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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> * But, the companies fighting against becoming dumb pipes much prefer to charge $5/mth for a base data plan, plus the $12 unlimited social package, plus the $10 for 40 hours of music package, etc.*

I work at an ISP. You hit the nail very squarely on the head, these conversations are happening every day.

I believe we're soon going to introduce a "NetFlix" package where all netflix data will not count towards your usage cap. (Of course, the entire Netflix catalog is already locally cached inside our network anyway)

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So this raises two questions I hadn't thought of before. (1) Doesn't this totally wreck the ISP argument for charging Netflix extra? (2) What's to prevent me from setting up the same sort of caching in my house and effectively breaking the Netflix DRM?

This came up on HN not too long ago - I imagine it's how they do the caching:

https://www.netflix.com/openconnect/hardware

To answer 1, I would guess this kills the argument for a wired connection, but not necessarily wireless since there are greater bandwidth restrictions. That's just a guess though, since my perception of how far wireless tech has come might be off.

2) as colinsidoti says, our ISP has the hardware from Netflix (& others). We plug it in, tell them the public IP address and forget about it from there.

1) Remember their argument is not logical. And it's a secret that we have local caches in our network, so nobody is allowed to know that anyway.

Do they understand that if they do this it is just as easy for a company like Youtube to cut off complete access to them?

Try to put my site in a package = no access for any of your customers.

They're talking to the companies in question.

i.e. they won't offer a "Netflix" package with Netflix's agreement.

EDIT: Above - should be

they won't offer a "Netflix" package WITHOUT Netflix's agreement.

If companies get into such deals with the isp's they should be blamed. What if tomorrow Google forbids any ISP from creating a Google pack or say Facebook? That would help the cause of net neutrality. Can we have companies supporting the cause oppose such packs?

I actually don't know how the companies feel about it, I am not part of the discussions being had, I just hear about them after the fact.

I know we're under very strict conditions that we're not even allowed to say we even have local caches, much less who we have caches for.

I like Netflix's approach: very publicly blame Verizon's network http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/netflix-refuses-t...

Does the bandwidth a customer uses actually relate to your costs in any significant way, especially when measured as bytes per month?

No. The regulatory body here in Canada, the CRTC, ruled that internet can not be sold from one ISP to another based on usage, only based on speed.

So we have a however many Gbit link, and we pay $x/month for that whether we saturate it the entire time, or it sits idle.

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