DrPeering -

[...stuff about the previous askDrPeering article.... religion, extortion, etc. deleted ...]

What about the actual Comcast Paid Peering Service?  I’d like to know how well it works in practice.

Anees

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At NANOG lunches, over beers, at dinners, and over a recent California Geek Lunch, a bunch of us peering geeks discussed the Comcast Paid Peering Service, and DrPeering got an earful.  Almost all of it positive.

Aside from the religious fervor over the politics of paid peering, Peering folks said of the actual Comcast Paid Peering Service that:

1. 1)Unlike the previous attempts at Paid Peering products, Comcast priced it right, down towards the lower end of the transit price scale ($1-$3/Mbps). (In the past AOL priced paid peering higher than transit, arguing that it performed better and was priced to cover costs. Very few people took AOL up on its paid peering product.)
   

2. 2)Peering provides a shorter AS hop, so a transit provider that peers with Comcast  tends to get more of the multi-homed traffic destined to Comcast. For ISPs this leads to not only better performance for its customers, but more traffic and therefore more revenue. (There have been heated debate in the past about this Dave Rand argument.)
   

3. 3)Peering provides better performance than getting access to Comcast customers via their transit providers. One customer said they experienced 2-3 times better performance with the paid peering product. One other said that was not their experience. It depends on the previous path I suppose.
   

4. 4)One peer said that Comcast paid peering helped them bypass the networks that experienced  routing issues, maintenance, upgrades that failed, etc. issues; their traffic went directly to the eyeballs while before they saw these issues.
   

5. 5)With paid peering there is support, while free peering relationships generally has less support. One peer said the Comcast Paid Peering support was actually too aggressive.  Comcast apparently was over communicating, calling NOCs when maintenance or upgrade outages were already known, scheduled and accounted for. The conversation then turned to the fact that they preferred more communication to less.
   

I know this reads like a Comcast Paid Peering promotional piece, but what can I say? This is quite simply what folks are saying in the field about the service.

Dr Peering

DrPeering@DrPeering.net

PS  -  We do need to continue to explore the Paid Peering issue as it related to net neutrality, as there is a very real threat of regulation that could impact everyone in the Internet Peering Ecosystem and across the Video Internet Ecosystem. 

They can’t regulate this?   Consider for example that Australia government officials took a brief look at Peering and said “Peering looks like barter, and therefore should be subject to taxation as barter” !