Hacker News Reader

Google is publishing data on the quality of operators: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=e9krd11m38onf_&...

Besides, one nitpick: the Google News story was in Belgium, not in France.

Actually, both:

Belgium http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-13/google-belgian-news...

France http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21302168

Your ISP wanting money to install caching servers for Netflix and YouTube is not something which has been covered ny net neutrality in the past. It would be great if there was a fixed colo fee for caching servers.

That said, I pay my ISP for bandwidth and service. It's bullshit if they refuse free installation of caching servers which improves my service and frees up upstream bandwidth for others.

I can't believe ISPs would fight free caching servers. I was happy when I saw traffic coming from somehost.myisp.net while loading content from YouTube.

Streaming video competes with Comcast's original and probably much higher profit product.

If an ISP thinks the bandwidth savings of caching servers don't outweigh the space and power that they consume, there's always peering. It sounds like major broadband ISPs are doing neither.

>It would be great if there was a fixed colo fee for caching servers.

Great for whom? Legally mandated fixed fee services are generally not the highest in customer satisfaction.

FWIW, if Netflix agrees to install one of their appliances in your network, they do it completely free of charge.

If you don't meet their requirements (which are based upon average aggregate traffic levels), you can't even pay them to get one.

If your ISP meets the requirements and is refusing, well, it's their own damn fault -- they're simply wasting money.

Personally, I am happy to peer with anyone with whom I share a presence, even if they're an "eyeball network" like me and we'd only be passing a few megabits of traffic.

Looking forward to Netflix Preferred(TM) ISP recommendations.

http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/

I don't see that net neutrality has much to do with it. I think that your other reason: monopolies: is the sole reason for these problems.

I have never had any of the problems described in the article. I live in the UK, and use a small ISP that prides itself on giving me a high quality service. And I get it.

Edit: downvoting? Really? If you disagree, then why not provide an actual explanation of why fixing the monopolies won't fix this problem on its own in a reply?

Providing internet service requires a lot of physical infrastructure, e.g. cables run to every home, all the attendant routing and switching gear, a fleet of trucks and maintenance workers available 24/7, etc. Right now the ISPs (phone and/or cable company) provides this. Are you saying that the physical infrastructure should be separated from the ISP function? Who owns the physical infrastructure then?

municipalities?

The public (ie, local or state government). Like the roads. Like the sewers. Like (some) power lines. Like the phone and coax lines (depending on time period, they have passed between private and public owners, but were always state subsidized in their deployment).

I'd rather deal with some shitty ISPs and some good ones than be forced to use a single shitty government ISP for the rest of my life.

Not a government ISP, you can have private routing centers. Just public wire in the dirt, so that one company can't own the only access to ones home and make it impossible to compete.

While that might have been true of the past, we do have countries like Sweden, where the state is currently rolling out 1Gb/s connections. Even the country side is having fiber rolled out.

The "public" doesn't own anything. You can demonstrate that by trying to sell your share of the thing you supposedly own.

Just because you own something doesn't mean its a liquid asset..

I'm not allowed to sell my own body parts, does this mean they're not mine?

Depending on your mindset, that could be the case.

What's your stance ? That's a very valid question regarding relationships between individuals, with the law and authorities in one group.

Depends on where and who you ask. There are definitely people who will take your body parts in sale. (Think iPhone craze + China and remember back to people selling kidneys.)

They said "allowed", organ sale is very illegal everywhere in the world except Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Current_Restriction...

That's what's they've started to do here in Australia. Government owns the new lines (FTTH), wholesale to ISPs who then compete with services.

Thanks, but no thanks. Have you seen the roads around here? They've been repaving / widening / narrowing / re-routing the main drag near my apartment for something like a year now and it still isn't done, and the design makes traffic far worse than it was before. No way do I want the same people who run the local highway department having anything (more than already) to do with my broadband access.

It's not a perfect analogy, but as the old saying goes... "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in 5 years there would be a shortage of sand".

Considering the state of the infrastructure in the US I think the last people I would trust with this is the government. I can see a model similar to how natural gas and even electricity is using in some states, where their is one carrier responsible for the pipes/lines and everyone and their brother selling service over it.

The government got involved with a lot of those examples because private firms at the time (allegedly) couldn't have gotten it done (too expensive, required easement rights on properties, etc).

The internet already exists. All of today's problems are minor in scope to the original problems of connecting the nation together. Why turn it over the government now?

Several different options are available:

We could have a FRAND like situation, where backbone network entities has to sign a Reasonable and non-discriminatory agreement regarding traffic flows. FRAND like systems has it own set of issues, but it has also clear benefits.

Government is the second obvious one. As with roads, government benefit greatly from improved infrastructure. All roads do not benefit from being toll-roads, especially when the traffic flow can radically change overnight. Who knows where the next youtube will be, or if google will move the servers suddenly after a SOPA directive is voted in.

Lastly, government could loosen their total control of the electromagnetic spectrum. Doing so would enabled a true global mesh network to be built, giving anyone with a receiver/transmitter the ability to participated. So long government claims to own the communication layer in the air, I will hold them responsible for the current communication issues in the cables.

The FCC now dictates that all are ISPs must include a statement on their public websites detailing what types of filtering, rate-limiting, traffic shaping, etc., that they do (e.g. if they prioritize their own VoIP customers over Netflix or something), but I'm not sure that many providers do. Even most of the ones that do probably intentionally try to make it hard to find.

In my perfect world, municipalities would only fiber that ran to every home and to a central facility but they would not manage any logical devices or infrastructure. Any carrier who wanted to have a presence in the facility could, for the same exact cost.

Customers would then be able to pick and choose their carrier and carriers would be forced to compete based upon service. Not happy with ISP A? Call up ISP B, sign up, and they'll put in a ticket to a tech at the facility to patch you over from ISP A to ISP B instead.

I realize, of course, that this a fantasy that will never happen.

Amsterdam seems to be a good example of what you're describing (FTTH installed by the city, Internet service provided by private companies). See:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was...

From the article: "Instead, network operators can degrade traffic by failing to upgrade connections without severing them entirely. The public won't realize that's what's going on unless negotiations become so contentious that one party makes them public—or a government decides to investigate."

I don't think the US government (or those of its several states) is competent enough to regulate the complex interconnections between networks. I predict that the major ISPs will be able to find new tools to degrade network conditions faster than regulators will be able to sanction them for it, should the government choose to go after this fight at all: the essential abandonment of the wholesale provisions of the Telecommunication Act of 1996 ended the possibility of reasonable widespread competition for broadband: lack of choices is why this is a problem in the first place.

> The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre.

why is this bizarre?

Because given that practice continues, and is accepted, we could find ourselves in a position where making a website now requires a regional fee to the ISP guild.

Wat. It already happens. I don't get free hosting for my sites.

I think you're confused about the issue.

you pay for hosting, yes, of course. You don't additionally pay individual ISPs to guarantee it's users access to your sites.

I don't? I honestly don't know that. If my hosting company does, I'm sure they would pass that additional cost directly to me. I don't see a problem here.

You don't pay it directly. But you are paying your hosting company who is several steps down the line paying a backbone provider to tie their network to the rest of the world's networks. So, yes, you really are paying to have other users be able to connect to your site.

> We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation

I walked away from the article much more skeptical of the value of net neutrality rules.

Are you going to have a law that requires someone maintain all their equipment? How will you know what's "maintained enough?" What about the companies that didn't deploy as much capacity as service providers wanted? How will you eliminate the appearance of favoritism in regulators enforcing something so vague?

That said, I'm all for breaking up monopolies and punishing collusion though, that seems like an easier fix, something we have more experience enforcing.

> The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre.

Some even go a step further, inspecting unencrypted HTTP traffic and replacing referrer IDs and such on advertisement links (e.g. links to Amazon).

There are plenty of places (especially in the US) that you don't have a choice of ISP. Unless you count dialup as the alternative.

So, the problem is that bandwidth is limited. There isn't infinite bandwidth available. You're dissatisfied with the way a monopolizing ISP is choosing to ration bandwidth.

Your solution is to have the government, through legislation, control how bandwidth is rationed? Yes, by all means, instead of degraded YouTube performance, let's just cut everyone's bandwidth across the board to some idiotic bandwidth guarantee. As if the government would somehow magically be able to better ration bandwidth than the companies that, you know, actually provide it.

A better solution might be to get rid of regulations and try to lower the barriers to entry, so that it's easier for smaller startups to get into the same space as the ISP's. "But limited infrastructure, blah blah, whaa whaa." Shut it.

Google shouldn't be the only company with the ability to create new infrastructure (like inflatables). But since regulation around internet infrastructure has to be micro-managed by so many levels of government, it only makes things harder for the non-Googles.