Netflix has agreed to pay one of the largest broadband providers in the United States Comcast Corp for faster speeds, throwing open the possibility that more content companies will have to shell out for better service.
This seems to set a bad precedent. Maybe I don’t see the bigger picture, but I’m uneasy about this going forward.
Shakedown.
Can someone comment on this Forbes article. It puts this deal in another light and puts the blame on peering, but I don’t know if it is true or full of it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2014/02/24/comcast-netflix-didnt-violate-net-neutrality-but-it-wasnt-benevolent-it-was-business/
“Netflix agrees to pay Comcast for faster service” is a mischaracterization.
Netflix has simply agreed to pay Comcast to peer to their network. Netflix traffic isn’t getting any preferential treatment. They’ve essentially signed up for Comcast to be their ISP (as far as getting to Comcast customers) instead of Cogent.
This is exactly how CDNs like Akamai work. This is exactly how Apple distributes iTunes and App Store content, except that Netflix is doing it on their own instead of paying Akamai to do it.
Ill timed as far as the announcement goes, but it really sounds like there is more to this than just a simple “Comcast is making Netflix traffic look bad so they can collect more money”.
Purely anecdotal, but I have Comcast here and we have not had any issues with Netflix streaming besides my router dying on me. Purely anecdotal.
PLEASE..! Everyone read this. My first reaction was the knee jerk “Well, there goes net neutrality”, which seems to be reinforced by a lot of the media coverage.
This guy seems to know what he’s talking about and paints a very different picture. Basically, Netflix was already paying CDNs to distribute their content. By moving (some or all) to Comcast, their getting their caches closer to the last mile, closer to their end users.
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/media-botching-coverage-netflix-comcast-deal-getting-basics-wrong.html
Welcome to “the Internet”, and “how peering and transit networks work”.
I haven’t had any trouble with Netflix either. I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in a hugely populated area or relatively near one of the country’s major metropolises. I’ve known many who are in or nearby more densely packed areas that have problems. Most of Netflix’s problems stem from Cogent’s getting bottlenecked by peak hour Netflix traffic in these big areas. If you lived in a place where your traffic to and from Netflix was going through these areas then you’d have high latency problems.
I’ve been trying to tell so many people this that are going up in arms about this. Net neutrality has nothing to do with this deal. I just find it bizarre seeing people whom I respect just show they have little knowledge of how the Internet actually functions. One hundred years ago phone companies were paying each other for line access. This is nothing different. Heck, Comcast pays for line access.
Netflix has tried to get this deal done for a couple of years now since most ISPs rejected Netflix’s idea for the Super HD servers in their data centers. Netflix was probably offered ridiculous prices for internet access. Now, they were offered a more-reasonable deal this January that looks to be most surely tied to Comcast’s getting hammered in the press by a belief they were throttling Netflix traffic.