Last week Level 3 posted some new data from interconnection points with three large broadband service providers. The first column of the chart, with data from last spring, shows lots of congestion between Level 3 and the three BSPs. You might recall the battles of last winter and early spring when Netflix streaming slowed down and it accused Comcast and other BSPs of purposely “throttling” its video traffic. (We wrote about the incident here, here, here, and here.)
The second column of the Level 3 chart, with data from September, shows that traffic with two of the three BSPs is much less congested today. Level 3 says, reasonably, the cause for the change is Netflix’s on-net transit (or paid peering) agreements with Comcast and (presumably) Verizon, in which Netflix and the broadband firms established direct connections with one another. As Level 3 writes, “You might say that it’s good news overall.” And it is: these on-net transit agreements, which have been around for at least 15 years, and which are used by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, all the content delivery networks (CDNs), and many others, make the Net work better and more efficiently, cutting costs for content providers and delivering better, faster, more robust services to consumers.
But Level 3 says despite this apparent improvement, the data really shows the broadband providers demanding “tolls” and that this is bad for the Internet overall. It thinks Netflix and the broadband providers should be forced to employ an indirect A–>B–>C architecture even when a direct A–>C architecture is more efficient.
The Level 3 charts make another probably unintended point. Recall that Netflix, starting around two years ago, began building its own CDN called OpenConnect. Its intention was always to connect directly to the broadband providers (A–>C) and to bypass Level 3 and other backbone providers (B). This is exactly what happened. Netflix connected to Comcast, Verizon, and others (although for a small fee, rather than for free, as it had hoped). And it looks like the broadband providers were smart not to build out massive new interconnection capacity with Level 3 to satisfy a peering agreement that was out of balance, and which, as soon as Netflix left, regained balance. It would have been a huge waste (what they used to call stranded investment).
