The scale of streaming video on the Internet.

Sat Dec 4 22:28:46 UTC 2010

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> wrote:
> - Ratio needs to be dropped from all peering policies.  It made sense
>  back when the traffic was two people e-mailing each other.  It was
>  a measure of "equal value".  However the net has evolved.  In the
>  face of streaming audio and video, or rich multimedia web sites
>  Content->User will always be wildly out of ratio.  It has moved from
>  a useful measure, to an excuse to make Content pay in all
>  circumstances.

I think that's the key point here - ratios make sense when similar
types of carriers are peering with each other, whether that's
traditional Tier 1s or small carriers or whatever; they don't make
sense when an eyeball network is connecting to a content-provider
network.  The eyeball network can argue that it's doing all the work,
because the content provider is handing it 99% of the bits, but the
content provider can argue that the eyeball network makes its money
delivering bits asymmetrically to its end users, and they'll be really
annoyed if they can't get the content they want.  There are still
balance-of-power issues - Comcast won't get much complaint if it drops
traffic from Podunk Obscure Hosting Services, so they can bully Podunk
into paying them, while Podunk Rural Wireless Services will get lots
of complaint from its users if it drops traffic from YouTube.

Level 3 is functioning not only as a transport provider for smaller
content providers, but also as an aggregated negotiation service,
though in this case the content provider, Netflix, is big enough to
matter.  (Some years ago, when they were DVDs by mail only, it was
estimated that they had a bandwidth about 1/3 that of the total (US?)
internet, just with slightly higher latency) (or significantly lower
latency, if you were still on modems.)

-- 
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             Thanks;     Bill

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