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Comment by ismarc | Hacker News Reader

I think it's easiest to think about in terms of AT&T UVerse (an easy example). You have TV, Internet and VoIP service delivered over the same network connection. TV and VoIP (the VoIP isn't carried over the Internet, instead it's direct to the internal switching network and just happens to use IP for the packets) are independent of Internet access. TV and the VoIP service can be prioritized as needed, but Internet is just Internet and is only prioritized in relation to the other services (i.e., all Internet traffic is prioritized identically for a connection).

I actually like this distinction. It will encourage more broadband rollout as companies add more services that use the same infrastructure but aren't used for just "dumb pipes".

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Couldn't agree more.

I have TV and Internet services on Telus' network here in Canada (I think they use the same platform that AT&T uses, which is a Microsoft IPTV solution).

TV and Internet come through the same connection at my house as a shared pool of bandwidth. They are sold separately, and TV actually hinders Internet performance.

I have 25Mbps down, total (which is freeeaking awesome for the price, about $50/month). Each HDTV channel used consumes 5Mbps. So if we are watching two TVs, we'll see only 15Mbps remaining for other data services.

I have no issue with this, either in practice or in principle.

In practice, Telus backs up the bandwidth truck and unloads it at my house every month, and I can't consume it all.

In principle, the market will decide whether to support the model longer term.

I for one won't hesitate to turf the dedicated TV services if Internet services can equal it in terms of quality/availability/price. But until then, I'm happy.

> I have 25Mbps down, total (which is freeeaking awesome for the price, about $50/month).

Everyone in America hates you right now. Just FYI. :)

Sorry. Believe me, I know how good I've got it, and I was reminded again this past week while on holidays at my father's cabin. It is in a valley, so below the line of sight required for mobile phone access. It was like a return to the early 90s, when one had to go to the University for Internet access and didn't have it at home. How did we live?

Thankfully, the iPad was loaded up with Kindle books beforehand, so the week wasn't a total disaster.

Everyone in Canada hates him too - this sort of connection isn't the norm. For example, see Rogers and Sympatico pricing. They have a monopoly on the Toronto area, mostly.

Videotron has the cable monopoly in Quebec. It's fast and reliable but man is it expensive.

I get a rock solid 16 mbps here on the Toronto area for 39.95 and it doesn't matter how many HD channels I'm watching. This is Cogeco using coax and they preassigned a bank for television a bank for voip and a bank for the internet. The crowding is generally a problem of telcos that are sticking with twisted pair (i.e. ADSL)

Guess I'm lucky. I have Verizon fios where I live (Long Beach CA). I get 25 Mb up and down. (I only pay for 25/15 but I get 25/25, not complaining). I pay $100 a month for that and HD TV. Not super cheap, but cheaper than Comcast which I previously had been using.

I get 20 Mbps in the US- from Cablevision in CT. It costs 29.95 a month. For $20 more a month I could get it upgraded to 30 Mbps. Btw, my upstream is 2 Mbps.

I don't think this is a good precedent. What happens when you want HDTV and each channel is 20 megabits? Well, your Telstra connection gets upgraded to 50 megabits but only 40 is available for TV - 2 HD channels at the same time, and the remaining 10 Meg is for Internet. Now, you have a situation where you can get 2 simultaneous HDTV feeds from Telstra but you can not get a single feed from an Internet TV provider, because they only give you 10 Meg for Internet. This is EXACTLY what net neutrality is supposed to prevent.

I'll say it again. Google says they want to push network neutrality but they just created a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.

>Google says they want to push network neutrality but they just created a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.

Keep in mind, they did get Verizon to agree to it. That's strictly more restrictions than they've agreed to in the past.

They got Verizon to agree to what exactly? Being able to provide enhanced TV and other services over IP that aren't constrained to any net neutrality guidelines? LOL

They've always been able to do that. They agreed to:

Consumer Protections: A broadband Internet access service provider would be prohibited from preventing users of its broadband Internet access service from-- (1) sending and receiving lawful content of their choice; (2) running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice; and (3) connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service. Non-

Discrimination Requirement:In providing broadband Internet access service, a provider would be prohibited from engaging in undue discrimination against any lawful Internet content, application, or service in a manner that causes meaningful harm to competition or to users. Prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted.

Just turn off the dedicated TV, leaving 50 megabits for internet.

What if your ISP reserves those 40 megabits for only THEIR IPTV traffic - all other carriers get to fight over the remaining 10. This is exactly the scenario that net neutrality is supposed to prevent - and exactly the scenario the Goorizon want to create.

Youtube and FIOS get the fast lane- everyone else gets leftover bandwidth.

I'm not sure I like that allowance, if that's indeed what the terms are. Are you saying the broadband carrier, like AT&T or Verizon can prioritize the delivery of their TV service as needed, to always be faster than say a Google or YC backed TV startup/service?

They can prioritize the delivery of the TV service and telephone service that is delivered on the same physical cables as the internet service. There's only so much bandwidth available on each physical connection, and they're delivering several services on that physical connection.

If the startup service is using the internet service, and the Internet service is prioritized under the telephone service, indeed it will potentially be slower, but not because the startup is being discriminated against. It would be slower because ALL Internet traffic over that link is discriminated against.

The most likely reality is that any additional services will have a minimum QoS set that is required for a reasonable experience. This would only be hit if the customer premise is utilizing the entirety of the physical connection...essentially they're providing guarantees that TV/Phone/Internet/etc. would work at at least a certain level of quality, which would be at the expense of other services based on what those minimum level of qualities were defined as.

What happens if you want to move to another phone provider which operates through the Internet? As people have said, nowadays most phone connections do anyway. So why should the ISP phone connection be any faster than another one?

And while today this may sound weird (we are used to have phone connections via our ISP) what happens if tomorrow's technology (say an interactive film) ends up in the same situation? A startup creates a field, just to get squashed by the ISP who picks up the idea (that clearly works) but gets extra priority because it is their own service.

But can't the QoS and prioritization be left to the customer to decide dynamically? If they have too many video streams open, they'll see reduction in quality of all of them. And they can decide to close / pause the ones that are of lower priority. Why should Verizon's TV _always_ be prioritized? Bandwidth and Service are two different things. Everyone is paying for bandwidth. Why also give priority to Verizon's service when Verizon's bandwidth requirements is already subsidized by it's customers?

Thanks for elaborating. Hmm, I suppose that is fair since it is their wiring investment at the "last mile". I like the idea of a minimum QoS for the different data traffic. As long as consumers could transparently see, expect, and receive minimum numbers for any given service, that should be okay, especially if they can opt to increase Internet bandwidth in lieu of buying any "specialized" service offerings.

That's only a problem if the internet as a whole isn't fast enough, and the FCC is supposed to ensure that this never happens.

And a great job they've done at that up till now. My cable internet providers in the past couple years (3 of them) have all been complete crap.

On the other hand, one of the reasons for Net Neutrality in the first place was to encourage an open market for services like video.

The fact of the matter is that it's 2010, and I still have to subscribe to UVerse/Comcast/whatever if I want cable TV, and have to pick from their packages, and endure their stupid upstream contract disputes. If it's all packets, why can't I subscribe to a cable TV provider over the Internet?

Hulu, YouTube, etc. are addressing part of this problem, but anything that puts the legacy carriers at an advantage seems counterproductive to me.

Those two services are NOT equal. UVerse/Comcast/whatever deliver cable TV to your house via real multicast with a shared tree all the way from the distro point to your door.

There is no multicast in the public internet so every stream is actually unicast. There are some tricks you can play but it's nothing like PIM on a private network. The public internet would simply fall over if everyone started streaming unicast TV stations from folks like Hulu.

I'm not sure it's quite this simple. Yes, my ISP streams cable TV to my house via multicast, but it's a multicast not just of the 1 or 2 channels I am using at any given moment (2 if I'm recording DVR on one and watching another), but of all 150 or so channels on the menu. If each household were only getting the actual TV channels they were watching, unicast might be feasible. (It would, of course, require more upstream bandwidth, so each household could tell its TV provider what it was watching.)

That's exactly how the multicast works. It's not broadcast, it's multicast. Your local set tells the next closest router the streams it's interested in. If it's already receiving them, the packets are forwarded to your on-site router. If it's not, it calls to it's next hop router and does the same registration. A multicast stream is a "limited broadcast" in that it only goes to the nodes that wish to participate and is managed by a tree structure in the network so that any given link only has as much travelling over it as the child nodes are requesting.

Yes, but what about the "if it's already receiving them" part? I don't know exactly how the cable providers provision their networks, but I'd be very surprised if my local set's registration had to go more than one or maybe two hops up the router chain to find one that was already receiving all 150 channels. Otherwise it's hard for me to believe that changing channels would be as fast as it is (effectively instantaneous). (Note, I'm not saying this is a necessary feature of any multicast setup, just that it seems like it would have to be set up that way for the cable providers because of user expectations.)

Cable distribution of channels is completely different from the U-Verse example. Cable uses a certain band of frequencies for channels, each HD channel requiring a larger band. The Internet access they provide is delivered the same way, but with a smaller band for upstream. The bands for Internet service are shared by all customers on the segment, with rate limiting at the maximum rate you're paying for. For cable carriers, there is no "profiling" ability to prefer one over the other, they each have separate channels. U-Verse and similar services (like the Verizon fiber solution) use a multi-homed router on your premise with one network for TV, one for VoIP and one for Internet. They are all 3 IP based networks and travel over the same copper, meaning they share the same bandwidth, but only one of them is actually connected to the Internet. For those services, you only receive the channels over the copper that your local router has requested the multicast streams for, allowing for a much more efficient use of the bandwidth but providing the possibility for services to interfere with each other.

Thanks, the technical background makes things clearer (I wasn't familiar with the details of how the different services get distributed).

Wouldn't that be really easy to dodge? Something like iPlayer or Hulu integrated with your TV: is that internet or TV?

What if you can get the news from a website, or its app? The app "just happens to use IP for the packets".

You're confusing terms that are independent of what's actually being discussed. If it is Internet based, it's Internet service and prioritized with all other Internet traffic. If it's traffic that does not go over the internet, but instead through another infrastructure (such as a public switched telephone network, or a local multi-cast network for TV service) it gets prioritized however is deemed appropriate. Just because you watch it on your TV doesn't make it separate from Internet service.

No, sorry. The point made was that a lot of communication is being moved using TCP/IP. So they use the same infrastructure.

Right. What if Youtube and Hulu start bundling their services as part of Verizon's TV service and thus enjoy higher QoS than other video startups?

Thats a loophole now.

its a crock.

it means if I want to compete with AT & T's 'official' TV service delivered over IP, I have to do so only within the confines offered by the 'Internet' service.

This is a total crock that relies on everyone interpreting 'The Internet' as being the world wide web, and conveniently forgetting the rest.

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