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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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What the hell are they waiting for? Put in the fast lane! I wanna watch my damn movies!" Telling a customer they're not getting what they paid for from their service provider is about as plain English as you can get. I daresay we need this sort of rhetoric, and I doubt their response will be levied toward Netflix unless they start getting letters from their ISPs saying "We're throttling you because you're watching…

I hope it does get ugly, because that's the only way this 'fast lane' horseshit is going to stop.

Or perhaps it'll just make ISPs start charging by bandwidth instead of offering "unlimited" and hoping most people don't use it.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#352
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it does get ugly, because that's the only way this 'fast lane' horseshit is going to stop.

Or perhaps it'll just make ISPs start charging by bandwidth instead of offering "unlimited" and hoping most people don't use it.

That doesn't address the net neutrality aspect of this. Above at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7858919 we see quoted from a Verizon press release that "Verizon had a total of 5.8 million FiOS Internet and 5.0 million FiOS Video connections at the end of the [2nd] quarter [of 2013]"

Verizon doesn't want more "cord cutters" of a sort to drop their FiOS video accounts in favor of a la carte offerings from Netflix et. al. AT&T's U-verse isn't as big a thing for them, but they use vicious caps to protect it, and of course all the cable companies are by definition video service providers.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#353
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point about U > T. It also happens in Gym business where they oversell their gym capacity betting that 80% of their customers will be too lazy to come exercise everyday. Now imagine if I sell a motivation pill that makes you go to gym everyday. It would be absurd if Gym companies send me a cease and desist letter because i am overburdening their facilities because everyone who takes my pill wants to use their gy…

Playing the devil's advocate: what if the higher contention ratios lead to 50% reduction in gym membership fee? All other gyms follow suit and consumers and gyms both benefit from the realization that not all members will be in the gym at the same time. Marketing departments start vying for consumers who they know are unlikely to attend everyday and lure them with annual sign up discounts. Fast forward 3 years later,…

>>What should the gyms do?

Be Honest. They can invent a new business model based on transparency. Imagine if price is not fixed but you are charged per use based on the traffic at the moment. It could be similar to what Uber does, price based on demand.

In terms of ISPs, I think there should be a micro transaction exchange where I can buy X minutes of data transfer. If Verizon is clogged I switch my router to connect with ATT etc. All networks should create a single broker device thats given to each consumer.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#354
post #336
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree about health insurance. I think that in the absence of health insurance, health care wouldn't work. Imagine getting in an accident, you're unconscious, you need emergency assistance. If the hospitals weren't reasonably sure you're insured and can pay for the services, they wouldn't be motivated to help you. Most European countries offer health insurance, and total healthcare costs are much lower (compared…

There's a question though here as to how to define insurance: in your example, everything still works if everyone has catastrophic insurance. Insurance, classically understood, is risk sharing, not cost sharing. In other words taking it from a "not everyone will use this service" risk sharing model to "everyone will use this at some point" cost sharing model is what causes the problem of hidden pricing. You can have…

This is exactly the root of the issue with medical "insurance". We know that everyone will need medical care at some point. Insurance models work only in circumstances where the policy is rarely used; the concept is that everyone wants to be protected in case this rare, almost anomalous event happens, so they're all willing to put up a small payment to pay for that coverage in the extremely unlikely event that it will be utilized. However, in today's society, medical care will be needed by everyone at one point or another, and many people will need it consistently or in large amounts.

Insurance is absolutely the wrong model for something with this kind of usage pattern. The insurance industry is notorious for its antics precisely because they're one of the only industries that can only make money when they don't provide the service you're paying them for. The fact that medicine is so widely used makes this especially egregious with regard to medical insurances. They'll do anything they can to deny your claim because aside from basically accidentally having a healthy group of people in the insurance pool (due to the way corporate policies work, and the new health legislation), denying claims is how they make money.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#355
post #21

It's frustrating that Verizon and friends can make grandiose statements in their advertising about "unlimited bandwidth", "faster wifi" ,"stream 5 things at a time", etc, etc. Or lie to customers, My mother just called Comcast to downgrade her service and the CS Rep said "WiFi won't work with our Economy Plus internet plan" Yet when another entity does something as simple as showing an error message that casts them i…

Story about Shaw (in canada, BC):

I had one of their built in modem/router combos that provides internet and wifi, me and a room mate had a minecraft server set up on a box wired into the router, and we played locally, but for some reason every 20 minutes, our connections to the server, the internet, and eachother would just die.

leaving an active traceroute on a spare computer suggested that the router just stopped routing for a period of 20-30 seconds, every 20-30 minutes.

Angry and annoyed, I called in a tech from Shaw to look at and replace the hardware. Standard operating procedure here: "We will show up some time between 8am-1pm". Of course he showed up at 3pm, with no call that he was going to be late. I had to call them.

Unbelievably, he logged into the router (with no permissions given, so those routers are backdoored... goody) and actually identified that the router WAS resetting every 20 minutes or so. Yes, the problem was identified! The problem was that my internet plan was not sufficient enough to support online games, and that if I didn't get another better one, the problem couldn't be fixed. (For the record, I had a 30 mbps down, 3 mbps up, cable connection.)

Jaw agape, I tried to explain to him that A. The game server he was referring to was literally right next to his feet, and B. that even if it wasn't, game data is minuscule compared to video data, something I am a prolific consumer of with no obvious problem there. All that combined with the subtle hint that the router literally just told him it was resetting, the conclusion clearly was that the router is broken, and my internet is fine.

His response to that was:

   ...
that's a direct quote. I'm not paraphrasing.

He didn't want to say anything because I had the audacity to say something that went contrary to the marketing line, and the only option he had was to either say I was wrong, or accept it.

He wouldn't replace the router regardless.

So I told him to take his modem/router, put in my old modem, get it registered, and buzz off (though maybe not so colourfully).

When I talked to a Shaw customer representative about having a Tech show up late, lie to me, and not fix the problem without an upgrade, I got this response:

   uh, ok?
That's a direct quote. I'm not paraphrasing.

Fun part though: that transgression was actually considered a transgression by Shaw's regulatory agency, So I reported it to them after I got piddly squat from customer service.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#356
post #21

It's frustrating that Verizon and friends can make grandiose statements in their advertising about "unlimited bandwidth", "faster wifi" ,"stream 5 things at a time", etc, etc. Or lie to customers, My mother just called Comcast to downgrade her service and the CS Rep said "WiFi won't work with our Economy Plus internet plan" Yet when another entity does something as simple as showing an error message that casts them i…

Story about Shaw (in canada, BC): I had one of their built in modem/router combos that provides internet and wifi, me and a room mate had a minecraft server set up on a box wired into the router, and we played locally, but for some reason every 20 minutes, our connections to the server, the internet, and eachother would just die. leaving an active traceroute on a spare computer suggested that the router just stopped…

oof :(

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay $25/14 GB pretty consistently here in Singapore. Ironically, in Singapore, it's cheaper for me to pay for traffic on a pre paid SIM, than it is to pay for it with a pre-paid account. Works out great when we're downloading 50-60 GBytes/month. $100/month gets us 56 gigabytes @ about 20-30 mbits/second.

Is wired bandwidth that expensive in Singapore?

It's too slow. Everywhere I go - St. Regis, Fusionopolis, Fraser Place - Lucky to get more than 3 Mbits/second. I have to rely on wireless for performance. Singtel + LTE gives me about 30 Mbits.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#358

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…

Over subscription is what drives economies of scale in IaaS and PaaS. It allows companies to drive down prices and increase performance for the p99 customers.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry this perfectly valid and relevant quote is being down voted. Disagreeing with the hive mind on HN has consequences now days unfortunately.

It's not valid, as has been discussed about a dozen times in the thread. Peering arrangements to consumer ISPs are not symmetrical, and never have been.

That's what peering is. Both parties agree to connect their networks for mutual benefit of each other. If one side is lopsided on traffic usage, this really is no longer a mutually beneficial relationship. See Wikipedia for more definition information.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is wired bandwidth that expensive in Singapore?

It's too slow. Everywhere I go - St. Regis, Fusionopolis, Fraser Place - Lucky to get more than 3 Mbits/second. I have to rely on wireless for performance. Singtel + LTE gives me about 30 Mbits.

Interesting. I find it fascinating that your situation seems to be the exact opposite of the US.
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