Verizon Throttles Netflix Subscribers in Test It Doesn't Inform Customers About
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If your local grocery monopoly started rationing out milk to 250ml sold per day there would be protests, investigations, and 10 minute time blocks for it on the nightly news because the people would demand it. The internet just hasn't had this moment yet and it sucks because the momentum for this moment is building but it hasn't reached critical mass. I don't think this moment will happen for another decade at least.
Also, data caps are just price discrimination, which is pervasive even in highly competitive markets (and not necessarily a bad thing): http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/222.pdf. You walk into Home Depot and they charge you twice as much for the "Best" paint rollers versus the "Good" paint rollers. It's not because there isn't competition in the paint roller market, or because it costs twice as much to make one paint roller versus the other.
This is pretty similar to how you can't just freely add your own fiber to a utility pole, or freely build your own utility poles.
Oligopolies also appear to be the future of the American economy, with new business formation on the decline and wealth + market share concentrating under the few largest players in many industries.
So perhaps the discussion we should be having is, should we do something about oligopolies, and what? We already have antitrust laws, are they adequate? Are they being enforced?
It is a utility.
Now you can't have it both ways. Either you are a utility or you are not. Having competition doesn't mean you're no longer a utility.
Insofar as it might work for Home Depot, it may be due to local monopoly (competitor is not co-located) and asymmetric information (customers assume a bigger quality difference than is true). However in my experience, the price of premium tools/supplies often does reflect higher production cost these days.
Truly different goods don't have the same implications for consumer and producer surplus. That's not to say that price discrimination can't be disguised.
Capping certain websites is not price discrimination, it's website discrimination; Verizon promises a certain amount of GB per month on our phones, and capping certain websites for me when I'm still under my monthly data limit has nothing to do with my data limit and everything to do with discriminating against those websites to my and their detriment.
If you're fine with corporations turning the playing field into an uphill slant against you based on their preferences regardless of yours, then please argue for them capping limiting certain completely-legal websites they don't want to treat fairly.
There's definitely no way they could write a simple app to provide this info, and it would be crazy for them to white-list it so it didn't count against bandwidth usage :)
Social media and search seem to exhibit signs of monopoly as well.
Pull that paint roller out of your pocket and paint the wall next to you, then go to the restroom and pull it out again to paint over the graffiti on the stall wall. Then walk your dog and use it to paint the neighbors houses...
Never gunna happen. When do you need a paint roller? About once every 5 years on average, vs WIRELESS connectivity once every 5 minutes on average.
Not quite.. if they rationed milk to 250mL, but then let you buy an extra 25mL for what the first 250mL costs. They're not only creating scarcity, but then creating a market to profit from this artificial situation.
> They're not only creating scarcity, but then creating a market to profit from this artificial situation.
Seats on a plane are a limited resource.
Nowhere are IPSs offering "3mbps from 5-10 and 30mbps the rest of the day" plans. Because the cost to improve total network bandwidth is almost nothing, relative to the last mile costs. Every ISP could easily meet the full rated line bandwidth of every residential connection they have within their current margins without issue. They don't, because they have no competitive pressure to actually do anything than make sure the current service works. They have no competitors besides maybe cellular providers, who are already paying them in business contracts to attach towers to the backbone.
I've seen "off peak" data plans all over the world.
e.g. https://www.skymesh.net.au/nbn-services/fibre-to-the-premise...
$54.95
30GB Anytime Data
60GB Off Peak
50/20 Mbps*
$1.83 per GBAt (peak) times they actively traffic shape and penalize the heaviest users. It sucks, but I don't see people willing to pay the $$$ to upgrade infrastructure faster.
Do you think that everyone gets the aggregate rate they pay for? Do you think any ISP has capacity to deliver everyone their aggregate rate simultaneously? Does the combined bandwidth consumption of all customers over a given billing cycle approach the maximum theoretical bandwidth of the ISP? No, no, and no.
ISPs are charging for bandwidth like it's a commodity you buy at the store but if you buy a bag of rice at the store, the store doesn't take your left over rice at the end of the month and expect you to buy more. ISPs do though...
Make no mistake, the technical side of this has only gotten cheaper. That's before you consider the "investment" necessary to resolve the vast majority of Netflix bandwidth issues is connecting a cable from one router to another in a CIX.
Of course when you do that it becomes blatantly obvious that ISPs have oversold and overbooked capacity dramatically as we get closer and closer to the last mile to the customer. Now they don't want to pay up to actually provide what they have sold.
On one hand they don't have to compete in many place so ISPs are close to being a monopoly so they can keep charging $80 for < 1Mpbs if they want.
At the same time Moore iterations don't dig trenches and lay fiber between cities. Also frequency spectrum doesn't grow with Moore's law either.And in many instances it is still mostly a shared resource. Cable companies usually have groups of houses share the upstream bandwidth.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1219210/000119312513...
Of course none of that ever makes it to the consumer, investment is stagnant or down and all this tech ends up achieving is accommodating higher Internet penetration (and customer counts).
Here is the DOCSIS evolution:
http://www.cablelabs.com/full-duplex-docsis/
All this cable infrastructure previously wasted on free to air crap has turned into a veritable gold mine with no further investment and tech again making up for all the growth so you don't have to spend any.
Sure, Moore isn't helping dig trenches but he sure has been tremendously helpful in turning that ole shitty copper wiring financed by Uncle Sam into a lot of green.
On what planet? I did a speedtest.net run the other day on LTE and got 150 Mbps down/20 Mbps up near a strip mall in exurban Maryland. That network did not come cheap.
Nice distraction, but no cigar.
We rely on the internet so much for our lives and jobs and economy and banking that it should be a utility and a right, hell, we use the internet more than our phones, and cell phones are more ubiquitous and relied upon than landlines by a longshot!
"Nobody's got to use the Internet." - Sensenbrenner
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/04/15/...
I can choose Sprint, T-mobile, Verizon or ATT.
What monopoly are you speaking of?
Considering the barrier to entry to becoming a cellular operator is owning spectrum, that is one of the most impossibly high barriers to usurp. Nobody has to sell you any, the owners can set whatever price they want, and there are no mechanisms to mitigate this state-created impossible to overcome monopoly on light.
Landline access, by comparison, is macro-harder and micro-easier. It is more likely you can get easement rights to run fiber on a given street than to get the right to use wavelengths of EM, but trying to get easement in an entire city can be similarly impossible.
Power is setup the same way in some states, where multiple companies share the wires. This is only because the government demands the wires be shared fairly. Its an interesting arrangement, essentially a regulated monopoly called a utility.
I see your point but as long as it's services like Netflix I hope people will not claim it as a right.
Netflix in particular is indeed not a right, and in fact Netflix charges a monthly subscription that you may or may not be able to afford. But if I pay for Netflix, I should have a right to access it, or any service I want, via my "chosen" internet service provider.
Anyway I'm making this post because I think I have a better version of the milk analogy, so here goes...
The main problem with the milk analogy is how the transactions are done. I pay the grocery store a fee for access to walk in and out of the market with a certain weight of groceries per second. Separately I pay the milk provider for all-you-can-drink access to milk.
(Alternatively, you can imagine the grocery store is one of those stores in a mall that you have to walk through to get to the rest of the mall, but I'm forced to walk in and out through their front door).
In this analogy, the grocery store should have no right to limit the amount of milk I can carry through their market, while claiming to offer access to any food by weight.
I'm tired of being used as a pawn in this bullshit game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married..._with_Children
> Its theme song is "Love and Marriage" by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Frank Sinatra from the 1955 television production Our Town.
...
> The Sony DVD box sets from season 3 onward do not feature the original "Love and Marriage" theme song in the opening sequence. This was done because Sony was unable to obtain the licensing rights to the song for later sets. Despite this, the end credits on the DVDs for season 3 still include a credit for "Love and Marriage."
Here I stand on "right to burn" author's side. They can do whatever they want with their music, like putting a trillion dollar price on it, or selling it to an evil publisher. It's authors's nonprescribable right. If you don't like it -- feel free to write your own music.
That game makers should have probably make a modification to the game to replace original music with something else.
It seems unwise of the game maker to purchase a music license that expires. Though, I suspect it was a calculated risk, and that they believed potential sales this late after release weren't worth paying more for. Alan Wake was released seven years ago.
Why so? It only happens in unhealthy monopolized markets. In healthy competitive markets, content providers should be independent from distributors. They create something (films for instance) and distribute them as widely as possible (i.e. through all distributors), to maximize reach and in turn profit. That would include global unrestricted distribution. But when market is monopolized and there are cartels, all that becomes totally messed up and restrictions pop up all over the place.
Honestly, if you're at the point where you're circumventing region locking to access Netflix, you should just pirate it. You're violating copyright either way.
Many people think it's an ethical requirement to pay artists for their work. So even if they're okay (arguably) violating the law, they might not be okay with just taking the art without paying at all.
I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime, and still pirate all the content.
I’m on Linux, and they only provide 144p video for me, so pirating is easier for getting access to content I paid for.
It also may make it more likely that Netflix will drop the content if it's not getting good enough numbers.
So even if there isn't a per-view payout, I'm sure the view numbers do contribute to the studio getting more money.
Netflix mass-negotiates content contracts with distributors for lump sums. The distributor then pays out one-time royalties from that lump sum.
If a show is getting press and social media talk then they probably value that higher since new subscribers is of very high value. Retention is a different problem and not as particular to one show.
Who knew Cisco was selling enterprise-grade circumvention devices to the world's corporations? Somebody better notify the MPAA!
More seriously, this type of thinking is pernicious. It demands "consumers" simply "consume" is easy-to-control ways, stay in their lanes and not be suspicious.
There would be no internet if people did that. Don't get me wrong; if people want to be sheep, they can be. I will happily encrypt, tunnel, send weird packets and otherwise play on the net the way it was intended, and anyone with a problem with that can chose not to do business with me if they prefer more tractable clientele who will shut up and eat what they're fed.
Let's not be disingenuous here: we're not talking about VPN the technology -- it's impossible to detect if someone's traffic has passed though a VPN. We're talking about public 'VPN Services' which are all but billed for circumventing region locking, ISP throttling, and piracy.
Any kind of content provider would blacklist those endpoints in a second.
I honestly don't care if "content providers" want to block VPNs, as I mentioned in my comment. I much more strongly object to this notion that there's something somehow wrong with users using things like this. The attitude of suspicion directed at anyone who values privacy, wants to learn how things work, or even does somewhat dodgy things sometimes is what I object to. That creates sheep, not citizens, and discourages engagement and learning.
It is up to businesses that depend on artificial scarcity (really, any business, but the legacy copyright industry is being discussed here) to make their businesses work; it isn't my responsibility to make my behavior fit their business model. And if they can't, well, they deserve to die.
You can use most (any?) dedicated server or VPS service as a VPN. I personally just create a SSH tunnel to my server in order to browse any site. You do not need to rent any shady "VPN Service".
> for circumventing region locking, ISP throttling
Circumventing either of these is a fine act.
> and piracy
If they wanted to "pirate" they would not have used Netflix.
And on the flip side, certain firewall providers have marketed similar features to restrictive regimes such as China for the Great Firewall. And not just 'nudge nudge wink wink', but produced marketing material saying "This will help you prevent Falun Gong material being available, and help identify end users trying to access this material."
Because to me, it makes sense.
I don't think that way. Everybody deserves a reasonable income, but what these "artists" make is totally insane. The only reason I watch their movies is because with the help of their fans, they have created an artificial monopoly around their persona and I am basically forced to watch them. In a free market with intelligent consumers, these people would not make this much.
You're also not "basically forced to watch them".
HBO operates with a margin of 33% (1.7Billion income on 4.9 Billion of revenue). That's healthy, but it isn't "totally insane". There isn't much room to spare before they'd have to sacrifice quality. That'd be quite sad, considering the last decade is generally regarded as a golden age of TV.
What other method do you suggest for me to stay up to date on pop culture, considering I do not want to support it?
Now I don't watch TV anymore, or ever so rarely. I've converted the time to reading. It changed my life in dramatically good ways —pun very much intended. There's a time for everything, and quite frankly after some time it's like you've watched it all, you could predict plots and even lines (sometimes it feels as though all authors just get inspired from their peers and much of the writing/directing feels recycled).
There's no "keeping up to date" with pop culture imho, at some point it becomes anthropological. You just overgrow pop culture beyond a certain amount of experience. You could actually produce it for that matter. As it relates to the medium, thus technology, I'm thinking it will evolve once again with VR/AR/etc.
Most productions that people watch have somewhere between hundreds and tens of thousands of people working on them. Almost none of them are rich, including most of the producers, directors, and stars of your favorite shows--who are usually locked into contracts they signed before their shows got big, and shows almost never get big. The number of people who will get rich from a given TV show or movie is between zero and almost zero.
99% of show business is folks trying to get by, same as anywhere else. Most people in show business could earn more doing almost anything else. Almost all of them make less than some kid in Silicon Valley building Tinder for Dogs. Programmers at Netflix make far, far more than almost every artist and even many of the financiers, and few here would complain about that.
Pay for your content.
Also, we should all benefit from economies of scale, not just the film producers.
I think I've seen that scene... Clockwork Orange, right? http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/clock...
Perhaps... perhaps you might choose a different phrasing than "forced to watch"?
In a free market with intelligent consumers, these people would not make quite so much, but it would still be a significant amount.
People that can uphold a willing suspension of disbelief are rare enough, but those who can invoke it are the ones truly deserving of that reasonable income. Those folks aren't always the actors. Sometimes it's the writers, directors, or even the make-up or foley artists. Those people that don't get face time in front of the public might not always get the recognition they deserve, and they're the ones we really want to be paid for their art. But there are a lot of people shaving money off the wad before it gets to them, so putting too much cash in their hands is a small price to pay so that those who deserve it can actually make a living.
It's like buying stolen art.
The difference is "This dollar came from a user in the US", versus "This dollar came from a user in Eastern Europe (or wherever Netflix isn't available)".
Netflix is still licensing the content, just not for your (real) jurisdiction.
To imply that it's better, then, to just outright pirate the content is... confusing.
You don't really need to, you just need to say "VPN IP? Okay, you get our own global content only."
They're already doing the VPN IP test.
Films I can't get there, I just pirate. I'm not interested in installing DRM platforms on my computer to be able to watch very heavily compressed videos if they haven't been yanked offline yet.
If you're looking for a weekend project and have a movie/TV collection I'd highly recommend it. The base software is free and it runs on linux (and Windows/OSX).
Edit: Or that might be wrong and the framerate can be changed separately.
That probably doesn't help with things that aren't on DVD/Blu-Ray, such as some of their original content. I don't think you can get Stranger Things in that format yet.
> I'm not interested in installing DRM platforms on my computer
I believe the majority of people don't watch Netflix on their computer, but instead on set-top devices connected to their TV's That may also include hybrid solutions like Chromecast, where something may be installed on a local computer (likely a phone) as well, but those generally already have DRM platforms installed...
I rarely rewatch seasons after more than 5 years so streaming is usually the best/cost effective option.
Ditto, but almost everything I watch is one-and-done. The series that I like enough to watch more than once are few and far between...so I tend to buy those, whenever they come up in a particularly good sale. Among things I liked enough to buy, the longer it's been since I watched it last, the more likely I am to watch it in the near future. But the longer I wait, the more likely that some contract expires, and it disappears from streaming services.
Recently I picked up a couple Blu-rays with digital copies for $3 at Fry's. Vudu had one of them on a huuuuuuuge sale this weekend, digital copy only, for $5. The iTunes price is $14.99. Again, I got that $15 iTunes price... for $3 as physical copy with a digital code. And if I wanted, I could sell the disc at a resale shop and get back a buck or two. Buying video on demand online right now makes no financial sense whatsoever.
That's only if you place little or no value on convenience. I don't spend much money on video, so the occasional $10 or $20 purchase is bearable.
I don't want a physical copy and I certainly don't want to go to Fry's. For me, iTunes / Google Play / Amazon Video all make more sense.
I've actually thought about cancelling cable and buying everything on demand because I think I would save some money. We're paying more than $1000 / year for TV. That would pay for a lot of TV at $2-$3 per episode. We've never made the jump though because of live sports and the stupid blackout rules.
I place a fair amount of value on convenience, but I weight it differently than you do. Not having to worry about my player's internet connection is a big plus. Not caring where I bought the video from is also nice. I like that it's a fire-and-forget operation to convert the video into a format that works on virtually every piece of video-oriented electronics that I own.
Bonuses: I get to choose which version of a particular video that I buy (there are often several available), often receive it in multiple formats, can loan it to a friend, and local media tends to have fewer compression artifacts than streamed media.
Of course, all this only applies to things that I care enough to buy separately. I've got Netflix and Amazon. I've got a few hundred games through a combination of half a dozen services, and it's a pain figuring out which service I bought a particular game through, and all that. I'd rather go to my wallet of game DVDs and pull it out (and I do, for services like Humble Bundle and GOG, where I can download the games and put the installers on external media).
So, like stopping paying AT&T to essentially lobby against better connectivity in my neighborhood, it's time for my financial support -- playing "by the rules" -- to these big IP rent-seekers, to stop.
P.S. I'm the guy who actually buys CD's after a show. Will cough up bucks for funding. I'm not opposed to paying for what I get, in reasonable -- even generous -- measure. However, I no longer feel that's what's going on, here.
This is a good point, but note that a bunch of the special "Netflix" content is actually licensed from another country. Also some of "their" content is stuff funded in concert with others, who will have retained certain restrictions (bogusly called "rights" in legalese)
So the total amount of material Netflix owns free and clear probably isn't big enough for them to bother with special-casing. If it were it would be in their interest to do so as a way of putting pressure on others.
So cancel your Netflix.
I just turn on my VPN (VyperVPN) which has great bandwidth to the YouTube servers and I get crystal clear 4K streaming. It's kind of pathetic. I don't think they are deliberately throttling, its just that Verizon is being cheap and there is plenty of local bandwidth between VyperVPN's servers and my home, but not enough bandwidth between YouTube's servers and FIOS network in NYC.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/space...
*I should clarify when I say "the video space" I mean original AAA content like Netflix is doing. I could be underestimating them but that's a LONG way from their market sweet spot.
I don't think that's right.
At its most basic, an interconnection agreement says “You carry some traffic for me, in return for which I’ll do something—either carry traffic for you, or pay you, or some combination of the two.”
With Netflix and Google, both were basically saying, "we're not going to pay you (Comcast/Verizon) for access to your network, because we're important enough that we shouldn't have to." They don't have their own ISP networks to exchange traffic at the same rate, all they have is their services, so they don't have anything to offer the ISP in return.
So it's disingenuous to say that service providers (Google, Netflix), are extorting anyone. They don't see themselves as ISPs, but they are setting up their own interconnects to provide faster access to customers, so they assume they are exempt from what were traditionally informal interconnect rules.
I don't think anyone was saying that.
> With Netflix and Google, both were basically saying, "we're not going to pay you (Comcast/Verizon) for access to your network, because we're important enough that we shouldn't have to." They don't have their own ISP networks to exchange traffic at the same rate, all they have is their services, so they don't have anything to offer the ISP in return.
Generally peering agreements work on total bandwidth and generally you try to make it as balanced as possible, so there's no cost to either side, as traffic may traverse your network from the peer but not terminate there (it continues through another peer), and that's just a load you bear, but the other side has the same risk.
For an end service peering, that's not really as much of a risk, to my knowledge, so what you have is purely a win-win, where Netflix delivers content directly to your network so it's quicker, and you aren't using up peer bandwidth and backbone connections to serve that same content. In any market where Comcast/Verizon didn't have near monopolies over large areas, Netflix could easily charge for this access given their size and ubiquity. That some large ISPs are actually throttling the content only highlights the perverse incentives at play.
But they still want to enforce those "agreements"... when it suits them.
The recent changes are more around who is involved in the peering disputes. It used to be smaller ISPs trying to get peering with larger ISPs, such as Cogent trying to get peering with [name your favorite, or PSINet vs Cable and Wireless; and most often the ISP refusing to peer didn't have residential customers themselves. Now it's more often the content providers themselves trying to peer with the residential isps directly. A major factor here is the huge consolidation of residential ISPs, but also the consolidation of content providers.
Consolidation of residential ISPs means each ISP is big enough to run their own backbone, and as a result they can credibly have strict peering requirements. Smaller, regional ISPs will tend to want to peer, because otherwise the traffic will come through on paid transit connections. Large ISPs may not care; because of their size, they may not be paying anyone for transit, and because of the common asymmetric nature of residential connections, there's not likely to be many networks where the large ISP is on the wrong side of the ratio.
If I were one of these content providers, I would spend a lot more time messing with the large ISPs. Figure out how to make the traffic cost them money, so they'll want to peer. Provide transit to data backup services to try to make the ratios less unbalanced. Run campaigns suggesting that residential ISPs should be paying their customers, given that the traffic is unbalanced. Etc.
> Consolidation of residential ISPs means each ISP is big enough to run their own backbone, and as a result they can credibly have strict peering requirements. Smaller, regional ISPs will tend to want to peer, because otherwise the traffic will come through on paid transit connections. Large ISPs may not care; because of their size, they may not be paying anyone for transit, and because of the common asymmetric nature of residential connections, there's not likely to be many networks where the large ISP is on the wrong side of the ratio.
> If I were one of these content providers, I would spend a lot more time messing with the large ISPs. Figure out how to make the traffic cost them money, so they'll want to peer. Provide transit to data backup services to try to make the ratios less unbalanced. Run campaigns suggesting that residential ISPs should be paying their customers, given that the traffic is unbalanced. Etc.
I can upload all my files to Google Drive and all my photos and videos to Google Photos if you think it helps the ratio...
Exactly. If the Internet worked on this model—where the recipient of the net imbalance was paid money for it—I'd get a check from Verizon each month instead of a bill!
the router ports on both sides, let's say you are using 4 ports across 4 fully loaded nexus 9508 (let's call those $500k per incl. optics, so $2M / 384 x 4 ports / 36 months = $600/port/month x 4 = $2400/4-ports/month)
Depending on how the connection between the two worked or was paid for, it could be $1000-$20000 for 2 pairs of fiber per month depending on distance. Let's take a middle of the road $10k average cost.
So for 10Gbps peak redundant capacity, you are at $12,400 per month. Netflix 4k stream is about 16 megabits, so you can fit 625 4k streams in $12,400 of cross-connect capacity. If you don't share costs, that's about $20 per user to support Netflix's business model that people seem to think it's Comcast's responsibility to pay. That's not even considering Comcast's last mile distribution cost or paying any salaries.
Streaming video services soak up a lot of network resources and putting all of the cost on ISPs is going to increase your ISP's cost and price. How many low-income families do you think would lose broadband if it went from $50/mo to $100/mo?
1) The peering happens in Internet exchanges, there's no way a peering connection in an Internet Exchange costs 1000$, your range is simply ridiculous. Usually, it is fixed cost 1K or less depending on the locations of the router
2) Yes, you have to pay for bandwidth between the Exchange and your users. But guess what? That's what your users are paying for.
3) Not everyone stream movie in 4K at the same time. So you could optimize your bandwidth usage out of the exchanges. It is called "multiplexing".
Yes, the rest of the chain could be expensive, but that's what your clients are paying for. Net neutrality is about transparency. I have no problem in understanding that my 40$ connection will perform differently than an 80$ one. But you should compete in giving me the best service (where best is best for me, not universally) at the lowest price point in a way I could easily compare prices.
The problem, with my statement, is that implies Broadband Internet is a commoditized service. And that is all the battle about Net Neutrality, ISP doesn't want to act like commodities, they don't want to be your P&G or your ConEd. They don't have the structure to compete and instead of changing for the new market structure, they are fighting back. What they are doing is rent seeking. Good for them, bad for the economy...
My numbers have been called ridiculous by a couple of people now but they are based in personal experience, albeit a few years old, and nobody has posted any other cost breakdowns that demonstrate an understanding of the industry and the costs involved, just "those numbers seem really high!"
The difference between bandwidth and power is that data is NOT a commodity like power is, power is fungible and can be drawn and combined from a number of sources to fulfill the demand, but the dilemma with ISP bandwidth is that in order to satisfy customers the ISP must ensure adequate bandwidth to each individual content provider, and this is a much harder problem.
As for the "distance" - they are sitting next to each other in a data-center. The distance is likely measured in tens of feet and the cost is likely a fixed cost of a couple hundred dollars. The optics on either end if they aren't close enough for twinax would add a couple more grand.
It's also ridiculous to use 36 months as your payoff date, they are running equipment a heck of a lot longer than that. The line cards and supervisor modules might get swapped out, but I'm willing to bet Verizon keeps their chassis level switches for 7-10 years on average.
So now you're at about 4$ per user to support Netflix traffic.
It's also not Netflix's responsibility to support Comcast's business model if they can't afford to provide bandwidth that customers desire and are allowed.
It's Comcast's responsibility to support their advertised usage sufficiently. If they say that they support 100mbps then I should be able to get 100mbps from wherever I like. They're going to have to pay for that uplink somewhere, whether it's Netflix or Google or Zayo or Level3 or whoever.
Precisely. Not "from wherever we've got a 'preferred' agreement or kickback only".
So what is my $80/mo Comcast Internet Service supposed to be buying me?
Seriously, though, could someone do a traceroute and tells me who pays for each hop?
That, alone, tells me that this is not a congestion or a cost problem, it is a bull-headedness for the purpose of rent seeking problem.
And as to the "last mile" costs, those are what Comcast subscribers are paying Comcast for. They act like this traffic is unsolicited noise, when in reality it's why they're being paid anything by anyone. I say don't charge people for x megabits down if you don't intend on them using it.
If you think this is unfair, then the answer is to get rid of bullshit "unlimited [but not really]" connections and charge people based on what they use. Stop making low-impact users subsidize people who stream HD movies 24/7.
Funny, the upwards of $50 to $200 I pay Comcast per month should go somewhat to that.
Besides, how many users are streaming 4K content, on what little 4K content Netflix has (I'm going to wager that we're looking at about 5% or less).
At 5mbps for 1080p, peak, now we're at 2,000 users, and $6/month.
Is it really that onerous for most users of Comcast to expect that $6 of their say $60/mo cable bill goes to Netflix?
I'm also not sure why you're populating 4 ports and then only talking about 1 10Gbps connection, when in reality (though I'm no expert), that's probably 4 10Gbps connections. Accounting for the cost of 4 populated running ports and then only talking about the capacity of 1 of those ports when calculating cost/megabit seems misleading.
Your numbers are like historical fiction based on reality but not an accurate portrayal. Do you work for verizon or comcast?
You don't pay "for the bandwidth", you pay for a link between two ISPs (Google and Verizon). The bill between then should be split, otherwise the traffic will have to pass through somewhere else, and that will cause congestion problems.
The sole and only thing they are being paid for on the ISP side of Verizon's operation is to quickly and reliably deliver the content people want to consume over the pipe people have paid to have installed.
YouTube by hosting content people want to consume is driving demand for Verizon's services.
Pretending that this is a cost is a bazaar inversion of reality.
Do they? Who do they pay? I thought that maybe one of the reasons Google got into the ISP business was to be a peer with the other big networks and not pay any peerage fees.
Does Verizon pay for network services?
s/bazaar/bizarre/https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/15169
Youtube is available via public peering at the Equinix Internet Exchange New York:
https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/12
Purchasing a port on public peering fabric isn't the same as buying bandwidth from a transit provider. It's a great way to get traffic to your users much cheaper than you could via transit which is why people do it. The issue is eyeball networks - Comcast, FIOS, Time Warner etc. may choose not to do so because they went to seek rent in the form of "paid peering" from these same content providers that their users paid them to get access to in the first place.
Once they know you're connected to Youtube, they just limit the bandwidth on that connection. The Youtube video player will detect this and automatically downgrade to a lower quality until it finds one that fits within the bandwidth profile. Netflix does the same thing, which is why after buffering sometimes the video looks like crap and then gets better after 15 seconds or so. It buffered a lower quality until it figured out it could send higher quality again.
EDIT: I should add, this is why VPNs are sometimes used as a "solution" to such bandwidth shaping. You are hiding the true recipient by purposefully man-in-the-middling the connection with a peer you (hopefully) trust. VPNs are also popular for connecting with business networks, so it's generally not "safe" for the ISP to shape bandwidth to any VPN as aggressively.
Ahh, this is the key point I missed, thanks. So it's a problem with the video player itself trying to "decide" for you the quality you want. Couldn't this be worked around with things like youtube-dl?
Youtube-dl would probably work, because it will would download the high quality video as a file, and your ISP would make the download take longer than the video.
It's an extremely annoying thing actually, especially when it changes after I manually set it to 1080p. This is why I use mpv to watch stuff from youtube nowadays.
I'd imagine this is due to politics and AT&T betting net neutrality will go away. Once YouTube forks over money a peering point will be upgraded.
[1]https://forums.att.com/t5/AT-T-Fiber-Equipment/Gigapower-You...
Now Verizon gets the blame if something's slow.
It was the first time in my life that I'd been wishing for Comcast. 320p videos could barely load, and the lag in certain MMORPGs was unplayable (we're talking 500-1000ms delays)
It got better after a while, but google had some stats by ISP for Youtube, and FiOS in my area was like 1/10th of the speed of Comcast on average.
Google needs to take gloves off.
Or maybe they are throttling it...
Reality is a bit more complicated than this simple example but such an issue is certainly not unheard of (and inspired mitigations such as RFC7871, for example).
But really...it's still pretty good so I don't care enough? This is probably why they do it.
So what exactly does "do something about it" mean in this circumstance? Is your download rate actually saturating your throttled connection?
If I'm paying Netflix and paying Verizon for 40+ Mbps wouldn't this impact us? Shouldn't I be able to watch four shows at once if I pay my bill on time?
> If I'm paying Netflix and paying Verizon Wireless for 40+ Mbps wouldn't this impact us? Shouldn't I be able to watch four shows at once if I pay my bill on time?
> We are implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in our network to transmit data files in a more efficient manner to allow available network capacity to benefit the greatest number of users. These techniques include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing the video more appropriately for the device. The optimization process is agnostic to the content itself and to the website that provides it. While we invest much effort to avoid changing text, image, and video files in the compression process and while any change to the file is likely to be indiscernible, the optimization process may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device. For a further, more detailed explanation of these techniques, please visit www.verizonwireless.com/vzwoptimization.
Resizing the data, changing the video compression, and potentially changing the text(!!) is not the data that I, the customer, asked them to deliver nor is it what I'm paying them for. Let me and my device worry about requesting the bits... And Verizon wireless can worry about sending me those bits at 40Mbps without worrying about how our why I want them and certainly (!) without modifying what the server sends to my end application. That's exactly what net neutrality is fighting for!
I perfectly understand the argument they're making (the link you provided is superfluous). It's just total BS; a red herring.
> Why?
I am not festizio, but the news makes me sad because I find T-Mobile's customer service and stick-it-to-the-big-carriers attitude both delightful, and my memories of dealing with Sprint (only ever landline, so I have no idea of the mobile quality) are terrible. On the other hand, your point:
> Seems like that would make them a more viable 3rd alternative to the big two, which is something I'd really appreciate.
seems like a good argument for why it could at least be a mixed blessing.
At&t sucks, though. It's not good that the best two providers (in terms of how they treat their customers) are merging
Coverage in my home area of North Carolina (the Triad != Triangle) is quite good, Verizon is kind of expensive. It's a lot better than coverage I had living in the SF Bay Area -- whenever I go there I still find so many dead zones.
Outside the EU?
Still, I used a lot of data, was well worth it. I'm not sure what Amsterdam Lebara / Lyca prices will be or what kinds of data packages they'll have, didn't seem as promising when I look briefly online. So perhaps Copanhagen was a one-off great deal, I'll see tomorrow a.m. when the SIM card stores open again.
To try to get an idea of user behavior we would run "experiments" on previously collected data, i.e. rely on natural experiments - not change things and then see what happened.
In every case the experiments I was part of were to see if we could improve user throughput, not degrade it.
Sure you do. If you don't throttle Netflix to 10M, it will happily chomp away 25M of bandwidth. Add a bunch of such people nearby and suddenly the network became a lot less responsive for the people in your cell. My facebook will take a few more seconds to open, some guy on the edge of reception might not even get a usable connection.
> And you can get similar speed guarantees by balancing the available bandwidth across active users.
If the stream bandwidth keeps varying from 5 to 25M isn't that a bad thing? It's better to have a stable 10M stream rather than a variable unpredictable one.
Finally it all comes down to cost. Everything has a cost. Not throttling Netflix has a cost. It will maybe cause Verizon to deploy a few less cell towers in a year, maybe it makes them a bit slower to respond to areas needing more bandwidth or radios. Verizon has decided they want to cater to the users who value reliability over the capability to stream 4k on their cellphone. How can you fault them on that? When the tech catches up, you will be able to stream at 25M. Just like 10M on-demand video was unthinkable on a cellphone 5 years ago.
Let's say there's 40M of bandwidth in this situation, and other users are taking up 15M in total. The way to ensure responsiveness is by dropping the throughput down to something like 37M so that buffers don't fill up as packets arrive randomly. This would let you continue to use 22M for netflix with nobody else harmed. And importantly, if three people tried to use netflix at once, just throttling to 10M each would still result in an overloaded network. But giving them each a third of 22M wouldn't.
> If the stream bandwidth keeps varying from 5 to 25M isn't that a bad thing? It's better to have a stable 10M stream rather than a variable unpredictable one.
If there's enough use to intermittently drop your bandwidth to 5, then it'll happen with or without throttling to 10. Throttling can lead to more stable bandwidth than a total packet free-for-all, but it's not more stable than just splitting the bandwidth evenly among all the users.
> while Wall Street cries about this
> rise in competition hurting earnings
> at least once a week
Caps can't help with that in highly populated areas. The radio spectrum is simply finite. It's physics.
Most people aren't objecting to rationing, per say. (Though, misleading advertising of available bandwidth does lead to disappointed customers.)
What most are objecting to is unequal provisioning of bandwidth. This incentivizes users to use a VPN (doubling aggregate bandwidth consumption) or use steganography to make the traffic look like voice calls (at significant reduction in transfer efficiency).
Everyone would benefit if service providers rolled out provisioning that incentivized application programmers to truthfully mark traffic using QoS / ToS ... unlimited bandwidth at lowest priority, limited bandwidth if low latency is required.
Instead, they're doing the exact opposite... encouraging P2P developers to encrypt the traffic and then use the ciphertext bitstream to drive an Nth order Markov model that makes it look like compressed voice or HTTP traffic... sort of LZMA in reverse. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game where even the cat loses in the end.
So what you're saying is, I can run a few iptables rules on my phone and prioritize all my traffic ahead of everyone else's? Sweet.
QoS in a LAN is fine, QoS using untrusted devices just plain doesn't work.
The only reason we even have real competition at this point is because the FCC blocked AT&T's acquisition of tmo. That NEVER would've been blocked in our current climate.
Japan seems to be doing just fine with high density, high bandwidth mobile usage.
In layman terms, the air around you is limited and there can't be more of it.
Regardless, the first of his two points still applies:
> More cell towers
In layman terms, better allocating the air around you will not create more air.
Let's just take a look at radio spectrum in US [1].
Right now you are trying to say, that everything there is completely saturated 100% of the time? That is simply false.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/United_S...
Yes, the usable frequencies are saturated.
Is it really a value add for the economy for Verizon to turn a higher profit which they funnel to their executives? Or do you think that money would be better spent buying infrastructure which requires thousands of jobs to build?
Why?
Oh, but our elected representatives totally have our best interest at heart /s
I travel full-time and quite a few places lately the Verizon tower is obviously at capacity. (Strong signal.. slow speeds)
Ideally, we might offer users a baseline of 10Mbps all the time, and some quota of 100GB at 100Mbps regardless of source, and then people can choose what they want to download fast, but I think this would be a UX disaster.
But I don't see the topical connection with throttling people to use a certain amount of data each 10s.