The service is solid, there’s no upselling or throttling, and hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when we talk about “open”, “fair” and “monopolies” the model of a local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality could offer a real alternative. It doesn’t directly solve the peering issues, but it shifts the balance of power (and cost) somewhat.
tldr: one town in the US did it and it became an economic miracle, big telcos noticed and have set up lobbying and advertising infra to ensure it never happens.
> "The average voter doesn't understand how these systems work so there is little risk for [state] lawmakers in siding with these companies."
The million-dollar question is why those lawmakers are siding with these companies when the economic miracle case exists right in front of their eyes. The answer to that question is the real explainer.
My home country's formerly public energy provider has a weird share structure: a Chinese company and BlackRock add up to a fourth of the stock. No foreign investor should really be buying up stock in critical infrastructure.
This will always upset me.
Of course our lobbied state congress critters passed a law to restrict this, so EPB can only offer internet to a limited geographic area (under the auspices of network monitoring of power delivery) — wouldn't want their Comcast-bros to have any competition! Certain apartment complexes are exempted, which prevents you from using EPB.
Wish more jurisdictions were even allowed to do this; wish politicians weren't such whores.
I'm glad this non-profit ISP exists but on a national level I would prefer (strong) net neutrality laws. Probably not an issue in NL but in less developed countries neutrality isn't guaranteed.
Telecommunications law in Europe is a very interesting thing.
If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water.
More. Far more visible. Much easier to go without municipal power than without internet.
In some sense a democracy is also a market and can lead to efficient allocation of resources, particularly common resources for common good.
This is why public utilities tend to work so well in practice. People, especially in the US, don't seem to realise that such services are also subject to strong market forces, just a different kind of market.
Voters care a lot about good public services, and they also care a lot about not getting taxed much. This can lead to very efficient outcomes in well functioning democracies, often more efficient than those that come out of private enterprise, when it comes to services that most of the population needs.
On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.
(Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context) What is a low quality network participant? One of the "bulletproof" hosts?
I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm for larger providers.
If there was such a large difference in volume they would be choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for themselves.
Afaik, their requirements have never been judgement based: just bandwidth minimums, port types and locations. I would expect that they prioritize new connections in some way, so if you barely hit the criteria and are somewhere well served by transit, you'll be low priority, and the requirements might change before your connection gets setup and if so, you might not get connected because you don't meet the new requirements, but otherwise, seems like if you meet the requirements, send in the application, and have some patience, the peering connection should turn up eventually.
It's not like they have a mostly balanced flows requirement like Tier 1 ISPs usually do. Also, even in their current peering policy, they don't require presence in multiple metros; just substantial traffic (10gbps), fast ports (100G), two pops in the same metro.
Could this be due to the rise of services like Equinix Fabric and Inter.link? Google doesn't need to peer directly with most anymore because there is always a middleman somewhere who can handle it, and for many businesses the convenience of a point and click web gui outways whatever it costs?
The result has been some funny routes sometimes. I live in Toronto and have seen trace routes bounce over to Chicago to connect to stuff colocated here in Toronto.
It's frustrating as their fibre is my only real high speed option; also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.
There have been periodic times where it became an acute problem, like early in the YouTube and Netflix years there was a lot of congestion in their upstream peers and they held out hoping those orgs would pay for the peering. They were also over provisioned in early DSL days where their upstreams became saturated and there were few alternative paths.
This gives me even less confidence after BCE took over ZiplyFiber, US PNW provider. There's a long running joke about IPv6 just one more lab test away from deployment.
See Telstra(Australia), the Korean Telcos, NTT(in Asia), Globacom (Nigeria) etc
That being said, the threat to the open internet is also more than just ISPs being gigantic assholes: it’s centralization in general. A majority of web traffic passes into or through one of three main cloud compute providers; Cloudflare has such an outsized impact that regional IP blocks can disrupt global traffic; and ISPs have been permitted to consolidate through mergers and acquisitions into expansive monopolies. The internet is fiercely centralized and largely closed already, which is why these ploys by shitty ISPs are likely to work absent Government intervention.
You want to protect the open internet? Regulate the shit out of its major players again. Force them to keep it open, especially when it hinders expanding profit margins.
South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
The problem isn’t regulation, but regulatory capture ensuring companies get the regulations they desire and benefit from.
Aka regulation..... Nearly all regulation is for regulatory capture and if you think of something that isn't it probably just outlived who it was designed to capture for.
See Hivane and HOPUS
Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery. At one point they even owned most of the railroads[0]. Communications and travel infrastructure are things government is moderately good at.
For some reason, we just decided not to have a government-sponsored telecom company, even when Ma Bell made it patently obvious that having all the country's telecom infrastructure be privately owned by one company was a bad idea. It's obvious that a government-run ISP is about as crucial to life in 2025 as a government-run postal carrier was in the early 1800s.
[0] In the 1970s, all of America's railroads went bankrupt. First, they discharged their passenger rail mandates into Amtrak, then they went bankrupt anyway, and then they got nationalized.
Regulations get a bad rap because for decades the only ones to really get passed have only entrenched existing players and (rent-seeking) business models while blocking new entrants or competitors. I’m 100% in agreement with you that every single state and country should have an internet network that’s open access and governed solely by that country’s constitutional law - a sort of digital state, if you will, with which they can court business and interest groups alike to represent their interests globally. Instead, we’re presently stuck with a “whoever donates the most money to politicians wins” model, and that means the open internet exists in spite of the interests of Capital, not because of their good graces.
In my city, the municipality owns much of the fibre. The country I live in owns a bank where you can get a mortgage pretty cheap. The good parts of GDPR or CRA are very good and was not disrupted by large corporations?
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me the US government is doing a terrible job at all of these.
1. The suburbanization of cities turning road-building into a Ponzi scheme and transit into a guaranteed money-loser. Lowering the density of cities dilutes the tax base while increasing the need for roads and cars to carry people on them.
2. America's absolutely stupid decision to privatize Conrail without retaining ownership over the trackage. Wall Street infected all of the Class I railroads and convinced them to downgrade their own infrastructure. Imagine if your local city had sold all the roads to a private company.
What a time to be alive.
The simple solution would be to make this illegal, i.e. require landlords to allow at least two competing wired ISPs to connect each household.
No need to make them pay for it; I suspect it would be more than enough to end their very lucrative arrangement of somehow rewarding exclusivity. (I don't have any evidence that landlords are getting paid for it by Vodafone directly, but I highly doubt that there's any above board reason for the status quo.)
I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.
If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on Vodafone's part?
I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.
I did force my cell phone carrier to grant me proper 4G speeds last year, after spending many hours with their help line and ultimately complaining to the (then) ministry of transportation and digital infrastructure.
I downloaded the app of the german ministry that allows you to take speed tests and file a complaint. After multiple weeks of measuring connection speeds on the cellular network, I was able to file a complaint.
That's why you are paying for a "up to" 1Gbps connection. (I think it was already a struggle that they had to put the "up to" in the big advertisement)
One solution could be to have geographically distributed test points. Any connection to be able to claim a certain speed has to be able to get that speed to those test points. And the test points are legally required to connect to anyone that can bring fiber to their doorstep. If someone plays hardball with peering there will then always be the backup option of routing traffic through one of the test points.
Idk, just throwing out ideas here.
Who is to say where the performance problem is? Certainly not your contract.
Maybe if the last mile is cronically congested, or between the local aggregation switch and their regional exchange points, you might have a legal case. But if the issue is insufficient connectivity between their network and other networks, I would be very surprised if the contract terms covered that at all.
There's a bunch of networks throughout the world where their policies mean you can get more economically acheive better connectivity to their customers by hosting outside the geographic boundaries of the network rather than inside it. Doesn't make sense from a theoretical point of view, but when German ISPs won't interconnect within Germany, serve their customers from Poland or France and the connectivity picture may change significantly. Worst case, serve them from the US (but the latency may be too high)
There's nothing as good as hard verifiable data—even if regulators play hardball and favor ISPs then you've the evidence to whip up political action (claim biased decisions, etc.).
Layer 2 = their infrastructure connects you to the internet
Layer 3 = theyre literally just a reseller, DTAG is providing your internet connection, the ISP just billing etc.
Some apartment buildings exlusively offer DOCSIS via a single provider (as there's never been any unbundling of the DOCSIS "local loop"; presumably under the assumption that a landline will always be available anyway?).
If that one provider is oversubscribed, you're pretty much out of luck.
I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.
So for the "commoners" it seems a solid choice, while we, the Lords & Ladies of tech, are cursing in our basement home labs ;-)
Also, and that's why I'm stuck with them, for some reason they're the only one who offer combined DSL with 5G "boost". Our line is limited to ~45 MBit/s, and we get another 100 MBit/s over 5G. Doing this yourself with multiple links is of course an option, but costs a magnitude more than the 5€ extra I'm paying now; and the day only has so many hours to take care of such private deployments.
South Korea pioneered fair share govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
The commenting APIs in ghost are a little obscure.
> This isn't about efficiency—it's about extraction
> The problem isn't your connection to Vodafone—it's Vodafone's restrictive connections to the rest of the internet.
> Vodafone's exit from public peering isn't an isolated technical decision—it's part of a broader pattern of large telecoms trying to reshape internet economics in their favor
The more obnoxious signs though is the excessive length, loose structure, repetition, and lack of serious editing. Writing ~3000 words used to take quite a bit of effort, so you'd need to be at least a strong enough writer to organize and structure your thoughts to make it that far. Now it's so easy anyone can put out tons of generated content on whatever topic they want.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
This article is 2700 words of repetitive slop. It seems that people are adapting to this new world.
Until I switched, it would only peer with other Tier 1 providers 2000 mi away from my location, even though there is a large IX 5 mi from home co-located with a large regional ISP with several other networks and appliances connected to it.
I filed a complaint but it is impossible to escape the event horizon of the customer service black hole, and customer protection regulation agents fail to appreciate how clownish it is to have 100 ms ping to my university 5 mi away.
So I switched and recommended everyone within earshot to do so as well.
To this day I fail to understand the logic behind not peering locally.
Also if something goes wrong with their traffic ratios, Telefonica would have to pay for transit.
As a past customer, I'd like to challenge the implication that it's possible to send any data over Vodafone's network. (My DOCSIS connection with them peaked at fractions of an Mbps for many months during the pandemic, with latency measured in multiple seconds.)
> There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows through something called an "internet exchange point"—a giant room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly, swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free.
When you open a Youtube video page, the video is probably loaded from Google's caching servers located in your ISPs network.
Sure, you lose Vodafone germany. Then you explain clearly why to every major media.
This coukd be stopped fairly quickly.
https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provid...
1299, a Google gold partner is at IXes
Inter.link! https://inter.link/google-verified-peering-provider/
"As Google discontinues its direct peering agreements at Internet Exchanges worldwide"
Wait... does that mean that "Google is killing the open internet?!" Quick "write" a AI rage bait article about it.
Tab closed
> We may have failed in some areas to grasp the issue entirely. The reader is advised that not everything might be correct and you should follow the sources and conduct your own research to get an adequate understanding of the subject at hand.
And who funds Inter.link? Their publicly available balance sheet shows significant, growing debts to a linked company, but it doesn't mention its name.
Companies are extractive by nature, and they will always try to find new ways of squeezing blood from a stone absent regulations saying otherwise (and suitable punishments ensuring anyone caught violating them is crippled in the marketplace, if not outright destroyed). This has been going on for decades and will continue absent regulatory intervention. Just look at how the US Electrical grid bills to see how this could end up (higher prices, bullshit fees, redundant billing).
No one's allowing you to plug X x 100G into their eyeball network for free
It would be more about having a slow, free and backup internet available. Nowadays, we talk a lot of cyber attacks and WW3. I am pretty sure the Internet would be the first thing to go out if things would escalate (at least at the same time as the grid).
I am not sure how long a "modern" society can operate without connectivity. The idea of a mesh network is also very cool.
This was surprising to my Canadian sensibilities. Our mobile networks are expensive, but I generally get solid 4G and now 5G coverage between Toronto and Montreal and had full 4G (at the time) coverage on a road trip between Saskatoon and Calgary.
1. State stat the error also occurs with the Vodafone router.
2. that you already have done a factory reset of the Vodafone router.
3. that you already have turned your Vodafone router off for 24 hours and it didn't fix the error.
4. that you already talked to the hotline multiple times.
After that you have to pray that someone with the same problem comes along and endorse your problem. Like, "I have the same problem since...". This sometimes conjures a Vodafone guy who tells you he has informed the technicians. Than you have won and within less than a day the error is gone.
I was six month without IPv6 even though the error message was clear. The forum route finally worked.
That's giving free transit/route leaks
We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodafone still
Outsourcing peering to a 3rd party seems like their playbook.
Interlink is to get to France Telecom/ Orange from German Starlink users
And to get Italian/Bulgarian landed traffic to AS3320
From what I see most of the traffic that flows via inter.link from SpaceX is point to point traffic. Not regular IP transit like what they get from 1299 or GTT
SpaceX is settlement free in Germany, customer elsewhere.
Once under more centralized control, new and old efficiencies are moved from customer benefits per charge, to conglomerate revenue per expense.
The centralization enables the change, and defends it from competitive pressure.
And regulators keep falling for it, because industry money has so many ways to push watchdog decisions in the direction they want, under the cover of relentless PR.
--
It would be a very blunt instrument to require companies that reached 50% market share, or $500m valuation, for more than three years to split into independent companies. In any way they wanted to organizationally and asset-wise, as long as the highest valued component was valued at less than 60% of the original. (Strategically owner/leadership designed breakups often result in a greater sum value. So more than one component may end up worth more than 50% of the original.)
A very very blunt economic instrument, indeed.
But I really think markets would become more dynamic, competition fiercer, technological growth faster, economic growth higher, and customer benefits greater.
Great for the labor market too. Both in job creation and economic mobility. The continual emphasis on developing new leadership talent for success created spinoffs would be significant.
Startups would have fiercer competition in terms of incumbent adaptation and innovation, but lower passive barriers based on scale, brand, etc.
Billionaires would continue to be minted. Warren Buffet adds value to many companies without creating self-serving keiretsu out of them. Other billionaires would tilt more toward the multi-founding pattern, instead of the single-company (or tree of controlled subsidiaries) mogul type.
(I am aware that some markets, especially some utility type markets, "want" to be monopolies due to objectively high costs of duplication. But even those can be made more decentralized and more competitive by increased modularity on functional lines, and similar decompositions, suited to specific economics and practicalities.)
There is this idea in Europe (and I think it is taking shape in other parts of the world) that content providers should also pay the ISPs for the traffic to/from them. Basically ISPs want to double-dip in making money from both sides of the pipe.
And this needs to be put to rest, otherwise we'll pay for the Internet access like we pay for cable TV: Netflix - $5/mo extra, HBO - $3/mo extra, Facebook - $2/mo extra.
I am all for capitalism, but greed needs to have a hard cap at some point.
Play stupid games, win stupid prices. Just wait until Vodafone Germany customers get slow speeds and an automated warning banner on every other website they visit. "Too big to fail" until it isn't.
As a business, at that point, you're basically extorted to pay the ransom or deal with a loss of revenue. Since the ransom is most likely lower it won't take long for your other competitors to start paying it as well leaving you with an objectively worse product, irrespective of your warning banner (which lefty Linda or Gradma Garry isn't going to understand).
If you're sending a packet from German Shittytel to German Okaytel, and Okaytel just happens to buy a connection to Singapore from Asiatel to get packets to Asia, and Singapore Internet Corp just happens to buy a connection to German Shittytel to get packets to Europe, they'll be glad to send your packet all the way to Singapore so Asiatel will have to pay them for it. But if you sent your packet to a VPN server in Berlin with a neutral peering with both ISPs, the packet would take a nearly common sense route.
In practice, these situations don't happen, at least not this extreme. Partly because ISPs are trying their best not to be the recipient of this. Okaytel doesn't want their packets to be round-tripped through Singapore - that's a bad user experience and they're ultimately paying for it in money as well. So they might negotiate with Asiatel that Asiatel won't tell Shittytel that it's able to deliver packets to Okaytel - in fact there are often BGP attributes they can set to do this automatically. Business is incredibly cut-throat and incredibly stupid. I guarantee Shittytel has a lot more money than Okaytel because they are better at "extracting value". Not only the ISP business is like this btw.
Datacamp, which hosts lots of them has very good peering
If anything, this move to centralized PNIaaS platforms makes interconnecting with the eyeball networks even easier for smaller providers. The portals allow for straightforward visibility on what they want to charge for paid peering, and instant automated EVCs and turnup, shortcutting the long and windy process of negotiating terms and establishing individual XCs in DCs that you agree to peer in.
