from Hacker News

Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

by bdb on 2/21/14, 8:13 PM with 68 comments

  • by ck2 on 2/21/14, 8:49 PM

    It would be funny if netflix just looked for one of their hubs/datacenters and moved in next door on purpose.

    ISPs are common carriers and must be regulated as such, because as soon as Comcast makes its own netflix-like service, you can forget getting netflix to stream smoothly.

  • by MiguelHudnandez on 2/21/14, 9:19 PM

    It's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1].

    Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic.

    This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware.

    [1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines

  • by koblas on 2/21/14, 8:38 PM

    I've noticed that the 11greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net router(s) (Equinix SV1) are typically the ones that fail / have large latency issues. Hopefully if this has happened then they've increased overall capacity through this bottleneck.

  • by jeremydw on 2/21/14, 9:01 PM

  • by bifrost on 2/21/14, 9:09 PM

    I can confirm this:

    198.45.63.0/24 *[BGP/170] 2d 05:02:06, MED 150, localpref 100, from 68.86.80.82

    AS path: 7922 2906 I

  • by akulbe on 2/22/14, 3:15 PM

    I will admit that I am probably making a pretty sweeping assumption here... but I'm assuming Netflix previously had the same access as everyone else on the Internet, from Comcast - and now, they do not. They have BETTER access.

    To me, this is disturbing. Surely there is some financial incentive for Comcast to do this.

    It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thing that the whole "net neutrality" issue is trying to prevent (i.e. back office deals that give one content provider better access over others)

    Or... am I just missing lots of things? (wouldn't be the first time!) :)

  • by jonny_eh on 2/21/14, 8:54 PM

    I did notice last night that my stream of House of Cards looked way better than it has in the past month (when it started to go bad). It was HD level the whole hour, while previously it would only go HD for about 10 minutes total randomly through the episode.

    I'm a Comcast user in San Mateo, CA.

  • by egray2 on 2/22/14, 4:30 AM

    Isn't it possible that the traffic could just be going over an MPLS backbone? If that's the case, then there could potentially be more hops that aren't seen.

  • by squigs25 on 2/21/14, 8:47 PM

    A short route doesn't necessarily mean good bandwidth

  • by CamperBob2 on 2/21/14, 10:02 PM

    How are you concluding that from the tracert?

  • by freeasinfree on 2/21/14, 8:58 PM

  • by sergers on 2/21/14, 11:05 PM

    Meh. So your ISP joined the Netflix open connect CDN to make your Netflix experience even slower.

    Have fun blocking that address and other known Netflix cdn