Hacker News Reader

Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

> Plenty of startups that make it big, Comcast doesn't get to add their tax on that success

That's one way of looking at it. Note that I do not think Comcast would successfully turn off youtube for any customers without creating a major uproar.

On the other hand, suppose I invent a game that mirrors the contents of every user's hard drive to every other user constantly, utilizing 99% of available upstream and downstream bandwidth. Suppose this game goes viral and becomes the next Youtube.

How should ISPs deal with it? Should they be required by law to allow it?

I think it's reasonable for ISPs to create a definition of residential bandwidth that prevents against unexpected bandwidth utilization trends. I want unfettered bandwidth, but I realize that there is additional cost associated with provisioning it.

View on HN

>Should they be required by law to allow it?

They allow or disallow it? The question itself doesn't make sense. If the users want to use capacity they bought and Comcast sold, is the user's right. Comcast didn't foresee the demand is error of their actuaries. A insurance company pays up even if their actuaries make an error. Comcast doesn't get to externalize their costs, they could try, but we as customers have no obligation to honor it. I would claim that video demand has actually made the equation very simple for them with higher build out but lower risk of it not being utilized. The demand is very predictable and not "unexpected". And, monthly quotas (1TB per month) on top of bandwidth limits (150 Mbps) the risk is quite reduced. If someone with 250 Mbps ran at 99% capacity, 1TB quota would be over in less than 11 hours.

It's not as if Comcast sends you a check every time there is a network congestion and you don't get top speed that you are paying for. There is no consequence of congestion for Comcast but they are using it as a reason to get ransom from content owners. They are setting up the conversation such that they have less and less reason to remove congestion, more the congestion, more the end user suffer, more the case for google and netflix to open up their wallet.

$70 a month is same as cable bill and for cable Comcast has to pay channel operators. On internet, Comcast doesn't even have to pay to youtube or netflix. I mean internet service is pure profit compared to cable which runs on same infrastructure. They charge to take traffic at exchanges, one 100 byte URL in browser results in 2GB of data transferred from Netflix. It is a request that Comcast customer is making, trying to use the bandwidth and quota that the customer purchased, but Comcast makes money at exchange because they take on that 2GB of traffic. So they are already compensated for taking this traffic on both ends, by customer and at the exchange. Now on top of that they want to pry open the communication channels and charge more to the two parties talking. That's triple Comcast tax.

Comcast runs their cable programming on their tcp/ip network as well, so they are provisioned enough for now. If net neutrality goes away what promises youtube/netflix has that Comcast won't prioritize their xfinity platform over netflix?

The customers are using the capacity that they wanted and bought, Comcast sold that capacity, they must deliver. They are having no problem delivering so far. Networking gear (merchant silicone switches and OpenCompute switches) are dirt cheap, gone are the days of buying expensive gear from Cisco and BigIP. Cheaper networking hardware is making it easy to operate and upgrade for Comcast. Same goes for cable boxes, DVRs. Seen the disk prices lately? A raspberry pi can be effective cable box. Their unit costs have gone down significantly. They are benefiting from Cloud platforms like everyone else. Netflix uses AWS, Amazon uses AWS, Comcast uses AWS.

Look at hosting bandwidth costs, look at CDN bandwidth costs, content providers are paying for their side of it fairly. Comcast has a large share of CDN and can get even bigger there.

I think content providers should pick a month and ban entire Comcast network for a month together. Users will switch to shitty stuff that phone companies are selling but at least Comcast will learn a lesson. What do you think would people chose to watch xfinity or would they switch to telco ISP?

I think you are misunderstanding what a residential type of circuit is (compared to a business class circuit). A residential circuit is shared bandwidth and is sold with the necessary caveats to allow the ISP to apply its arbitrage strategy.

ISPs compete on the basis of their ability to provide residential bandwidth at competitive prices:

Suppose one ISP offers 1 Mbps up and down for $99 per month and another ISP offers 10Mbps down and 0.25 Mbps up. Both of these plans may cost the same to provide. Similarly, a 0.5 Mbps dedicated bandwidth circuit may cost 2x or 3x the cost of the residential circuit to provide.

Individual ISPs determine what markup to apply and how to price the bandwidth (with or without contracts, etc.). You are arguing that all circuits should be dedicated bandwidth circuits. There is nothing wrong with that argument, but it reduces the value of every piece of copper or fiber in the system because it prevents it from being maximally utilized.

Also, keep in mind that if a law were passed requiring all circuits to be dedicated bandwidth circuits, ISPs would have no incentive to preemptively upgrade hardware. Notice that customers do not demand symmetric dedicated bandwidth circuits. For most residential customers, only a minimum amount of upstream bandwidth is needed (for ACKs and the occasional upload) because most of the data is flowing to the customer and being watched on a screen.

T-Mobile's "Binge-on" service is a brilliant way of applying QoS to consumer demand to extract more value from the network, yet it was criticized as non-neutral. It's amazing the level of misunderstanding that is attached to net neutrality!

Clear Straw-man.

When did I say I am asking for dedicated circuit?

I actually granted that congestion could and would happen. I pointed out what happens if someone decides to saturate the line... would last only few hours each month before quota being hit.

What you are granting Comcast doesn't make sense technically, financially, legally or ethically. Don't open my packets other than headers for destination. Don't look inside the data of my packets. Don't offer intermediate certificates posing as proxy for end site. All those things are fine within a corporation's privately owned network. Comcast is similar to post office, they are not allowed to see inside my mail to see if it goes to bank or to insurance company, just the address on the envelope can be used. It is none of Comcast's business whom I talk to and what I talk about and how much I talk. As long as I am under quota and under bandwidth limit, they must carry the traffic.

In the catastrophic event they can stop traffic to certain IP address segments to keep voice lines and emergency sites accessible. They can work that out with regulators like for 911 service. But they can't use that as a way to extract payments from content providers. Complete stopping is preferred over degraded service. Comcast would have to come up with justification why they stopped the traffic, degraded is just a play to get ransom payment.

I'd say that if you don't want your packets inspected, use encryption and only trust specific certificate authorities.

A regular HTTP GET is meant to be cacheable and meant not to be considered private. If you want private, use SSL and do not encode information in URLs that can be abused by intermediaries.

I realize you consider the attempt to charge upstream providers a fee to ensure high quality throughput extortion, but the fact is, some services utilize 99% of bandwidth.

Take the typical residential ISP, 99% of the upstream bandwidth it purchases likely moves traffic from youtube, youporn, etc. In the remaining 1% are gmail, HN, VOIP, etc.

The natural move would be for the ISP to adjust QoS to favor minimal streaming quality that will prevent customers from defecting to another ISP.

But content providers compete on the basis of content variety, quality, etc., and so their incentive is to maximize quality. If you are 1% more likely to click on an ad after watching porn at 4K, then it's potentially worth it to youporn to serve only 4K quality video since bandwidth is cheaper at scale and highly predictable.

But an ISP is operating at smaller scale. For last mile circuits, bandwidth cost is bound by hardware investments, and so a disproportionate amount of the cost of Youporn's added 1% chance you'll click is borne by the ISP.

So how can the ISP align its own incentives with youporn? Simple, by threatening a QoS that will reduce network load in exchange for a fee that helps share the cost of the additional bits.

So it's not extortion any more than Uber surge pricing is extortion. It helps increase the efficiency of the market process going on by aligning incentives where previously they were less aligned. Strong market incentive exists for ISPs not to overplay their hand, and to date as far as I know this hasn't been a problem.

I agree that last mile monopolies are bad, but the solution isn't to entrench them with top-down regs that hide the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com