Netflix and AT&T strike deal to boost streaming speeds
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@scottalanmiller said:
Rackspace and CloudFlare are CDNs. I don't follow the logic. If I run two proxy servers for people, I'm a CDN. But not a peer.
A network operator (a CDN is one such) can make a peering agreement. A network operator is not required to do so. If a network operator wants their network to talk to another network with a specific guarantee of service then they will negotiate a peering agreement. If they do not, then they are at the mercy of the existing peering agreements from the locations providing the internet service.
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Technically anyone can make a peering agreement. It's like any Internet connection.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Technically anyone can make a peering agreement. It's like any Internet connection.
Right and the traffic passing through that connection should be subject to no other special throttles other than the data throughout balance specified in the agreement.
That is what network neutrality is.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Technically anyone can make a peering agreement. It's like any Internet connection.
Right and the traffic passing through that connection should be subject to no other special throttles other than the data throughout balance specified in the agreement.
That is what network neutrality is.
Correct. So if I have a connection to my ISP they are a peer to my house network and they should not be throttling Netflix or any other service en route to me. If Netflix wants to directly peer with my ISP, that's fine. If they don't, though, I still have my own peer agreement to get them via their peer through the peer to peer Internet connection.
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Makes sense. Peering is fine, it is throttling that is the problem - forcing new peer agreements when existing peer agreements are already in place.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Correct. So if I have a connection to my ISP they are a peer to my house network and they should not be throttling Netflix or any other service en route to me. If Netflix wants to directly peer with my ISP, that's fine. If they don't, though, I still have my own peer agreement to get them via their peer through the peer to peer Internet connection.
You do not have a peering agreement with your ISP. You have a subscriber agreement (generally). Your subscriber agreement is subject to specified terms of service. Among the ISP requirements should be (but is not in the current design) the commitment of network neutrality from the ISP network to your house. Obviously the customer side of the subscriber ToS can have other stipulations on bandwidth and acceptable use.
Your use of Netflix or any other service should not be impacted by the ISP wishing to provide better QoS to one service over another for a fee for the traffic flowing through their network.
Your use of Netflix or another service can be impacted by the connections from your ISP to the rest of the world. This is the side that peering happens on in almost all cases. Though it does not have to be restricted to here as noted in previous posts.
Your quality of service to Netflix has been degraded because a) VerizonAT&T are intentionally screwing with the traffic on their internal network or b) the peering agreement delivering Netflix content to your ISP is out of tolerance for its negotiated amounts and is being throttled/billed/whatever by your ISP based on their peering agreement with the network dumping the traffic to them.
Example A is also where network neutrality should be enforced, while example B has nothing to do with network neutrality.
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Hmm... very complex.
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@JaredBusch So as Netflix is an end point, not a network (in the same way that my home is an endpoint, not a network) what makes one a subscriber and one a peer? AT&T to Verizon where both provide "pass through" networking and not endpoint services (server or subscriber) is what peer to peer used to mean - network providers who provide routing services. Anyone providing an actual service or consuming a service is an end point.
Netflix might be being granted a peering agreement, and I might not be, but the situation is the same that in both case, I am an endpoint (node) and they are an endpoint (node) and we are trying to talk to each other across a network (AT&T, Cablevision, Verizon, etc.) from which the only service either of us pay for is the routing of traffic from one to the other.
Netflix is much bigger than me, but it is still just an endpoint service. You can't get traffic to route from AT&T through Netflix to Verizon for example, so not a network peer. And you can't buy an IP address from Netflix. So Netflix is neither a backhaul carrier nor even an ISP. They are an end node every big as much as I am.
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@scottalanmiller That is not correct. They are not just an end point. They are also in the business of peering traffic now. They were an end point and they paid their provider for their connection. That provider was out of balance of their peering agreement and that agreement was being enforced by the other parties (Comcast/Verizon/AT&T) causing the issues with the service. This is why Netflix chose to get into the business of peering traffic.
Netflix did not have to. They chose to in order to get around the problem that they were experiencing with their current provider.
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Think of it this way, what if I got a dual WAN connection at home? I could have Verizon and Cablevision. That's not unlike what we are calling a peering agreement for Netflix. They had a connection to one carrier but they wanted lower latency, better bandwidth or whatever so they got another WAN connection. That's all a peer connection is (normally more than two links, of course.) But it is not fundamentally different than what you can and sometimes do do at home. I don't route traffic between the WAN links, I just use both for myself. Netflix is doing the same, being an end user on multiple networks. Netflix does more detection to determine shortest path to client to determine which of their WAN connections to choose, but you could do that at home if you wanted to.
It's perfectly fine for them to do this and it is fine for the carriers to let them. It makes sense. If you want to talk on the Verizon network with the best possible quality using them as your ISP (getting a peering agreement) allows for that in the best possible way.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller That is not correct. They are not just an end point. They are also in the business of peering traffic now. They were an end point and they paid their provider for their connection. That provider was out of balance of their peering agreement and that agreement was being enforced by the other parties (Comcast/Verizon/AT&T) causing the issues with the service. This is why Netflix chose to get into the business of peering traffic.
Netflix did not have to. They chose to in order to get around the problem that they were experiencing with their current provider.
A peer is still paying a provider for a connection. Using the term peer does change their endpoint status. In what way is Netflix different than any other endpoint other than a piece of paper (maybe not even that) using the term "peer" on it? What is different at the network traffic level?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Think of it this way, what if I got a dual WAN connection at home? I could have Verizon and Cablevision. That's not unlike what we are calling a peering agreement for Netflix. They had a connection to one carrier but they wanted lower latency, better bandwidth or whatever so they got another WAN connection. That's all a peer connection is (normally more than two links, of course.)
Dual subscriber connection is not the same thing. You may use them in a similar fashion, but they are not the same.
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The "real" peers, carriers like AT&T and Verizon, are still subscribers to each other. They are equal in that they both service roughly identical amounts of upstream and downstream traffic and so are called peers because they give and take the traffic. The word peer implies an equal relationship where they are both doing the same thing.
Netflix might have signed something called a peering agreement but unless they become an ISP, they are not a real peer with AT&T or Verizon. They are just an end user with a different title on their paperwork.
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@JaredBusch said:
Dual subscriber connection is not the same thing. You may use them in a similar fashion, but they are not the same.
How is it different?
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Netflix can't be paying to be a peer. Peers don't pay because they are peers and the interconnect is mutually beneficial. There is nothing for either side to gain. Here is Wikipedia's definition of peering: In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network. The pure definition of peering is settlement-free, "bill-and-keep," or "sender keeps all," meaning that neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic; instead, each derives and retains revenue from its own customers.
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Also according to Wikipedia, for purposes of misleading, incorrect labeling of some agreements as peering happens quite often. That is what is happening here. Netflix is being called a peer for marketing reasons but is clearing not a peer: Marketing pressures have led to the word “peering” sometimes being used to intentionally mislead when there is some settlement involved. In the face of such ambiguity, the phrase "settlement-free peering" is sometimes used to explicitly denote pure cost-free peering.
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Yes and that is the same point I argued in a prior thread but I got lazy on the terminology because no one else seemed to care or understand. I simplified to using the word peer.
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I even linked to the wiki article last time.
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@JaredBusch said:
Yes and that is the same point I argued in a prior thread but I got lazy on the terminology because no one else seemed to care or understand. I simplified to using the word peer.
I understand, as does every news article. But the reality is is that Netflix is an end user, not a peer. They are just paying for more WAN connections to more carriers directly for better levels of service than are possible passing only through that network's own peers. It all makes sense. It's just not a special case.
I've worked for shops that had global "peer" agreements like this and BGP and massive 10Gb/s and higher connections to lots of carriers and points of presence. But we weren't a peer, just a massively high performance and highly redundant endpoint network.
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Peering is swapping or doing favours (that sounds naughty.)
Netflix is a customer. A big customer. The biggest. Netflix is a special case, sort of, due to their size. But they shouldn't be treated unfairly and in this case I doubt that they are. But if we agree that they are not really peering and are, according to the Wikipedia article, just a "customer" then.... what's the discussion about? I'm a customer in the same way. I have a network that pays for a link to a peer-level carrier. Aren't we back to Netflix being a subscriber / customer like me?
