Comcast, Level 3 Peering Dispute Resolution Unlikely to Affect Customers
Comcast and Level 3 customers are unlikely to notice any change in their Internet service following the resolution of an ongoing peering dispute between the two companies, according to interviews this week with an industry official familiar with the resolution and experts not aligned with either company. The two companies said Tuesday they settled the interconnect dispute that began in 2010 on “mutually satisfactory terms” (CD July 17 p18). Because the companies continued to peer as they settled the dispute, the customers are unlikely to see a change now, the industry official told us. Comcast and Level 3 worked to find a new way to route data over regional transports, which cuts the costs associated with the transport, said industry officials.
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In 2010, Level 3 accused Comcast of charging for transmission of over-the-top content to Comcast customers (CD Dec 1/10 p6). Level 3 said the demands came just days after it announced it would carry traffic for Netflix. Comcast and its allies said Level 3 was suddenly sending an imbalanced traffic load across the Comcast network, and its fees were just the fair share of the cost of transporting that traffic.
Now that the companies reached a deal, “it is possible that the performance might improve somewhat,” for Comcast customers, said Vishal Misra, associate professor of computer science at Columbia University, who isn’t privy to the details of the deal. He said he doesn’t anticipate much of a discernable change. “Netflix customers already fare well on Comcast, as the Netflix blog shows,” said Misra of the online video provider’s statistics showing how quickly its content is streamed on various ISPs. “If Comcast had stopped peering with Level 3, then the performance difference might have been a lot more noticeable."
The minimal fanfare with which Comcast and Level 3 announced the resolution of their dispute could signal that their agreement isn’t much more than a short-term solution, said Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent Communications. It’s been involved in a number of other high-profile peering disputes (CD July 1 p1) and Schaeffer isn’t privy to the Comcast-Level 3 accord. “I don’t think anything materially changed” between them, Schaeffer said. “If it really changed, there would be a great deal of transparency that would be put forward,” he said. “They would make a point [of a new relationship], for marketing reasons. Both companies have a reason to tout having a long-term, stable relationship.” It appears all the two sides “agreed to do is say that they're not going to publicly say they're fighting anymore,” said Schaeffer. Comcast and Level 3 spokespeople both disagreed with that characterization. The Level 3 spokesman said “Just as our statement indicates, we did resolve our dispute with a new agreement on mutually satisfactory terms.”
Schaeffer said peering dispute resolutions typically fall into one of three categories. First, the two parties could choose never to reconnect. This happens in a majority of cases, but most often, the parties are insignificant enough that nobody notices, he said. Other experts have said previously many such de-peerings are smaller in scale than the one between Comcast and Level 3 and are never settled. Second, the two parties could agree to increase routing capacity in the short term and resolve the problem without necessarily finding a “mechanism for long term stability and growth going forward,” said Schaeffer. Finally, companies could find a permanent settlement that establishes very objective measures, and contractually forces both parties to behave in a certain way. “It’s pretty rare for parties to build a long-term framework, because everyone believes their situation is going to change and they don’t want to lock themselves into a long-term contractual deal,” he said.
Experts disagreed over whether the two-plus years of negotiations in this dispute was unusual. Schaeffer said resolution doesn’t usually take so long. “I think there was a lot of bad blood between these two, and they're both fairly large and fairly dug in in their positions,” he said. “Both of them were going to be cautious not to establish precedents that would end up creating consequences with other peers.” Another peering expert said the technological details can take time to work out, and the involvement of lawyers can also slow the process.