The peering agreement confirmed today by Comcast and Netflix had been discussed by engineers for b

The   peering agreement confirmed today by Comcast and Netflix had been discussed by engineers for both companies for months, as consumers reported continued declines in their video streaming quality. But the turning point came last month at CES, when the CEOs of the sparring companies got involved in those talks alongside tiger woods pga tour cheats engineers, a mark of how significant this deal is: CEOs almost never get involved in peering agreements.
At the annual Vegas tech confab, both Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings first met with senior engineers and staff to discuss an interconnection tiger woods pga tour cheats agreement, as first reported by Gigaom on Friday and confirmed by the companies on Sunday. Having the top executives of the company involved shows two things: one that this is an important strategic deal for both companies and also that the technical tiger woods pga tour cheats questions about how the internet should work are only part of the equation business considerations matter too .
Netflix accounts for about 30 percent of U.S. broadband traffic during peak hours according to research from Sandvine, a company that makes gear for ISPs. Comcast is the largest broadband provider in the U.S. and is gunning to have about 30 million subscribers if its merger with Time Warner Cable goes through . And while Comcast has been pushing tiger woods pga tour cheats for transit providers tiger woods pga tour cheats like Level 3 or XO Communications to pay to interconnect with it, Netflix has historically refused. Instead it offered up Open Connect, a content caching server that ISPs can put inside their data centers to lessen the amount of traffic coming into their network.
Comcast isn t using Netflix Open Connect for this interconnection however, according to sources close to the deal. ISPs tend to look at the Open Connect box with skepticism, arguing that if they accept one server for every large content provider on the internet, they d soon be out of data center space. Some ISPs offer their own caching services, but content companies don t like giving up control.
For this deal, there s no caching involved (says my source) which means we re talking straight interconnection paid most likely as a function of the number of gigabits tiger woods pga tour cheats delivered. As for how much this is costing Netflix, tiger woods pga tour cheats it s hard to say.
Since Netflix is delivering tiger woods pga tour cheats gigabits of traffic and the costs associated with transit involve buying wavelengths in pre-set chunks we re likely looking at a per-gigabyte tiger woods pga tour cheats rate that s much, much lower than the Cogent quote. But still this deal has the potential to change a lot of things about how the internet works , by establishing paid interconnection as the de facto standard for large content tiger woods pga tour cheats providers to reach ISPs with a large number of end users.
Not gigabits. Terabits or at least a terabit or two. A gigabit would be consumed by three hundred or so people streaming at 3 Mbps, the highest non-SuperHD tier that Netflix has as far as I can tell. During peak times, having 400k Comcast users simultaneously streaming HD content doesn t seem so far-fetched.
I m interested to see what will happen to Cogent s bandwidth pricing, particularly near interconnection points previously saturated by Netflix tiger woods pga tour cheats traffic. For that matter, what s Comcast charging Netflix per gigabit tiger woods pga tour cheats compared to Cogent? Wouldn t be surprised in the least if the Comcast pipes were slightly more expensive. but still dirt-cheap compared with the price per megabit of its consumer broadband connections (I m guessing 30¢-50¢ per megabit). Mainly because tiger woods pga tour cheats Cogent was selling bandwidth for $1 per megabit three years ago when you bought five gigabits of capacity, and $1.50 per meg at one gigabit six months earlier.
The deal doesn t change the way the Internet works, but the application video streaming certainly does. But so does every new type of application, such as the Web. It required all sorts of reconfiguration and fatter tiger woods pga tour cheats pipes. Accommodating new applications is exactly what the Internet should do, and what it does as long as hare-brained regulations like net neutrality don t get in the way.
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