Re: Netflix To Cogent To World

[Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu>]

On Thursday, July 24, 2014 02:27:01 AM Jimmy Hess wrote:

> It would be interesting if Google, Wikimedia, CBS/ABC,
> CNN, Walmart, Espn, Salesforce, BoFa, Weather.com,
> Dropbox, Paypal, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter,
> Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay, Wordpress.com, Pinterest,
> Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Forbes, Zillow,   formed a
> little club and said

> "OK, Tier1.. providers.. we're not paying you guys for
> transit anymore; your customers want our stuff  and will
> consider their internet service DOWN if they can't get
> it.   You are going to pay us for a fast lane to our
> content now.  If you want it,  please start sending us
> your bids, now."

I almost wrote this a few weeks ago but decided not to - but 
I've been saying it for a while now and maybe I'll write it 
now.

The bridge between content owners and their customers is 
service providers.

Those service providers are either wholesale transit 
providers or consumer service providers.

Commercial trends have been moving farther and farther away 
from, "How much bandwidth do you want to buy?" to, "How many 
Tv channels, voice minutes and cloud recording can I get?", 
particularly in much more developed markets. We see evidence 
on this in the current transit prices being so low that now 
selling in Gbps as a minimum might be the only way to 
survive.

(very) Slowly but (very) surely, the service provider 
(wholesale or consumer) is becoming a less visible part of 
the chain (well, unless we are in the news talking about de-
peering or how much grief Netflix are causing us this week), 
because eyeballs just want their "House of Cards".

There really is very little reason why certain major content 
owners and providers who operate their own IP networks 
cannot turn around and become full-blown wholesale ISP's 
(and in some cases, consumer ISP's).

As a transit provider industry, we need to get our act 
together and play nice, before we all get run over by the 
content owners. They will not hesitate to take us out of the 
equation the first chance they get.

Mark.

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