Netflix transit preference?

Sat Dec 29 10:17:25 UTC 2012

Hurricane electric has a very open peering policy , can peer with them at
any major Equinix with pretty much no push or pull requirements , which is
why Netflix prefers them cause it costs them almost nothing , why pay
hurricane for transit when most of there connectivity can be accessed by
peer routes pretty much for free through Equinix exchange or any2...

On Thursday, December 27, 2012, randal k wrote:

> Hey NANOG!
> I work at a datacenter in southern Colorado that is the upstream bandwidth
> provider for several regional ISPs. We have been investigating our
> ever-growing bandwidth usage and have found that out of transits
> (Level3,Cogent,HE) that Netflix always seems to come in via Hurricane
> Electric. (We move ~1.4gbps to Netflix, and are thus not a candidate for
> peering. And they have no POP close.)
>
> I tested this by advertising a /24 across all providers, then selectively
> removed the advertisement to certain carriers to see where the bandwidth
> goes. In order, it appears that if there is a HE route, Netflix uses it,
> period. If there isn't, it prefers Level3, and Cogent comes last.
>
> Since Netflix is a big hunk of our bandwidth (and obviously makes our
> customers happy), we are included to buy some more HE. However, if Netflix
> decides that they want to randomly switch to, say, Cogent, we may be under
> a year-long bandwidth contract that isn't particularly valuable anymore.
>
> With all of that, I am interested in finding out of any knowledge about
> Netflix transit preferences, be it inside information, anecdotal, or
> otherwise. I did email peering@ but haven't heard back, thus the public
> question.
>
> Thanks!
> Randal
>