Have you ever wondered how those really popular apps like Netflix, TitkTok, Youtube, and others fit into the whole internet picture? How do ISPs really deal with all that bandwidth needed to let those popular content platforms work without buffering, stuttering and packet loss? As if the popularity of Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, TikTok, and other’s wasn’t obvious enough, their popularity is DIRECTLY related to internet utilization worldwide. Here’s a little eye opener courtesy of a Statistica post from May 2023. The most popular apps we all use account for about ~56% of all the worlds internet utilization at any given time. Maybe you can remember a while back the whole net-neutrality debate, where AT&T tried to stick it to Facebook, Netflix and others to get them to pay huge sums of money for the pleasure of connecting to their tier1 network. The issue being AT&T wasn’t going to give them access for free (shocker, even though a lot of providers do peer for free with them), and then you started having issues with buffering, and latency and performance issues to get “paid” “fastlane access”. Ultimately the FCC has mostly been on board with fair rules preventing internet service providers from trying to scrape cash out of those services, which absolutely is a good thing. Internet providers were put on notice, no throttling, no blocking, no wild routing stuff to get around the need for their internet consumers to have access to those services, any time they want. So deal with it…and here we are!
The internet is a tiered list of companies in America, and pretty much this list is the who’s who of Americas internet…
- Verizon
- AT&T
- Lumen/Level3/etc
- Cogent
- Hurricane Electric
- Aurelion
And then you have the rest…regional and local tier[23] companies, who are connected to one or more of those tier1 players in some fashion…
- Soon, FireByte Networks
- Windstream
- Equinix
- Megaport
- Municipal Fiber Utilities, such as Cedar Falls Utilities, Pella Fiber, Indianola Fiber, etc…
- Aureon
- IMON
- MetroNet
- Mediacom
And so that pretty pretty much sums up how the core guts of the internet works. Tier1s mostly connect with each other, regional and local tier[23]s connect with tier1s, sometimes with each other…and then there’s those pesky content app providers like Netflix, Facebook, TikTok/ByteDance, and YouTube, they want to connect to everyone, and most of them have an open free peering policy in place to make it less expensive for them and for those ISPs who are willing. They clearly don’t want to get back to the days of paying AT&T a premium and it’s way easier for them to just offer free peering services in key markets with anyone who is willing to pay for a cross connect, or a peering session on an Internet Exchange such as Equinix IX. So there you have it, the real benefit, the core idea. Those cool Apps, content providers, tv services all need to connect to the internet in some fashion, most of them are paying for a little connectivity to a tier1, called paid peering, but they really prefer to connect to any and everyone on a free peering arrangement in key markets such as Chicago, Denver, LA, New York, in colocation facilities such as those from Equinix. At the end of the day, free is better then paid, especially when AT&T and company really try and screw you over on what should be an economical internet rate.
There you have it folks, while you can just pull up your netflix app on your phone in the middle of no where Wyoming, Netflix is connected to your provider either directly or indirectly and most of the time they’d prefer to have a direct network connection closest to you the consumer. If your ISP wants to setup a peering link with any of those sweet app providers, links below!
Image Credit: Statistica May 2023
