Earlier this morning a Comcast peering manager had the following things to say about the recent NANOG thread, in a public IRC channel with many witnesses:
my management is pretty disgusted with the badmouthing and accusation slinging on nanog.org btw
the demands to disclose confidential data on the blog aren't helping either
the budget for hosting will be impacted I guarantee because it came out of folks who are being hassled's budget
there is a meeting today to discuss the value of supporting the NANOG community
Apparently Comcast's support and sponsorship of NANOG has actually been a ploy to buy our silence, and if we keep talking poorly of them they're going to cut off the funding. Shhhhh don't tell anyone.
Pardon my ignorance here but what does Comcast do for the NANOG community?
I know they attend many conferences and share their experiences with a lot
of us which is very much appreciated...
Comcast may need a reminder that an Internet Service Provider's job
is to provide internet service to its customers. If you cannot do
the job, open up your infrastructure to sharing and let someone else
have a go at it. This leveraging-captive-customers-to-get-money-from-
others game is fundamentally dirty, at least if the rumors about your
transit connections are true.
Which probably brings us around to the reasons that it'd be interesting
to have Comcast volunteer the information.
I'm sure the concern is that Comcast signed up to return NANOG (newNOG?) to philly.
I think they may be overly sensitive to some of the comments, just as if people were posting similar comments about my employer, I would likely be sensitive. (Also there are a lot of people who post stuff but don't actually attend NANOG meetings. There is this overlap but disjoint as well between the two in my experience. Hope everyone is wearing their teflon pants).
Aside from the 'public comments', the leaked graphics (which I personally would believe are accurate, but the motives of the leakers not obvious), I don't directly have a role here. I understand comcast has a lot of infrastructure and costs. Likely more fiber than the incumbent telcos, and they are constrained by a variety of local business conditions from doing what may be a more optimal solution for themselves.
All that said, the whole issue of 'local content' is going to continue to rage on for years to come. Getting the content closer to the end user is going to be a key to reducing costs for the long-tail providers to homes and businesses. Should it be incumbent on the CDNs to pay for colo at the headend? That's a business decision that will entirely be driven by these ongoing disputes.
It surely feels like we are slowly going down the road of telco-style settlement based on call direction. I've observed some trends that point at this happening when someone has a fortress they wish to defend, monetize or subsidize further. Will it win out? I'm not entirely sure.
Pardon my ignorance here but what does Comcast do for the NANOG community?
I know they attend many conferences and share their experiences with a lot
of us which is very much appreciated...
I'm sure the concern is that Comcast signed up to return NANOG (newNOG?) to philly.
They also were the sponsor for IETF-71 in Philly in 2008.
All that said, the whole issue of 'local content' is going to continue to rage on
for years to come. Getting the content closer to the end user is going to be a
key to reducing costs for the long-tail providers to homes and businesses.
Should it be incumbent on the CDNs to pay for colo at the headend? That's a
business decision that will entirely be driven by these ongoing disputes.
What I still don't understand is this (and please pardon my ignorance):
If the issue is the costs that long-tail providers must bear to transit content across their own network, and the solution is to move the content closer to the providers' customers, (why) is the content provider obligated to subsidize that?
If collocating equipment to the headend is truly the correct response (if it truly reduces the ISP's costs to provide access to that content, and truly results in a better customer experience), then surely the savings would cover the ISP's cost of collocating equipment at that ISP's own headends? It seems reasonable to expect that a content provider come up with the equipment to be collocated, as well as bear the cost-burden of supporting that equipment, so there can't be a significant capex for the ISP...
The idea of buying colocation from a last-mile ISP to reduce that last-mile ISP's costs seems (at first glance) to be a hysterically unfair proposition - though it seems that incumbent ISPs may have great enough leverage to extract this revenue if they really want to. Or am I off my rocker?
With all due respect, logs or GTFO. I can find no mention of this outside of your email.
I would expect there to be quite a few mentions of such a statement made in "a public IRC channel with many witnesses".
Pardon my ignorance here but what does Comcast do for the NANOG
community? I know they attend many conferences and share their
experiences with a lot of us which is very much appreciated...
We've gone from "Backdoor Santa" dropping graphs that we can't specifically attribute to Comcast, through to "Backdoor Parrot" now adding IRC communication that yet again we can't attribute to Comcast.
In the former case we've gone from disbelief through to academic "what if", swiftly moving on to damning accusation without there being /any /supporting evidence, as far as I can see, that the graphs are anything to do with Comcast. I fear we're likely to see the same results from these IRC logs.
All we're ending up with is what is mostly hearsay being treated as facts.
If you can buy wholesale IP for $X/meg from a generic provider that delivers the bits to all destinations
vs
Buying local IP for $Y (where Y>X) in the local network access, you will pay the $X rate. If there were some price advantage for the CDNs, I doubt the discussion would be happening at all. Some people call this "dumping", others call it market forces.
I'm not sure debating the business merits here make sense, as I'm neither comcast nor a CDN, and all my data is based on similar 'backdoor' or 'whisper' comments over many years. I seriously doubt the CDNs care about much other than the price:quality ratio. Clearly what happened here was a business decision that has been dragged out too long in public.
If you can't figure that out from this thread yet, you may not "get it" even if you saw an xls telling you the same thing.
Most of the companies involved are publicly traded, read their 10-K's and extrapolate the costs and pressures. Either the costs involved here represent enough to be material and something to be noted in a filing at edgar, or they are people fighting over loose change.
I saw it too. I don't support posting of IRC logs trying to get people
"in trouble" (though lord knows it wouldn't be the first time that has
happened :P), but I also completely disagree with Comcast's position on
this (big shocker, I know).
As one of the people who has spoken out against Comcast's actions the
most vocally, I suppose the original sentiment might very well be
targeted at me. Personally I really don't think that people on the NANOG
list posting about their network issues or actions has ANYTHING to do
with their sponsorship of the NANOG conferences or community, and I
suppose I should be shocked and appalled that it might come down to
these type of threats to silence people who have something negative to
say. I'm a Comcast customer too (50M/10M or 6M/768K DSL at home, gee,
decisions decisions :P), what are they going to do next, shut off my
cable modem for TOS violations?
Seriously guys, this is an operator forum and you're running a congested
network, to expect that people are not going to comment on those facts
just because you've put money into NANOG sponsorship is absurd.
(...) All we're ending up with is what is mostly hearsay being treated as facts.
One consumer organization in France during the ongoing debate with
regulators on network neutrality called for network operator to publish
some verifiable information on their bandwidth issues:
Alain Bazot, president of "UFC - Que Choisir" a well-known french
<<
(...) Avant toute intervention, l’opérateur devrait prouver qu’il y a un
réel problème sur son réseau, comme une congestion. Alors que les
témoignages quant à la réalité de la saturation des réseaux divergent,
cette condition me semble essentielle. (...)
My poor translation:
<<
(...) Before any change the network operator must prove he has a real
congestion issue. Since informations on the reality of network
saturation are divergent, this condition seems essential to me. (...)
Regulators and the public need data for proper regulation and future
changes in regulation, and the issue is the same everywhere :).
Sincerely,
Laurent
PS: sorry for my miscalculation AMSIX 1.2Tbit/s cost is $2.25 per
month per Comcast subscriber assuming 16 millions customers and
$30/Mbit/s/month transit but as pointed out by participants of this list
for a 10G port at Comcast cost is likely to be closer to $3 Mbit/s so it
all cancels out to my original erroneous $0.225 :).
Forgot to attach a giant disclaimer on the previous post: I'm speaking
solely for myself, and not in any way, shape, or form, for the NANOG,
NewNOG, or any other organization.
I think the "post the logs" comment was due to no one speaking up as to having seen the quote. Anonymous posting without collaborating evidence is useless.
I may not agree with Comcast, but I also can't agree with people quoting them without any evidence; and multiple people having seen it is acceptable evidence.
