Friday, June 13, 2014

Clashing perspectives from core and edge network players show urgent need for Internet policy review

FCC looking into slow Internet download speeds - Yahoo News: "Netflix has been paying (for traffic delivery) since inception. It wants free, I get it, but someone has to pay for it," Jim Cicconi, AT&T Inc senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, said earlier this week.

Netflix streaming accounts for nearly one-third of North American web traffic during peak times, according to research by Sandvine Corp.

Netflix vice president for global public policy, Christopher Libertelli, this week said the company already invests money in delivering traffic to the Internet provider.

"We pay a lot of money to drop content at the doorstep of an ISP. All we're really asking is for the ISPs to swing the door open," Libertelli said at the Aspen Institute think tank. "This has become a new choke point."

These statements make clear as day that it's high time for a core to edge review of Internet policy. 

Netflix believes it is adding value to the network edge operators like AT&T by providing core content for their customers. AT&T and other edge providers however hold the exact opposite view -- that Netflix is instead imposing a cost burden to transport that core content to the homes and businesses they serve. Meanwhile, edge providers prevent core provider content from fully reaching all potential consumers with ultra risk averse policies that leave much of the last mile network infrastructure in their service territories only partially constructed.

1 comment:

InfoStack said...

Fred,

1) Edge access providers have been trying to push the WAN/MAN (core vs edge) demarc point towards the core for 100 years to protect their last mile monopolies.

2) efficiency of and returns on supply are driven by demand ex ante, or before the fact. This ex ante view of future markets allows for the best investment (capex and opex) returns because tradeoffs between transport, switching (processing), and storage is best managed from the core across complete demand. The edge access providers do not have this perspective

3) lastly, the edge access providers are actually hurting themselves by "closing the door" at the WAN/MAN demarc in that they are fighting yesterday's battles, stranding investment in their vertically integrated service provider models (where their own incomplete video operations are competing against stronger core providers like Youtube and Netflix), and worse, not preparing their networks to provide 4/8K VoD, 2-way HD collaboration, seamless mobile BB, and IoT cheaply and ubiquitously for end users.