Keep getting D/C symbol

[Raist]

is basically what I was told

"The route you showed actually had no loss. That is called ICMP deprioritization and is non-impactful and completely normal. It simply means the router you were pinging was too busy doing real things to be bothered with your pings. Based on what I see at the moment there is nothing wrong on our end. If you have more I'm more than happy to look at it."

Oh wow...you do realize they just admitted there is a problem with over-utilization, right?

They admitted that the load has ramped up to the point that it has to enforce prioritization rules. In other words it is intentionally ignoring/delaying/discarding what they consider lower priority traffic in order to preserve bandwidth for what they deem is higher priority traffic. Basically it is overloaded and they are throttling the traffic. If traffic was in the normal range (below 80%), there would be no need to enforce such rules.

Ties in quite well with some of the Level3 blog posts we've often linked to in these threads over the last year or so...especially the two I quoted from recently in one of the Verizon threads:

http://blog.level3.com/open-internet...tal-mea-culpa/

So let’s look at what that means in one of those locations. The one Verizon picked in its diagram: Los Angeles. All of the Verizon FiOS customers in Southern California likely get some of their content through this interconnection location. It is in a single building. And boils down to a router Level 3 owns, a router Verizon owns and four 10Gbps Ethernet ports on each router. A small cable runs between each of those ports to connect them together. This diagram is far simpler than the Verizon diagram and shows exactly where the congestion exists.

Verizon has confirmed that everything between that router in their network and their subscribers is uncongested – in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used. Above, I confirmed exactly the same thing for the Level 3 network. So in fact, we could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something we’ve been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion. Why is that? Maybe they can’t afford a new port card because they’ve run out – even though these cards are very cheap, just a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it.

http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/not-neutrality/

But it is now late September. So what has changed? Well, let us look at three large Local Exchange Carriers (LECs) in the United States. These LECs are telephone companies that built broadband networks on the back of monopoly-funded telephone infrastructure. Over the past six months, the utilization of each interconnection location between their networks and Level 3’s has changed as shown in the following diagram.

Each number shows utilization at one of the interconnection locations in various cities throughout the United States between Level 3 and the LECs. Utilization above 85% indicates the LEC is causing congestion in that city by refusing to add interconnection capacity

This shows a dramatic improvement for LEC1 and LEC3, but a continued degradation for LEC2. You might say that it’s good news overall. But if you value an open Internet underpinned by a dynamic competitive environment, you may have a different opinion.

And that’s because the reason the interconnect utilization between Level 3 and LEC1 and LEC3 improved is that these LECs forced Netflix to pay them to interconnect directly with them. And as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has pointed out several times, Netflix didn’t do that because they were taking advantage of a highly competitive Internet marketplace. They did it because they had no choice: all third-party content that LEC broadband users want to see eventually has to go through LEC interconnection points. When the LEC tries to turn these interconnection points into Internet tollbooths there is no alternate path for the content to take to reach the consumers.