@izzion said:
Ultimately, a lot of the interconnection problems come down to things like <a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/level-3-accuses-six-broadband-providers-of-degrading-network-traffic/">this</a>:
> "Until Level 3 fomented this dispute, Comcast and Level 3 exchanged Internet traffic as part of a commercial interconnection agreement, under which Comcast paid Level 3 for interconnection facilities. Although the parties exchanged traffic at a ratio of about 2:1, with Comcast terminating more of Level 3's traffic, this was well within the industry's established bounds for "roughly balanced" traffic, and they exchanged their on-net traffic on a settlement-free basis.
> "Now, Level 3 has decided to reinvent itself as a major CDN, in competition with other commercial CDN players, all of whom pay for transmission of their traffic on Comcast's and others' networks. And in so doing, Level 3 would more than double the amount of traffic it sends to Comcast -- which would result in a traffic imbalance that could be in the range of about 5:1. The parties' current interconnection facilities could not begin to support that type of traffic flow."
So, Comcast's position is basically that Cogent / Level 3 tried to use their non-CDN interconnection agreement to do CDN business and make the money for that from Netflix, and Comcast argued they should pay the same fees that other CDN interconnects do.
That's not what I would have called a CDN; for me, a CDN requires hosting servers inside an interconnect border to improve content delivery speed. I'm not part of that industry, so that explains why I didn't understand that point. I thought a CDN involved hosting servers inside borders and paying for special interconnects to those servers to improve content delivery. Since, as far as I am aware, Comcast is not participating in whatever Netfilx calls their CDN service by hosting servers, I did not consider the data transit to be part of a CDN service.
I would agree that using peered routing for CDN should be discouraged. The fact that the data being delivered is content, does not strictly make Cogent a CDN in my option. If it did, then all networks are CDNs to me.
Again, these are my naive observations on that topic.