The article is about T-Systems (AS-DTAG), which is the largest ISP in Germany and basically the company we mean when we talk about net neutrality violation here.
Look at the speeds of their exchange points: https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/196 - 34 Gbps total: 1x 20G, 1x 10G, 4x 1G. Seriously, 1Gbps!
Now compare with another ISP with only 25% the revenue: https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/997 - 890 GBps total.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
But also, people who work for exchange point operators are the only ones left flying business class in the telecom industry. At the same time public exchanges are a single point of failure in the network that one should(!) design around anyway. There are much cleaner solutions you can design into a network at a fraction of that cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_countries_by_Inte...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/americas-ugly-t...
Whereas DTAG _does_ way better.
I dont like it, but as others have said: Relying on transit peering will not work well once you reach certain traffic levels.
Also you can get Servers from Strato (DTAG Sub) for about the same price as from Hetzner and pump your Traffic directly into a Tier1.
We even needed to contact Github to change our peering since the default route from Github to DTag just sucks.
Our overall bandwidth with Telekom simply sucks. Most networks are really really slow, compared to Kabel Deutschland.
and they were like "sure cosider it done"?
no. they tried to find a way with us. but after that it didn't worked they changed the routing and it worked.
The cable service slowdowns are technology inherent. But that's a last-mile problem and not a backbone problem. Also, these providers aren't trying to use their customer base to extort money from hosters.
yet i doubt that buying from a (DSL-)Reseller is improving service quality and prices are roughly the same.
Yes, it's a bad thing. Internet traffic is bursty so usually you have to overprovision a lot to deal with the spikes. Operating at full capacity means that they get money for a service that they cannot fullfil. This is their intended goal such that later they can ask money from whoever wants to have priority.
* Not upgrading their network as they should
* Discriminating against certain traffic, see Comcast and Netflix speeds
* or by not allowing content providers to connect their CDNs free of charge, which should be a win-win situation if the providers acted in the customers best interests.
I honestly believe that these bussiness practices are the providers digging their own grave. Best case scenario, they make a few quick bucks before laws get passed against this sort of thing, worst case scenario: the big boys get tired of dealing with them and start competing directly (like Google fiber).
Marginal capacity changes are pretty cheap. There's no technical reason to treat network links as constrained resources. So as a network provider, you only create constraint to make money.
Think of it as food & drink in a movie theatre. A bag of popcorn at the Target snack counter is $1.50. A bag of popcorn at the movies is $9. Same product, both high-margin scenarios -- the difference is you're captive to the movie theatre.
Yes. Basically existing links (thru transit providers) is saturated, if you(content provider) want good connectivity with these end-user networks you gotta pay more for direct connection.
Yes. This allows providers to say "guys look, we can not increase the traffic going over the lines, so we have to priorize things. Thats 3.50€ a month per uplink"
What do (presumably) Comcast and these other companies say when you communicate with them about peering, and you ask them why they won't? Anyone with insight into these issues care to share the DLS/cable provider perspective? (Is there some kind of reasonable argument there we're not hearing - "Infrastructure costs are rising, you see, and we built the infrastructure we have now with a government subsidy that's no longer available. So when we expand, it's going to cost 10x as much ... " just to make something up. Is there another side to the story, or is it really just supply/demand where the providers exploit their market power? "Our customers are not likely to drop our Internet service for a competitor just because Netflix is slow. In fact, our data show that they start watching cable TV more, which is good for us - we want cable TV to be sticky. So we'll charge a fee since we're nearly a monopoly and the market will sustain it. Further, since Netflix is where all the traffic is going, we'll just charge them directly rather than expand pipes all around".) [edits]
> For this reason, interfaces are being operated at their highest capacity -- to make paid access to the DSL and cable providers' networks attractive for content providers. The end consumer is then forced to pay double for unlimited access to the Internet.
I don't entirely follow this part. Could someone clarify? Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing? Is the implication "operating at their highest capacity [without expanding capacity when they should]"?