US Cable Support > Comcast HSI > We're talking about competition now

reply to BiggA

Re: We're talking about competition now

This whole upgrade discussion is getting farther and farther out of whack. The generalizations are rampant. I get opinions.. thats great. But Ive been involved a LOADS of Upgrades and Rebuilds and never has the fact that my employer was an incumbant come up, never did the general income or make up of an area come up, never did we anyone make "promises" of completion dates.

For real gang- There are many groups of people ( like you) behind all of these endeavors.. and to hear on the back end a bunch of armchair theorists go on and on about how things get done and why they get done is getting a bit old.

Not one factual statement has been made, but the authority at which it is stated is astounding.
--
CableTechs.org/"Horrible People with Integrity"

reply to Floppy
They clearly don't. If they did care, they would have been pushing 100 HD's and 20mbps on every system back in 2008. Some systems today still have less than 30 HD channels.

reply to CableTool
that isnt true i cant get wow or rcn im limited to comcast or at&t how is that competition if you have work done on your house you can choose from 100s of general contractors not 2 that is competition and the companies that ran the lines did that years ago and got special tax breaks and such before comcast bought it it has been about 4-5 different providers its not like comcast went and hung all brand new lines when they aquired the area they now serve and its not like ftth is coming to chicago land anytime soon which would still be ran by only 1 company so...

reply to iansltx

I am aware that Qwest...er...CenLink have similar issues. Could be for the same reason, though Qwest's much larger network (versus Comcast's leased Level3 fiber) means that they have more of a right to charge for transit because, you know, Qwest's network is actually set up to give a good transit experience.

Comcast tries only to sell transit to their cable customers...and let's face it, Comcast is an end-user ISP, not a backbone provider. They have points of presence in markets where they have customers, plus NYC and Dallas...and that's it. They also use rather circuitous routing practices, introducing latency into the network to the point that you really want to peer with them at several points rather than just one if you want reliable, speedy bit delivery. Compare this to someone like Level3 (who, oddly, provides the very glass that Comcast rides on) where you've got good connectivity as long as your server is in the same country as your target audience.

I'm not making hte network issues with Comcast's backbone up Take a look at WebHostingTalk for more information. Yes, other networks may have similar issues, but at this point Comcast is forcing everyone to pay them for peering (or at best settlement-free interconnect) in order to get decent service to their subscribers, the alternative being routing over a super-congested TATA link (which Comcast pays a pittance for, but it is still transit).

There's also the fact that Google has a large backbone network of its own, which is why it can peer in Chicago to serve up websites from...wherever; they have data centers in lots of places. It's not like Comcast has to haul Google's bits terribly far from the last mile, thus providing reason to charge the content giant.

Personally, I'm puzzled as to what Comcast is selling to its cable internet customers. If they're charging for peering and intentionally keeping transit ports congested (they are), they are cutting costs and forcing the hand of most content providers, who don't want to give customers of Comcast a horrible experience (even though, the way the Internet works, you should be able to just buy transit from a peer or upstream of Comcast and things will be fine...but they aren't). This translates into a subpar experience for Comcast customers who try to reach non-Comcast websites (or websites without Comcast direct peering). It's kind of like if your cell phone dropped calls more often to people who weren't mobile-to-mobile, but your mobile to mobile minutes were billed no differently than out-of-network minutes.

I just think there's something wrong with Comcast (and CenturyLink...funny how they're the only providers in the area with wireline service) when it takes a VPN to make YouTube behave reliably...that or firing up a cellular connection, which will stream things fine (at least T-Mobile does).

Most of what you have outlined is either inaccurate, half truths or information to drive a WebHostingTalk position that peering is an entitlement vs a true mutual value relationship. In that world, only the consumer funds network growth.

In this new Internet position the consumer does not always win.

This has been debated to death so I'll end with... be careful what you wish for... you just may get it.

I'd rather pay more for a reliable connection to anywhere I want, and have bandwidth costs be a minor concern for content providers. Then again, I've worked more on the side of people providing for reasons for the Internet to exist (content/communication) than as an ISP employee.

I agree that transit should cost money. Peering...depends on how much value the peer is providing to the other. Is you're a CDN and get far into the peer's network before handing traffic off to them, there's no good reason for the "eyeball" network to charge for peering.

Re: paragraph 1: Keep in mind that smaller ISPs provide their own last (dozen or more) miles and PAY for bandwidth while they're at it. I'm also talking about specifically CDNs that will drop traffic at the closest available IXP to the user (e.g. RMIX here, which is mere miles away from most of Comcast's customer base in Colorado). Also, what are the ISP's actual customers (the ones paying $70 per month for their connection) paying for if not the last mile? Where's the balance between subscribers paying for the connection and content providers doing so (as a hidden cost to the subs)?

Re: paragraph 2: Some ISPs will peer with content networks for free (e.g. Sonic.net, at least as far as I know). Should content providers tier their rates by what ISP you're on? Such costs are otherwise bundled into the content providers' costs across the board. It goes both ways.

As for the current cost structure of peering and transit, I completely agree with you that it has been driving down prices year over year. Well, except if you look at Comcast transit/peering prices, which for peering may have actually gone UP, since Comcast no longer needs to sign on huge data centers and provide them super-cheap transit to balance their inflow/outflow ratio (e.g. FDCServers). The market outside of Comcast can do what it wants, but if you want to get good connectivity to Comcast customers you actually have a limited number of providers to choose from when ordering network service, and this number excludes certain "Tier 1" networks like Verizon and Qwest. That's not what's supposed to happen on the Internet.

reply to yt
And yes, I'm aware that currently the Denver Qwest speedtest works just fine. I'd check it during prime time but I won't be at my apartment this evening

reply to iansltx

As for evidence to support my spposition, I cant get hard numbers because they're behind NDAs. As for other connectivity options, I'm not completely sure which peers have adequate capacity and which don't to Comcast, so I'll bow out here.