Netflix To Cogent To World

Wed Jul 23 18:00:25 UTC 2014

On Jul 23, 2014, at 1:18 PM, Adam Rothschild <asr at latency.net> wrote:

> Comcast’s position is that they could buy transit from some obscure networks who don’t really have a viable transit offering, such as DT and China Telecom, and implement some convoluted load balancing mechanism to scale up traffic.
> 
> (I believe this was in one of Jason Livingood’s posts to broadbandreports, unfortunately I don’t have a citation handy.)

If this is Comcast’s position, it is patently absurd. In 2005, I had several options available to buy transit from with reasonably good connectivity to >90% of the Internet’s eyeballs (eg: Level3, Global Crossings, NTT). While DT and China Telecom may have a huge presence in certain parts of the world — suggesting using them for general delivery in the USA.

As far as I am concerned, Netflix is sticking their neck out for the good of the internet here — and the don’t really have to.  Netflix has money.  Netflix has many pops. They can “just pay”. They can buy from whomever they have to. They can change their codecs however they need. 

The “little guy” doesn’t have those options, and Netflix’s battle is really for their benefit.

-Phil