[opendtv] Re: ISP Filtering
- From: dan.grimes@xxxxxxxx
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:00:52 -0800
Craig wrote:
"Comcast was not blocking anything.
"In November of 2010 Comcast started to charge Level 3 - the provider that
streams for Netflix - an additional fee because of an "imbalance" in their
provisioning agreement. In essence they had an agreement for carrying each
other's data, but Level 3 is pushing far more data over Comcast networks
than Comcast over Level 3 networks. So they imposed additional carriage
fees on level 3."
Okay, fair enough. But the way some reported it, Comcast was threatening
to close off Level 3 if Level 3 didn't pay up. And the proximity to the
Level 3 announcement of expansion due Netflix success certainly led to the
apparent connection. It certainly seemed suspicious to me.
Not being in the network business at this level, I suppose I can't pass
judgement, but is Level 3 pushing data onto Comcast or are Comcast
customers pulling this data?
And is it imperative that the data ebb and flow in a balanced manner?
Unless Comcast has some major streaming providers on their network, and
since they are more of an ISP to individual homes and businesses, won't
they always be more on the download path rather than an upload to the main
highways of the internet?
Craig also wrote:
"More recently, Comcast, AT&T, Charter and others have been imposing
bandwidth caps on subscribers who go over certain caps. They may shut
down the subscriber or throttle their bandwidth. There are claims that
these MVPDs are throttling Netflix services."
I've suspected such. Cox automatically increased us to the next higher
tier and charged us more without our request. We got it back to the level
of service we originally signed up for, which is sufficient for our
consumption.
In truth, I think network consumption could be more of a utility with usage
rates. I would rather have that than my ISP cutting off sources, if it
could ever come to that, which appears to be possible with some of these
deals. And I hope it doesn't require government intervention to keep
things above board. It quite often seems to have the opposite effect.
Dan
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