Netflix

I have been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for the last few days. This is my first travel to Mongolia and this far up in the North (except for previous travel to Russia in 2016 and some parts of Nordic areas in Europe). Geographically Mongolia is located between Russia (on the North side) and China (on the South side).

I am here for mnNOG 5 event. mnNOG is the Mongolian Network Operators Group. On Monday mnNOG conducted it’s 5th annual conference and it followed a five-day workshop. I am doing a workshop here on Network automation along with engineers from local networks. Mongolia is a landlocked country with no access to sea and hence no sub-sea cable. For the internet Mongolia relies on in-land fibre optic cables to connect to Russia and China. Though cables connect physically via Russia and China, I do not see Mongolian networks doing L3 termination in Russia or Mainland China. Instead, there is connectivity to Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt etc. for the L3 connectivity. Interestingly due to it’s geographic location, a bit of China-Russia internet traffic exchange happens via Mongolia.

Yesterday there was an article in the Indian paper Financial Express with the title “OTTs may have to pay access charge to telcos”.

Quoting a few points from the article:

• Social media intermediaries like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter, and over-the-top (OTT) players like Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+Hotstar may have to pay a carriage charge to telecom service providers
• Data, particularly video, comprises 70% of the overall traffic flow on telecom networks, and this would grow further with the rollout of 5G services
• Upon reference from the DoT, Trai is currently studying various possible models under which OTTs can be brought within the purview of some form of regulation
• According to sources, an interconnect regime is a must between OTTs and telcos because as 5G services grow, there would be immense data/ video load on networks, which may lead to them getting clogged or even crashing at times.

This concept of “OTTs must pay” is not new. This has been argued a few times in past. Exactly ten years ago in 2012 I wrote a blog post about Bharti Airtel expecting Google/YouTube to pay. At that time they could not convince OTTs to pay. Why is this renewed interest now? Well, that has to do with the first SK Telecom (South Kore telecom) Vs Netflix court case in South Korea where SK Telecom claimed that a large part of bandwidth utilization was because of Netflix and hence they should pay a “fair share” of their traffic which they lost. Soon around this multiple of large telecom monopolies in Europe started this discussion in their respective geography. Four of the top EU players - Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone and Telefonica are of opinion that OTTs should share the burden (news here). And hence Indian telcos possibly looking to renew this debate.

And it’s less than a week before the INNOG 2 i.e Indian Network Operators Group Conference 2. We (Indians) are little late to start a NOG but it’s finally working out and this is the 2nd event. First one happened last year.

Event website: www.innog.net

Why INNOG is important and why we should care?

Well, having a functional NOG is as important for local community as a working Internet Exchange Point. In absence of either people just start peering outside for an expensive price. There a lot of things which Indian Network Operators need to work on and without knowledge sharing that’s just not going to happen.

An impressive and detailed presentation by Mr. Dave Temkin on how Netflix deploys caching nodes and challenges around them. It’s from Feb last year.