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Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

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Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#211

Post by jusben1369 »

pikachu_is_cool wrote: post #192
jusben1369 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix has an ISP tracker on their site that shows performance by ISP. Trust me, if they know your ISP is a "throttler" they have the ways to get this in front of you and highlight "Hey you're having a crappy experience because you're using X and they throttle us. Y wants your business and will give you a $150 coupon to change. Click here now"

I had no idea someone could be this naive. WE'RE AT THE MERCY OF AN OLIGOPOLY. THEY HAVE MEETINGS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS TO COLLECTIVELY RAISE THEIR PRICES AND PROVIDE MINIMUM SERVICE. THEY CAN FUCK US AS MUCH AS THEY WANT, AND WE CAN'T DO SHIT BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ANY COMPETITION. THERE ISN'T ANY COMPETITION BECAUSE THE BARRIER TO ENTRY FOR A NEW ISP IS SO HIGH THAT IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE; EXCEPT FOR COMPANIES WITH…

oh my all caps on HN. I guess there really is no where safe on the Internet.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#212

Post by shinratdr »

aroch wrote: post #209
spinlock wrote: post #142

This is why I think streaming is a broken model: it spikes usage at the same time every day. BitTorrent (or just off-line downloading) is so much better because you can amortize the download over the whole day and take advantage of off-peak bandwidth. We just need to convince copyright holders that its in their best interest to deliver a superior product.

Except streaming is the only viable option due to how content licensing works. You could do slow (200Kbps) download of content you plan on watching in the evening while you're at work, but because of restrictive licensing the cost becomes prohibitive ($10-40/night to rent and watch the same thing as on Netflix)

That sounds like a problem for content licensing, not me. Promoting a broken model because the model that model is built on is broken as well hardly bodes well for this burgeoning industry.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#213

Post by jusben1369 »

er35826 wrote: post #164
jusben1369 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. That's news to me. The majority of people in the US really only have one choice?

Somewhat. Most people in the US only have a choice between the specific type of line they use (Cable, DSL, Satellite). There are typically only one provider for either Cable or DSL in an area, and you're not even guaranteed to have an option between either.

I'm really struggling with this concept. I've lived in 3 different metro areas in the US and always had more than one option. I can see it for rural areas but in terms of % of population. Can't find anything definitive on the internet though.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#214

Post by dreamdu5t »

dalore wrote: post #167
waps wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The netflix data itself points to a gradual lowering of bandwidth to their service. Now here's 2 scenarios : 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…

Didn't ISP's in the USA get a whole bunch of money in the past from the government to improve infrastructure but they didn't which now led to the current state of USA not being an internet leader?

Telcos got subsidies in the form of tax breaks to improve infrastructure. They spent their own money though. They talked about wiring America with fiber when trying to get the subsidies through congress, so that's why people claim they didn't live up to their "bargain."

Today this has been twisted into a false narrative: "the teclos got paid 200 billion to build fiber and never did".

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#215

Post by forcer »

bhouston wrote: post #13

Someone should write a speed test website that looks to read from a set of common cloud services and then compares the speeds and records this based on ISP and location. 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 slo…

You inspired me to do exactly that - coded within 6 hours - http://netneutralitytest.com/

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#216

Post by wmf »

twoodfin wrote: post #92
nathan_long wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An excellent test. If a VPN makes something faster, despite the fact that it adds overhead to the process , that seems like proof that it's being throttled.

Not necessarily. It might just be bypassing the congested route that everyone else on your ISP is using. Comcast and Verizon have had disagreements peering with Cogent, one of Netflix's ISPs: 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…

This popped up on NANOG today; apparently FIOS-Cogent and FIOS-Level3 are both hosed. http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2014-February/06411...

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#217

Post by sologoub »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #151
eli wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because just giving everybody a connection which is twice as fast doesn't mean everybody is going to immediately double their usage. 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

Peak load is what you have to design capacity for, but that is hardly unique to Netflix. They seem to have it sorted for FiOS/U-verse/etc, don't they? 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, w…

It sounds like what we need is the equivalent of local loop unbundling for internet services: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

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...

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#218

Post by wmf »

aroch wrote: post #209
spinlock wrote: post #142

This is why I think streaming is a broken model: it spikes usage at the same time every day. BitTorrent (or just off-line downloading) is so much better because you can amortize the download over the whole day and take advantage of off-peak bandwidth. We just need to convince copyright holders that its in their best interest to deliver a superior product.

Except streaming is the only viable option due to how content licensing works. You could do slow (200Kbps) download of content you plan on watching in the evening while you're at work, but because of restrictive licensing the cost becomes prohibitive ($10-40/night to rent and watch the same thing as on Netflix)

If Netflix pre-cached content during off-peak hours it's not clear that their licensing bill would be any higher.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#219

Post by ericd »

dublinben wrote: post #176
twoodfin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand: If under total load, with every customer pulling the maximum possible bandwidth simultaneously, Comcast could give you 250Kbps, you want them to sell a product that only gives you 250Kbps all the time just so their advertising will be accurate? 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 i…

It is practically and theoretically impossible for Comcast (a residential ISP with asymmetrical connection speeds) to have a balanced traffic relationship with any Tier 1 ISP. Every typical internet behavior of a Comcast subscriber follows the pattern of sending a small request, and receiving a large amount of data (webpages, music, video, etc.) in return.

Unless they'd like to start allowing their customers to have servers :-)

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#220

Post by jlgaddis »

geofflane wrote: post #53

Net Neutrality is fine. The FCC just needs to reclassify internet providers as common carriers rather than information services. 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. I…

> The FCC just needs to reclassify internet providers as common carriers rather than information services.

Yeah, it's not quite that easy. With the "common carrier" classification comes a lot of other regulatory issues.

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