How the internet works, and why its

impossible to know what makes your Netflix

slow
By Tim Fernholz and David Yanofsky

http://qz.com/187034/how-the-internet-works-and-why-its-impossible-to-know-what-makes-your-netflix-
slow/
The internet is a confusing place, and not just because of all the memes.
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Right now, many of the people who make the internet run for you are arguing about how it should
work. The deals they are working out and their attempts to influence government regulators will
affect how fast your internet access is and how much you pay for it.
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That fight came into better view last month when Netflix, the video streaming company, agreed to
pay broadband giant Comcast to secure delivery of higher-quality video streams. Reed Hastings, the
CEO of Netflix, complained yesterday about Comcast extracting a toll, while Comcast cast it as
an amicable, market-based solution. You deserve a better idea of what they are talking about.
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For most of us, the internet is what youre looking at right nowwhat you see on your web
browser. But the internet itself is comprised of the fiber optic cables, the servers, the proverbial
series of tubes, all owned by the companies that built it. The content we access online is stored on
servers and transmitted through networks owned by lots of different groups, but the magic of the
internet protocol lets it all function as the integrated experience we know and, from time to time,
love.
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The last mile first
Start at the top: If youve heard about net neutralitythe idea that internet service providers, or
ISPs, shouldnt privilege one kind of content coming through your connection over another
youre talking about last mile issues.


Thats where policymakers have focused their attention, in part because its easy to measure what
kind of service an individual is getting from their ISP to see if it is discriminating against certain
content. But things change, and a growing series of business relationships that come before the last
mile might make the net neutrality debate obsolete: The internet problem slowing down your
Netflix, video chat, downloading, or web-browsing might not be in the last mile. It might be the
result of a dispute further up the line.
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Or it might not. At the moment, theres simply no way to know.
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These issues have always been bubbling and brewing and now were starting to realize that we
need to know about whats happening here, April Glaser of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
says. Until we get some transparency into how companies peer, we dont have a good portrait of
the network neutrality debate.
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What the internet is
What happens before the last mile? Before internet traffic gets to your house, it goes through your
ISP, which might be a local or regional network (a tier 2 ISP) or it might be an ISP with its
own large-scale national or global network (a tier 1 ISP). There are also companies that are just
large-scale networks, called backbones, which connect with other large businesses but dont
interact with retail customers.

All these different kinds of companies work together to make the internet, and at one point, they did
so for freeor rather, for access to users. ISPs would share traffic, a process called settlement-
free peering, to increase the reach of both networks. They were worked out informally by
engineersover drinks at networking conferences, says an anonymous former network engineer.
In cases where networks werent peers, the smaller network would pay for access to the larger one,
a process called paid peering.
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For example: Time Warner Cable and Comcast, which started out as cable TV providers, relied on
peering agreements with larger networks, like those managed by AT&T and Verizon
or backbone providers like Cogent or Level 3, to give their customers what they paid for: access to
the entire internet.
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But now, as web traffic grows and it becomes cheaper to build speedy long-distance networks,
those relationships have changed. Today, more money is changing hands. A company that wants to
make money sending people data on the internetNetflix, Google, or Amazontakes up a lot
more bandwidth than such content providers ever have before, and that is putting pressure on the
peering system.
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In the facilities where these networks actually connect, theres a growing need for more ports, like
the one below, to handle the growing traffic traveling among ISPs, backbones, and content
providers.

A 10 gigabit ethernet port module built by Terabit Systems.
But the question of who will pay to install these ports and manage the additional traffic is at the
crux of this story.
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How to be a bandwidth hog
There are three ways for companies like these to get their traffic out to the internet.
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With cheaper fiber optic cables and servers, some of the largest companies simply build their
own proprietary backbone networks, laying fiber optic wires on a national or global scale.

Google is one of these: It has its own peering policies for exchanging data with other large networks
and ISPs, and because of this independence, its position on net neutrality has changed over the
years. Thats also why you dont hear as much about YouTube traffic disputes as you do about
Netflix, even though the two services pushing out comparable quantities of data.
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Or your company can pay for transit, which essentially means paying to use someone elses
backbone network to move your data around.

Those services manage the own peering relationships with major ISPs. Netflix, for instance, has
paid the backbone company Level 3 to stream its movies around the country.
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The final option is to build or use a content distribution network, or CDN. Data delivery speed is
significantly determined by geographical proximity, so companies prefer to store their content near
their customers at nodes in or near ISPs.

Amazon Web Services is, among other things, a big content distribution network. Hosting your
website there, as many start-ups do, ensures that your data is available everywhere. You can also
build your own CDN: Netflix, for instance, is working with ISPs to install its own servers on their
networks to save money on transit and deliver content to its users more quickly.
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Ready to be even more confused? Most big internet companies that dont have their own backbones
use several of these techniquespaying multiple transit companies, hiring CDNs and building their
own. And many transit companies also offer their own CDN services.
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Why you should care
These decisions affect the speed of your internet service, and how much you pay for it.
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Lets return to the question of who pays for the ports. In 2010, Comcast got into a dispute with
Level 3, a backbone company that Netflix had paid for data transitdelivering its streaming movies
to the big internet. As more people used the service, Comcast and Level 3 had to deal with more
traffic than expected under their original agreement. More ports were needed, and from Comcasts
point of view, more money, too. The dispute was resolved last summer, and it resulted in one of the
better press releases in history:
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BROOMFIELD, Colo., July 16, 2013 Level 3 and Comcast have resolved their prior interconnect
dispute on mutually satisfactory terms. Details will not be released.
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Thats typical of these arrangements, which are rarely announced publicly and often involve non-
disclosure agreements. Verizon has a similar, on-going dispute with Cogent, another transit
company. Verizon wants Cogent to pay up because it is sending so much traffic to Verizons
network, a move Cogents CEO characterizes as practically extortionate. In the meantime, Netflix
speeds are lagging on Verizon networkand critics say thats because of brinksmanship around the
negotiations.
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What Netflix did last month was essentially cut out the middle-man: Comcast still felt that the
amount of streaming video coming from Netflixs transit providers exceeded their agreement, and
rather than haggle with them about peering, it reportedly reached an agreement for Netflix to
(reluctantly) pay for the infrastructure to plug directly into Comcasts network. Since then, Comcast
users have seen Netflix quality improveand backbone providers have re-doubled their ire at ISPs.
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Users versus content
Youll hear people say that debates over transit and peering have nothing to do with net neutrality,
and in a sense, they are right: Net neutrality is a last-mile issue. But at the same time, these middle-
mile deals affect the consumer internet experience, which is why there is a good argument that the
back room deals make net neutrality regulations obsoleteand why people like Netflixs CEO are
trying to define strong net neutrality to include peering decisions.
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What were seeing is the growing power of ISPs. As long-haul networks get cheaper, access to
users becomes more valuable, and creates more leverage over content providers, what you might
call a terminating access monopoly. While the largest companies are simply building their own
networks or making direct deals in the face of this asymmetry, there is worry that new services will
not have the power to make those kinds of deals or build their own networks, leaving them
disadvantaged compared to their older competitors and the ISP.
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Anyone can develop tools that became large disruptive services, Sarah Morris, a tech policy
counsel at the New America Foundation, says. Thats the reason the internet has evolved the way it
has, led to the growth of companies like Google and Netflix, and supported all sorts of interesting
things like Wikipedia.
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The counter-argument is that the market works: If people want the services, theyll demand their
ISP carry them. The problem there is transparency: If customers dont know where the conflict is
before the last mile, they dont know whom to blame. Right now, its largely impossible to tell
whether your ISP, the content provider, or a third party out in the internet is slowing down a
service. Thats why much of the policy debate around peering is focused on understanding it, not
proposing ideas. Open internet advocates are hopeful that the FCC will be able to use its authority
to publicly map networks and identify the cause of disputes.
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The other part of that challenge, of course, is that most people dont have much choice in their ISP,
and if the proposed merger between the top two providers of wired broadband,Time Warner Cable
and Comcast, goes through, theyll have even less.