We have received numerous questions and comments on the congestion information that I shared on Internet interconnection in the U.S. and Europe. We thought it would be helpful to provide a bit more detail to create more open dialogue on these important issues.

The measurement statistics that we used to evaluate congestion were from the first week of April, 2014. Over time, congestion with any given interconnect partner can change for a variety of reasons. Some of those are positive, such as when carriers voluntarily agree to augment interconnection capacity at congested locations under existing agreements. In other instances, carriers negotiate changes to their existing arrangements to agree on fair, reasonable, scalable and secure practices to exchange traffic and augment and adjust interconnection capacity and locations. In these situations, each party’s customers continue to receive high quality Internet services. We have many interconnection partners that routinely augment congested links as a matter of sound engineering practice and good customer service. And some (but not all) ISPs are willing to negotiate scalable interconnection agreements on fair and reasonable terms. If those negotiations are successful, congestion can be eliminated over time. All of these things are good for the Internet.

By the way, every ISP has access to exactly the same data that we have. Every one of them could easily provide, on a city-by-city basis, a view into the level of use (and the congestion, if it is happening) of interconnections to the rest of the Internet. That level of transparency would provide subscribers with useful information on how robustly their ISP is connected to all content and applications available on the Internet.

An example of that is our long-term relationship with Cablevision. This is a demonstration of how the transparency may be applied.

The graph is an aggregate view of all the interconnect capacity between us and clearly shows a well-managed architecture. Traffic rises and falls over the course of each day with consumer demand, and unlike the graphs in my prior blog post there are no flat tops. Needless to say no packets are dropped, as there is no congestion at the interconnection points.

Cablevision was also the first interconnect partner to move to 100Gbps ports. They wanted to make their architecture more efficient and the traffic flows easier to manage.

To be clear, the majority of ISPs around the world work with Level 3 in this way. Most of them routinely augment congested links as a matter of sound engineering practice and good customer service. And most have been willing to negotiate scalable interconnection agreements on fair and reasonable terms.

But since some of the largest ISPs have refused to do so, have left interconnection ports congested and deliberately harmed the quality of the services that customers have paid them for, we felt compelled to shine a light on that practice and believe that some rules are required to put an end to their anticompetitive behaviors.

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