Yes, they did.

Why? Because there was no benefit for Comcast to do so.

This isn't like Comcast refusing aid to vets, the homeless, or kicking kittens, or anything like that.

The colocation appliance *only* helps Netflix. For Comcast, it increases OpEx for no benefit. That tends to make shareholders mad.

So what responsibility does Comcast, a for-profit entity, have to help another for-profit entity (and a direct competitor to Comcast's own streaming service) contain their operational costs. Would it be nice? Sure. But Comcast isn't in business to be nice. It's in business to make money.

The idea that Netflix is some sainted company that deserves to be treated better than any others mystifies me.

I actually know quite a bit about routing. Enough to know that you don't call an interconnect a 'route'. A route is a destination prefix with a valid next-hop. But go right on ahead and think you know all about internet routing just because you read a blog entry or two.

And yes, you do let interconnects get congested if there's no business case for upgrading them.

I'm not saying I disagree with your opinion. As an operations wonk, it pains me to see capacity issues and my natural inclination is to fix it.

However, that shit costs money, and not lunch money either. This is when the business side interfered with the tech. Unless there's a good business case for it, those links aren't getting upgraded until there is.

In this case, there was no business case to do so. If Netflix was complaining about the quality of service because of the saturation on the Cogent interconnect, all they had to do was alter their routing policy to send the traffic for Comcast's prefixes out their Level 3 links instead. It's a trivial and often performed piece of BGP traffic engineering. Netflix decided not to do so (because Level 3 is a crapload more expensive than Cogent) and make a public stink about it.

Even after the public stink failed, Netflix *still* decided not to send the traffic out Level 3, opting to purchase direct links into the Comcast network (and, shortly thereafter, into AT&T's network as well. Strangely enough, people don't seem to have an issue with AT&T telling Netflix to go fuck themselves, just Comcast). That decision should tell you a couple things - Bandwidth ain't cheap. It's cheaper than it was 10 years ago, on a per mbit/gbit cost, but the amount of traffic crossing has scaled up even while prices have been scaling down. And it should tell you just how expensive Level3 is to actually use.

You're basically saying that, just because the Cogent link was saturated, Comcast should have instantly gone ahead and upgraded their links with Cogent, nevermind that the guys doing the complaining had links to another Comcast transit provider, who's links *weren't* saturated.

When bandwidth costs are the clear majority of your OpEx, you think twice about doling out CapEx and additional OpEx if there is another option. You would make a horrible network operator.

Ok, and how many customers do you think are cancelling their internet service with Comcast just because of Netflix? I'll give you a hint - before Netflix agreed to pay for their peering links, the effect of Netflix performance had a negligible effect on customer churn. By and large, Comcast was keeping it's customers without having to colocate Netfix apps onto it's network. IE, no upside at all for Comcast. By saying no and letting Netflix come to the conclusion that it was better business to just pay for the links, Comcast's upside is more revenue. Netflix sure are being crybabies about it though.

Then Netflix would lose all revenue from Comcast customers.

I strongly suspect the loss of revenue is larger than the fee Comcast wants to charge to link them directly to the network.

Comcast is basically acting like Wal-Mart does for alot of it's vendors. They're so big that they can dictate terms, and the vendors have no choice but to comply because losing access to that market has dire effects on their bottom line.

You misunderstand the problem entirely.

Comcast is not charging Netflix to deliver packets on it's network that come in from a transit provider. Comcast was not sitting there and saying 'Hey Netflix, we're going to drop or degrade your inbound traffic at our border if you don't pay us'.

Netflix wanted direct connections into the Comcast network to help them save on transit costs. And they wanted them for free, arguing that Comcast was already making money off the customers they'd be delivering the traffic to.

Comcast said we'll give you direct links into our network, but it won't be free. If you want direct access, you pay for direct access

Situations are a bit different.

You have woefully misunderstood the nature of your subscriber agreement.

You are not paying for a piece of the infrastructure to use to its fullest when you pay your fee. Since we're talking about Netflix, we're talking about the internet side. What Comcast gives you in exchange for your money is internet service with a specified downstream/upstream _UP TO_ the stated speeds, and it's all best effort (for residential access, anyway. Business Class has different parameters).

That's it. You don't get to claim a piece of the infrastructure and use it however you please. You send packets, Comcast does it's best to deliver them. You request packets, Comcast does it's best to deliver them. How you think it is, or how you think it should be is irrelevant. The only thing that *is* relevant is what was agreed to when service was established. If you think the legalese matches your opinions, you're in for a very sad revelation.

You're kidding right? Books are freaking heavy.

There are no man in the middle machines. The taps they use for monitoring are passive, not active. If the tap goes down, it has no effect on the data transferring across the wire that's being tapped.

Most providers will simply capitulate to a request and turn down the links and/or bgp sessions instead of actually having their gear powered off. Cutting power to a datacenter, or even a floor of a datacenter, can have a major impact in the ability to recover. If the government is going to shut me down anyway, I'd rather kill the peering sessions myself rather than risk additional loss of revenue due to equipment becoming unrecoverable.

Ah Waldenbooks, how I miss thee. many hours of a misspent youth in malls with Waldens...

Different service.

DirectTV has their rental service, in which you pay 3 to 5 bucks for a movie, and that streams from the sat feed. It is, essentially, pay per view, though the terms of the rental may let you watch it more than once over a day or so, and it also gives you the ability to watch relatively recent movies in your home for alot less than theatre.

Traditional Video on Demand is stuff like your weekly television shows, or older movies which are long out of the theatre and not currently being hyped for DVD sales. That kind of Video on Demand, as delivered by DirectTV, does stream over your internet connection, as the sat feed doesn't have nearly enough bandwidth to handle that level of VOD. I work as a network engineer for one DirecTV's competitors, and the bandwidth that VOD consumes is one of our biggest hogs, easily outpacing linear video.

Wow, the amount of pessimism here is amazing. Do you really believe that the entire health of US economy and society is dependent on our entitlement programs?

I don't think we've quite reach the point where the majority of Americans are proles on the dole, I don't think losing those entitlement programs would be a bad thing. Would it cause some problems? Of course it would, and the politicians would take a heavy beating in the media (which, don't kid yourself, is the *real* reason this was never going to default), but ultimately, it would be to the benefit of the country.

This is why I don't get folks that want to hoard gold as a hedge against economic fallout. If civilization collapses, gold becomes worthless. In a collapsed economy, gold has no practical value. If civilization collapses, I want things that will actually be useful. Food. Water. Shelter. Guns. Clothing. These are the currency of a collapsed economy, not pretty baubles or shiny bricks.

Or maybe because what I buy is my business and my business alone? Without anonymity, it makes it trivial for people to track my purchases. If people can track my purchases, they can target me for their sales campaigns in order to try and manipulate me into giving them more money, Since I'm not terribly fond of being manipulated, nor am I terribly fond of junk mail or spam, I prefer my transactions to be as anonymous as possible.

But yeah, I guess you're right, it's all about the hookers and blow, Couldn't possibly be any other reason I don't want folks up in my business.

Which doesn't really apply to the nuclear industry in the southeast, seeing as how the NRC has the oversight, and not state agencies. Federal law actually places severe constraints on any states ability to regulate nuclear plants, which results in the ball being pretty much entirely in the NRC's court.

Someone very close to me happens to be employed as a civil engineer at a southeastern nuclear plant. The NRC is constantly in their business. Right now, my acquaintance has spent the last two weeks in hectic meetings over a "potential" hazard that someone at the NRC thought might could happen (the chances are astronomically small) because they saw a video from a vendor trying to sell a solution to the problem and directed the plant to make sure that particular issue could never, ever happen.

The consequence is that the culture at the plant is one where safety is the paramount concern, because they don't want the NRC to make their lives any harder than it already is. As a consumer and someone who's outside of the industry, I can actually appreciate that. I suspect that the higher rate of incidents out west has alot more to do with bad NRC oversight than with southeastern state agencies keeping things on the down low.