Variety, On The Media, don't understand the Internet

Wed May 15 00:55:50 UTC 2013

On May 14, 2013, at 15:53 , Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> On 13-05-14 13:06, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> 
>>  http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/netflix-puts-even-more-strain-on-the-internet-1200480561/
>> 
>> they suggest that Akamai and other ISP-side caching is either not
>> affecting these numbers and their pertinence to the "backbone" at all,
>> or not much.
> 
> 
> This is from a Sandvine press release. Sandvine measures traffic at the
> last mile, so it doesn't really know whether a Netflix stream is coming
> from a local caching server within the carrier's LAN, from a caching
> server that is peering with the carrier, or via the real internet.
> 
> In the case of a large ISP with a Netflix cache server accessible
> locally, (either in-house, or via peering at a local carrier hotel), the
> traffic doesn't really travel on the internet.

Since when is peering not part of the Internet? Since when is even on-net caches not part of the Internet?

I always thought if I am on the Internet, anything I ping is "on the Internet". (I am intentionally ignoring things like split tunnel VPN nodes.)

Perhaps you think of the "Internet" as the "tier ones" or something?

> But for smaller ISPs, the traffic will travel on the internet between
> the nearest cache server and their facilities.

I guess you assume smaller ISPs don't peer? Unfortunately, reality disagrees with you, 100s if not 1000s of times.

Still confused about this whole notion, though. Perhaps you can clarify?

> Because of caching, the load on the actual internet won't increase as
> much as the amoount streamed onto last mile infrastructure.

Uh....

I give up.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick