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S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

reuters.com

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Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#101

Post by tw04 »

pocketarc wrote: post #37
jonnat wrote: post #8

> South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic It's impressive how this framing has gotten so much acceptance. The content providers are not generating the traffic, the users are, and they are paying their ISPs to be able to do so.

It really is wild. ISPs have been overselling "unlimited" connections for forever, and being paid for it, but when their customers actually want to use literally the service they paid for, _legally_, it's somehow wrong? I guess that's the thing with Netflix though, it's torrent-like traffic, but legal, so there's no excuse to stop it and they have to come up with something. "oh they're generating explosive traffic th…

The thing that's most ridiculous about this is that the bandwidth is essentially "free" for SK telecom. They sit a netflix caching server in their network and the traffic never leaves. Other than the cost of switch ports (which are dirt cheap relatively speaking) they have absolutely 0 overhead beyond power and cooling for the netflix box which again with their user count is a rounding error.

I'm not sure if the lawmakers are ignorant, bought and paid for, or a little of both but it would be refreshing if one of them took 30 seconds and applied a little critical thinking to the situation.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#102

Post by the8472 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #100

The Internet is literally a series of erbium doped tubes, analogous to highway traffic. Videos of cats at high enough bandwidth can melt optical interconnects. For the same reason truckers pay some tax for brutalizing the roads, giant content providers beaming data through these systems must be taxed lest the Internet infrastructure be destroyed and the cost only be burdened by general taxpayers instead of users. (be…

> literally [...] analogous to highway traffic.

No, it isn't. Cars can't spawn clones as they travel down a branching set of roads.

But IP Multicast can do this, which is how IPTV works on the ISP level. And multicast is basically emulated by edge distribution boxes so that the traffic moving into the ISP can be multiplied to multiple customers.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#103

Post by Aerroon »

jonnat wrote: post #8

> South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic It's impressive how this framing has gotten so much acceptance. The content providers are not generating the traffic, the users are, and they are paying their ISPs to be able to do so.

This seems like a really popular technique in politics. Frame the problem in a way that makes it seem unjust regardless what the wider implications are.

Online ads and data vacuuming is often presented in a similar fashion. Your browser goes to the advertiser and requests the ad. The advertiser asks for your data. Your browser sends the data to the advertiser. And the way we frame this is that advertisers are stealing our data.

Once a system is opaque and automated enough it doesn't seem to matter how it really works. Netflix is a big entity, therefore we blame Netflix. If Netflix didn't exist then the traffic surge wouldn't exist, therefore Netflix should pay.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#104

Post by the8472 »

mercora wrote: post #88
ninjinxo wrote: post #18

Similarly, Australia had problems when Netflix was first becoming popular here, putting huge strains on the network and causing widespread congestion issues from 6 to 10 pm. I wonder if we'll ever see a predictive home-caching system; if I watch the first three episodes of squid game in one night, it might be sensible to have my TV download the rest of the series overnight.

having multicast working on the internet would make this extremly efficient for the distributors (i.e. netflix) but the last mile (i.e. your ISP) still would have to deliver the packets to their customers one by one. at Netflix scale it would probably be already very beneficial to do that by broadcasting the stream starting every 5 seconds or something for uncached viewing. (i.e make the player wait for the next broa…

A hybrid approach would be the best. You could start with an unicast stream and prefetch the rest of the show in the background by subscribing to a few cycling multicast streams. That requires a few gigabytes of temporary storage of course.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#105

Post by mercora »

hansel_der wrote: post #99
mercora wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having multicast working on the internet would make this extremly efficient for the distributors (i.e. netflix) but the last mile (i.e. your ISP) still would have to deliver the packets to their customers one by one. at Netflix scale it would probably be already very beneficial to do that by broadcasting the stream starting every 5 seconds or something for uncached viewing. (i.e make the player wait for the next broa…

a long, long time ago, we used devices called "vcr" to record specific streams that were broadcast over the cable network to have them ready for offline watching.

yes its basically the same thing with DRM on-top.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#106

Post by lelanthran »

flixic wrote: post #78
ojhughes wrote: post #11

Squid Game is one of those shows you can never "unwatch". It's quite harrowing but strangely addictive and a great critique of modern capitalism. Strongly recommended if you have the stomach for it

It's also very simplistic. In subject matter, in character archetypes, sometimes in acting, and most annoyingly, in editing (how it never trusts the viewer to remember what happened 25 minutes ago, so they show flashbacks to remind you).

> It's also very simplistic. In subject matter, in character archetypes, sometimes in acting, and most annoyingly, in editing (how it never trusts the viewer to remember what happened 25 minutes ago, so they show flashbacks to remind you).

I just saw the final episode last night, and I don't remember seeing many flashbacks other than at the start of E01.

I admit it is slower moving than I'd like, and some of the episodes had way to much filler and not enough plot arcs, but I seriously do not remember seeing flashbacks.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#107

Post by xxs »

mrpopo wrote: post #29
jonnat wrote: post #8

> South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic It's impressive how this framing has gotten so much acceptance. The content providers are not generating the traffic, the users are, and they are paying their ISPs to be able to do so.

If anything, customers should be suing ISPs every time they don't get the expected bandwidth. It's the ISP that fails to deliver according to the contract.

>suing ISPs every time they don't get the expected bandwidt

this is beyond flawed, unless you consider all possible bandwidth, not just Netflix being slow. The latter can be entirely an issue on Netflix side.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#108

Post by fabbari »

wodenokoto wrote: post #45

A lot of commentors here are defending that netflix shouldn't pay data charges. I don't know how internet prices works for big players, but from the perspective of a little guy, it seems kinda reasonable that netlflix pay, doesn't it? I mean, why am I paying for bandwidth on AWS? Shouldn't that be paid for by the downloading party? If I download something from my neighbors computer over a p2p app, then we both still…

That, though, is exactly how it works. Netflix pays for their traffic and infrastructure, the SK clients pay for access to internet for a given bandwidth and SK pays for the infrastructure and interconnections needed to give their clients what they paid for.

Netflix doesn't get free interconnections.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#109

Post by hhw »

notyourday wrote: post #98
ksec wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is why Open Connect Appliance wasn't even in their network in the first place? I mean there are only a few ISP in every country. SK Broadband isn't small either it is something like 25% of market share. If I remember correctly Korean Telecom was 50% and LG was something like 15%. SK Telecom is also the largest MNO is South Korea. And if you are into hardware you may have at least heard of SK Hynix, world'…

> My question is why Open Connect Appliance wasn't even in their network in the first place? By having Open Connect Appliance network gives up ability to traffic engineer Netflix, which may decrease the leverage the network has with its peers or its transit providers. Fundamentally, unless someone must peer with you (settlement or settlement free) and must peer with you on your terms ( locations, types of connections…

No matter what, SK Telecom is going to be eyeball (ingress) heavy and no amount of engineering of Netflix traffic is going to help with that, as it's all inbound anyway. Not that Netflix's upstreams like Level3 or Telia would be peering with SK Telecom anyway. Reducing the amount of Netflix traffic can only help.

Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'

#110

Post by lifthrasiir »

sodality2 wrote: post #96
Jensson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is netflix super popular in Korea? Yes, from the article: > The popularity of the hit series "Squid Game" and other offerings have underscored Netflix's status as the country's second-largest data traffic generator after Google's YouTube

Previously to Squid Game, I mean.

That too is true. As of March 2021, Netflix was the only over-the-top service that has reached 10M subscribers in SK (seconded by Wavve, currently operated by SKT and but only had ~4M subscribers at that time).
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