Muni Fiber and Politics

Mon Jul 21 18:33:54 UTC 2014

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com> wrote:
> Interestingly enough, this seems to be coupled
> with a statement that Verizon will be deploying
> Netflix CDN boxes into their network:
>
> http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/level-3s-selective-amnesia-on-peering
>
> "Fortunately, Verizon and Netflix have found a way to avoid the congestion
> problems that Level 3 is creating by its refusal to find “alternative
> commercial terms.”

"So what has changed for Level 3 [in the 2005 Cogent peering dispute]?"

They lost the argument with Cogent. They figured out their customers
were too valuable to risk their wrath over a desire to play chicken
with someone willing to go the distance.

That's what changed.

Playing chicken with a large peer is a bad idea. Playing chicken with
the FCC now that it's taken an interest is a worse one.

I'm sorta surprised the class action lawyers aren't all over this. It
seems to me a few million Verizon end-users are owed partial refunds
of tens to hundreds of dollars each due to the admitted discriminatory
constraints Verizon has placed on their data traffic to netflix and
everybody else using the same networks netflix uses.

I'm one of them. My Verizon connection became unusable for netflix a
couple months ago and has been unusable for gaming every evening for
the last few weeks. I'm only using a few dozen kilobits (paid for 25
mbps) for gaming, but the packet loss at the congested peering links
kills it dead.

If I didn't also have Cox I'd be ready to blow a gasket. There's a
quality operation.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
Can I solve your unusual networking challenges?