Consumer internet providers will always have assymmetry because people generally are consumers of content, not creators or distributors. Remember that standard home internet connections have assymmetric download/upload speeds and also ban consumers from running hosting via their consumer grade internet connection.

The issue is that Verizon is both a transit provider and a last mile ISP.

For transit providers, asymmetry = Paid.

For local ISPs, they are typically willing to asymmetrically peer because they'd otherwise have to pay transit.

Since verizon is a T1 transit provider, it doesn't want to give it's service away for free.

I think the fair answer in this dispute depends on whether L3 and Cogent are forcing Verizon to provide transit for free or are they just delivering the data the local network for the customer (like a local ISP peering arrangement).

I'm not sure which is going on. If L3 is just dumping Netflix packets on the nearest Verizon peering location, well then Verizon is providing them a transit service. If L3 carries the data all the way to the local network, then it's not transit at all.

I'm not sure what is actually happening. I'd imagine a mix of both.

Level 3 is a tier 1 provider so in theory they should be peering for "free" with other Tier 1 providers such as Verizon.

From Wikipedia:

"However, the most common definition of a tier 1 network is a network that can reach every other network on the Internet without purchasing IP transit or paying settlements."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

> Is that legitimate?

Not really, for the consumer ISP side of its business Verizon absorbs more traffic than it produces by definition: consumers don't typically produce much data outside of p2p.

Furthermore, Netflix has offered putting server inside Verizon's network which makes this argument moot.

VZ just wants to double-bill.

No, it's not. Their customers are paying Verizon money for access to the internet, their customers are accessing Netflix.

Shouldn't it be Verizon paying level 3 to provide the access Verizon customers are paying for?

One solution would be for Netflix to modify their clients to send useless and quickly discarded UDP packets back to balance out the traffic. Verizon then has tons of data to push back to Level3 and everyone's happy.

That wouldn't work though. Verizon sells unbalanced services with larger download capacity than upload capacity. So it's simply not likely/possible that their customers can send matching data for what they are requesting. Additionally, while this might not negatively affect their FIOS customers their DSL customers are on asynchronous connections meaning that the uploaded data will negatively impact their ability to receive data at the same time in effect degrading their ability to stream and the quality of the video they can receive.

What DSL cusotmers have are asymmetric connections, not half-duplex. Even on ADSL, you can watch a HD video stream while uploading stuff. The only way the upload matters is if it prevents timely delivery of ACKs for the video being downloaded, and that's only a problem on the lowest speed tiers and when you don't have decent QoS.

Thanks for catching that error, as I typed out asynchronous I was saying to myself "this isn't right, the a is in the dang acronym" and then I was too lazy to double check.

So the client should just keep sending useless UDP traffic in the background even when the customer is not watching anything. I'm sure that can be evened out somehow :)

oh man... the evil in me laughs with glee at this.

But honestly, it couldn't be done. Not with the upload restrictions at the end of the pipe.

You could get it much closer to balanced. A good quality Netflix stream is 3Mbps down and probably only a few dozen kbps up. You just have to send some occasional bookkeeping data.

What if Netflix got that number to go up from say 30kbps to 500kbps? Still only 10% of upload speed link utilization on a 50/5 Mbps customer line.

Even if the ratio only went from 3:1 to 3:2 suddenly you're much, much closer to balanced. Takes a lot of wind out of their sails. Instead of "ZOMG THREE TIMES AS MUCH!" it's "FUCK IT'S 50% MORE!" which doesn't sound nearly as good.