Comcast Continues Discussions With Level 3 -- Offers to Trial New Solutions
While we continue to believe the peering dispute that Level 3 initiated with Comcast is best resolved through discussions between engineers and business people, we think it is important to give a status update to the Internet community.
Level 3 and Comcast engineering teams held several in-person discussions over the past 48 hours to discuss potential significant revisions to parts of our peering and direct connect architecture. Together, we constructively developed a potential new and different architectural approach that we proposed to trial with Level 3 as soon as next month. We proposed a mutual and relatively modest investment that would allow us both to better understand the traffic, routing, and economic considerations. We also offered to keep the economics of the existing newly executed agreement at "no cost" until we mutually learned the actual costs of the new approach during this trial.
Additionally, we began some initial discussions about other solutions (including structural and technology approaches) to ensure we were thoughtfully evaluating a full set of potential solutions.
Level 3 chose to leave the meeting when we wouldn't agree to a "zero cost" outcome without the benefit of a trial and the opportunity to understand -- with Level 3 -- the full implications of the new approach, including the impact on our mutual customers. Everyone knows that networks have investments and costs to operate over the longer term; Level 3 effectively demanded unlimited capacity at our cost.
This would be a significant shift of Internet infrastructure and we believe that it is prudent to be thoughtful in any approach given that traffic flows are not well understood without a trial.
We'll continue to actively seek solutions, but both sides have to be willing to come to the table in an open and mutual value consideration. We still are.
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Comments (3)
Thanks, JT, that does help break it down. Much appreciated!
@ Adam The new architecture proposal was actually from Level 3 - they requested incremental regional based interconnects deeper into the Comcast infrastructure to help address their dramatic increase in imbalanced traffic. I believe their assumption is that this would save cost and reduce the overall expense. Their engineers and ours discussed this to understand any incremental edge infrastructure, traffic flows, national and regional routing announcements, cold and hot-potato routing, asymmetric flows, etc., given this is different than, and incremental to, how we exchange traffic today. After all the joint discussions, it was clear that this was complex and required a bit more thoughtful consideration. The incremental design needs, scalable route management, failure analysis, economics, etc. are clearly not straightforward enough for us to immediately agree that our respective costs will go away or be drastically reduced. This was the reason we proposed a limited, manageable trial to better understand these costs and complexities before either of us made long-term commitments to a new and untested architecture with our mutual customers. Certainly, as an Internet eco-system participant, we’re happy to work toward new technologies, architectures, economics, and customer needs that are supportable for all participants delivering core Internet infrastructure.
I'm sorry John, but your post was technically vague, to the point of leaving us technical readers completely in the dark. Would you be able to shed some light on what, specifically, you're proposing from a configuration and infrastructure prospective? Did you propose some sort of a cold-potato routing policy from Level 3 to Comcast, or what, exactly?
If you want to leave out specific costs, that's okay, however it's hard for an educated reader to draw any conclusion above and beyond "Level 3 emo-parted" from the information you've provided. I'd like to show some sympathy to your side of this debate, but you're not exactly making it easy on us!