is a little short sighted if not a bit naive. What
both parties are sold is a pipe that carries data. A subscriber has one,
Netflix has one. They are different bandwidths, at different locations, and
have different costs.

Where your statement is short sighted I already explained partly in saying
its too difficult to decide who gets a free ride and who gets the bill so I
challenge you to propose an actual policy that prohibits charging for
peering that doesn't have major unintended consequences. All in all I am
sort of disappointed to find so few rational opinions around here. One of
the few decent articles I have read on it is here:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/media-botching-coverage-netflix-comcast-deal-getting-basics-wrong.html

I think if you make a law that says all content providers big and small get
free pipes and the residential subscribers of broadband must pay the tab
the cost of broadband in the US compared to the rest of the world
skyrocket.

I also think the practice of paying an intermediary ISP a per Mbps rate in
order to get to a last mile ISP over a settlement free agreement is also a
bit disingenuous in cases where the amount of traffic is sufficient enough
to fill multiple links. Theoretically there are many times where the
intermediary ISP can hand off the traffic to a last mile ISP in exactly the
same building they received it in so they have very few of the costs of
actually delivering the traffic yet are the only party receiving money from
the content provider for delivery. This arrangement makes sense when the
traffic to the last mile ISP is a percentage of one link but after enough
links are involved the intermediary ISP is serving no real other purpose
than as a loophole used to circumvent paid peering fees (right or wrong).

I think if paid peering were made illegal overnight for companies big or
small the landscape of the Internet would be completely redrawn and not for
the better. I honestly think what last mile ISP's should do in this
situation is to offer to provide transit for content delivery for a low
cost. They generally have available outbound capacity to other networks and
they can play the settlement free only card back at some of the companies
they are in dispute with. If nothing else it would result in having similar
traffic profiles and settlement free would start to make more sense so
everybody wins.








On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 1:56 PM, William Herrin b...@herrin.us wrote:

 On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 2:05 AM, Rick Astley jna...@gmail.com wrote:
  #3 On paid peering:
  I think this is where people start to disagree but I don't see what
 should
  be criminal about paid peering agreements. More specifically, I see
 serious
  problems once you outlaw paid peering and then look at the potential
  repercussions that would have.

 Double-billing Rick. It's just that simple. Paid peering means you're
 deliberately billing two customers for the same byte -- the peer and
 the downstream. And not merely incidental to ordinary service - the
 peer specifically connects to gain access to customers who already pay
 you and no one else. Where those two customers have divergent
 interests, you have to pick which one you'll serve even as you
 continue to bill both. That's a corrupt practice.

 What sort of corrupt practice? You might, for example, degrade your
 residential customers' speed to the part of the Internet housing a
 company you think should pay you for peering. Or permit the link to
 deteriorate while energetically upgrading others to keep pace with the
 times. Same difference.

 This doesn't have to be true. You could bill downstreams for
 consumption and exclude the paid peering from that calculation. But
 you don't do that. And you aren't planning to.


  #4 On QoS (ie fast lane?):
  In some of the articles I skimmed there was a lot of talk about fast lane
  traffic but what this sounds like today would be known as QoS and
  classification marking that would really only become a factor under
  instances of congestion. The tech bloggers and journalists all seems to
 be
  unanimously opposed to this but I admit I am sort of scratching my head
 at
  the outrage over something that has been in prevalent use on many major
  networks for several years.

 It's prevalent on private work networks and users hate it. It
 generally disables activities the network owners don't approve of
 while engaging in doubletalk about how they're OK with it. Users don't
 want to see this migrate outward.

 Regards,
 Bill Herrin



 --
 William D. Herrin  her...@dirtside.com  b...@herrin.us
 3005 Crane Dr. .. Web: http://bill.herrin.us/
 Falls Church, VA 22042-3004

Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

[Rick Astley]

?
 Because you need to reach our customers, and we're the only path to them,
 so we have leverage.
 *blank stare*
 So you're willing to give your customers crappy service because your
 customers don't have alternate options and you think we need this more than
 you do?
 That's a possibility.
 I hate you.
 I know; sign here please.

 But, again, this is outside looking in.  For now, I'll pick up a copy of
 Bill Norton's Internet Peering book as per Bob's suggestion, for some light
 Sunday night reading.

 Cheers,

 --
 Hugo

 
 From: Rick Astley jna...@gmail.com
 Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 8:45 AM
 To: Hugo Slabbert
 Cc: nanog@nanog.org
 Subject: Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could
 enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

 If it were through a switch at the exchange it would be on each of them to
 individually upgrade their capacity to it but at the capacities they are at
 it they are beyond what would make sense financially to go over an exchange
 switch so they would connect directly instead. It's likely more along the
 lines of needing several 100G ports as Netflix is over 30% of peak usage
 traffic in North America:

 Netflix (31.6%) holds its ground as the leading downstream application in
 North America and together with YouTube (18.6%) accounts for over 50% of
 downstream traffic on fixed networks.  (source
 https://www.sandvine.com/trends/global-internet-phenomena/ )

 That amount of data is massive scale. I don't see it as double dipping
 because each party is buying the pipe they are using. I am buying a 15Mbps
 pipe to my home but just because we are communicating over the Internet
 doesn't mean the money I am paying covers the cost of your connection too.
 You must still buy your own pipe in the same way Netflix would. I covered
 this scenario in more detail in my post What Net Neutrality should and
 should not cover but if you expand on the assumption that paying for an
 internet connection also pays for the direct connection of every party who
 you exchange traffic with then you have a scenario where only half the
 people connected to the Internet should have to pay at all for their
 connection because any scenario where people simply buy their own pipe
 would be considered double billing.

 The cost for residential broadband is high enough in the US without a
 policy like that in place. If there is one policy that would keep poor
 families from being able to afford broadband it would be that one.





 On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 2:58 AM, Hugo Slabbert hslabb...@stargate.ca
 mailto:hslabb...@stargate.ca wrote:

  ...but if that point of congestion is the links between Netflix and
 Comcast...

 Which, from the outside, does appear to have been the case.

  ...then Netflix would be on the hook to ensure they have enough capacity
 to Comcast to get the data at least gets TO the Comcast network.

 Which I don't believe was a problem?  Again, outside looking in, but the
 appearances seemed to indicate that Comcast was refusing to upgrade
 capacity/ports, whereas I didn't see anything indicating that Netflix was
 doing the same.  So:
  I have gear; you have gear.  I upgrade or add ports on my side; you
 upgrade or add ports on your side.


  The argument at hand is if Comcast permitted to charge them for the
 links to get to their network or should they be free/settlement free. I
 think it should be OK to charge for those links as long as its a fair
 market rate and the price doesn't basically amount to extortion.

 Are we talking here about transport between Netflix's POPs and Comcast's?
  I definitely don't expect Comcast to foot the bill for transport between
 the two, and if Netflix was asking for that I'm with you that would be out
 of line.  If there are existing exchange points, though, would it not be
 reasonable to expect each side to up their capacity at those points?


  Once that traffic is given directly to comcast no other party receives
 payment for delivering it so there is no double billing.

 The double-dip reference was to charging both the content provider and
 the ISP's own customer to deliver the same bits.  If the traffic from
 Netflix was via Netflix's transit provider and Comcast then again was
 looking to bill Netflix to accept the traffic, we'd hit double billing.

 I guess that's the question here:  If additional transport directly been
 POPs of the two parties was needed, somebody has to pay for the links.
  Releases around the deal seemed to indicate that the peering was happening
 at IXs (haven't checked this thoroughly), so at that point it would seem
 reasonable for each party to handle their own capacity to the peering
 points and call it even.  No?

 --
 Hugo

 
 From: Rick Astley jna...@gmail.commailto:jna...@gmail.com
 Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2014 11:23 PM
 To: Hugo Slabbert
 Cc: nanog@nanog.orgmailto:nanog@nanog.org
 Subject: Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality

Re: Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company

[Rick Astley]

I think most the points made here are valid about why it isn't an easy
problem to solve with multicast.
Lets say for instance they had a multicast stream that sent the most popular
content (which to Randy's point may not cover much) and 48 hours of that
stream was cached locally on the CPE. What is the additional cost to expand
each of these CPE's to handle this? Will it be HD or SD or both? Are people
willing to Sacrafice their Xbox and PS3 disk space? Does the $60 Roku become
the $400 Roku? Does securing all the content then become more difficult?
What is the hard drive failure rate of these devices with them constantly
writing to disk?

What incentive do users have to to shell out the money for a device that
will handle this caching? Multicasting this type of content seems to create
more problems than it solves.


On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Randy Bush ra...@psg.com wrote:

  why not permit your users to subscribe to shows/instances, stream them
  on-demand for viewing later... and leave truly live content
  (news/sports/etc) as is, with only the ability to pause/rewind?
 
  how is this different from broadcast tv today though?

 for some of us, the thing that is wonderful about netflix is the long
 tail.  my tastes are a sigma or three out.

 randy