Level 3 is a major network operator that provides backbone connectivity for some of the largest broadband networks. Last year TelecomsTech interviewed the company’s Director of Cloud Services about infrastructure and how it affects gaming services, especially because latency and packet loss can significantly impact online gameplay.
To keep services reliable and prevent gamers from being disadvantaged by lag, Level 3 offers a range of products designed to reduce packet loss and latency. Today the company has claimed that some ISPs are allowing packets to be dropped deliberately during disputes over money and interconnection arrangements.
In a company blog post, Level 3’s Vice President Mark Taylor wrote:
“A port that is on average utilized at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades—this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers.
That leaves the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content.
Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers.”
Level 3 alleges those operators are refusing to add capacity because of ongoing disputes over whether backbone providers such as Level 3 and Cogent should pay ISPs access charges to exchange traffic. Large access providers, including AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner Cable, have also targeted high-traffic content services such as Netflix and YouTube as part of those commercial conflicts.
In late 2010 Level 3 reached an agreement to pay Comcast following a dispute tied to Netflix traffic. Level 3 had accused Comcast of creating a situation where content companies could not reach end users over Tier 1 networks unless they agreed to pay additional fees to each ISP. Because many ISPs operate their own content services, they can avoid those interconnection costs, potentially disadvantaging rivals.
Today, Netflix pays for direct connections to Comcast and Verizon, while Level 3 continues to carry a portion of Netflix traffic across its backbone.
The same tensions have played out in Europe. In January 2011, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia and Telefónica commissioned a report arguing that companies like Netflix and Google’s YouTube should compensate ISPs more for the traffic they deliver. Cogent, another large internet backbone provider that carries Netflix traffic, filed a complaint in France in August 2011 alleging Orange provided inadequate interconnection capacity.
The result is a tit-for-tat dynamic that can harm end users, as congested interconnection points cause packet loss and degraded performance. Level 3 and Cogent have urged the Federal Communications Commission to prevent ISPs from imposing charges for exchanging internet traffic, but the FCC’s earlier attempt to establish net neutrality rules was overturned in court after a challenge by Verizon.
Those proposed rules would have restricted blocking, discrimination and pay-for-priority charges on the last mile of broadband networks, requiring ISPs such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T to treat internet services equally once traffic entered their networks on the way to homes and businesses.
ISPs argue that traffic growth justifies higher fees or tighter controls; backbone providers and content companies counter that ISPs are leveraging market power to extract payments. The dispute raises important questions about who should bear the cost of carrying rapidly growing online traffic and how to preserve a fast, open internet for consumers and businesses alike.