Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

One of the funny truths about the business of networks, is that the one who "controls" the most bandwidth has the #1 negotiating spot at the table.

Take for example, if say Verizon decided to charge more for bandwidth to Netflix... if Netflix said "no" and went with another provider, then Verizon's customer's would suffer from worse access times to Netflix.

Verizon has the advantage in that they have a huge customer base that no one wants to piss off Verizon. So it cuts both ways. Bandwidth becomes not a cost at this scale, but instead a moat.

View on HN

My hypothesis is that if Netflix/Youtube hadn't stressed out our bandwidth and forced the ISPs of the world upgrade for the last decade, the world wouldn't have been ready for WFH of the covid world.

ISPs would have been more than happy to show the middle finger to the WFH engineers, but not to the binge-watching masses.

> My hypothesis is that if Netflix/Youtube hadn't stressed out our bandwidth and forced the ISPs of the world upgrade for the last decade, the world wouldn't have been ready for WFH of the covid world.

Couldn't agree more.

We see the opposite when it comes to broadband monopolies: "barely good enough" DSL infrastructure, congested HFC, and adversarial relationships w.r.t. subscriber privacy and experience.

When it became worthwhile to invest in not just peering but also last-mile because poor Netflix/YouTube/Disney+/etc performance was a reason for users to churn away, they invested.

This isn't to say that this is all "perfect" for consumers either, but this tension has only been good for consumers vs. what we had in the 90's and early-mid 00's.

The US is still not ready. The vast majority of people have access to only over subscribed coaxial cable internet, with non existent upload allocation.

Anecdotally, I'm always very impressed with the connectivity I see in the US versus my home connection in the UK. I'm fairly certain that the last mile from my suburban home to the cabinet is made of corroded aluminium.

UK is certainly worse. Even in a well populated suburb 10min from Birmingham, I know a family that can only get ADSL or some other service like that at 2Mbps.

I have been spoiled with symmetric 1Gbps up and down fiber for a few years, and using the internet is like turning on the electric or gas or water, you do not ever have to think about it.

I live in central London (zone 2) and the fastest wired broadband service available at my house is slower than 20Mbps. (I'm playing with LTE now, but so far it's been a bit of a mixed bag.)

The binge-watching masses are easy to satisfy. All it takes for the stream to work is average speed of a few megabits per second, but there's so much caching at client end that high latency and few seconds of total blackout every now and then don't really matter.

Pandemics are temporary. Binge watching will never go away.

Not sure if you realize which ISP you picked, but Verizon and Netflix actually had peering disputes in 2014 which gave me quite the headache at my then-current employer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com