France Telecom is the latest service provider to become engaged in a traffic peering scuffle with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and its Internet backbone provider Cogent Communications (Nasdaq: CCOI).
A techdirt article citing a report from broadband reporter Dave Burstein's site, said that consumers are seeing poor performance of both YouTube and other online video services such as TF1.
The telco said that it won't accept more traffic from Cogent and have asked them to pay for all of the streams their customers request. Autorite de la concurrence, France's competition regulator, approved France Telecom's charging plan.
Peering battles aren't just relegated to France, however. A similar issue emerged between Level 3 (NYSE: LVLT) and cable operator Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) that emerged in 2010. In that dispute, Comcast argued that Level 3 pay for delivering extra traffic for its online video customer Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX).
Level 3 claimed that Comcast erected a "toll booth" to block content from Level 3 online video customers like Netflix.
It's likely that this argument between Cogent and France Telecom is just one of many battles that will emerge between wholesale operators and incumbent cable operators and telcos as more consumers subscribe to and consume online video applications.
For more:
- techdirt has this article
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