There were quite a number of stories that inaccurately reported on the Comcast versus Level 3 peering dispute.  Those stories inaccurately reported that Comcast was trying to charge an additional toll on the entire Internet (video in particular).  The mistakes in the stories were understandable because so many analysts go it wrong but those stories do need to be updated and corrected.

Here are some examples of the problematic reporting from TheStreet.

“Until recently, Comcast was paying Level 3 to handle its Internet backbone traffic. But following Level 3′s recent Netflix deal, the ratio has flipped, putting Level 3 traffic at a five-to-one higher rate than Comcast’s. At least, that’s what Comcast thinks.”

Too many people are conflating transit with peering and many are disputing the fact that there was a peering agreement in place between Comcast and Level 3 because they believe that only a transit connection exits and that Comcast is somehow trying to put a toll on their transit providers by threatening to block video on the Open Internet.

I have actually proven this to be wrong when Comcast confirmed the facts I reported in my video on the Level 3 vs Comcast dispute.  Comcast confirmed my initial analysis based on my careful deduction of public statements and letters from both companies.  There is *both* a peering connection and a transit connection.  Comcast pays Level 3 for transit access on Internet inbound/outbound traffic.  Level 3 pays Comcast for an additional 200 Gbps of private peering capacity.  The claims that Comcast is somehow trying to convert a transit agreement to a peering agreement is false.

The transit traffic has nothing to do with the peering ratios.  Peering ratios are purely based on on-net traffic between Level 3 AS (which includes Level 3 caching servers) and Comcast AS.  Increasing transit traffic to Level 3 from Comcast does nothing to alter those ratios.  It might require Comcast to pay Level 3 more for transit services which offsets what Level 3 CDN pays Comcast, but we should not be conflating peering and transit.

Here is another example of an inaccurate story from Nate Anderson who initially reported that Comcast was trying to “nuke” the Internet.  Anderson later reported some more factual information on the dispute.  Where Anderson went wrong the first time was his reliance on analysis from Professor Rob Frieden and analyst Dave Burstein.  In his earlier story he wrote:

“Rob Frieden, a Penn State telecoms prof and recent author of the book Winning the Silicon Sweepstakes, has studied such issues for years. He says that Comcast’s argument about this being a mere peering traffic imbalance is plausible, but he notes that the company could do plenty to adjust its own routing strategies to send more off-network traffic through the Level 3 backbone in order to make the ratios more even. But Comcast might well have an incentive notto do this, “deliberately reducing the volume of ‘return’ traffic it hands off” in order to make the imbalance even larger.”

Dave Burstein in the same article also said:

“Comcast’s explanation why they should collect from Level 3 would also apply to every other backbone carrier and hence to essentially every bit carried over the Internet. Downstream traffic is about four times as high as user upstream, so even a company with a lot of users receiving packets from Comcast users would be asymmetrical.”

This is grossly misguided.  The transit ratios are irrelevant as Comcast pays for transit on the incoming and outgoing transit traffic.  Comcast merely charges for some if the imbalanced traffic coming from Level 3 AS coming over the exclusive peering circuits (which likely dwarfs the Comcast-Level3 transit link).  The idea that Comcast’s paid peering service would set a precedent to somehow allow Comcast to bill every bit coming over the Internet is ludicrous.

The idea that Comcast is gaming the transit system by not buying enough of it is laughable since the economic constraints are dictated by Level 3 and other Tier 1 transit carriers.  If Level 3 wanted Comcast to have more transit, they could almost certainly give them more transit at the current rates they charge Comcast and they wouldn’t have to pay Comcast for private peering capacity.  The problem is that they don’t want to do this as they would have to share that transit capacity with the “open Internet” and it wouldn’t be exclusively available to Level 3′s CDN business.  All these stories needed to be corrected for the record because they’re essential to public debate.