Many of you are probably aware of the conflict between Level3 and Comcast over the past few days. The debate revolves around the extent to which Comcast can provide peering for the data that will now flow across both of their networks as a result of Level3’s Netflix business win. This dilemma points to the inherent problems in the operation of the Web today, and especially towards the shortcomings of backbone providers and their peering partners. We have in fact touched upon the basis of this dispute already in our previous Direct Peering blog post.
A good aggregation of information on this issue can be found in this Datacenter Knowledge article.
We won’t choose sides here, but a few things are certain…
1) The current system does not seem to be working. As Daniel Gooding, Managing Director of DH Capital and guest blogger at GigaOm says, “No one here did anything wrong; these disputes aren’t uncommon.” Clearly there must be a better way.
2) Netflix unfortunately hangs in the balance while Level3 and Comcast settle their squabble. Netflix and many other companies today hold efficient delivery of their services at the core of their business. If Level3 and Comcast sever ties and no longer share bandwidth, it is devastating for Netflix.
3) It is most critical for content providers to choose neutral parties for delivery of content. This is especially true for parties that are not also Tier-1 providers. These companies have much different business objectives than a CDN/Content Accelerator whose sole objective is efficient delivery of the content. Performance should always be the main objective, not saving money delivering content.
4) In this example with Level3, they are first and foremost a Tier-1 provider. They also happen to offer CDN services, but the fact that they are a Tier-1 affects their ability to deliver. Because of their Tier-1 status, they only have settlement-free peering relationships with other providers. They do not buy transit from anyone. In the case of Comcast, it’s not like they’re seeing any new traffic from Netflix, it’s just that the traffic is now coming from Level3 instead of other providers when it was previously with Akamai. So, Comcast is now being asked to spend money putting in a lot more connections to Level3. The bigger issue is probably that Comcast will now have many underutilized transit connections to other providers, which is costly, and there is no way for Level3 to send the Netflix CDN traffic to them any other way.
This crisis illustrates one of the problems that has been central in the creation of Cloud Acceleration. The fact is that these disputes do happen all the time, and they point to the importance of owning a private network with connections to every provider out there. If an Acceleration solution were in place for Netflix, any relationship severance between providers wouldn’t affect them whatsoever!
The outcome of this will be very interesting, and one must ask… is this conflict between Level3 and Comcast the beginning of a “water rights” type of dispute between Internet providers? Will we see more legal wranglings over who controls what portion of the Internet streams? How will this affect not only service providers, but end users as well?
In the words of Stacy Higgenbotham of GigaOm, “What began as a commercial dispute may end up fundamentally changing how the web works and who pays for it.”
Chris Gragtmans
