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Comment by jmileham | Hacker News Reader

The decision to push 4k streams certainly would carry repercussions for Netflix both from a storage and transit standpoint, even absent paying interconnect fees to Comcast.

As a cable subscriber, I expect that when paying for N Mbps of bandwidth, I'm entitled to N Mbps of bandwidth of the content of my choosing. If Comcast's pricing model needs to change to a cost-per-gigabyte model in order to cope with the increased quantity of data customers consume, so be it. But sneaking the costs onto Netflix's tab effectively shifts Comcast's costs to all Netflix customers, allowing Comcast to artificially lower their prices relative to smaller ISPs without the market share necessary to effectively extract rent from Netflix.

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> As a cable subscriber, I expect that when paying for N Mbps of bandwidth, I'm entitled to N Mbps of bandwidth of the content of my choosing

100% of the time ? not going to happen

So let's say I'm an ISP and I bring a fiber to your home, and gives you a gigabit ethernet port. You cannot expect all current and future customers to be able to use 1 Gbit/s at the same time. You would need a big non blocking switch with as many ports as subscribers, the technology for this does not exist once you reach a large customer base.

Now do you want me to shape your link to 0.1Mbit/s, because that's the only thing I can guarantee if all customers uses their link at the same time ? Or you'd rather have the 1Gbit/s possible bandwidth ?

Which one is better:

1) guaranteed 0.1Mbit/s for 10$, 5Mbit/s for 100$, 1Gbit/s for 4000$ 2) possible 1Gbit/s for 20$ ?

If you take the globalized approach, you cannot have business like Netflix, they destabilize the equation.

Probably what is better (or at least fairer) is a token bucket with a low guaranteed rate and a very large burst. http://blog.felter.org/post/64832783299/apropos-of-a-recent-...

I'll take the non-false dichotomy, please. Having enough capacity to meet the streaming demand of your current customers during peak times is a solvable problem that doesn't require a full gigabit for everybody, all the time. The pricing model required to support this while still looking attractive to customers I'll leave to Comcast's well-funded marketing department.

In order to make that happen, of course, we'd have to live in a fanciful world where shifting last-mile delivery cost to content providers wasn't an option so the painful process of exposing this cost to customers couldn't be hidden in a rat's nest of perverse incentives that benefit the most entrenched corporations. (Ironically, and despite its protestations, Netflix's ability to pay this rent is a barrier to entry for its own future competitors.)

> Having enough capacity to meet the streaming demand of your current customers during peak times is a solvable problem that doesn't require a full gigabit for everybody, all the time.

With adaptive streaming technology, there is not such thing as "today streaming demand"

If whenever you raise the pipe size, it is automatically filled by an higher resolution/quality/bitrate stream, it is a never ending game.

What I mean is that, whatever the state/quality of ISP networks is or could have been, we are doomed to face that "Netflix problem". If networks were better, then Netflix would already offer 4k or dual/triple HD streams and so there would be saturation anyway.

> (Ironically, and despite its protestations, Netflix's ability to pay this rent is a barrier to entry for its own future competitors.)

Actually, moving all Netflix traffic to private pipes will free the shared ones, so a new freeloader can use them and cut Netflix prices ;)

When they sell me the service, they don't sell it as possibly 1 Gbit/s. They sell me 1 Gbit/s. If they can't deliver, it is time to adjust that promise when I purchase the service.

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