One question: There aren't that many large edge providers around. What would Verizon do if Netflix signed a contract with a dozen of the larger ones and routed their streams through whichever had the best connectivity for a given endpoint? If Verizon throttle all of them, they are going to get a lot of collateral - essentially degrading the Internet at large for their customers. Or would they just do packet level filtering then?
I've wondered this as well. I suspect that it would be cost prohibitive for Netflix to have a contract with several edge providers like Level 3. I'm certain that Verizon's price demands to Netflix would be cheaper than this option.
Think about your own ISP. I pay $80 for service, but to get the same bandwidth shared between 2 ISPs I'd have to pay $120 plus now I'm doubling my hardware costs (routers to each ISP).
True. But I would assume that the contract is largely a pay per usage or at least expected usage. So if they just make an estimate of how many Verizon customers they have and buy that block from someone else than Level 3. Then route all that traffic through the other provider, while keep using Level 3 for the majority of their traffic.
Or perhaps they could ask Level 3 (who are clearly pissed at Verizon) to make the deal for them. These edge providers already have business with each other (peering), so it should be relatively simple for Level 3 to purchase some bandwidth from another large provider and then route some of their packets (e.g. the Netflix ones) through there.
In any case, the edge providers have good reason to collaborate on thwarting Verizon on this, so why don't they?
I think the costs work out differently at terabit scale. Sending a terabit split across two backbones may be the same cost or cheaper than sending it over a single backbone.
