Verizon made an enemy tonight

Many Americans don't have that option. The physical wires either in your house or connecting your house to the street trunks are often owned by the telco themselves. That's right the copper wires in your house you own, might be property of Verizon or comcast. They get exclusivity to these wires.

Re: Verizon made an enemy tonight

#5

Post by kaeawc » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 4:54 AM UTC

Wonder what location he tunneled from / to to get around Verizon's bottleneck.

Re: Verizon made an enemy tonight

#6

Post by sudonim » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 4:58 AM UTC

kaeawc wrote: post #5

Wonder what location he tunneled from / to to get around Verizon's bottleneck.

Hi! OP here. I'm in NYC. I tunneled to Washington D.C. and that seemed to do it. I figured I'd try a location as close as possible first.

Re: Verizon made an enemy tonight

#7

Post by kentonv » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 5:02 AM UTC

I think this issue may be more subtle than we want it to be.

I'm no fan of monopolistic ISPs, but it is true that when you have a peering point with unbalanced traffic flows, the side sending more traffic is supposed to pay the side receiving more traffic. You pay per byte sent, just like how the sender of a letter pays postage. This has always been the case, and as long as Verizon charges Level 3 the same amount per-packet as they do any other sender, there's no violation of net neutrality.

So Level 3/Netflix is making the argument that all Verizon has to do is install some additional network cables and everything would be fixed. Well that's a convenient argument, given that Level 3 sends way more traffic than it receives on that link, and currently (it seems) isn't paying for that difference. I hate to say it, but I think Verizon may actually be in the right here, at least insofar as that Level 3 should in fact be paying for that peering arrangement. Level 3's blog post seem deceptive on this point.

That said, Verizon has a video service that competes with Netflix. Verizon's video service presumably doesn't have to pay transit fees to reach Verizon customers. So what's to stop Verizon from charging unreasonable fees in order to stamp out competition? Presumably, this is the real problem: Verizon and Level 3 cannot agree on a price, because Verizon has no reason to offer a reasonable price.

So Level 3 and Netflix are waging a public campaign to shame Verizon, presumably as a bargaining chip to get the price lower. But neither side is really being truthful with us.

I'm just happy that in my area I can get sonic.net, an ISP whose only business interest is delivering packets.

Re: Verizon made an enemy tonight

#8

Post by djchen » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 5:13 AM UTC

I do the same thing as the OP, I use an OpenWRT router with OpenVPN back to a VPS I have and it improves streaming video quality and speed for Netflix and more. Highly recommend it.

Re: Verizon made an enemy tonight

#9

Post by pwarner » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 5:16 AM UTC

kentonv wrote: post #7

I think this issue may be more subtle than we want it to be. I'm no fan of monopolistic ISPs, but it is true that when you have a peering point with unbalanced traffic flows, the side sending more traffic is supposed to pay the side receiving more traffic. You pay per byte sent, just like how the sender of a letter pays postage. This has always been the case, and as long as Verizon charges Level 3 the same amount per…

I don't understand why ISPs can just be ISPs? Especially the telco ones are investing a lot of money to try to move up the value chain into things like video, IaaS, home security, probably more that I can't think of. Meanwhile they fail to innovate at actually being an ISP. Google seems to be the leader there with Google Fiber and their clever sofware for managing their data center networks.

Re: Verizon made an enemy tonight

#10

Post by djchen » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 5:17 AM UTC

kentonv wrote: post #7

I think this issue may be more subtle than we want it to be. I'm no fan of monopolistic ISPs, but it is true that when you have a peering point with unbalanced traffic flows, the side sending more traffic is supposed to pay the side receiving more traffic. You pay per byte sent, just like how the sender of a letter pays postage. This has always been the case, and as long as Verizon charges Level 3 the same amount per…

> Well that's a convenient argument, given that Level 3 sends way more traffic than it receives on that link, and currently (it seems) isn't paying for that difference.

That is true if Level3 was sending traffic through Verizon to say Cogent or HE. But in this case, the OP is requesting this traffic through VZ and he is paying VZ to carry this traffic for him.