Trying to Make Sense of the Comcast/Level 3 Dispute

Thu Dec 2 16:25:37 UTC 2010

In a message written on Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 09:40:01PM -0800, Paul Ferguson wrote:
> Considering the fact that I received an e-mail survey request today from
> Netflix (I am a subscriber) which, among other questions, asked if I ever
> did streaming of their services on the Internet, Wii, Live TV, etc. (I
> don't), as well as asked if I am a Comcast subscriber (I am), among other
> last-mile service provider options -- I just found the timing of all of
> this very "interesting".

Unfortunately Netflix's state of mind if you will is something we
can't derive from the routing tables.

They might have gone into this hand in hand with Level 3, wanting
to make a point to Comcast/The FCC/The Public about something.  On
the other hand, Level 3 might have told them things were just peachy
with Comcast and they could easily handle this traffic and Netflix
got sold a pig in a poke.  If so, they could be rather unhappy that
their new CDN partner is dragging them into this mess before they
even turn up.

But I have to wonder, why ask if you are on Comcast?  It's not hard
to identify all of Comcast's IP space from the routing table, and
they know the endpoint of every stream they serve.  They have perfect
data from their servers, why use error prone data from a survey?

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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