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Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

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Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#271

Post by altcognito »

notdonspaulding wrote: post #210
toomuchtodo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent question. Anything that doesn't have a natural monopoly. I can say with certainty that the following should be socialized or delivered in non-profit ways: * Water * Sewer * Power * Internet * Healthcare * Fire * Police * Roads * Education (added per /u/CodeMage) Feel free to chime in if you can add anything I forgot.

Education, Police, Fire, Healthcare do not have natural monopolies. Still a good list to have around so we can argue about where the line should be drawn. Kudos!

Healthcare is a highly imperfect market, and that's what makes it subject to either huge amounts of regulation, or outright external management. Consumers are very ill informed. Ccosts are not displayed, treatments options are not well defined, and knowing all of the options and understand them requires more time and education than is reasonable for most cases.

Education is tricky, and honestly, I don't know any better than the next guy how to solve the issue. What's important to one parent may not be important to another. Second language? Art? Music? Sports? Recess? Lectures? History? Religion? Critical thinking? What outcomes are important? Good test scores? Writing?

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#272

Post by lbcadden3 »

Netflix is paying someone for their traffic. Verizon customers are paying for broadband which includes streaming movies.

The ISP need to quit whining. They need to quit trying to get laws passed in every state that keep competition out.

Verizon 2014 1st quarter. $30.8 billion revenue $7.2 billion operating income http://www.verizon.com/investor/news_verizon_reports_fifth_c...

no sympathy

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#273

Post by wtallis »

josh2600 wrote: post #198
pionar wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your wireless network service is best effort. Wouldn't intentionally throttling and/or not keeping up your capacity intentionally be a violation of this "best effort" doctrine? Not arguing, honest question.

To the best of my knowledge, Net Neutrality doesn't apply to wireless networks.

However, false advertising laws do apply. If they advertise "up to 40Mb/s", then they can't configure their routers to throttle you to 10Mb/s - they can only drop below 40Mb/s due to real contention for limited bandwidth as a result of high utilization.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#274

Post by korzun »

josh2600 wrote: post #54
Arjuna wrote: post #46

Awesome response to the C&D, via spokesman Jonathan Friedland: "This is about consumers not getting what they paid for from their broadband provider. We are trying to provide more transparency, just like we do with the ISP Speed Index, and Verizon is trying to shut down that discussion."

Playing Devil's advocate here for a second: If Netflix is 35% of global internet traffic at peak capacity (as per the Akamai CEO's comments at a number of events), is it really fair to treat them like every other company? That is to say, if Netflix is really the sole driver of Network upgrades, why does Verizon have to subsidize their costs of business? I'm not taking the stance that this is correct, only querying as…

If anything ISP's should be thankful that NetFlix exist.

They have subscribers because those subscribers want to use stuff like NetFlix.

Take away all the good 'content' and why bother having an ISP? Mobile phone can check emails too.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#275

Post by raarts »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #153
sixQuarks wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're looking at this all wrong. It's not that Netflix is taking up 35% of all bandwidth. It's that CONSUMERS are choosing to spend 35% of their consumption on Netflix. The ISPs are punishing consumers for their choices - it's just ridiculous.

On the other hand, can you swear that Netflix is doing all that it can to minimize bandwidth? There's a conflict of interest: Netflix has a vested interested in provided lightly-compressed, very-high-resolution, bandwidth-hungry movies to its subscribers, especially if it obtains 100% free peering that it demands, as bandwidth would be free for them. On the other hand, ISPs are forced to upgrade network any time Netf…

> Should the ISPs be forced to upgrade their network every time?

Come on, they have been doing this since the internet started. And in the beginning of internet some services were hugely popular as well. Keep in mind that upgrading the network costs money, but once the infrastructure is in place, moving bits is really cheap.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#276

Post by dragonwriter »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #153
sixQuarks wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're looking at this all wrong. It's not that Netflix is taking up 35% of all bandwidth. It's that CONSUMERS are choosing to spend 35% of their consumption on Netflix. The ISPs are punishing consumers for their choices - it's just ridiculous.

On the other hand, can you swear that Netflix is doing all that it can to minimize bandwidth? There's a conflict of interest: Netflix has a vested interested in provided lightly-compressed, very-high-resolution, bandwidth-hungry movies to its subscribers, especially if it obtains 100% free peering that it demands, as bandwidth would be free for them. On the other hand, ISPs are forced to upgrade network any time Netf…

> Should the ISPs be forced to upgrade their network every time?

Forced to upgrade? Maybe not.

OTOH, should people be made aware that the ISPs failure to do so is a contributing factor to the unsatisfactory results they are getting so that they can make informed market (and political, insofar as government policy impacts the competitive landscape) decisions? Absolutely.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#277

Post by sliverstorm »

fekberg wrote: post #260
sliverstorm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix has their own ISP. Netflix's ISP and Verizon pay eachother nothing to exchange traffic (called peering). Verizon wakes up one day and says, "Shit out of all the ISPs we peer with, Netflix and their ISP is responsible for 35% of our traffic, we have to do huge upgrades on the link to them, and they aren't paying us a dime" That's my understanding of what is going on.

The traffic exchange would only occur once a customer routing data over a Verizon network uses Netflix, no? Meaning that the 35% of the Verizon network usage that Netflix uses, is due to customers actually using the connection they pay for, no? As an ISP, I think if you are offering 100Mbps unlimited in/out, you should Expect full thrust from every connection, or at least be capable of delivering that. I know it's no…

Do you have any idea what internet service would cost if they built every node to handle 100% of the Internet's traffic?

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#278

Post by wtallis »

hueving wrote: post #225
jwdunne wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, whenever I miss the payment on my TalkTalk bill, the whole local network goes down, not just Internet access. I've been meaning to get a cheapo router to remedy. People just don't know that you can have wifi for free, especially when you've got adverts from O2 and such that 2gb 3G and " unlimited wifi". I dunno if it's the same in the US but apparently it's some typically restricted resource that many providers…

>I dunno if it's the same in the US but apparently it's some typically restricted resource that many providers in the UK are lifting the limits off. No, this isn't too typical. Most people have their own router offering WiFi in front of the cable modem. It wasn't until recently that cable companies started bundling wi-fi and NAT into the modem.

Really? I had Time Warner Cable providing a Netgear modem+router+802.11g AP combo box back in 2004, maybe 2003. (It was shit.) I think the only thing that's changed is that nowadays even non-technical users have more than one device that needs a connection, so attaching the modem directly to the PC by USB doesn't cut it.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#279

Post by Crito »

joezydeco wrote: post #50
scrabble wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do they mean WiFi won't work? How is that anything other than a blatant lie? Reminds me of the late 90's when my ISP told me I couldn't get cable Internet because I didn't have a 486. I lied and told them I did to have the modem sent to me to hook up myself. It's a computer network, once it's in my house I can expose it as I like.

How many of us had to bluff our way through the first gatekeeper on tech support like this? Tech: "Could you please unplug your computer for 20 seconds and restart it?" Me: "Okay. . Okay, it's back" Or this gem? Tech: "What browser are you using?" Me: " Internet Explorer 6".

I had a fun time with a Comcast installation tech a year or two ago:

  Tech: "Looks like we're about done.  Now I just need to
         use your computer to activate the connection."

  Me:   "I don't have a computer,
       I only use my internet for tablets and my roku"

  Tech:  "I need to use your computer to
        activate your connection..."

  Me: "I don't have a computer, and of course you do not."

  Tech: "Okay, just a second, I have to make a call..."

  [one minute later]

  Tech: "Okay, your connection is activated, you should be
         good to go."

  Me: "Thanks!"
If there was really a hard and fast requirement that they use a computer to activate the connection, they would bring a computer with them. They just want to install their shitware on your computer.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#280

Post by massysett »

flavor8 wrote: post #161
addflip wrote: post #37

Verizon fios customer here. There has been a noticeable drop in the quality of streams in the past couple of months. The picture went from excellent > barely functional(after the FCC ruling) > watchable(after the peering agreement) still not great. Kudos to Netflix.

Yeah, same here. I was watching a movie on Roku/Netflix 6 weeks or so ago. Quality was 2* (out of 4, meaning OK, but visible encoding artifacts now and again) and yet it still fell back to the buffering screen 8 times in 30 minutes. I got fed up and rented the same movie on Amazon (still on Roku) and watched it in HD without a single instance of buffering. After it was done I switched back to Netflix and tried to wat…

Funny how Amazon works fine but Netflix doesn't, yet the groupthink here blames Verizon rather than Netflix.
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