Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?
davesblog.com
davesblog.com
As long as there is at least one ISP provider who is not throttling traffic, we should reward that ISP that does not discriminate on web traffic, and punish the ones that do. You might have to show some differences across different regions and cities, but this is critical. I don't know enough about monitoring web traffic to figure this out but it sounds like an awesome project to spearhead. How do we get started?
It's just that I'm just a little sick of the finger pointing, and would prefer to do whatever I could to fix the problem or use the markets to promote the good companies and punish the bad ones. If there is a market where all the ISP providers are throttling then you have a better case for government regulation. Who's with me?
The primary problem we'll have is the 'reward' system in locales with only one provider. You'll have to focus on markets with multiple providers. The solution involves building an escrowed Bitcoin fund which does payouts based on provider's aggregate throughput. How that is implemented, I have no idea.
You can have a coordinated event, a cancellation day where all users of ISP Y cancel on the same day and switch to ISP X. Make a big deal about it. Tell your friends about it.
The one concern I have is in certain markets there might not be enough competition. If all the providers in that market are throttling then you have a stronger case for the government to get involved. Heck, there might even be collusion in those markets. But you might be able to bypass any government enforcement of Net Neutrality if there are enough well informed consumers punishing the bad ISPs and patronizing the good ISPs. It aint rocket science.
Lack of competition though is a hard barrier to climb. If there are only say 2 ISPs in your area it seems like you are pretty much SOL. And that is where government intervention needs to happen.
Or, just ask the NSA who is already collecting ALL THE TRAFFIC!!!
But the proof is in the pudding, the speed tests speak for themselves, no?
That's exactly it -- multiple, independent yet individually unreliable measures can actually produce very reliable aggregate evidence through convergence. This is particularly true if one uses abductive reasoning, but IIRC, there's statistical proof behind this idea as well...
That is to say that the speed tests say something and the chat says something, but together, they begin to paint an troublesome picture. Combine that with the timing and it starts to look bad. More data points will add to that convergent picture, of course...
We need this to be verified by someone with intricate knowledge of whatever is going on inside Verizon's network. The number of people with the exact knowledge of what is going on will be necessarily limited.
1) Verizon decided to enter some router configurations that affect the packet forwarding to Netflix (well, most likely FROM netflix, as the internet is not actually symmetrical). What we should see as a result of this is a sudden change in bandwidth.
2) The load on the interfaces in between is changing, either because of more netflix subscribers, more AWS traffic, or more netflix traffic. Since these are things happening slowly over time, you'd see a gradual worsening of traffic conditions.
I think it's pretty fucking likely that what's happening here is 2). Now granted, Verizon could solve this problem by cooperating with Netflix. But for them that's an expense with no upside, so likely they're demanding Netflix make it worth their while to upgrade the interconnects.
This is one of the basic problems with the internet today. It used to be the case that bandwidth between providers was much more plentiful than last-mile bandwidth. So we upgraded last-mile bandwidth. Problem : doing that resulted in an exponential increase in load on the core network and the interconnects between different networks. Needless to say, nobody can keep up with exponentially rising demands (especially without subscriber growth). The basic problem is that a linear increase in bandwidth for the customer results in an exponential increase in costs for the ISP (so -surpise- small ISPs don't feel the effects nearly as badly).
So ISPs are desperate. Their costs are spiralling out of control, with everyone demanding they follow this exponential curve, but of course their customers not willing to pay for it (and all the money in the world would only buy time if thrown at this problem). Demanding the ISPs pay for it is simply not going to work. Right now, yes, they could theoretically pay for it, but that won't last long.
Plus Netflix is being a rather bad netizen themselves. The polite thing to do is to carry the traffic to very close to the user on your own network, and only use other's links, especially transit, as a last resort ("cold-potato" routing, for content providers). Netflix has caches, but no own network.
There's other problems that result from this cost problem. Already transcontinental and other long-haul links are strained to the limit. This has resulted in a massive degradation of non-local internet traffic, and it's getting worse fast.
It is really a very simple problem. You have consumers, and you have producers. And you get more and more of each. To a limited approximation you can assume everyone on the internet is both. To simplify things, let's say everyone uses a tiny amount of everyone else's services. Now given N participants in the network, what is the load on the core network ?
N * (N - 1) =~ N^2 (assuming full duplex links, which would be generally correct for the internet)
So adding more participants in the internet increases resources required to give every existing participant in the network his "old" speed. These need to be paid for. But unless everyone want to start paying an amount for your internet connections that rises with the square of the size of the internet, we're going to see progressively worse and worse throttling. Right now the strategy is fast becoming limiting interconnect capacity to prevent the core network overloading, which would have far worse consequences.
While, yes, historically this has mostly been monopolies cheating the market, that's less and less true. This is going to get worse, fast. And since those resources are obviously not going to be made available, there's only one thing to say :
Get used to it.
Isn't the cost to deliver a gigabyte of traffic something less than five cents, and decreasing?
Not if you judge by the telcos' profitability.
The cost of transferring each bit is exponentially decreasing as network equipment tracks Moore's law. Their costs are going down, not up.
What this is really about is damaging competitors to their cable TV operations. Wail about Netflix using a lot of bandwidth, never mind that the cost of providing that bandwidth is falling as fast as the demand for it is rising, and you can put on a good show for the regulators as to why you need to destroy Netflix and push everybody back onto U-verse and cable TV.
The real cost is building the infrastructure to handle higher and higher peak bandwidth. Suppose you're Comcast with 20 million subscribers, half of whom are trying to watch 5Mbit Super-HD Netflix during prime time. That's 5 terabit, and even if you could agree with Netflix's providers to divide it up geographically, it's still an outrageous amount of bits to figure out how to ship.
1. Increase the price for the subscription
2. Remove unlimited bandwidth for the subscription and go back to volume based models
It's pretty simple, really. You offer a product where cost is higher than revenue? Change the product, change your process, or change the price.
Like everything else, there's fine print: 20Mbps or whatever is described as a maximum speed, and many people actually see burst speeds that high. But as it would be unreasonable to be upset you can't get 20Mbps to Nigeria, it's also somewhat unreasonable to be completely upset at Comcast that you can't get 20Mbps to Netflix if Netflix is paying for cheap ISPs that won't fairly peer. I'm not sufficiently informed to take sides in that dispute, but I can easily imagine that Cogent (for example) is dumping way more traffic into Comcast than Comcast is dumping into it, and trying to get away without paying for that disparity.
No, their advertising just needs to be accurate! They need to say "250Kbp bandwidth, max peak 20Mb". The real number has to be the lead, not the BS peak number. There's a parallel here to audio amplifiers. Advertising the peak wattage and not the RMS is stupid and deceptive.
The bigger issue, however, is whether those limits are based on the underlying limits of the network or artificial caps: this is currently completely opaque. It'd be much better if they were forced to publish any traffic shaping performed so the consumer can actually make an informed decision. This might lead to other questions such as whether they should be refusing to deploy Netflix OpenConnect nodes which would be healthy – and no doubt a key factor in why they won't talk about it unless forced.
Saying they are 'desperate' makes them sound fearful. Verizon made $70B in gross profit last year. I can't see how they would be afraid of upgrading their network - it's part of the business.
> N * (N - 1) =~ N^2 (assuming full duplex links, which would be generally correct for the internet)
1) N^2 is not exponential, it's polynomial.
2) Expanding capacity isn't even N^2, it's just linear.
If you double each residential customer's bandwidth, you "only" have to double the capacity of your uplinks to other networks. The number of endpoints or total nodes in the network is entirely irrelevant, because you have the same 50Mbps whether you're drawing it from one AWS server or a thousand BitTorrent peers. The only way you would get the result you're assuming is if every endpoint had a fully meshed connection to every other endpoint, i.e. each customer gets 50Mbps to each Amazon server, a separate 50Mbps to each Google server and a separate 50Mbps to every single other user on the internet, for a total of several hundred billion Mbps for every customer. That's not how it works.
And in practice it's even less expensive. It's sub-linear. Because just giving everybody a connection which is twice as fast doesn't mean everybody is going to immediately double their usage. A large fraction of users, given a faster connection, will do with it only what they currently do with the slower connection. Their pages will load faster but they won't load more pages, so the load they put on uplinks to other networks will remain the same.
There are no exponentially increasing costs. There are only the same costs as there ever were: Cisco et al come out with a new router that puts twice as many bits through the same piece of cable and if you want those bits you pay them a fixed cost and swap out your old model for the new one, and in another few years you do it again.
My understanding is that peak load is the issue, not total data transferred in a month. If Netflix downloads/buffers video content as fast as it can, and people mostly use Netflix at the same time of day, then giving them more bandwidth is a potentially big problem
The argument they might make is that their services keep the data closer to the users, but that's such a cop out. They could do the same thing for Netflix with transparent proxies if they wanted to (but the result would be to make Netflix more usable instead of less, which is adverse to their interests as competitors). And in any event the uplink to a large peer is a totally inconsequential part of the cost of operating a network. The thing which is expensive is upgrading the last mile to handle a large amount of video traffic, but that cost is the same whether the traffic is Netflix or FiOS TV.
In the UK, I believe the main practice revolves around broadband, whereas in US it's all around phone (VoIP or otherwise). If you could enable competition within the same last mile service, you'd a)give a definite incentive to make sure the entire network delivers the best experience and b)have alternate sources of revenue to maintain the last mile network.
The current duopoly that exists SoCal in most areas (1 cable provider and 1 DSL provider) is a really terrible consumer experience. For those who have access to FiOS, it's a tad better, but not by much.
If you had access to 10 providers at once with comparable services, there would be real incentive for them to offer the best possible experience and lowest possible prices to consumers... but of course that would hurt corporate profits and so on and no politician getting those donations wants that...
The problem with just local loop unbundling is that the last mile provider has the incentive to favor their own services. They can operate their own ISP division at a loss or with zero margins (more than made up for by profits in the last mile division) which disadvantages competitors who have to lease the last mile and thereby maintains the status quo of no competition.
The answer is that there exists a box that mounts on a telephone pole. The purpose of the box is to terminate hundreds/thousands of DSL lines and connect them all to the central office with a single fiber optic cable. It allows you to get 30Mbps out of your 30Mbps DSL instead of getting .8Mbps, because the box is close enough to your house to get full speed unlike the central office. It saves the phone company from having to string a new strand of fiber to the premises of every individual customer who lives too far away from the central office for high speeds over twisted pair copper.
The first generation would have been actually installing the boxes, which they apparently never even did. Then you periodically upgrade the boxes to provide faster speeds as the technology improves and/or the cost comes down, e.g. from 1.5Mbps DSL to 3Mbps to 6Mbps to 12Mbps etc.
However, theoretical networking problems like this have been solved many years ago. The Clos Network can provide full duplex links at significantly better big-O
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clos_network
I don't fully remember the details, but I believe you grow at approximately N*log(n). The problem is that the original Clos paper was published before big-O notation was invented... and that this was just "one other homework problem" that a professor gave to me about 5 years ago when I was in college.
So my memory is fuzzy, and the math is undocumented on the internet :-(
The internet is built on top of unreliable datagrams, which means the connectivity problem is even simpler. It satisfies the conditions of a Rearrangeably nonblocking Clos network. So the Big-O is even smaller than the above networking problem.
Clos wrote his paper specifically for phone connections. You cannot disconnect people for no reason while they're in the middle of a conversation. However, unreliable IP packets can be disconnected and rearranged, allowing you to use a cheaper form of the Clos network.
Either way, (like my professor from half a decade ago...), I'm going to leave the asymptotic complexity of "Strict Clos networks" and "Rearrangeably nonblocking CLOS networks" as an exercise up to the reader.
Mostly because I don't remember the solution... As a hint, replace the crossbar switches (in the wikipedia page) with a recursive Clos network and solve for the Recurrence relation. Use a 2x2 crossbar as the base case.
In other words, core network capacity (meaning total bandwidth in all links) if you have a clos scales even worse than n^2, with n the bandwidth you deliver to users. Even worse : you need as many long-haul links as you have subscribers (because your subscribers are connected to different locations).
Is there question in your mind as to why ISPs don't do that ?
https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/faq
This is a boon for indie ISPs who are too small to host a cache as the bandwidth is cheap and it makes Super HD streams available. I wouldn't call NetFlix a bad netizen.
It is also worth noting, that FIOS was #6. I do wonder if that has really changed or not.
The main driver behind increased internet traffic is the migration from television to internet for video content. I think that trend is going to continue over the next decade or so until everyone uses the internet for video content. But after that I think you'll see internet traffic level off to an extent.
ISPs need to build out their systems to handle that. I can't see anything else causing a dramatic rise in traffic so once they build out their system to handle video content it should be good for awhile.
Unfortunately, most ISPs are also cable companies, so naturally they are resistant to spending money just to shoot themselves in the foot. But this trend is going to continue whether they like it or not. It's probably going to be a really painful process for the ISPs and their customers. Netflix is going to be trapped in the middle. The ISPs will want to choke netflix out and take over their business. With net neutrality gone they just might.It's going to take some good PR and strategy for netflix to come out of this fight alive. If I was a betting man I'd say they'll put up a good fight but eventually be bought out by one of the big ISPs.
See page 10 here: http://ptt.br/pttforum/6/doc/Netflix-Open-Connect-Network-BR...
Today this has been twisted into a false narrative: "the teclos got paid 200 billion to build fiber and never did".
"So, how does this analysis account for the fact that, in many reported cases like this, other services work just fine at high-speed? Your point 2 is that more consumers and producers are flooding the net as a whole, but that would cause widespread issues, not just premier services issues, right?"
But you're asserting the truth of this position, not its probability, and I don't think anyone participating in this discussion thus far has sufficient information to do that.
I had a deep fight with Verizon over a chromebook 3g service that they no longer offered, and I tried to get a copy of the internal memo that said the service was cancelled, but they would not give it to me. And everybody thought that the person I spoke to was lying.
It's more about low available bandwidth + more users, visible in the afternoons, when he is at home, in his residential area.
Comparing speed there with what he has at the office, after office hours, he gets an 'yes' to his questions from a guy most likely located on a different continent.
I still don't see the net neutrality issue in the article.
http://bgr.com/2014/02/05/verizon-throttling-netflix-amazon-...
Sure enough, when on the VPN, I get the highest quality picture. When I disconnected the VPN, Netflix dropped down to about 500kbps. Terrible.
http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about...
It's not throttling, but rather the peering points along the "best" route between Cogent and Comcast/Verizon are overloaded, resulting in lousy connections between them. Look at this traceroute hop from Comcast to Cogent I just recorded:
7 he-0-10-0-1-pe03.111eighthave.ny.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.83.94) 21.377 ms 20.379 ms 19.387 ms
8 be7922.ccr21.jfk10.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.13.161) 67.126 ms 67.747 ms 69.083 ms
The ISPs could just eat the cost, and let it be delivered for free. Or Netflix's CDNs could just pay the peering fee. Or Netflix could use different CDNs.
The reason the VPN works is because it sends the data over a different CDN that isn't saturated because of the dispute.
At least that is how I understand it, but I'm not an expert (or even a novice).
Edit: Wait I think I understand. I messed up peering and ISPs, right? Because the CDN connects to the internet via peering, and they're charging money (which does make sense to me), not the ISPs.
Net neutrality is about stopping the ISP from artificially decreasing available bandwidth. These kinds of things adjust the real bandwidth available.
Why does Comcast use so few peering locations?
Why do they route packets from their network to a university in the same city across half a dozen states?
On the verizon topic, soon after they got rid of the unlimited data tier my speeds would drop significantly after I reached 200-250MB of data transfer, but when I cycled the power and updated the roaming the speed would go back to normal until it hit the 200-250MB again. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that this was done on purpose or that they're currently limiting streaming traffic.
I had no problems with data speed/cap before they phased out the unlimited tier. I was grandfathered in, but like I said, it was never the same. I primarily worked from the phone during that period and it was a constant struggle. Which is why it wouldn't surprise me if Verizon, across all of it's services, throttled traffic.
To quote from the Washington Post [1]: "Broadband is currently classified by the FCC as an information service, a category that gives the agency a fairly limited set of regulatory options. If Internet providers were classified instead as common carriers, the FCC's rule would likely stand. In fact, the federal ruling on Tuesday upheld the FCC's net neutrality rules as a matter of principle; the problem is that the agency effectively tried to apply its powers in the wrong context."
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/14...
Yeah, it's not quite that easy. With the "common carrier" classification comes a lot of other regulatory issues.
Their own advertising has often touted how well their service can stream Netflix. People are already primed to judge them on it, because the industy's own advertising has taught them to.
Stupid stupid.
Unfortunately most people have very few ISP options.
It's also the first place I've lived where I have choice (Brighthouse being the other player).
Time Warner and Comcast are definitely among the worst though, and I suspect that if the OP is correct, it won't be long until Verizon joins them.
> I realized that the one thing in common between me and our president was that we both had FiOS internet service from Verizon.
Personally, I wish they'd quit trying to convince me to increase my bill by a significant amount by including TV, of which I've made it quite clear I do not want.
Well, that's the crux of the problem, isn't it?
The shitty TWC service I pay for is probably far superior to the more expensive, 500kbps, line-of-sight based wireless network of the only other competitor I know of in the area. Not exactly a glowing testimonial though, is that?
I'm on Verizon FiOS here at home, residential service, and they all downloaded at ~20Mb/s, which is the line speed I'm paying for.
Anecdotally, I watch Netflix every night and haven't noticed a buffering/quality issue. I'll have to try the download test again later.
As only the first-hop device appears to be different in the tracert, I doubt it's something upstream - if they were throttling, they'd probably do it at the network core - before it left the Verizon network for transit, which would apply to both circuits.
Meanwhile I can download games from Steam at 3+ MB/s, torrent at the same rate, and so on.
Maybe Netflix suddenly got a ton of demand shortly after the net neutrality ruling or changed their software, but frankly Verizon doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. They've done so many sketchy things that at this point if they aren't doing this on purpose they need to prove it.
Can anyone set up a "speed test" online on AWS or something similar? This way we can experiment with connections.
That sort of person would not have access to see such things directly and wouldn't have the skill set to interpret configuration.
http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/having-problems-with-your-netfl...
My company uses Cogent as an ISP, and remote workers have had nothing but trouble trying to use VPN and other connections back home via Comcast or Verizon because the Cogent/Comcast+Verizon peering points are severely overloaded, dropping packets at a 5%+ clip at some times during the day.
I think the evidence speaks for itself however.
Occum's razor would suggest the problem is likely with the video services themselves, and/or congestion from other people who are now home from work watching videos, than something malicious from Verizon.
I'm very lucky to live in the Netherlands if I compare the average speeds, even with the mediocre ISPs, with the rest of the countries where Netflix is active.
This shouldn't be hard to setup and you'll get a ton of page views probably for ever.
One can then see degradations over time and based on ISP. Would be even nicer to have some controls in there too so you can see if well known cloud services are slower than non-cloud services.
Unfortunately, there's no way to determine the actual cause of the slow down.
For instance, you said that the slow down happens after 5pm, which quite literally is when 80+% of the working force gets off work. It could also be an artifact of AWS, and not Verizon FIOS.
Also, 2 instances does not a trend make. There's no way to know if you're one of those people who were sent a letter because they were using terabytes of data a month, and they're simply protecting the network traffic of 99% of their other users. Granted, I assume you aren't, but I can't be 100% sure.
For a truly independent test, you'd need the same modem/access device, without a local switch (i.e. a machine connected directly to the modem), and you would need VPN access to test both identifiable and non-identifiable traffic.
If you could verify that Netflix traffic through the VPN, on the same network, without any interference through the router, was delivering much more bandwidth than the same Netflix traffic, but in the open (not through the VPN), and could do so for a statistically significant portion of the Verizon FIOS user base, then you'd have reason to complain. Until then, I don't see your claim being taken very seriously.
Just my opinion though, ymmv
Is networking the most frustratingly complex field in technology? As someone who admittedly knows little about it it all seems like a pile of hacks stacked on top of one another. It's the only explanation I can come up for why it's near impossible to figure out why a network isn't behaving correctly.
Netflix is like that family of giants.
The solution is to build a bigger green, but how is that going to be funded. Customers don't want to pay for it and feel they're already being overcharged. Netflix doesn't want to pay for it just because they are streaming giant files. Such costs are not built into their ability to make profits.
It's a common tragedy.
Plus, both the customers and Netflix already pay into the system, it's just that the companies in charge of it want more simply because Netflix is a competitor to some of the services they offer.
It's not like the ISPs and making a profit. They are extremely profitable and just want more.
Makes me wonder how much this discussion is being atrsoturfed.
No need for pitchforks, but corroboration would certainly be welcome.
Welcome to the future.
I deal with Verizon Wireless (as far as I can tell, the article is about the other Verizon entity) reps often, I've heard this mentioned many times in an almost off-handed, positive, revenue-generating manner.
That they're positioning themselves to charge providers like Netflix for "priority" on their network. Except the way they describe it, it sounds like they will be deprioritizing or otherwise "shitifying", for lack of a better word, the provider's traffic. Netflix was specifically mentioned.
It's never mentioned on internal slides, but there's always some vague term on a slide that brings up this topic.
This is going to happen, people, unless legislation interferes with their plan and even then they may be able to loophole it. Net neutrality is the enemy, as far as Verizon (and possibly the other big telcos) are concerned.
Maybe there's something in the transition to IPv6 that might help with this? But then I guess they could do the opposite and throttle everything but what's on their ransom list.
I wonder how much independent ISPs could make if they stick to a small list of customers, but take up the "We Don't Throttle" stance.
I understand that it's a great service for a great price, but the question is how long that remains sustainable. Right now they're sitting on such a pile of money that it doesn't matter whether they provide internet access in a few cities at a super cheap price. They benefit enough in reputation and in extra usage of other services when people are able to use very high quality internet.
Proof of this is that Google disallowed running servers (the very thing that makes the internet the internet, end to end communication) up until their reputation was almost completely tarnished in the hacker community. Only then did they relent and allow servers to be run. They're not much different from other for-profit companies.
Of course, Google is collecting information about me. As is every other ISP (Verizon and Comcast hijack domain misspellings to redirect to their search pages), which is why VPNs and Tor are so popular right now.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/google...
What?! Thought only OpenDNS (and similar services) did that bullshit, and in their case I can understand. In the case of an ISP... you're paying them already!
E.G. http://youtube.ff goes to http://search.dnsassist.verizon.net/assist.php?url=youtube.f...
They explain it in the DNS about page : http://search.dnsassist.verizon.net/skins/verizon/en/about.h...
You have to go into the router to turn it off. http://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/fiosinte...
It's a different matter if I consume 5TB of data per month and it's costing them a lot of money on bandwidth to upstream providers. But filtering servers altogether is plain old evil. It doesn't cost them anything and they don't have to decide what's right for me.
You never actually made a point here, do you have one? Obviously google makes money through advertising so getting you fast internet allows you to see more ads, is that a bad trade off?
So my point is, if it wasn't clear already, privacy invasion. As I mentioned, they are like any other for-profit company and not interested in doing what's best for consumers. Their goal of making other ISPs provide better service sounds so noble, but I doubt it.
It could be any number of things, like a problem with one of their peering providers. I wouldn't take one customer support agent's word for it.
By most accounts I read NetFlix is responsible for 30% + of evening internet traffic. Kind of staggering. If an ISP actively throttled Netflix people would leave that ISP for another one that didn't throttle Netflix Netflix is clearly a hugely popular service with enough people that it could exercise that clout. Netflix can sign agreements and tout such providers (heck, bundle in sign up offers etc) So the market can solve this problem.
Secondly, why are they throttling this service? Because they can't charge effectively for it. We all love the simplicity of "all you can eat" pricing. Yet Netflix essentially exploited that model to their own benefit to the point now that model is under risk.
I find it fascinating that a service that has (legally and ethically and followed standard biz practices and sensibilities) grown to gobble 30% of all resources and effectively squeezes out other traffic is seen as a victim here. I'm not trolling so would love to hear what I'm missing.
I lived in northern Bothell, in Seattle, and I had one ADSL provider (not even 'fast' DSL) and one cable provider to choose from. In the metro area I live in currently, I've had exactly one DSL and one cable provider, and I've moved across the city and the variety didn't change.
Haha.
1) There may not be other services in the area - or all services throttle. Your only solution is to move house.
2) The user may not realise it is their ISP which is the problem. "NetFlix sucks - it's so slow. But TimeWarnerCastPlayer is awesome - it's so fast!"
NetFlix isn't "squeezing" anyone. Customers are requesting data through their ISP, NetFlix are sending it as asked.
Jesus Christ. I can't believe you are savvy enough to pay for your own internet service and you don't realize this.
And what if I want to compete with netflix myself? They have the cash to make a deal with Verizon, I don't.
That assumes people have a choice for their ISP.
If I want high speed internet I have two choices. Both of them are huge national companies.
If they decide to go the throttle route, where do I go?
>Secondly, why are they throttling this service? Because they can't charge effectively for it.
That's an interesting take considering how they offered a product at a certain bandwidth and I agreed to pay for that bandwidth. If I use it to capacity, the services I receive from third parties are somehow 'exploiting' the model? I don't think so.
If the post office offers to ship anything under 10lbs for a flat rate, is a company taking advantage if they offer, say, a 10 lbs cheese of the month package using that USPS service?
There's your flaw. Most people have 0, 1, or 2 choices for ISP. And those ISPs offer similarly sucky service.
Compare US bandwidth rates to modern countries, and you'll see that the US businesses are not in any way competing with each other to the benefit of the consumer.
"NetFlix is responsible for 30% + of evening internet traffic"
This is false. Netflix is not responsible for the traffic usage. PEOPLE WHO WATCH NETFLIX are responsible for this traffic.
I also think you are incorrect on the "all you can eat" pricing. Of course, I am not privy to the actual business deal that Netflix has with their internet provider... but I very much doubt that they have unlimited bandwidth. They, like their customers, are most likely paying for how much they use.
"We treat all traffic equally, and that has not changed," the statement read. "Many factors can affect the speed of a customer’s experience for a specific site, including that site’s servers, the way the traffic is routed over the Internet and other considerations. We are looking into this specific matter, but the company representative was mistaken. We’re going to redouble our representative education efforts on this topic."
Although in the comments there's a guy who differs:
"Chris Walsh wrote: Verizon is absolutely doing this, at least in Silver Spring. I stumbled on the daveblog's post via a facebook friend and was amazed because if finally explains what has happened to my home FIOS connection over the last few weeks, even down to the exact 40 kbps speed. ..."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/02/05...
Where is the part of this where they are promoting their video services over Netflix's "inferior" experience?
Honestly, getting people fed up with Netflix (not realizing that Verizon is at fault) and then deciding to go with an actually TV package (with a discount for bundling it with internet, no less) might be the goal here.
That, or the goal is simply to hurt Netflix, which approaches the same end from the side of the provider, not the consumer.
We all know where this is going.
Ping google and netflix while connected to a verizon network. Repeat on a network with a different provider, see if the speeds are proportional, or if there is a larger % decrease for netflix than for google when on the verizon network.
I know this doesn't explicitly prove anything, but if several people all get this result that starts to compile more evidence.
Make Verizon and whatnot pay with their wallets.
The ISP providers that use fixed wireless to customers have the same upstream infrastructure and costs as Verizon..
Want to guess if they are throttling?
They are not.. for example CSINEt local to me does not
So we should be asking what part of verzion's structure is forcing them to do this..
It cannot be money alone as both entities are entitled to the same broadband federal grants