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“Not” Neutrality?
- opendais 12y agoI like how the first comment on the blog is: "Face it: You are simply trying to defend your CDN business as it is being bypassed by direct connections between content providers and last mile ISPs." Its clearly a telecom employee that wrote that or someone who is ignorant. If they weren't, they'd realize https://www.netflix.com/openconnect https://www.netflix.com/openconnect was Netflix offering to do that for free. Netflix is paying to get the data from their datacenters to the LEC regardless.
- josh2600 12y agoIs this the logical conclusion? Everyone puts a CDN box inside the local ISP? Doesn't this cease to scale at some point?
- nmjohn 12y agoDoes it need to? At the moment netflix is 50% of internet bandwidth. If that could be delivered from a CDN within the ISP, that takes a majority of traffic off the congested pipes and leaves enough room for all the current demand with quite a bit of overhead.
- ryandvm 12y agoUgh. I think it's very Brave New Worldish that half of our global telecommunications grid is saturated by people watching TV.
- opendais 12y agoWe are in the Brave New World, my friend. That is just the open internet. Now add all those lovely people who watch cable, satellite. ;) http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/americans-spend-34-hours-week-watching-tv-nielsen-numbers-article-1.1162285 http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/americans... People spend more time watching TV as they do working on average. [34 + 3 = 37] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm 34.5 hour work week average
- snowwrestler 12y agoIt's partly structural; video content just takes up a lot more bits and bytes. Even if you could somehow find a movie and a novel of equal positive social value, the movie would take up orders of magnitude more network capacity than the novel.
- vectorpush 12y agoWhy? Doesn't that seem a little arbitrary? Streaming video just happens to utilize a lot of bandwidth. If the state of things were such that current netflix activity only utilized 5% instead of 50%, people would still be watching the same amount of netflix, but the statistic wouldn't seem as effective for comparison to a dystopia. Further, netflix watchers are almost entirely composed of former/would-be TV watchers who ultimately end up spending less time in front of the tube because they avoid commercials entirely (adding up to a ton of time in aggregate) as well as at their leisure instead of when the TV guide demands they stop what they're doing to catch their show.
- driverdan 12y agoI bet amateur radio operators said the same thing when TV stations took some of their frequencies away.
- pyrocat 12y agoSource? I know Netflix is popular, but that seems excessive.
- opendais 12y agohttp://variety.com/2014/digital/news/netflix-youtube-bandwidth-usage-1201179643/ http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/netflix-youtube-bandwid... It is more like 32%. The 50% number was all video.
- pyrocat 12y agoI wish they linked to the chart or study that provided that info, instead of just saying "a study". I had to go digging to find this https://www.sandvine.com/downloads/general/global-internet-phenomena/2014/1h-2014-global-internet-phenomena-report.pdf https://www.sandvine.com/downloads/general/global-internet-p...
- opendais 12y agoSorry, I was lazy. :P
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago> At the moment netflix is 50% of internet bandwidth. > If that could be delivered from a CDN within the ISP, that takes a majority of traffic off the congested pipes and leaves enough room for all the current demand with quite a bit of overhead. For how long? Every year the hardware vendors come out with faster equipment which makes bandwidth cheaper which causes people to use more. If they won't upgrade the interconnects then all removing Netflix does is buy a little time until the interconnect gets saturated again. When that happens you can't remove the Netflix traffic again, so someone else will be forced to pay, who will be smaller than Netflix and therefore their paying the danegeld will buy even less time for everyone else.
- revelation 12y agoHuh? None of that hardware vendor gear ever made it to an actual end customer. It's 2014, and the highest connection you'll get in most places is what, 50 mbit? We had that 20 years ago. Meanwhile, providers pocket the extra money from 20 years of Moores law while nobody on the last mile benefits. It's pretty clear that in the last decades, running an ISP can only have gotten ridiculously easier. And here they are not wanting to provide interconnect bandwidth.
- adrinavarro 12y agoMaybe that's where you live, but on the other half of the developed world we're starting to see 100/200mbit FTTH connections being pretty common in large and medium cities, with such affordable prices that "normal people" have them at home. So that's definitely a big change from the 10mbit DSL lines we had 5 years ago. And the 50mbit domestic connections wasn't at all common 20 years ago (heck, we did have 33.6kbps dial-up and it cost a fortune). In fact, if you say that there haven't been large, fast changes in bandwidth terms then I'd invite you to revisit the following facts: - Smartphones in every pocket, with people consuming 1-2 GB a month. This was unthinkable 7 years ago — and I vividly recall spending a ton of money because I used 1 GB of mobile internet. - 4G in every corner — just a few years ago the top was the 384kbps UMTS - FTTH and DOCSIS 3.0 ubiquitous, mainly to lowered costs for fiber equipment, GPON lowers the cost and tougher fiber cables that can easily be installed in houses - Ten-fold growth in internet provides bandwidth… or more. For example, <10 years ago, OVH's network (one of the largest dedicated server providers in the world) was one of the largest at 300Gbps (I remember the party when they reached out that capacity!). Now they are at +3Tbps and growing. - 1080p and 4K increasingly common — and then a decade ago we were still buying CRT televisions, a far cry from the FHD and higher bitrate contents I could keep going with the list… But the fact is: everywhere you look bandwidth is getting cheaper AND faster, same goes for consumer devices that profit said bandwidth (TVs, smartphones…) and that comes in hand with more, richer content.
- tzs 12y agoSo, on the one hand, we can have Netflix pay to put its boxes inside the major ISPs. On the other hand, we can have Netflix pay to upgrade the interconnects between the major ISPs and the backbone. I don't see how the former is better than the latter from a net neutrality point of view. In both cases, Netflix's humongous traffic is being treated as a special case, and in both cases Netflix is paying to deal with it.
- opendais 12y agoIf you deliver enough traffic to the ISP that you are more than 5% of their network utilization? Ya, you should or at least at a peering location by one of their DCs.
- Karunamon 12y agoYou mean if the ISP's customers request enough traffic to take up any arbitrary percentage of the pipe? Netflix isn't shoving their packets down anyone's throat here, the ISP's whining notwithstanding.
- opendais 12y agoRegardless of your pedantry, I was talking about when it makes sense to start doing something like OpenConnect.
- Karunamon 12y agoIt seems like a minor point, but it really isn't. Worded the first way makes one sound like an ISP attempting to slant perception (like Netflix is doing something wrong), worded the second makes it sound like what's actually happening in the real world (ISP's doing what their customers pay them to do). Please be careful on this, at least until the NN debate is settled. Words are important.
- opendais 12y ago"you deliver ... to ... ISP" Pizza delivers to me. Amazon delivers to me. NewEgg delivers to me. Please provide a counter example that implies what you suggest? All of these imply the first noun delivers something requested by the second noun. I'm uncertain why that is unclear?
- codezero 12y agoSounds like Usenet!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- blasteye 12y agoEveryone keeps citing the netflix openconnect initiative. But did netflix also offer to pay the co-location fees to place their servers in the ISPs datacenters? ISPs already allow businesses to co-locate servers, netflix could have done the same. But it'd have to at least pay colocation fees + bandwidth fees.
- kbenson 12y agoI think you misunderstand what the openconnect initiative does. It both reduces costs for ISPs and speeds delivery of content to end users. The ISPs no longer have to pay for the extra upstream bandwidth and network equipment to handle that load. The amount saved through that vastly dwarfs whatever small colocation fees would be gained if they charged. If Netflix is accounting for a significant portion of the traffic on the internet, then it's accounting for a significant amount of traffic that ISPs must handle, and that's a large amount of their overhead. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix will/does pay some amount to colocate in some instances. The economics in some instances may cause the amount paid to be less than the cost of the CDN traffic.
- opendais 12y ago> ISPs already allow businesses to co-locate servers, netflix could have done the same. But it'd have to at least pay colocation fees + bandwidth fees. You are ignoring the fact it is offering this to save the ISPs money and improve the quality of the service. Its cheaper for the ISPs to put an openconnect box inside their network in the LA area than it is to pay for more networking equipment.
- rhino369 12y agoNot if it means that they have to host everyone's content for free. And if you think they should only host the big guys for free, then how is that not discrimination?
- opendais 12y agoYou are making an invalid analogy, at best. ISPs are expected to provide sufficient capacity at peering points with other networks to provide reasonable quality delivery to their customers. How they handle that without demanding special privileges (as ISPs are in Netflix's case by holding traffic hostage until they are paid more money) is their buisness.
- earlz 12y agoI wish they would've named the ISPs, but I'm sure they'd probably get in trouble for that heh
- slantedview 12y agoIt's the usual suspects - Comcast, Time Warner, etc.
- function_seven 12y agoThis article limited itself to phone companies. The three companies are most likely Verizon, AT&T, and CenturyLink
- rosser 12y agoNever let facts get in the way of a good old-fashioned hate-on.
- wmf 12y agoLEC 2 is probably AT&T. (With congestion like that, I guess I won't bother to sign up for "GigaPower".) Verizon is LEC 1 or 3 and I'm not sure who the other LEC is.
- comex 12y agoEDIT: Disregard this I'm dumb Comcast? Comcast and Verizon were the big two Netflix signed deals with.
- function_seven 12y agoIt's probably CenturyLink, which is the 3rd largest LEC behind AT&T and Verizon. (Comcast isn't classified as a Local Exchange Carrier, it a cable operator.)
- pktgen 12y ago
- jcavin 12y agoWhen is a high tech Silicon Valley company going to pop up providing high internet speeds through wifi or data signal? Would be a booming startup for sure. Very surprised google has not taken this one on. I hate being forced to have only once choice for internet (cox). You know that there is not much of incentive for them to do a good job when they have no competition!!!!
- LandoCalrissian 12y agoA great idea to be sure, but I think the capital costs at the beginning would be really tough. If they are going to make their own data network they at least need to buy spectrum, which is insanely expensive (high millions to low billions).
- jessaustin 12y agoThe requirement to buy spectrum is what has kept the lid on radio network innovation. With appropriate technology, spectrum would not need to be ransomed by the agency that the incumbents own. We've seen rapid progress at 2.4 and 5 ghz, the unlicensed (i.e. free) nature of which may be the single greatest legacy of the microwave oven. If only the FCC would quit dragging its feet on white spaces and similar radio tech possibilities, and do what it promised to do a decade ago, we'd soon see similar progress at frequencies that accommodate longer ranges. This would create serious competitors to the broadband monopolists.
- rhino369 12y agoYou've seen rapid progress at 2.4gh and 5ghz because the FCC keeps power limits really low. If I were allowed to blast my signal all over my town, we'd all be interfering with each other left and right.
- jessaustin 12y agoWe keep hearing that, but when the FCC and similar entities have actually tested it they've found it not to be the case. It's not the 1930s anymore.
- adam-f 12y agoFYI: I'm running a 1920x1200 screen rotated, so with my browser (FF32) as full screen I'm just at the point that the annoying #dd_ajax_float element is shown, but it covers the left edge of the first paragraph.
- guelo 12y agoWhat about class action consumer lawsuit for false advertisement? You are not selling me 1Gbps if you are deliberately congested at the LEC.
- wmf 12y agoOr maybe the FTC could step in. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140608/07411627511/forget-fcc-should-we-be-looking-to-ftc-to-save-open-internet.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140608/07411627511/forge...
- click170 12y agoI think there's a valid argument for them to step in here. This is an issue of customers not being able to use what they purchased, eg The Internet. The water was arguably muddy when they were advertising "Speeds up to X", but now when their own infrastructure is incapable of providing what they're selling and they are fully aware of this, they no longer have a leg (or argument) to stand on.
- blasteye 12y agoI dont see how they can get in trouble for not providing their advertised speeds so long as the speed degradation only occurs outside of their direct network.
- click170 12y agoAre you choosing to ignore the fact that Level3 has offered to pay for the equipment and labor to upgrade their peering point and the ISP has refused, or are you choosing to imagine that the peering point is outside of that ISP's "direct network"? Either way you cut it, the ISP is in the wrong. The peering point is 100% within their control, and Level3 has gone above and beyond to try to ease congestion, the ISP has outright refused. How on earth can you side with the ISP on this - do you work for one?
- jessaustin 12y ago
- rlpb 12y agoCould Netflix start offering discounts to customers of more reasonable ISPs?
- Jgrubb 12y agoThat'd be great, but I only have one choice where I live.
- rayiner 12y agoDo you not have cable, DSL, satellite, and LTE?
- kingatomic 12y agoThe number of choices tends to drop off to one or two (at most) outside of metro areas. I live in a semi-rural area and TWC is the only broadband option. DSL is available but only at speeds barely surpassing dialup. LTE coverage is patchy and (where my house sits) not strong enough to send MMS, much less maintain broadband-level bandwidth.
- fragmede 12y agoCable is generally the primary option of high-speed internet ( > 10 Mbit). DSL (when not of the ATT U-verse variety) barely gets over 10-Mbit in practice, with speeds closer to 3-Mbit being fairly common. Satellite can't really be considered high-speed due to latency. LTE coverage is still poor, and I've yet to see hardware suitable for a home connection for it. (Tethering via a cellphone doesn't count.) So, no. There's really generally one, maybe two choices for home high-speed internet so it's not like customers can vote with their dollars and move to a Netflix-friendly ISP.
- rayiner 12y agoBy your reasoning there are only two mobile platforms: iOS and Android, because the other options aren't as good. Cable, Satellite, and most DSL is plenty fast enough for Netflix.