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.
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.
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.
What a time to be alive.
I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.
Sure, you lose Vodafone germany. Then you explain clearly why to every major media.
This coukd be stopped fairly quickly.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
South Korea pioneered fair share govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Outsourcing peering to a 3rd party seems like their playbook.
(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.
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.
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.)
Also if something goes wrong with their traffic ratios, Telefonica would have to pay for transit.
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.
South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provid...
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.
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.
That's giving free transit/route leaks
Telecommunications law in Europe is a very interesting thing.
we're also really good at feeding our poor and disabled too
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.
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)
This article is 2700 words of repetitive slop. It seems that people are adapting to this new world.
See Telstra(Australia), the Korean Telcos, NTT(in Asia), Globacom (Nigeria) etc
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.
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.
If there was such a large difference in volume they would be choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for themselves.
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.
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.
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)
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me the US government is doing a terrible job at all of these.
The problem isn’t regulation, but regulatory capture ensuring companies get the regulations they desire and benefit from.
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.
I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.
For anyone wondering: netzbremse.de/
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
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.
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
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.
> "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.
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.).
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
See Hivane and HOPUS
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
More. Far more visible. Much easier to go without municipal power than without internet.
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.
1299, a Google gold partner is at IXes
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.
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?
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.
They clearly didn’t publish a guarantee or an obligation that they will peer with anyone who meets the criteria.
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.
And doing all these things very well is not easy even in the nations that do it 'best' and most nations are not in that class.
In terms of the Post Office for example, they had to kill their commercial competitor to establish a monopoly and held back more advanced competitors like FedEx with their monopoly. Thus useful services didn't exist for many decades where they could have existed.
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.
Regulation is overwhelmingly positive, but the past fifty years have been a deliberate demonstration of the frailty and abusability of regulations by entrenched capital via regulatory capture, mainly to create people who (often unknowingly) champion a return to flammable mattresses, tainted foodstuffs, and corporate monopolies in the name of deregulation.
Regulations are a tool, a tool that can be wielded for the benefit of society or the benefit of Capital. It’s up to the electorate to be educated enough to advocate for proper use of said tool, rather than ignorantly swallow propaganda to let Capital run roughshod with them.
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.
And every single construction project takes forever. And costs a fortune. And it is impossible to build housing fast enough.
The reason to be in Berlin has always been its great art scene. Now they are actively destroying it. What's left is a few Rossmanns and an Edeka.
This is such an interesting cultural divide. As a German moving abroad, I was shocked to find ugly light fixtures already on the ceiling. I’d wanna make the space my own and not live with my landlords decor choices.
Basically, because people move out of cities that don't have good Internet connectivity, and it's unprofitable for private industry to serve rural America, rural America's towns and cities wound up just building their own ISPs. However, since a lot of these cities tend to be in blood-red states, a lot of these networks get kneecapped by state legislatures who are bought and paid for by cable companies worried that the government will subsidize Internet service into oblivion.
For example, in Utah we have a municipal fiber network, but because our state politicians are bought and paid for by Comcast, the UTOPIA[0] network is wholesale-only. That is, the towns in UTOPIA can lay the fiber, but they can't sell you Internet. At least, not without doing a shitton of accounting work to prevent subsidization by making sure they're accounting for costs that a fully private system would theoretically[1] incur. So, because of these stupid accounting rules, you have to buy Internet from someone else who is then paying UTOPIA for last-mile access, which makes it very difficult for UTOPIA to actually break even on their build-out. Other states have even more onerous laws[2] regarding municipal ISPs.
The thing about regulation is that it can either be constructed to improve competition and market freedom (i.e. antitrust) or it can be constructed to build moats around existing competitors. The state is the root of almost[3] all monopoly, after all. Additionally, it's difficult to write competent regulation without expert opinion; and if all the experts work for 2 companies, it's very easy for those companies to 'keep the story straight' and hoodwink the public. If you have a public option, then you can 'prove them wrong', so to speak.
[0] Utah Telecommunications OPen Infrastructure Agency.
For what it's worth, I'm not in the UTOPIA coverage area, but they did also have a Google Fiber buildout in my neighborhood. I jumped off Comcast almost immediately.
[1] To be clear here, almost no telecom last-mile is actually fully private, that's why Ronald "Fuck Antitrust" Reagan was willing to break up AT&T. This is just to make UTOPIA's life harder.
[2] https://www.baller.com/wp-content/uploads/BallerStokesLideSt...
[3] Strictly speaking, in a perfect ancap world of perfect competition with no aggression on homesteaded virgin land, you'd still see monopolies develop. Both because certain companies have value as infrastructure and because someone will break the whole 'no aggression' thing pretty damned quick and make themselves the state.
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.
The internet connection, which was FTTN VDSL, never skipped a beat. It was completely solid.
This was accomplished by using batteries and generators.
The ISP was The Phone Company, so their Cold War-era central office had very good backup power.
The VRAD nodes scattered all over town had enough battery backup that (at least in my neighborhood) things stayed up until they brought out generators for those nodes.
And at my house, the VDSL box had its own UPS. And I also had a rather overkill UPS, and a portable generator
We ran the generator intermittently, mostly to charge batteries and chill down refrigerators.
It wasn't an awesome time. It was hot as hell. It was a pain in the ass to keep the generator fueled. We didn't even try to run the desktop PC rigs.
But, yeah: The internet was working fine.
(We charged batteries for neighbors, too. One or two neighbors also dragged over extension cords to run their own fridge. And I opened up the WiFi completely so everyone nearby could use it.
So if you were my neighbour in that 2008 power outage, I'd have just taken care of that internet problem for you. The range at 2.4GHz was amazingly good in that abnormally-quiet RF environment.)
No one's allowing you to plug X x 100G into their eyeball network for free
All I'm getting from this is that it's a good idea to label ISPs utilities and bring the hammer down if they're being knobheads about it.
The question I'm having is: Where exactly do inter.link and Google peer? Like either they are both at a public IXP (which would mean Google is not actually discontinuing peering, or you'd have to really define the "direct" in that quoted sentence), or one has a fiber cable to one of the others DC? How does that work? Any insights?
Washington state just makes the customers pay the costs for build-out. Then the municipal utility district always breaks even. You can finance it through a utility lien, but either way, build out is expensive; less so if someone else already paid to get fiber to pass your lot, but still pretty spendy.
I'm genuinely curious.
I don't believe they peer either
The delay is inexcusable but the resultant airport seems pretty good. Why do you consider it one of the worst in the EU?
The solution that was developed in the Netflix-Comcast fight over a decade ago is content distribution. Instead of trying to build out extra capacity in every possible link, you shorten the path and thus reduce the number of contended links involved in each interaction. This scales much better, but it has two major problems: the first is rightsholders and their obnoxious anti-piracy restrictions, and the second is good old jurisdictional friction and economic misalignment. Somebody has to own the physical servers in all the myriad locations that keep the content closer to the consumer. If the ISP owns them, then they naturally want to exploit them. If Netflix owns them, they naturally don't want to serve their competitors. If a third party owns them, you address those two problems (potentially) but add new ones around liability, non-disclosure, competitiveness, etc.
If regulation is going to be useful here, it needs to focus on opening up opportunities to serve the unsexy middle of the infrastructure puzzle and not just the most visible parts that consumers/voters usually interact with. Also, "Netflix" needs to be understood as just a stand-in for any high-bandwidth Internet service, as the landscape is constantly changing.
At the same building where you connected with Vodafone in the past, you connect to interlink instead.
Instead of one to many you connect one to one.
Just to clarify one thing, the fact that's you're connected to an ixp doesn't automatically mean you have to accept any routes or traffic over it. And yes some of them allow you to sell/buy transit over the IXP fabric so instead of buying one connection for transit and another for settlement free pairing over the IXP, you do all that over one physical connection
No, that link is absolutely under Vodafone's control. They're deliberately not upgrading it so that they can extort money from Netflix.
The solution ... is content distribution.
CDNs have been worldwide, including Germany, for a long time. That's not the problem here.
If the CDN is so poorly interconnected with Vodafone that there's one bottlenecked link, then it's not really accomplishing its job, at least as far as "inside of Germany" is concerned. It might have reduced pressure on another bottleneck, like links between the US and the EU, but it still needs to spread out more. If Vodafone is blocking that, then pressure should be applied to force them to open up more connections. I'm assuming this CDN serves more than just Netflix, mind you.
Secondly, the question of responsibility cannot be answered the same way today that it was answered in the Internet of universities. Netflix and Vodafone are not peers. The bandwidth ratio between them is incredibly lopsided. This will never change, there is no foreseeable scenario under which Vodafone has a reason to send anywhere near the same amount of data to Netflix as it gets back. This asymmetrical relationship inherently implies a different kind of business arrangement than traditional peering.
What Vodafone (any ISP) provides to Netflix (any content provider) is access to consumers. This is a service, and services are not free. The natural monopoly ISPs enjoy implies some degree of regulatory restraint must be applied on them, but it does not mean they bear all the costs of all the infrastructure either.
However, my bigger point is that this cannot constantly be reduced to these two-party analyses. Netflix is waning, others are rising, this problem needs to be solved in a scalable way.
Your first example I was referring to - which you've now edited out of the article[0] to be more generic - stated:
> When Deutsche Telekom customers want to watch YouTube, that traffic flows directly from Google's network to Deutsche Telekom's network at a Frankfurt exchange point—maybe four or five router hops, minimal latency, no intermediaries. It's elegant. It's efficient. And it's exactly what Vodafone is abandoning.
Later:
> Deutsche Telekom pioneered this model in Germany, and the results have been catastrophic for customers. Not "slightly annoying" or "a bit slower"—genuinely, documentably terrible.
0 - original here: https://web.archive.org/web/20251107180616/https://coffee.li...
coffee.link is getting a git based version feature to make changes more transparent.
Also there is a deno (+ electron for GUI version) based testing tool coming to better understand network routes.
Additionally I plan to do a well researched series called "How does the internet work".
See Chinese providers who will happily buy transit from everyone but make sure it's choked
The telecom giant claims its exit from public internet exchanges will give customers "lower latencies." Is putting in the middleman (inter.link) achieving this? After some consideration, that might actually work.
Editor's Note: This article is based on comprehensive research of publicly available sources including official press releases, regulatory filings, consumer complaints, technical forum discussions, academic studies, and industry publications. I 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.
Before diving into the article: My parents' home has two internet connections - a Telefonica DSL line (50 Mbit/s down, 10 Mbit/s up) and a Vodafone cable connection (1 Gbit/s down, 40 Mbit/s up). Despite the Vodafone line offering 20× faster download speeds, it has been so unreliable at times during peak evening hours that we've configured the Telefonica DSL as the primary WAN on the UniFi router for the past month.
UPDATE 08.11.2025: Since the original article I've gotten a lot of feedback where the article might fall short. I still favour IXPs over NaaS (Network as a Service) providers because of the IXP's "public" nature. However I've since then gotten to better understand why the move to inter.link might ne good after all. I tried to work that perspective in at the end with a section "The case for the inter.link deal"
UPDATE 09.11.2025
I edited the article a little bit to get some details fixed. Most notably:
1.) I was mentioning DT as a good and a bad example, which did not really make sense.
2.): We need a common understanding. This is why there will be a series called "How the Internet works..." that tries to explain concepts and terminology.
3.) inter.link is actually quite well connected. Yes, they are a NaaS, but maybe this is a good thing for Vodafone customers after all.
4.) Vodafone maintains a private peering with YouTube (Heise got an update from Vodafone regarding this)
In the end I think the only real truth lays in the data. If Vodafone delivers, good for them.UPDATE 09.11.2025 #2
I removed the section on Starlink as alternative, cause it seemed a little besides the point.UPDATE 10.10.2025
1.) The Heise article, also linked by Theo Voss, got updated again to state that private peerings with HyperScalers will stay
2.) Also added a bit comparing current PeeringDb records
There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you download the latest Ubuntu ISO in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It normally 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.
Vodafone Germany is about to exit that public IXP based system.
By the end of 2025, Vodafone intends to have completely withdrawn from every public internet exchange in Germany, including DE-CIX Frankfurt, the largest internet exchange on the planet. Instead, all traffic will apparently flow through a single company called Inter.link (except for Hyperscalers apparently -> see the Update on the Heise article).
Vodafone says this move will deliver "lower latencies, more resilience, and cost savings." From my own experience Vodafone does have bandwidth problems currently, causing me to switch the primary WAN at my parents place to Telefonica, despite booked downlink capacity being 20x less on the Telefonica line. So: The question is wether this pans out. Will things get noticeably better or worse?
When you pay for internet service, you're not buying access to some centralized "internet"—you're buying access to your ISP's network. That network then connects to thousands of other networks through a patchwork of agreements and connections. The magic happens at places like DE-CIX Frankfurt, where over 1,000 networks plug into the same switching fabric and exchange traffic directly.
This system is called "settlement-free peering," and it's one of the internet's foundational principles. No money changes hands. Networks exchange traffic roughly equally, everyone saves money on long-haul transit costs, and users get faster connections because data takes the shortest possible path.
When an ISP customer wants to download a large file from a cloud server somewhere on the WWW, chances are that traffic flows directly from the DC operators network to the ISP network at an internet exchange point—maybe four or five router hops, minimal latency, no intermediaries. It's elegant. It's efficient. And it's seemingly what Vodafone is abandoning by leaving public IXPs.
Instead of connecting directly to content providers at neutral exchange points, Vodafone is outsourcing all its interconnectivity to Inter.link, a Berlin-based company that operates Network as a Service platform. Inter.link operates more than 40 points of presence across 15 countries (info taken from their peering policy, while their network page claims a lot more, but I think that includes extensions) and claims connectivity to 300+ data centers in Europe.
The pitch is automation. Instead of managing thousands of individual peering relationships, Vodafone gets "one-click provisioning" and "single sign-on access." For Vodafone's network operations team, this is genuinely simpler. But here's the thing: operational efficiency for a telecom company and good service for customers are not the same thing.
Vodafone's official press release from November 2025 emphasized that the partnership with Inter.link would "reduce time, resources, and peering costs" while delivering "lower latencies" and "more resilience."
Inter.link's public peering policy looks remarkably normal on paper. Updated September 1, 2024, it states the company is "open for settlement free peerings" and offers tiered arrangements similar to traditional internet exchanges: route server peering at IXPs with no traffic minimums, direct IXP peering above 1 Gbps, and Private Network Interconnects (PNIs) for networks exceeding 10 Gbps. The policy describes cross-connect cost-sharing but mentions no recurring charges, no per-Mbps fees, and no settlement payments between peering partners.
This mirrors how 99.5% of global peering relationships operate — networks pay for infrastructure access while exchanging traffic settlement-free with each other. The policy's technical requirements are actually quite sophisticated: mandatory IPv6 support, strict RPKI route validation, comprehensive BGP filtering, and modern 400GE backbone infrastructure. Nothing in the document reveals anything controversial.
Until you notice one critical sentence: "Inter.link does not peer with customers."
This to me appears to be the key to understanding the model. Here's what I take from it:
What we know for certain:
What I personally conclude: When Vodafone exits DE-CIX and routes all traffic through Inter.link, content providers might face a choice. They can establish settlement-free peering with Inter.link at public exchanges—but this doesn't guarantee quality delivery to Vodafone's network, since Vodafone is no longer there. One possible interpretation is that ensuring reliable access to Vodafone's customers might require becoming an Inter.link customer, though the exact commercial arrangements remain unclear without official confirmation.
A simplified example to illustrate the transformation:
Before (at DE-CIX Frankfurt):
After (via Inter.link):
Again, I might be wrong here, but this is to the best of my understanding.
The wikipedia article on Peering states: "The interconnection relationships between Autonomous Systems are of exactly two types:
Given the statement from inter.link's public peering policy, you can see that this implies that content providers might have to pay for traffic if they connect to inter.link as customer.
Questions I have here are:
Deutsche Telekom, another big German ISP, has been at the center of customer complaints about seemingly systematic service degradation for years. This has culminated in the project "netzbremse.de" (eng. Network Break).
You can look at the testimonials at https://netzbremse.de/#testimonials
Some network experts have suggested that congestion at interconnection points may sometimes result from capacity upgrade decisions, though the motivations and mechanisms behind such decisions remain disputed.
To be clear here: The jury is still out. Noone is convicted.
Let's talk about that "lower latencies" promise, because it seems to defy basic networking principles.
Academic research measuring performance found that there seems to be a benefit of using ISPs latency-wise and hop-wise. The reason is simple: shorter paths should be faster than longer paths, given equal capacity.
Every additional network you traverse adds latency from routing decisions, queuing delays, and physical transmission time. Direct peering at an exchange point minimizes this. Routing through an intermediary by definition increases it.
I couldn't find any supporting measurements that would prove Vodafone's point of better latency.
Now, to be fair: Cloudflare CDN for websites also adds a hop technically, and that somehow works. So, the inter.link thing could have merit to it. In general Cloudflare is considered faster because of caching content near to you and optimised routes.
The internet networks are commonly categorized in 3 distinct tiers:
Tier 1: Networks that can reach the entire internet without paying for transit, maintaining settlement-free peering with all other Tier 1 networks.
Tier 2: Networks that combine settlement-free peering with some networks and purchased transit from others to reach the full internet.
Tier 3: Networks that purchase all their internet connectivity from upstream providers and typically don't peer.
Vodafone Germany was until now considered a Tier 2 network (while Deutsche Telekom is considered a Tier 1 network). Currently you can see a multi presence at German IXPs in PeeringDB. By moving behind inter.link's tech stack one could argue that Vodafone Germany now is to be considered a Tier 3 network... To me it looks like they are moving away from an open internet (where connectivity scales in a settlement free, open way), apparently choosing to have paid transit in some way or form. I come to this conclusion, since I don't think inter.link is providing connectivity for free. The question: If correct, who pays exactly, and who profits? Does this comply with net neutrality?
Whats interesting: According to PeeringDB (Vodafone entry | inter.link entry) Vodafone currently maintains ports with an advertised combined capacity of 1.2T (600G + 600G), while inter.link currently maintains 400G at DE-CIX Frankfurt. Combining all listed IXP capacity the Vodafone entry lists 2.71T, while inter.link lists 1.51T IXP capacity. Being present at an IXP does not mean one is simply accepting traffic from everyone, one would have to know the BGP routing for that. So the details here are unknown to me. Just from a pure numbers perspective, as of 11.10.2025 to me it looks like Vodafone currently has almost double the port speed for total IXP capacity, and triple the DE-CIX Frankfurt capacity available compared to inter.link.
Scaling port size should be rather quick though. I'd expect we see more IXP port capacity in December from inter.link. (Interesting side-fact DE-CIX has a cute little robot for port switching.)
" Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney argue that net neutrality ensures that the Internet remains a free and open technology, fostering democratic communication. Lessig and McChesney go on to argue that the monopolization of the Internet would stifle the diversity of independent news sources and the generation of innovative and novel web content." says the article on net neutrality on Wikipedia. Moving from a multi party peering network to just a transit setup, largely from a single vendor, if I understand things correctly, could be seen as "killing the open internet - one peering connection at a time".
One possible interpretation of this migration is that it could change the internet's economic model.
Vodafone's new architecture, as I understand it, could position Inter.link as the primary intermediary for accessing Vodafone's clients. I assume that having the best available access for Content Providers means having to join Inter.link as a customer. Golem however mentions, that private peering with hyperscalers will stay.
Professor Barbara van Schewick of Stanford Law School, whose work informed FCC net neutrality orders and EU guidelines, characterized similar practices by Deutsche Telekom as "a frontal attack on the open internet."
In August 2024 comments to European regulators, van Schewick explained that ISPs exploit their "termination monopoly" by charging "monopoly termination fees" to reach subscribers, and concluded that "paid interconnection fees violate the Open Internet Regulation's ban on discrimination and paid fast lanes."
In December 2024, Switzerland's telecommunications regulator delivered an 11-year ruling against Swisscom for similar practices. The Swiss ComCom decision found that ISPs have a "technical monopoly of access to their end customers" and that charging content providers for traffic delivery is "not permissible" because costs are already covered by customer subscriptions. The ruling explicitly rejected the 'double-dipping' model where both customers and content providers pay for internet access—a model that critics argue could emerge from arrangements like Vodafone's Inter.link partnership.
The conflict reached a boiling point in September 2024 when Meta refused to pay Deutsche Telekom €20 million in court-ordered peering fees. Rather than comply, Meta rerouted all its traffic through third-party transit providers, completely severing its direct peering relationship with Deutsche Telekom. The German court had ruled that Deutsche Telekom could charge for peering, but Meta called this "putting the open Internet at risk and undermining net neutrality principles."
The April 2025 complaint against Deutsche Telekom came from a coalition including Germany's federal consumer organization (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband), Epicenter.works, Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, and Stanford professor Barbara van Schewick. The complaint documents technical evidence of artificial bottlenecks and charges that Deutsche Telekom creates "paid fast lanes" prohibited under EU law.
BEREC (Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications) released a report in December 2024 after a two-year investigation, identifying practices where ISPs "exploit bottlenecks at the entrance to its network to demand payments from online services" and classifying such practices as "potential violations of Europe's net neutrality law." The report listed "several examples, most of which involved Deutsche Telekom" [as cited in the complaint filing and CISPE's statement].
The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) backed these findings in April 2025, noting that their members have faced "artificial network service quality degradation" in Germany since at least 2015, used as leverage for "additional unjustified payments."
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. Thomas King, CTO of DE-CIX Frankfurt, warned without naming companies directly: "We are currently observing a trend in which large market players are increasingly using their dominant position to monetize not only their Internet access business but also network interconnection."
The trend is particularly concentrated in Germany, where both major incumbent ISPs now seemingly operate restrictive paid peering models while competitors maintain more open policies. IT-Administrator, a leading German IT publication, warned that Vodafone's shift "could reduce transparency, while smaller providers and content providers may face higher entry barriers" and "could impair the diversity and openness of European Internet infrastructure." (One could make the counter claim here, that inter.link's platform actually makes access simpler for smaller players.)
If this model proves profitable for Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, expect other European telecoms to follow.
This post was posted on news.ycombinator.com and got a lot of comments there. As I mentioned in the disclaimer, there may be parts that I do not grasp entirely. I've had a few thoughts and learnings that may play in favour of the Vodafone/inter.link deal.
I get that routing and peering can be hard and cost intensive from a maintenance standpoint. Outsourcing that part for sure can be cheaper. And given that inter.link might really know what they are doing, one could say that improves quality.
Inter.link's business model bears interesting similarities to Cloudflare's approach. While Cloudflare mainly protects and accelerates individual websites and services, inter.link's focus is at the interconnect network infrastructure layer, sitting between ISPs and cloud providers rather than between service providers and end users. Still there are also similarities: Cloudflare even provides a specific routing service with their Argo product. This website uses Cloudflare, so I can understand the motives. If I understand correctly, Cloudflare could even be a potential customer of inter.link, if inter.link's backbone is especially efficient in getting data from Point A to B.
Given the name "FlexPeer" the ideal outcome would be, that it is going against bottlenecks and will actually improve the situation.
From inter.link's own material on their websites I take they are quite well connected to other networks. They also state to be a VPP for Google, same as Vodafone themselves apparently.
Google explains here how the VPP program came to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg-qV6Fktjw
From that perspective it makes sense to go the inter.link route. It seems to be a shift across the industry to go towards more private agreements.
To go more on the Pro side: inter.link seems to really do make complicated things simple: It could be that connecting to Vodafone becomes actually way simpler with straight up clear pricing even for smaller players in the industry.
In the end I think time will tell how things will pan out. In the meantime I'll try to get an interview with someone who can clear up some questions that arose on my side.
Primary Sources:
Deutsche Telekom Complaints & Evidence:
Customer Complaints:
Academic & Technical Research:
Regulatory & Legal:
Industry Analysis: