6 ms·

Am I the only one who doesn't use streaming video and doesn't want my ISP rates to go up because a vast majority of the traffic they now have to deal with is vi

by gdulli 12y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't use streaming video and doesn't want my ISP rates to go up because a vast majority of the traffic they now have to deal with is video and their architecture needs to be built out in a way that it otherwise wouldn't?

gnoway 12y ago
Would you be less concerned if the traffic were bittorrent, or itunes, or $somethingElse?
Touche 12y ago
You should be a proponent of metered billing then. You'd pay for what you use.
short_circut 12y ago
You are probably one of the few. But I wouldn't buy too much into the argument that their rates have to go up. Internet speeds are higher and congestion are lower in many other countries where their rates are cheaper. I think there is one reason and one reason alone for this. That reason is localized monopolies. Take a quick gander into the deals the ISPs cut with local government. Prepare to be disturbed.
- danielweber 12y ago
  I think there is one reason and one reason alone for this. If there's "one reason," it's because the US is spread out. Of the countries with faster consumer Internet speeds than the US, the biggest in area is France, which is less than a tenth the size of the lower 48. That said, local governments often suck. A few months ago Google just gave up on putting Google Fiber into San Francisco. Take a quick gander into the deals the ISPs cut with local government. Prepare to be disturbed. Could you show us the example you have in mind?
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    The limiting factor is not land area, but the marginal cost to serve an additional subscriber. It isn't the size of your graph, but the total cost of your spanning tree. The numbers involved are linear distances and number of nodes, not areas. In most areas of the US, pre-existing infrastructure, such as improved roads and utility easements, makes serving additional customers relatively low cost. But monopolies and commodity suppliers operate at different supply points. A monopoly will intentionally reduce output below the point where marginal cost equals marginal revenue, to achieve higher prices and economic profits. Leaving aside the concept of natural monopoly, that's the one reason. Most telecom markets are a local monopoly. Service sucks because the company providing it makes more money that way. Land area and population density are red herrings. You need to measure the size of existing networks, such as roads, electric power, potable water and sewers, and divide those by the number of people served. To use a car analogy, think about the Autobahn-style Interstate highway system. Before and after it was constructed, places remain the same absolute distance apart. But afterward, traveling between those places could take more or less time. Places that were previously adjacent might now require a detour via an overpass, whereas places previously distant might both have convenient on and off ramps. Travel times by car are thus determined by the roads network topology and not purely geographical distribution.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      Land area and population density are red herrings No, when trying to wire up a population, population density really really matters. The #1 and #2 countries for Internet speed are Singapore and Hong Kong.
      - logfromblammo 12y ago
        Only in the sense that high population density makes minimal spanning trees very small indeed. The area simply is not relevant for wired coverage. Wireless links are another story, obviously, where antennas define a coverage area, but as long as the bits go through linear fibers, it simply does not matter how large someone's back yard is, or how far it extends from the front door. That area is irrelevant to the provision of service (unless someone lives on the other side of it). The fastest data networks are wired, and even the wireless networks have linear backhaul. By topology, a high-rise apartment building where everyone is within 100m of the utility closet on their floor is not all that different from a small town where most houses are within 100m of Main Street. The apartments have smaller area because people are stacked on top of each other. The total length of the cables and the equipment at the distribution nodes are still what matters. You are removing a step in the causality chain. High population density causes efficient networks because all high-density areas incorporate their vertical space, by necessity. High-rise apartment and office buildings make it relatively easy to wire up a lot of people all at once. But low population density does not necessarily imply a costly, inefficient network. The correlation between the two is stronger at the dense end of the scale. In the case where information about network topology is not available, population density may be used as a less accurate substitute, but your conclusions will likewise be less accurate, especially at the lower end of the scale. Probably a closer approximation could be reached by looking at aerial photos of the places under comparison, adding up the total length of visible streets, and dividing population totals by that number, to get people per street-meter rather than people per square-meter.
  - warfangle 12y ago
    > If there's "one reason," it's because the US is spread out. Stop trotting this meme out. It's false. South Korea invested 1.08 billion over about six years, from 1999 to 2005. They also deregulated, primarily around competition - direct competition is allowed between ISPs there (it is not here, usually due to locally determined monopoly status). South Korea has a landmass of approximately 100,000 square kilometers. Which calculates out to about 10,000 invested per square kilometer. From the mid 90s to the mid 00s, internet service providers received a sum of over 200 billion USD (some say as high as 300 billion USD) in direct and tax subsidies, with the understanding that they would build out fiber to the home. It never happened, for various reasons. But the point is we already tried subsidies to get it, and it didn't work. According to the 2010 census, there are 486 urbanized areas and 3087 urban clusters. UAs are 50,000 or more people, UCs are at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people. Pretty much covers everything from small towns in the middle of nowhere to large metropolitan areas like NYC but excludes Yosemite, most of Alaska, etc -- you know, the places where almost no one lives and probably don't even have cell reception. UAs and UCs combined, according to US Census data from 2010, cover 1,565,052.983 km^2. If we pretend that ISPs weren't planning on wiring up rural areas with fiber anyways, that means we spent $127,791 per square kilometer and got nothing for it. (For the record, the average population density of UAs and UCs together is 978.54/km^2). This would cover 80.7% of the total US population. Per square kilometer of populated area, we spent over twelve times what South Korea did to get fiber to the home and got, basically, nothing for it.
droopybuns 12y ago
When video is consuming most of the internet transport links, it only makes sense that website operators should also shoulder rate hikes. /s We who understand how the network works and what is actually happening to it and simultaneously observing the net-neutrality screaming of most people should take note. People do not behave rationally, nor do they care about anything nearly as much as their internet cat videos or "house of cards" episodes.
spdy 12y ago
You probably are, for myself most of my internet traffic comes from streaming. Twitch/YouTube/Amazon etc. I rarely watch normal TV nowadays and i dont want to be bound to someone who decides when and what i have to watch. And i expect that my ISP deliverers the internet speed i pay for and upgrade his infrastructure accordingly without raising prices.
Iftheshoefits 12y ago
Probably you aren't the only one, but then again I don't, either. It is a possibility (likelihood, even) that Verizon and other providers will raise rates, even though they aren't delivering on their commitments at current rates. I frankly consider residential ISP service providers who do what Verizon does to be in breach of the spirit of their contracts, even if the "best effort" language offers weasel-word loopholes out of being in breach (legal) of their contracts. I don't think they should be allowed to raise their rates until they demonstrate they can meet their current commitments under their current rate structures. But there is an infinitesimally small chance of regulatory, legislative, or court actions that will enforce that, especially in this country today, so I'm basically just waiting for the boost in monthly cost for my internet service.
danudey 12y ago
The problem, as I see it, is that Verizon/Comcast (and other ISPs) are overselling, and the amount of traffic that Netflix is generating is showing that. Verizon sells X customers Y-bandwidth connections, but they don't have X*Y worth of uplinks, so they can't supply data to the people who want it. Until now, this hasn't been a problem, because most people didn't max out their connections, and if they did they didn't do it for very long. The very nature of Netflix's business, though, is to serve the best traffic that the customer's connection can handle, and that starts to add up. Unfortunately, it adds up so much that in some cases (e.g. Comcast) you can't even serve VHS-quality content to all the customers who want it. Because Verizon is overselling their bandwidth, they're now having issues where they can't service the demand that they sold their customers on. Instead of upgrading their upstream connections (which would cost them money, which they have a lot of), they want Netflix to pay for it. The logic is that Verizon wouldn't have these problems if Netflix weren't sending so much content; that argument breaks down when you consider that Verizon sold their services based on available bandwidth and now can't provide it; Netflix is just the service that exposed the problem. Netflix has other solutions, though; they can provide servers that get hosted in the ISP's network to provide content to users without traffic coming from outside the ISPs' networks (thus freeing up their normal uplinks for regular traffic), or by peering with Netflix at various points (which accomplishes the same thing). Unfortunately, neither of these solutions involves Netflix giving money to Verizon, which is why Verizon doesn't want to bother with going to the time and trouble when they can force Netflix to pay for their infrastructure upgrades instead.
- barrkel 12y ago
  All ISPs oversell; the two alternatives are (a) really low bandwidth for everyone, or (b) really expensive bandwidth with lots of wasted capacity that people seldom use. If you're arguing against contention, you're arguing for a massively inefficient allocation of money. This is basically a thin provisioning vs thick provisioning argument. Thin provisioning makes lots of sense when not everyone is using the maximum all the time, and especially when thick provisioning is expensive. Uncontended bandwidth is expensive. If customers who watch Netflix are using more bandwidth on average than customers who don't watch Netflix, who should pay more? If you think Netflix shouldn't pay more for their bandwidth (and then take it out of their customer), you're arguing that Verizon should pay for the extra bandwidth (and thus take it out of their customer). The logical conclusion is that Netflix-watching users would be subsidized by non-Netflix-watching users. Alternatives might be a special "Netflix" package sold by Verizon that has better quality interconnects to Netflix. Would you agree with that? Not very net-neutral though.
danudey 12y ago
Verizon doesn't have to raise prices; they made $5.1bn in profit last year: http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/21/technology/mobile/verizon-earnings/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/21/technology/mobile/verizon-ea... They just don't want to have to re-invest it in their network if they can force Netflix to do so instead.
- danielweber 12y ago
  An absolute figure tells us nothing. Unless any company that has a profit should never raise prices on anything. And just to show how the numbers can be cherry-picked, in 2012 Verizon had a net profit margin of less than 1 percent.
danielweber 12y ago
I appreciate your POV that what you have now is "good enough" and it doesn't feel right to be taken along to support other people's habits. (And it's totally rotten you got downvoted.) However, ISPs are a shared resource. Just like I tell people who act shocked when their speeds aren't guaranteed, sometimes the needs of the shared network override yours. You are getting a tremendous discount over a private line by bundling your whims with a bunch of your neighbors. That said, if your current service is "good enough," you might try using wireless or DSL.
barrkel 12y ago
You're absolutely correct, IMO. This argument is over whether or not non-Netflix users will end up subsidizing Netflix watchers. The bandwidth needs to be paid for, at the end of the day. The only thing anybody is arguing about is how the balance of payments work out.
- gdulli 12y ago
  I don't know the right answer, but I think the issue is more complex than the typical Netflix-good/ISP-bad dogma which is usually all I see in response to it and seems to be driven more by consumer sentiment for the respective companies than anything else.
- socialist_coder 12y ago
  If ISPs can't afford to upgrade their facilities to handle streaming video at the current rates, why do you assume ISPs would just raise the price of all plans across the board rather than create "streaming video" plans that cost more?
wpietri 12y ago
Yes, you are the only one, or close enough that it makes little difference. Back in Ye Olden Dayes, when techies were the main audience for technical products, we could reasonably expect offerings that catered to our needs. But for quite some time, the industry has been driven by mainstream consumers. E.g., the last smartphone built for a nerd audience was the Palm Treo. The current ones are all consumer focused. We're along for the ride now, and video in particular has been a major driver for bandwidth demand. It could be that there will be enough we-don't-need-much-bandwidth consumers that somebody will offer a not-good-enough-to-stream package that will be a better deal for you. But again, that's a consumer pricing option.
xster 12y ago
Your advocacy in support of ISP monopolies will only end up costing you more should you be successful. What you pay your ISP has little to do with their infrastructure. Look at other countries with similar subscribers/km2. Rates you're paying are just profit (and lobbyists) from lack of competition.
chrismcb 12y ago
Maybe... I grew up in Tucson, and and about 40 years ago they wanted to put in some cross town freeways. A bunch of transplants complained "ohh we don't want to be like LA" and so the freeways weren't built... Did that stop people from moving to Tucson and cluttering up the roads there? More people want to stream video. More people are using the internet on more devices (AND the ISPs are encouraging it!) Doesn't matter if it is Netflix or not.

by gdulli 12y ago

gnoway 12y ago

Would you be less concerned if the traffic were bittorrent, or itunes, or $somethingElse?

Touche 12y ago

You should be a proponent of metered billing then. You'd pay for what you use.

short_circut 12y ago

You are probably one of the few. But I wouldn't buy too much into the argument that their rates have to go up. Internet speeds are higher and congestion are lower in many other countries where their rates are cheaper. I think there is one reason and one reason alone for this. That reason is localized monopolies. Take a quick gander into the deals the ISPs cut with local government. Prepare to be disturbed.

danielweber 12y ago
I think there is one reason and one reason alone for this. If there's "one reason," it's because the US is spread out. Of the countries with faster consumer Internet speeds than the US, the biggest in area is France, which is less than a tenth the size of the lower 48. That said, local governments often suck. A few months ago Google just gave up on putting Google Fiber into San Francisco. Take a quick gander into the deals the ISPs cut with local government. Prepare to be disturbed. Could you show us the example you have in mind?
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  The limiting factor is not land area, but the marginal cost to serve an additional subscriber. It isn't the size of your graph, but the total cost of your spanning tree. The numbers involved are linear distances and number of nodes, not areas. In most areas of the US, pre-existing infrastructure, such as improved roads and utility easements, makes serving additional customers relatively low cost. But monopolies and commodity suppliers operate at different supply points. A monopoly will intentionally reduce output below the point where marginal cost equals marginal revenue, to achieve higher prices and economic profits. Leaving aside the concept of natural monopoly, that's the one reason. Most telecom markets are a local monopoly. Service sucks because the company providing it makes more money that way. Land area and population density are red herrings. You need to measure the size of existing networks, such as roads, electric power, potable water and sewers, and divide those by the number of people served. To use a car analogy, think about the Autobahn-style Interstate highway system. Before and after it was constructed, places remain the same absolute distance apart. But afterward, traveling between those places could take more or less time. Places that were previously adjacent might now require a detour via an overpass, whereas places previously distant might both have convenient on and off ramps. Travel times by car are thus determined by the roads network topology and not purely geographical distribution.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Land area and population density are red herrings No, when trying to wire up a population, population density really really matters. The #1 and #2 countries for Internet speed are Singapore and Hong Kong.
    - logfromblammo 12y ago
      Only in the sense that high population density makes minimal spanning trees very small indeed. The area simply is not relevant for wired coverage. Wireless links are another story, obviously, where antennas define a coverage area, but as long as the bits go through linear fibers, it simply does not matter how large someone's back yard is, or how far it extends from the front door. That area is irrelevant to the provision of service (unless someone lives on the other side of it). The fastest data networks are wired, and even the wireless networks have linear backhaul. By topology, a high-rise apartment building where everyone is within 100m of the utility closet on their floor is not all that different from a small town where most houses are within 100m of Main Street. The apartments have smaller area because people are stacked on top of each other. The total length of the cables and the equipment at the distribution nodes are still what matters. You are removing a step in the causality chain. High population density causes efficient networks because all high-density areas incorporate their vertical space, by necessity. High-rise apartment and office buildings make it relatively easy to wire up a lot of people all at once. But low population density does not necessarily imply a costly, inefficient network. The correlation between the two is stronger at the dense end of the scale. In the case where information about network topology is not available, population density may be used as a less accurate substitute, but your conclusions will likewise be less accurate, especially at the lower end of the scale. Probably a closer approximation could be reached by looking at aerial photos of the places under comparison, adding up the total length of visible streets, and dividing population totals by that number, to get people per street-meter rather than people per square-meter.
- warfangle 12y ago
  > If there's "one reason," it's because the US is spread out. Stop trotting this meme out. It's false. South Korea invested 1.08 billion over about six years, from 1999 to 2005. They also deregulated, primarily around competition - direct competition is allowed between ISPs there (it is not here, usually due to locally determined monopoly status). South Korea has a landmass of approximately 100,000 square kilometers. Which calculates out to about 10,000 invested per square kilometer. From the mid 90s to the mid 00s, internet service providers received a sum of over 200 billion USD (some say as high as 300 billion USD) in direct and tax subsidies, with the understanding that they would build out fiber to the home. It never happened, for various reasons. But the point is we already tried subsidies to get it, and it didn't work. According to the 2010 census, there are 486 urbanized areas and 3087 urban clusters. UAs are 50,000 or more people, UCs are at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people. Pretty much covers everything from small towns in the middle of nowhere to large metropolitan areas like NYC but excludes Yosemite, most of Alaska, etc -- you know, the places where almost no one lives and probably don't even have cell reception. UAs and UCs combined, according to US Census data from 2010, cover 1,565,052.983 km^2. If we pretend that ISPs weren't planning on wiring up rural areas with fiber anyways, that means we spent $127,791 per square kilometer and got nothing for it. (For the record, the average population density of UAs and UCs together is 978.54/km^2). This would cover 80.7% of the total US population. Per square kilometer of populated area, we spent over twelve times what South Korea did to get fiber to the home and got, basically, nothing for it.

droopybuns 12y ago

When video is consuming most of the internet transport links, it only makes sense that website operators should also shoulder rate hikes. /s We who understand how the network works and what is actually happening to it and simultaneously observing the net-neutrality screaming of most people should take note. People do not behave rationally, nor do they care about anything nearly as much as their internet cat videos or "house of cards" episodes.

spdy 12y ago

You probably are, for myself most of my internet traffic comes from streaming. Twitch/YouTube/Amazon etc. I rarely watch normal TV nowadays and i dont want to be bound to someone who decides when and what i have to watch. And i expect that my ISP deliverers the internet speed i pay for and upgrade his infrastructure accordingly without raising prices.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago

Probably you aren't the only one, but then again I don't, either. It is a possibility (likelihood, even) that Verizon and other providers will raise rates, even though they aren't delivering on their commitments at current rates. I frankly consider residential ISP service providers who do what Verizon does to be in breach of the spirit of their contracts, even if the "best effort" language offers weasel-word loopholes out of being in breach (legal) of their contracts. I don't think they should be allowed to raise their rates until they demonstrate they can meet their current commitments under their current rate structures. But there is an infinitesimally small chance of regulatory, legislative, or court actions that will enforce that, especially in this country today, so I'm basically just waiting for the boost in monthly cost for my internet service.

danudey 12y ago

The problem, as I see it, is that Verizon/Comcast (and other ISPs) are overselling, and the amount of traffic that Netflix is generating is showing that. Verizon sells X customers Y-bandwidth connections, but they don't have X*Y worth of uplinks, so they can't supply data to the people who want it. Until now, this hasn't been a problem, because most people didn't max out their connections, and if they did they didn't do it for very long. The very nature of Netflix's business, though, is to serve the best traffic that the customer's connection can handle, and that starts to add up. Unfortunately, it adds up so much that in some cases (e.g. Comcast) you can't even serve VHS-quality content to all the customers who want it. Because Verizon is overselling their bandwidth, they're now having issues where they can't service the demand that they sold their customers on. Instead of upgrading their upstream connections (which would cost them money, which they have a lot of), they want Netflix to pay for it. The logic is that Verizon wouldn't have these problems if Netflix weren't sending so much content; that argument breaks down when you consider that Verizon sold their services based on available bandwidth and now can't provide it; Netflix is just the service that exposed the problem. Netflix has other solutions, though; they can provide servers that get hosted in the ISP's network to provide content to users without traffic coming from outside the ISPs' networks (thus freeing up their normal uplinks for regular traffic), or by peering with Netflix at various points (which accomplishes the same thing). Unfortunately, neither of these solutions involves Netflix giving money to Verizon, which is why Verizon doesn't want to bother with going to the time and trouble when they can force Netflix to pay for their infrastructure upgrades instead.

barrkel 12y ago
All ISPs oversell; the two alternatives are (a) really low bandwidth for everyone, or (b) really expensive bandwidth with lots of wasted capacity that people seldom use. If you're arguing against contention, you're arguing for a massively inefficient allocation of money. This is basically a thin provisioning vs thick provisioning argument. Thin provisioning makes lots of sense when not everyone is using the maximum all the time, and especially when thick provisioning is expensive. Uncontended bandwidth is expensive. If customers who watch Netflix are using more bandwidth on average than customers who don't watch Netflix, who should pay more? If you think Netflix shouldn't pay more for their bandwidth (and then take it out of their customer), you're arguing that Verizon should pay for the extra bandwidth (and thus take it out of their customer). The logical conclusion is that Netflix-watching users would be subsidized by non-Netflix-watching users. Alternatives might be a special "Netflix" package sold by Verizon that has better quality interconnects to Netflix. Would you agree with that? Not very net-neutral though.

danudey 12y ago

Verizon doesn't have to raise prices; they made $5.1bn in profit last year: http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/21/technology/mobile/verizon-earnings/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/21/technology/mobile/verizon-ea... They just don't want to have to re-invest it in their network if they can force Netflix to do so instead.

danielweber 12y ago
An absolute figure tells us nothing. Unless any company that has a profit should never raise prices on anything. And just to show how the numbers can be cherry-picked, in 2012 Verizon had a net profit margin of less than 1 percent.

danielweber 12y ago

I appreciate your POV that what you have now is "good enough" and it doesn't feel right to be taken along to support other people's habits. (And it's totally rotten you got downvoted.) However, ISPs are a shared resource. Just like I tell people who act shocked when their speeds aren't guaranteed, sometimes the needs of the shared network override yours. You are getting a tremendous discount over a private line by bundling your whims with a bunch of your neighbors. That said, if your current service is "good enough," you might try using wireless or DSL.

barrkel 12y ago

You're absolutely correct, IMO. This argument is over whether or not non-Netflix users will end up subsidizing Netflix watchers. The bandwidth needs to be paid for, at the end of the day. The only thing anybody is arguing about is how the balance of payments work out.

gdulli 12y ago
I don't know the right answer, but I think the issue is more complex than the typical Netflix-good/ISP-bad dogma which is usually all I see in response to it and seems to be driven more by consumer sentiment for the respective companies than anything else.
socialist_coder 12y ago
If ISPs can't afford to upgrade their facilities to handle streaming video at the current rates, why do you assume ISPs would just raise the price of all plans across the board rather than create "streaming video" plans that cost more?

wpietri 12y ago

Yes, you are the only one, or close enough that it makes little difference. Back in Ye Olden Dayes, when techies were the main audience for technical products, we could reasonably expect offerings that catered to our needs. But for quite some time, the industry has been driven by mainstream consumers. E.g., the last smartphone built for a nerd audience was the Palm Treo. The current ones are all consumer focused. We're along for the ride now, and video in particular has been a major driver for bandwidth demand. It could be that there will be enough we-don't-need-much-bandwidth consumers that somebody will offer a not-good-enough-to-stream package that will be a better deal for you. But again, that's a consumer pricing option.

xster 12y ago

Your advocacy in support of ISP monopolies will only end up costing you more should you be successful. What you pay your ISP has little to do with their infrastructure. Look at other countries with similar subscribers/km2. Rates you're paying are just profit (and lobbyists) from lack of competition.

chrismcb 12y ago

Maybe... I grew up in Tucson, and and about 40 years ago they wanted to put in some cross town freeways. A bunch of transplants complained "ohh we don't want to be like LA" and so the freeways weren't built... Did that stop people from moving to Tucson and cluttering up the roads there? More people want to stream video. More people are using the internet on more devices (AND the ISPs are encouraging it!) Doesn't matter if it is Netflix or not.