They're going to keep doing this too until customers start treating internet as a right and utility until then it's just seen as a commodity.
If your local grocery monopoly started rationing out milk to 250ml sold per day there would be protests, investigations, and 10 minute time blocks for it on the nightly news because the people would demand it. The internet just hasn't had this moment yet and it sucks because the momentum for this moment is building but it hasn't reached critical mass. I don't think this moment will happen for another decade at least.
How is Verizon wireless a utility? None of the usual arguments (natural monopoly) apply. And there are four major competitors in the market (more than in say search or social media).
Also, data caps are just price discrimination, which is pervasive even in highly competitive markets (and not necessarily a bad thing): http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/222.pdf. You walk into Home Depot and they charge you twice as much for the "Best" paint rollers versus the "Good" paint rollers. It's not because there isn't competition in the paint roller market, or because it costs twice as much to make one paint roller versus the other.
Wireless does have some features of a natural monopoly. In order to compete with Verizon Wireless, you need access to a finite amount of wireless spectrum. The FCC auctions off exclusive access to the wireless spectrum, so you can't just start competing with Verizon on the same spectrum.
This is pretty similar to how you can't just freely add your own fiber to a utility pole, or freely build your own utility poles.
That's right - wireless isn't a natural monopoly, but it is a natural oligopoly. Oligopolies tend to be better for consumers than monopolies, but still not great, because the firms involved only have to deal with a few competitors and tend to develop cartel characteristics.
Oligopolies also appear to be the future of the American economy, with new business formation on the decline and wealth + market share concentrating under the few largest players in many industries.
So perhaps the discussion we should be having is, should we do something about oligopolies, and what? We already have antitrust laws, are they adequate? Are they being enforced?
How is it "natural" when it's a governmental allocation? The point of the expression "natural monopoly" was to distinguish them for State-granted monopolies like those.
Sure, but you can buy alternative methods of accessing the internet to keep this metaphor going. They're expensive and aren't as convenient but that's true of having to go to the store to buy bottles of water as well.
Let me introduce you to the story of hurricane Sandy. Verizon doesn't want to rebuild its union encumbered wireline network so they wanted to switch people over to local wireless.
Now you can't have it both ways. Either you are a utility or you are not. Having competition doesn't mean you're no longer a utility.
Price discrimination doesn't work under perfect competition (see: law of one price).
Insofar as it might work for Home Depot, it may be due to local monopoly (competitor is not co-located) and asymmetric information (customers assume a bigger quality difference than is true). However in my experience, the price of premium tools/supplies often does reflect higher production cost these days.
It sounds like law of one price only refers to goods where there is an arbitrage opportunity. If the goods have different intrinsic values, then they would have different prices, which I believe is what the original comment is arguing.
Price discrimination is when a producer charges different customers different prices for the same good. So yes, price discrimination is implicitly an arbitrage opportunity - assuming there is competition.
Truly different goods don't have the same implications for consumer and producer surplus. That's not to say that price discrimination can't be disguised.
How often do people rely on wireless phones compared to landlines? Do you use the internet more than a landline phone? The landline phone system is a utility, but Verizon wireless shouldn't be?
Capping certain websites is not price discrimination, it's website discrimination; Verizon promises a certain amount of GB per month on our phones, and capping certain websites for me when I'm still under my monthly data limit has nothing to do with my data limit and everything to do with discriminating against those websites to my and their detriment.
If you're fine with corporations turning the playing field into an uphill slant against you based on their preferences regardless of yours, then please argue for them capping limiting certain completely-legal websites they don't want to treat fairly.
Even if you do accept variable pricing based on use, the data cap strategy doesn't make sense. Why not just charge more when the network is stressed? At least consumers could be incentivized to make efficient use of the network.
Surge pricing works for Uber/Lyft--both from a user experience and possible legal point of view--because the customer can see the rate before pulling the trigger. A cellular carrier has no way to provide that feedback.
>A cellular carrier has no way to provide that feedback.
There's definitely no way they could write a simple app to provide this info, and it would be crazy for them to white-list it so it didn't count against bandwidth usage :)
Pull that paint roller out of your pocket and paint the wall next to you, then go to the restroom and pull it out again to paint over the graffiti on the stall wall. Then walk your dog and use it to paint the neighbors houses...
Never gunna happen. When do you need a paint roller? About once every 5 years on average, vs WIRELESS connectivity once every 5 minutes on average.
> If your local grocery monopoly started rationing out milk to 250ml sold per day there would be protests
Not quite.. if they rationed milk to 250mL, but then let you buy an extra 25mL for what the first 250mL costs. They're not only creating scarcity, but then creating a market to profit from this artificial situation.
Don't airlines do this too? You can buy the first ten tickets on a given plane for the same price that you would pay for the very last available ticket. Don't see anyone getting lynched in that industry.
Except if bandwidth were legitimately scarce ISPs would be trying to incentivize the use of bandwidth at low times and disincentivize its use when congested. Power companies can and do do this - the price per kwh can be much cheaper at night or in the morning than by day or evening when there is less peak load on the system.
Nowhere are IPSs offering "3mbps from 5-10 and 30mbps the rest of the day" plans. Because the cost to improve total network bandwidth is almost nothing, relative to the last mile costs. Every ISP could easily meet the full rated line bandwidth of every residential connection they have within their current margins without issue. They don't, because they have no competitive pressure to actually do anything than make sure the current service works. They have no competitors besides maybe cellular providers, who are already paying them in business contracts to attach towers to the backbone.
A decade ago, my (European) ISP had even more complex rules: it was unmettered during the night, but during the day it had different caps for International, National and In-ISP traffic.
Our (rural wireless ISP) does something along these lines ... data between something like 1am and 7am does not count towards the monthly data cap.
At (peak) times they actively traffic shape and penalize the heaviest users. It sucks, but I don't see people willing to pay the $$$ to upgrade infrastructure faster.
Aggregate bandwidth or rate is limited and is what costs money to increase but that's not what ISPs are charging for.
Do you think that everyone gets the aggregate rate they pay for? Do you think any ISP has capacity to deliver everyone their aggregate rate simultaneously? Does the combined bandwidth consumption of all customers over a given billing cycle approach the maximum theoretical bandwidth of the ISP? No, no, and no.
ISPs are charging for bandwidth like it's a commodity you buy at the store but if you buy a bag of rice at the store, the store doesn't take your left over rice at the end of the month and expect you to buy more. ISPs do though...
Paying for transfer isn't the same as paying for bandwidth. If I download something in the middle of the night vs at peak usage, it's the same transfer billing, but one utilizes bandwidth that isn't scarce and one does.
ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology.
Make no mistake, the technical side of this has only gotten cheaper. That's before you consider the "investment" necessary to resolve the vast majority of Netflix bandwidth issues is connecting a cable from one router to another in a CIX.
Of course when you do that it becomes blatantly obvious that ISPs have oversold and overbooked capacity dramatically as we get closer and closer to the last mile to the customer. Now they don't want to pay up to actually provide what they have sold.
> ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology.
On one hand they don't have to compete in many place so ISPs are close to being a monopoly so they can keep charging $80 for < 1Mpbs if they want.
At the same time Moore iterations don't dig trenches and lay fiber between cities. Also frequency spectrum doesn't grow with Moore's law either.And in many instances it is still mostly a shared resource. Cable companies usually have groups of houses share the upstream bandwidth.
Of course none of that ever makes it to the consumer, investment is stagnant or down and all this tech ends up achieving is accommodating higher Internet penetration (and customer counts).
All this cable infrastructure previously wasted on free to air crap has turned into a veritable gold mine with no further investment and tech again making up for all the growth so you don't have to spend any.
Sure, Moore isn't helping dig trenches but he sure has been tremendously helpful in turning that ole shitty copper wiring financed by Uncle Sam into a lot of green.
This is completely ignorant on two fronts. First, the neither POTS nor cable was "financed by Uncle Sam." Second, new headend equipment isn't free, and DOCSIS upgrades have gone hand-in-hand with node splits and pushing fiber deeper into the HFC network.
> ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology.
On what planet? I did a speedtest.net run the other day on LTE and got 150 Mbps down/20 Mbps up near a strip mall in exurban Maryland. That network did not come cheap.
The effective bandwidth of that network even on some unobtanium 50 GB plan is <1 Mbps and that's before we get into latency and packet loss discussions.
That's like saying the "effective speed" of a 777 is 45 mph because that's the maximum average speed over a month accounting for refueling and servicing. Or that the "effective battery life" of a MacBook Pro is 70 minutes because that's how long you can run it at full tilt. It completely ignores the typical customer use case.
I feel nerdsniped! The utilization rate of a major airline 777 is ~12 hours per day. If the ORD-LAS flight I took today is representative, average in-transit speed is 331mph, so the average speed of a jetliner isn't 45mph, but rather... 165mph?
Hmm, I think that figure could be off by a decent amount though depending on what exactly is measured by "utilization". Taxiing, for example, or sitting at the gate with an hour delay.
I think the best way to figure this out is to conduct a little study: set up a script to monitor a representative sample of planes on FlightAware for a while.
Taxiing is included in utilization time, but also in my average transit time (I just took the nautical distance traveled and divided it by the actual transit time).
Moore's law has not held for long-haul bandwidth for quite some time. Moore's law is for semiconductors and that has little to do with signal efficiency.
If we don't stop this kind of behavior now, it'll become industrialized and infrastuctures will be built on top of it that will become very disruptive to dismantle once we realize how much were getting screwed.
We rely on the internet so much for our lives and jobs and economy and banking that it should be a utility and a right, hell, we use the internet more than our phones, and cell phones are more ubiquitous and relied upon than landlines by a longshot!
Where is there a local grocery monopoly? I grew up in just about the most rural part of WV and we had several grocery options to choose from within a reasonable area.
Does that still hold true now? When I lived in Buckhannon, WV, our local "grocer" was a Walmart, and you needed to drive 15 mins on the interstate to get to it.
Monopolies are not only formed of one company, they can be a collusion of companies so long as the barrier to entering the market and competing with the colluders is impossibly high.
Considering the barrier to entry to becoming a cellular operator is owning spectrum, that is one of the most impossibly high barriers to usurp. Nobody has to sell you any, the owners can set whatever price they want, and there are no mechanisms to mitigate this state-created impossible to overcome monopoly on light.
Landline access, by comparison, is macro-harder and micro-easier. It is more likely you can get easement rights to run fiber on a given street than to get the right to use wavelengths of EM, but trying to get easement in an entire city can be similarly impossible.
Ah yes, a single example is more than enough to override the mountains of evidence that the majority of Americans only have a single choice of internet provider.
Power is setup the same way in some states, where multiple companies share the wires. This is only because the government demands the wires be shared fairly. Its an interesting arrangement, essentially a regulated monopoly called a utility.
But if you're in a longer term contract you're out of luck for a while. If they are allowed to change the service then they must allow customers to switch providers without exit fee.
Your analogy would be better with fast food, ice cream or candy than with milk. Nobody needs Netflix and ironically the society would probably be better off if people did not waste so much time with their eyes glued to their screens.
I see your point but as long as it's services like Netflix I hope people will not claim it as a right.
I think you misunderstood the OP's post. He is saying that the people have a right to access the internet as a utility,
regardless of the destination address, be it Netflix or Google. Just like I should have the right to choose which food I eat, be it milk, or as you suggest, candy or fast food.
Netflix in particular is indeed not a right, and in fact Netflix charges a monthly subscription that you may or may not be able to afford. But if I pay for Netflix, I should have a right to access it, or any service I want, via my "chosen" internet service provider.
Anyway I'm making this post because I think I have a better version of the milk analogy, so here goes...
The main problem with the milk analogy is how the transactions are done. I pay the grocery store a fee for access to walk in and out of the market with a certain weight of groceries per second. Separately I pay the milk provider for all-you-can-drink access to milk.
(Alternatively, you can imagine the grocery store is one of those stores in a mall that you have to walk through to get to the rest of the mall, but I'm forced to walk in and out through their front door).
In this analogy, the grocery store should have no right to limit the amount of milk I can carry through their market, while claiming to offer access to any food by weight.
Just because they created the content doesn't mean they have ownership of all IP involved. Music especially can be a PITA, see the videogame Alan Wake being unsellable because the licensing for the music used in the game ran out.
I have heard this was a problem for Top Gear. They'd include a music clip like The A Team jingle in a clip because the BBC would have a licence to broadcast that. And when they want to show that episode outside the UK, they need to patch the show to use different music instead that they have a licence to.
That's very true. I can't stream one of my favorite shows, Northern Exposure, because of the music licensing. They even had to change some music in order to release the DVDs. http://actsofvolition.com/2005/03/musiclicensing/
> Its theme song is "Love and Marriage" by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Frank Sinatra from the 1955 television production Our Town.
...
> The Sony DVD box sets from season 3 onward do not feature the original "Love and Marriage" theme song in the opening sequence. This was done because Sony was unable to obtain the licensing rights to the song for later sets. Despite this, the end credits on the DVDs for season 3 still include a credit for "Love and Marriage."
That's question to the music authors. They probably decided to sell the licensing rights to an "evil" media company.
Here I stand on "right to burn" author's side. They can do whatever they want with their music, like putting a trillion dollar price on it, or selling it to an evil publisher. It's authors's nonprescribable right. If you don't like it -- feel free to write your own music.
That game makers should have probably make a modification to the game to replace original music with something else.
It seems unwise of the game maker to purchase a music license that expires. Though, I suspect it was a calculated risk, and that they believed potential sales this late after release weren't worth paying more for. Alan Wake was released seven years ago.
I used to do work re-writing music for tv shows when they went to syndication in other countries. I did it in hopes that it would lead to bigger gigs but that was naive/silly in hindsight. It's probably been 10 years since I did one of those gigs, but I'm sure others are out there still doing it for music, movies and games.
It doesn't mean they should block VPNs since it's effectively a discriminatory (bordering on xenophobic) practice, same as rejecting foreigners in a physical store.
I think more likely by local distributors, who have too much leverage on said content providers. Local distribution is often at odds with global Internet one.
The content providers don't have a product to sell to local distributors if they don't have significant control over online distribution, so it's not like they'd be complaining if that were the case.
> The content providers don't have a product to sell to local distributors if they don't have significant control over online distribution
Why so? It only happens in unhealthy monopolized markets. In healthy competitive markets, content providers should be independent from distributors. They create something (films for instance) and distribute them as widely as possible (i.e. through all distributors), to maximize reach and in turn profit. That would include global unrestricted distribution. But when market is monopolized and there are cartels, all that becomes totally messed up and restrictions pop up all over the place.
This isn't a thing that's unique to digital content - it's a common business arrangement for some company to be allowed to be a sole distributor for a product in a market. It reduces risk for the distributor, meaning that they're able to give the product manufacturer a bigger cut.
Because it's not worth the effort to allow VPNs, but only allow content that's available globally since they can't figure out where the traffic really originates?
Honestly, if you're at the point where you're circumventing region locking to access Netflix, you should just pirate it. You're violating copyright either way.
> Honestly, if you're at the point where you're circumventing region locking to access Netflix, you should just pirate it. You're violating copyright either way.
Many people think it's an ethical requirement to pay artists for their work. So even if they're okay (arguably) violating the law, they might not be okay with just taking the art without paying at all.
I really doubt there is any per-view payout. There would be no point in their constant content churn if they were able (or wanted to) negotiate per-view contracts.
The view numbers surely get used during contract negotiations, though. When a movie's contract runs out and Netflix needs to figure out how much they're willing to bid to renew it, they'll look at the view numbers as one factor in determining how much they're willing to bid.
So even if there isn't a per-view payout, I'm sure the view numbers do contribute to the studio getting more money.
My guess is similar, except that the distributor never actually pays out royalties; instead using Hollywood-accounting to funnel the extra money away into the contract for some captive film-rights service company owned by contacts and cronies.
You'd have to imagine Netflix does more than viewing numbers since it's not ads that makes them money but subscribers to the overall service.
If a show is getting press and social media talk then they probably value that higher since new subscribers is of very high value. Retention is a different problem and not as particular to one show.
Kinda funny how a VPN - a perfectly sensible defensive/precautionary strategy for any purpose - automatically equals something nefarious to these schmoes. I use a VPN all the time, including for the most benign activities... I just leave it on all the time. So it's always weird and I never quite seem to get used to it, when some site like Netflix (not that I use Netflix) singles my IP address out. It always takes me a minute to realize, "Oh they think I'm like sup3r 31337 haxxx0r5 because of the VPN." So to protect their security and prove how trustworthy I am, I have to let down my security. Where's the give & take? It's just weird.
Because more often then not, VPN is used to circumvent something they shouldn't be accessing. Just like torrents are essentially used to download pirated software. I bet you side with pirates, because they are only trying to "test" the software first.
> more often then not, VPN is used to circumvent something they shouldn't be accessing
Who knew Cisco was selling enterprise-grade circumvention devices to the world's corporations? Somebody better notify the MPAA!
More seriously, this type of thinking is pernicious. It demands "consumers" simply "consume" is easy-to-control ways, stay in their lanes and not be suspicious.
There would be no internet if people did that. Don't get me wrong; if people want to be sheep, they can be. I will happily encrypt, tunnel, send weird packets and otherwise play on the net the way it was intended, and anyone with a problem with that can chose not to do business with me if they prefer more tractable clientele who will shut up and eat what they're fed.
And if you were on a corporate VPN you wouldn't get detected and blocked by Netflix.
Let's not be disingenuous here: we're not talking about VPN the technology -- it's impossible to detect if someone's traffic has passed though a VPN. We're talking about public 'VPN Services' which are all but billed for circumventing region locking, ISP throttling, and piracy.
Any kind of content provider would blacklist those endpoints in a second.
Don't believe I was being disingenuous. Read the comment to which I was responding.
I honestly don't care if "content providers" want to block VPNs, as I mentioned in my comment. I much more strongly object to this notion that there's something somehow wrong with users using things like this. The attitude of suspicion directed at anyone who values privacy, wants to learn how things work, or even does somewhat dodgy things sometimes is what I object to. That creates sheep, not citizens, and discourages engagement and learning.
It is up to businesses that depend on artificial scarcity (really, any business, but the legacy copyright industry is being discussed here) to make their businesses work; it isn't my responsibility to make my behavior fit their business model. And if they can't, well, they deserve to die.
You can use most (any?) dedicated server or VPS service as a VPN. I personally just create a SSH tunnel to my server in order to browse any site. You do not need to rent any shady "VPN Service".
> for circumventing region locking, ISP throttling
Circumventing either of these is a fine act.
> and piracy
If they wanted to "pirate" they would not have used Netflix.
You jest, but in fact, MPAA, RIAA, absolutely -have- in the past tried to mandate, lobby, require that enterprise devices do L7 inspection for exactly this reason. They have been more than happy to argue that their member's products should have explicit preventions in third party hardware and software (at the third partys expense, of course) to protect revenue.
And on the flip side, certain firewall providers have marketed similar features to restrictive regimes such as China for the Great Firewall. And not just 'nudge nudge wink wink', but produced marketing material saying "This will help you prevent Falun Gong material being available, and help identify end users trying to access this material."
If netflix found that the majority of VPN connections were to avoid region locking, would you agree that blocking VPNs to enforce region locking makes sense?
As if the system for compensating artists was in any way equitable for them. We're better off with piracy, at least noone is pretending to support them... right now the economics are just downright predatory.
> Many people think it's an ethical requirement to pay artists for their work.
I don't think that way. Everybody deserves a reasonable income, but what these "artists" make is totally insane. The only reason I watch their movies is because with the help of their fans, they have created an artificial monopoly around their persona and I am basically forced to watch them. In a free market with intelligent consumers, these people would not make this much.
They haven't "created an artificial monopoly around their persona". You've just created an artificial justification around your actions.
You're also not "basically forced to watch them".
HBO operates with a margin of 33% (1.7Billion income on 4.9 Billion of revenue). That's healthy, but it isn't "totally insane". There isn't much room to spare before they'd have to sacrifice quality. That'd be quite sad, considering the last decade is generally regarded as a golden age of TV.
I've watched probably more than 8,000 episodes in my life. Not because I wanted to keep up with anything (no external motivation), simply because I was addicted to TV shows (great ones, no regrets).
Now I don't watch TV anymore, or ever so rarely. I've converted the time to reading. It changed my life in dramatically good ways —pun very much intended. There's a time for everything, and quite frankly after some time it's like you've watched it all, you could predict plots and even lines (sometimes it feels as though all authors just get inspired from their peers and much of the writing/directing feels recycled).
There's no "keeping up to date" with pop culture imho, at some point it becomes anthropological. You just overgrow pop culture beyond a certain amount of experience. You could actually produce it for that matter. As it relates to the medium, thus technology, I'm thinking it will evolve once again with VR/AR/etc.
Man, if you think TV and movies is the path to wealth...
Most productions that people watch have somewhere between hundreds and tens of thousands of people working on them. Almost none of them are rich, including most of the producers, directors, and stars of your favorite shows--who are usually locked into contracts they signed before their shows got big, and shows almost never get big. The number of people who will get rich from a given TV show or movie is between zero and almost zero.
99% of show business is folks trying to get by, same as anywhere else. Most people in show business could earn more doing almost anything else. Almost all of them make less than some kid in Silicon Valley building Tinder for Dogs. Programmers at Netflix make far, far more than almost every artist and even many of the financiers, and few here would complain about that.
Movies and TV shows have become much more expensive than in the 80s, and yet I don't think they are much better. It's as if producers are throwing in money instead of creativity. I just can't support that to the extent that they expect me to.
Also, we should all benefit from economies of scale, not just the film producers.
> The only reason I watch their movies is because with the help of their fans, they have created an artificial monopoly around their persona and I am basically forced to watch them.
I have seen enough MST3K to know that an actor that is skilled at the craft is worth quite a bit more than I had previously suspected. You really don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.
In a free market with intelligent consumers, these people would not make quite so much, but it would still be a significant amount.
People that can uphold a willing suspension of disbelief are rare enough, but those who can invoke it are the ones truly deserving of that reasonable income. Those folks aren't always the actors. Sometimes it's the writers, directors, or even the make-up or foley artists. Those people that don't get face time in front of the public might not always get the recognition they deserve, and they're the ones we really want to be paid for their art. But there are a lot of people shaving money off the wad before it gets to them, so putting too much cash in their hands is a small price to pay so that those who deserve it can actually make a living.
By VPNing into content, you aren't really paying artists. You pay Netflix, but Netflix doesn't license the content. So really you are just paying Netflix for stuff you are effectively pirating. Skip the middle man.
You still have to pay for an account. Which is used to pay licensing fees.
The difference is "This dollar came from a user in the US", versus "This dollar came from a user in Eastern Europe (or wherever Netflix isn't available)".
Netflix is still licensing the content, just not for your (real) jurisdiction.
To imply that it's better, then, to just outright pirate the content is... confusing.
> Because it's not worth the effort to allow VPNs, but only allow content that's available globally since they can't figure out where the traffic really originates?
You don't really need to, you just need to say "VPN IP? Okay, you get our own global content only."
Makes me wonder if continued escalation might push more people back towards Blu-Rays. Personally, I prefer just purchasing content anyways. Then if Netflix or whoever has to pull it, I still have it.
I actually just subscribe to Netflix' DVD service. I get films in much higher quality delivered every other day, and I use MakeMKV to copy them onto my computer for when I want to watch them.
Films I can't get there, I just pirate. I'm not interested in installing DRM platforms on my computer to be able to watch very heavily compressed videos if they haven't been yanked offline yet.
A lot of initial work maybe. I rip all of my movies with MakeMKV to a Plex Media Server running on an old 2009 desktop. The setup can take a while, mostly picking through extras on the disk and naming them properly. But the interface is just as slick as Netflix and they have an app for practically every device. And if you don't care about the extras ripping the movies is essentially just pushing a button on MakeMKV.
If you're looking for a weekend project and have a movie/TV collection I'd highly recommend it. The base software is free and it runs on linux (and Windows/OSX).
Honestly, that just seems like a waste of time to me. Regardless of "much" higher quality, at best you're getting 480p from a DVD. I'll take acceptable quality 1080p over great quality 480p every day of the week. What's more, you're still pirating, so why not just download full quality BD rips if you're going to bother?
Sorry for the late response. I get BDs from Netflix, not DVDs (when possible). And I'm already pushing my bandwidth to its limit at home, so it's much easier to get the BDs delivered. Also, for a lot of the films I want to see, I can't find full-quality BD copies anywhere online, only recompressed rips.
Nitpicking intensifies: There is no PAL/NTSC in DVD as they are analog TV color encoding systems, DVD has just resolutions and frame (field) rates. So you can practically have 576p dvds in any region.
> I actually just subscribe to Netflix' DVD service. I get films in much higher quality delivered every other day
That probably doesn't help with things that aren't on DVD/Blu-Ray, such as some of their original content. I don't think you can get Stranger Things in that format yet.
> I'm not interested in installing DRM platforms on my computer
I believe the majority of people don't watch Netflix on their computer, but instead on set-top devices connected to their TV's That may also include hybrid solutions like Chromecast, where something may be installed on a local computer (likely a phone) as well, but those generally already have DRM platforms installed...
Often true, though I know a lot of people who don't own a TV and just watch Netflix on their laptops, even when watching with a large group. I personally have a dedicated Chromebox running LibreELEC with Kodi plugged into my projector, though I also sometimes television on my laptop when I don't want to set everything up.
Unfortunately, their back catalog is getting worse and worse. If it weren't for ripping what they do still have for later watching I probably would. But I've started thinking of just dropping their DVD service and putting the money toward purchases, paid streaming, and Redbox.
If I wanted to buy the BluRays of all the series I've watched on Netflix it would be way too costly. Buying the release day cost for a new seasons BluRay is even more expensive than the 14.99 or whatever I spend for HD Netflix.
I rarely rewatch seasons after more than 5 years so streaming is usually the best/cost effective option.
> If I wanted to buy the BluRays of all the series I've watched on Netflix it would be way too costly.
Ditto, but almost everything I watch is one-and-done. The series that I like enough to watch more than once are few and far between...so I tend to buy those, whenever they come up in a particularly good sale. Among things I liked enough to buy, the longer it's been since I watched it last, the more likely I am to watch it in the near future. But the longer I wait, the more likely that some contract expires, and it disappears from streaming services.
Plus the physical space cost of storing discs. Even if you remove them from their cases, which is definitely sub-optimal, they take up a decent amount of storage space.
Digital copies on iTunes are priced somewhere near "highway robbery". Because of the lack of retail-style transactions, there's no price competition on digital copies. What's funny, it's usually cheaper to buy the Blu-ray/DVD/digital copy combo packs... even if you just want the digital copy.
Recently I picked up a couple Blu-rays with digital copies for $3 at Fry's. Vudu had one of them on a huuuuuuuge sale this weekend, digital copy only, for $5. The iTunes price is $14.99. Again, I got that $15 iTunes price... for $3 as physical copy with a digital code. And if I wanted, I could sell the disc at a resale shop and get back a buck or two. Buying video on demand online right now makes no financial sense whatsoever.
> Buying video on demand online right now makes no financial sense whatsoever.
That's only if you place little or no value on convenience. I don't spend much money on video, so the occasional $10 or $20 purchase is bearable.
I don't want a physical copy and I certainly don't want to go to Fry's. For me, iTunes / Google Play / Amazon Video all make more sense.
I've actually thought about cancelling cable and buying everything on demand because I think I would save some money. We're paying more than $1000 / year for TV. That would pay for a lot of TV at $2-$3 per episode. We've never made the jump though because of live sports and the stupid blackout rules.
> That's only if you place little or no value on convenience.
I place a fair amount of value on convenience, but I weight it differently than you do. Not having to worry about my player's internet connection is a big plus. Not caring where I bought the video from is also nice. I like that it's a fire-and-forget operation to convert the video into a format that works on virtually every piece of video-oriented electronics that I own.
Bonuses: I get to choose which version of a particular video that I buy (there are often several available), often receive it in multiple formats, can loan it to a friend, and local media tends to have fewer compression artifacts than streamed media.
Of course, all this only applies to things that I care enough to buy separately. I've got Netflix and Amazon. I've got a few hundred games through a combination of half a dozen services, and it's a pain figuring out which service I bought a particular game through, and all that. I'd rather go to my wallet of game DVDs and pull it out (and I do, for services like Humble Bundle and GOG, where I can download the games and put the installers on external media).
> I place a fair amount of value on convenience, but I weight it differently than you do.
That really is the key. I get it that all those things you list go into the choices you make. I value similar things, but differently so my choices are different. There's no right or wrong.
I'd have to be pretty loaded to want to spend 500% the price for minor convenience. ;) Similar major discounts are available via Amazon Prime as well, if you can wait two days for it to arrive.
I just ordered a Blu-Ray copy of Sing off Amazon yesterday, it's $20 on iTunes and $15 on Amazon for the Blu-Ray/DVD/Digital product. Considering I can keep a high-quality archival copy of the movie in a box and still get a code I can plop into iTunes, though I'll just rip the disc into my Plex library anyway, it's a much better deal.
My list of things I want to watch is longer than I'll ever have time for. Because I'm not rewatching movies, building up a library doesn't make a whole lot of sense for me nor do I want more boxes and discs to be the caretaker of. If I can rent or buy a stream, I'm happy. I don't do it all that often, so the cost isn't really a factor.
Totally reasonable, there's a reason why Redbox/Netflix/iTunes/Amazon/Sony/etc. all offer rentals and I've used them all at one point. If you can't ever see yourself re-watching a movie or only doing so infrequently rentals can make a lot of sense.
I'm a bit of a digital packrat who likes to collect media, but a large chunk of my present movie collection is stuff for my daughter who wants to rewatch the same movie constantly so purchasing content to keep is the way I go 99% of the time.
I'm moving towards pulling the plug in terms of my money -- my subscription -- going to pay for such behavior. I've come to believe it's being used more against me (locking things down, walled gardens, artificial limits to access, culture, knowledge, and creation -- building on what's come before), than it is being used to my benefit (e.g. here, entertainment -- which with the ever increasingly balkanized for-pay libraries, is becoming more limited and more expensive).
So, like stopping paying AT&T to essentially lobby against better connectivity in my neighborhood, it's time for my financial support -- playing "by the rules" -- to these big IP rent-seekers, to stop.
P.S. I'm the guy who actually buys CD's after a show. Will cough up bucks for funding. I'm not opposed to paying for what I get, in reasonable -- even generous -- measure. However, I no longer feel that's what's going on, here.
> And Netflix is blocking VPN's. The original reason was it didn't have licenses for certain regions, but then what of original content?
This is a good point, but note that a bunch of the special "Netflix" content is actually licensed from another country. Also some of "their" content is stuff funded in concert with others, who will have retained certain restrictions (bogusly called "rights" in legalese)
So the total amount of material Netflix owns free and clear probably isn't big enough for them to bother with special-casing. If it were it would be in their interest to do so as a way of putting pressure on others.
It's a technology issue. The VPN blocking is done at a different layer than the content. It doesn't know what you're watching, so it can't allow VPN for some content and not others.
I'd swear Verizon FIOS is throttling YouTube recently for me, the quality is getting worse and worse. Constant buffering even at 720p. Forget 4K these days, which used to be perfectly fine a year ago. With the current FCC I'm afraid it's just going to get worse.
In NYC Verizon has an issue where they haven't purchased enough bandwidth into NYC from the Youtube servers.
I just turn on my VPN (VyperVPN) which has great bandwidth to the YouTube servers and I get crystal clear 4K streaming. It's kind of pathetic. I don't think they are deliberately throttling, its just that Verizon is being cheap and there is plenty of local bandwidth between VyperVPN's servers and my home, but not enough bandwidth between YouTube's servers and FIOS network in NYC.
You've got that backwards. Verizon is trying to extort Google by getting them to pay for interconnects and Google wants nothing to do with it. It's the exact same thing that was going on with Comcast and Netflix. It's complete and utter garbage that they continually double dip, and is the EXACT reason ISPs shouldn't be allowed to own ANY content. It's a direct conflict of interest.
Google should instead throw a couple more billions at the SpaceX mesh Internet satellite project, bypassing these asshats completely once and for all. I'd switch in a heartbeat, even if it was a bit more expensive.
The proposed SpaceX satellite network is in low earth orbit unlike traditional satellite Internet, so it should provide decent latencies (25ms vs 600+ms):
Unlikely. Even if Google were to go hard into the video space (unlikely but not impossible), they still wouldn't benefit from throttling/capping. It would just give users a reason to go back to their original providers. Furthermore we've already seen the governmental backlash when facebook tried similar in developing nations.
*I should clarify when I say "the video space" I mean original AAA content like Netflix is doing. I could be underestimating them but that's a LONG way from their market sweet spot.
If only there were a legal solution for such problems, something that any sane person would consider obvious. We could solve it by tomorrow 6pm, without a single satellite launch.
Verizon is trying to extort Google by getting them to pay for interconnects and Google wants nothing to do with it.
I don't think that's right.
At its most basic, an interconnection agreement says “You carry some traffic for me, in return for which I’ll do something—either carry traffic for you, or pay you, or some combination of the two.”
With Netflix and Google, both were basically saying, "we're not going to pay you (Comcast/Verizon) for access to your network, because we're important enough that we shouldn't have to." They don't have their own ISP networks to exchange traffic at the same rate, all they have is their services, so they don't have anything to offer the ISP in return.
So it's disingenuous to say that service providers (Google, Netflix), are extorting anyone. They don't see themselves as ISPs, but they are setting up their own interconnects to provide faster access to customers, so they assume they are exempt from what were traditionally informal interconnect rules.
> So it's disingenuous to say that service providers (Google, Netflix), are extorting anyone.
I don't think anyone was saying that.
> With Netflix and Google, both were basically saying, "we're not going to pay you (Comcast/Verizon) for access to your network, because we're important enough that we shouldn't have to." They don't have their own ISP networks to exchange traffic at the same rate, all they have is their services, so they don't have anything to offer the ISP in return.
Generally peering agreements work on total bandwidth and generally you try to make it as balanced as possible, so there's no cost to either side, as traffic may traverse your network from the peer but not terminate there (it continues through another peer), and that's just a load you bear, but the other side has the same risk.
For an end service peering, that's not really as much of a risk, to my knowledge, so what you have is purely a win-win, where Netflix delivers content directly to your network so it's quicker, and you aren't using up peer bandwidth and backbone connections to serve that same content. In any market where Comcast/Verizon didn't have near monopolies over large areas, Netflix could easily charge for this access given their size and ubiquity. That some large ISPs are actually throttling the content only highlights the perverse incentives at play.
That's somewhat simplistic. Peering that's somewhat one-sided can have fees built into one side. Still, getting a large chunk of your content quicker and without overloading your other peers or upstreams means that Netflix and the like should have the power here, and if they desired could charge for this better access (it is one-sided, as mentioned before). It's totally backwards that Comcast/Verizon would be throttling them instead, and is only possible because they don't really compete in a fully open market.
And yet ISPs happily provide vastly asymmetric pipes to the end user, ergo they're _physically incapable_ of playing the peering game in fair sense of the word either.
But they still want to enforce those "agreements"... when it suits them.
If Google was paying Verizon for transit, and you were paying them for transit, that wouldn't be double dipping. Why should one side of the transaction be the only ones paying for a network that connects both parties?
In a way, they used to. Peering agreements between large networks allow unbilled traffic from either party with the understanding that both would be serving and consuming similar amounts of traffic. With the emergence of the network neutrality debate ISPs have claimed that peering agreements are not appropriate because content providers "send" more traffic than they receive. This of course ignores the fact that their customers are requesting the traffic and their whole business model is designed on asymetric traffic.
Peering disputes have always been when the party wanting to peer had an unbalanced traffic ratio, and the other party didn't want to peer (possibly for other reasons), and they started much earlier than the network neutrality debates.
The recent changes are more around who is involved in the peering disputes. It used to be smaller ISPs trying to get peering with larger ISPs, such as Cogent trying to get peering with [name your favorite, or PSINet vs Cable and Wireless; and most often the ISP refusing to peer didn't have residential customers themselves. Now it's more often the content providers themselves trying to peer with the residential isps directly. A major factor here is the huge consolidation of residential ISPs, but also the consolidation of content providers.
Consolidation of residential ISPs means each ISP is big enough to run their own backbone, and as a result they can credibly have strict peering requirements. Smaller, regional ISPs will tend to want to peer, because otherwise the traffic will come through on paid transit connections. Large ISPs may not care; because of their size, they may not be paying anyone for transit, and because of the common asymmetric nature of residential connections, there's not likely to be many networks where the large ISP is on the wrong side of the ratio.
If I were one of these content providers, I would spend a lot more time messing with the large ISPs. Figure out how to make the traffic cost them money, so they'll want to peer. Provide transit to data backup services to try to make the ratios less unbalanced. Run campaigns suggesting that residential ISPs should be paying their customers, given that the traffic is unbalanced. Etc.
> Peering disputes have always been when the party wanting to peer had an unbalanced traffic ratio, and the other party didn't want to peer (possibly for other reasons), and they started much earlier than the network neutrality debates.
The recent changes are more around who is involved in the peering disputes. It used to be smaller ISPs trying to get peering with larger ISPs, such as Cogent trying to get peering with [name your favorite, or PSINet vs Cable and Wireless; and most often the ISP refusing to peer didn't have residential customers themselves. Now it's more often the content providers themselves trying to peer with the residential isps directly. A major factor here is the huge consolidation of residential ISPs, but also the consolidation of content providers.
> Consolidation of residential ISPs means each ISP is big enough to run their own backbone, and as a result they can credibly have strict peering requirements. Smaller, regional ISPs will tend to want to peer, because otherwise the traffic will come through on paid transit connections. Large ISPs may not care; because of their size, they may not be paying anyone for transit, and because of the common asymmetric nature of residential connections, there's not likely to be many networks where the large ISP is on the wrong side of the ratio.
> If I were one of these content providers, I would spend a lot more time messing with the large ISPs. Figure out how to make the traffic cost them money, so they'll want to peer. Provide transit to data backup services to try to make the ratios less unbalanced. Run campaigns suggesting that residential ISPs should be paying their customers, given that the traffic is unbalanced. Etc.
I can upload all my files to Google Drive and all my photos and videos to Google Photos if you think it helps the ratio...
I've long thought the Netflix app should simply upload random noise, to "balance out" the tremendous download/upload difference with which some poor ISPs struggle so.
> This of course ignores the fact that their customers are requesting the traffic and their whole business model is designed on asymetric traffic.
Exactly. If the Internet worked on this model—where the recipient of the net imbalance was paid money for it—I'd get a check from Verizon each month instead of a bill!
My understanding is that its not an issue of the cost to "upgrade" the interconnection infrastructure. That cost is likely negligible. What's happening is that VZ is refusing to do it, and allowing service to degrade, unless Google pays X. So yeah, basically extortion. Google has already paid for bandwidth, and this is traffic that VZ's paying customers are requesting.
the router ports on both sides, let's say you are using 4 ports across 4 fully loaded nexus 9508 (let's call those $500k per incl. optics, so $2M / 384 x 4 ports / 36 months = $600/port/month x 4 = $2400/4-ports/month)
Depending on how the connection between the two worked or was paid for, it could be $1000-$20000 for 2 pairs of fiber per month depending on distance. Let's take a middle of the road $10k average cost.
So for 10Gbps peak redundant capacity, you are at $12,400 per month. Netflix 4k stream is about 16 megabits, so you can fit 625 4k streams in $12,400 of cross-connect capacity. If you don't share costs, that's about $20 per user to support Netflix's business model that people seem to think it's Comcast's responsibility to pay. That's not even considering Comcast's last mile distribution cost or paying any salaries.
Streaming video services soak up a lot of network resources and putting all of the cost on ISPs is going to increase your ISP's cost and price. How many low-income families do you think would lose broadband if it went from $50/mo to $100/mo?
1) The peering happens in Internet exchanges, there's no way a peering connection in an Internet Exchange costs 1000$, your range is simply ridiculous. Usually, it is fixed cost 1K or less depending on the locations of the router
2) Yes, you have to pay for bandwidth between the Exchange and your users. But guess what? That's what your users are paying for.
3) Not everyone stream movie in 4K at the same time. So you could optimize your bandwidth usage out of the exchanges. It is called "multiplexing".
Yes, the rest of the chain could be expensive, but that's what your clients are paying for. Net neutrality is about transparency. I have no problem in understanding that my 40$ connection will perform differently than an 80$ one. But you should compete in giving me the best service (where best is best for me, not universally) at the lowest price point in a way I could easily compare prices.
The problem, with my statement, is that implies Broadband Internet is a commoditized service. And that is all the battle about Net Neutrality, ISP doesn't want to act like commodities, they don't want to be your P&G or your ConEd. They don't have the structure to compete and instead of changing for the new market structure, they are fighting back. What they are doing is rent seeking. Good for them, bad for the economy...
I acknowledge that the costs are ballpark and not exact, but I was responding to a post that called the costs "negligible" - I was simply trying to quantify a slice of the cost and demonstrate that it can be a significant fraction of your bill. Of course your bill ALSO pays for the last mile infrastructure and connectivity to the hundreds of thousands of other routes carried on the internet. But it's clarifying to see that the data interchange component, which people are calling "negligible" actually is a significant portion of the cost.
My numbers have been called ridiculous by a couple of people now but they are based in personal experience, albeit a few years old, and nobody has posted any other cost breakdowns that demonstrate an understanding of the industry and the costs involved, just "those numbers seem really high!"
The difference between bandwidth and power is that data is NOT a commodity like power is, power is fungible and can be drawn and combined from a number of sources to fulfill the demand, but the dilemma with ISP bandwidth is that in order to satisfy customers the ISP must ensure adequate bandwidth to each individual content provider, and this is a much harder problem.
The problem is your numbers are terribly wrong in multiple ways. I don't think people have mentioned that not every subscriber is online simultaneously or that most are still watching 1080p.
Your argument is at least as wrong as mine, though, while you seek to reduce the numbers, you are not also seeking to increase the scope of the cost from JUST the hardware depreciation and monthly fiber cost of the interconnect to the actual cost of the interconnect. The point is, it's not even close to "negligible"
Not to mention if you're saturating a 10gbps connection, Netflix will throw as many OpenConnect appliances at you as you'd like. Yes, they're not "free" when you factor in racking, etc, but local bandwidth is cheaper than peering, even factoring in your valid comments here.
Those numbers aren't even close to accurate. A fully loaded nexus 9508 (assuming the 10Gbe ports you listed) is ~300k LIST. I'd be shocked if a company that orders as much as Verizon does would pay even half of that.
As for the "distance" - they are sitting next to each other in a data-center. The distance is likely measured in tens of feet and the cost is likely a fixed cost of a couple hundred dollars. The optics on either end if they aren't close enough for twinax would add a couple more grand.
It's also ridiculous to use 36 months as your payoff date, they are running equipment a heck of a lot longer than that. The line cards and supervisor modules might get swapped out, but I'm willing to bet Verizon keeps their chassis level switches for 7-10 years on average.
So now you're at about 4$ per user to support Netflix traffic.
Now throw in some standard oversubscription math, and you're at 40¢ per user. 625 simultaneous streams can probably serve roughly 6,250 customers, given that half the customers don't use Netflix, and the half that do, use it at different times of the day.
Also the proportion of customers who needs 4k as opposed to 1080p is negligible. Most consumers don't even have equipment capable of displaying 4k content.
Netflix in 1080p uses 4.22Mbps or sometimes 7.15Mbps, so we're now at 15¢ per user.
It's not Comcast's responsibility to support someone else's business model.
It's also not Netflix's responsibility to support Comcast's business model if they can't afford to provide bandwidth that customers desire and are allowed.
It's Comcast's responsibility to support their advertised usage sufficiently. If they say that they support 100mbps then I should be able to get 100mbps from wherever I like. They're going to have to pay for that uplink somewhere, whether it's Netflix or Google or Zayo or Level3 or whoever.
I agree, this is the crux of the argument. Broadband ISPs have been guilty of this for some time. Mobile players are generally getting a little more leeway by capping total transfer per month and not talking about rates as much. And T-mobile's "Binge On" product has been mostly hailed as pro-consumer, even though it does shape video down to SD bitrates and is a direct violation of the "paid prioritization" tenet of net neutrality as described in FCC's directive.
That's assuming that we're talking a connection streaming a video from Netflix's CDN to the customer's device. When in reality, Netflix offered to put a CDN cache box in Comcast's DC which would largely reduce the problem, Comcast turned them down.
That, alone, tells me that this is not a congestion or a cost problem, it is a bull-headedness for the purpose of rent seeking problem.
And as to the "last mile" costs, those are what Comcast subscribers are paying Comcast for. They act like this traffic is unsolicited noise, when in reality it's why they're being paid anything by anyone. I say don't charge people for x megabits down if you don't intend on them using it.
My understanding is that Comcast offered Netflix commercially reasonable terms for colo and cross-connect and Netflix opted for public interconnect via an exchange, which alleviated the bandwidth constraints caused by Cogent taking Netflix's money and then refusing to comply with their cost-sharing peering agreement with Comcast. Calling the Netflix CDN boxes "free" is totally misleading because Comcast would still need to pay for the router ports to carry the traffic internally, space & power, and management assistance. That deal works for a small ISP that pays for most of its bandwidth but not a large ISP that uses significant amounts of shared-cost peering. If Comcast is required to host those boxes "for free" what of every other CDN that they previously had agreements with?
I agree that Comcast marketing "up to X megabits" is misleading and those chickens have come home to roost with people thinking that their last mile means they should get that speed to every point on the Internet 24 hours a day. I have been negotiating commercial bandwidth agreements for years and even from a tier 1 you can't get that guarantee in a contract.
Calling the Netflix CDN boxes "free" is totally misleading because Comcast would still need to pay for the router ports to carry the traffic internally, space & power, and management assistance.
Which is still less than the cost of doing a proper interconnect - they chose instead to let it degrade and play semantic games instead. It also puts the lie to their complaint that it was ever about congestion. The correct response to people requesting a lot of traffic from X is to ensure that traffic is delivered efficiently. That is why their customers pay them.
My ISP keeps on trying to get me to upgrade to "up to" 100 Mbps service. What in the world do I need that kind of bandwidth for except to stream videos? Shouldn't they disclose that if I upgrade I can't actually use the bandwidth unless the video provider pays them too?
Eh, that's getting less and less of an issue. My nominal 105/20 internet connection from Comcast Business rarely pushes less than 80mbps download speeds, and from any major provider, CDN, regularly hits and sustains 120mbps.
That's not $20/user to support Netflix's business model, that's $20/user to support Comcast's customers' usage model.
If you think this is unfair, then the answer is to get rid of bullshit "unlimited [but not really]" connections and charge people based on what they use. Stop making low-impact users subsidize people who stream HD movies 24/7.
> that people seem to think it's Comcast's responsibility to pay
Funny, the upwards of $50 to $200 I pay Comcast per month should go somewhat to that.
Besides, how many users are streaming 4K content, on what little 4K content Netflix has (I'm going to wager that we're looking at about 5% or less).
At 5mbps for 1080p, peak, now we're at 2,000 users, and $6/month.
Is it really that onerous for most users of Comcast to expect that $6 of their say $60/mo cable bill goes to Netflix?
I'm also not sure why you're populating 4 ports and then only talking about 1 10Gbps connection, when in reality (though I'm no expert), that's probably 4 10Gbps connections. Accounting for the cost of 4 populated running ports and then only talking about the capacity of 1 of those ports when calculating cost/megabit seems misleading.
Back in reality the huge ISP's provide network services at a huge premium and make a very substantial profit. If we cared about providing affordable service to low income families we would let municipalities sell access to existing fiber networks not trying to prop up an industry providing bad service at monopoly prices.
Your numbers are like historical fiction based on reality but not an accurate portrayal. Do you work for verizon or comcast?
Source your numbers. Most specifically that netflix which can provide the entirety of its service for 10 per subscriber actually costs providers $20 per subscriber.
You don't pay "for the bandwidth", you pay for a link between two ISPs (Google and Verizon). The bill between then should be split, otherwise the traffic will have to pass through somewhere else, and that will cause congestion problems.
Google has most certainly paid for bandwidth/traffic from their end. Whether that's to a CDN or some other arrangement, and there's likely already peering agreements in place. In these cases what Verizon is doing is asking for money above and beyond what it actually costs to handle the interconnection. They use declining service to their own customers as leverage. Its ridiculous, and even more worrying when you see ISPs and content providers merging as is the case with VZ buying Yahoo and AOL, Comcast and NBC merger, etc.
Google pays for their own network services. Whomever google pays for network services pays pays if applicable to connect to Verizon's network.
The sole and only thing they are being paid for on the ISP side of Verizon's operation is to quickly and reliably deliver the content people want to consume over the pipe people have paid to have installed.
YouTube by hosting content people want to consume is driving demand for Verizon's services.
Pretending that this is a cost is a bazaar inversion of reality.
Do they? Who do they pay? I thought that maybe one of the reasons Google got into the ISP business was to be a peer with the other big networks and not pay any peerage fees.
They don't need to purchase bandwidth, Youtube is available via public peering exchanges. The way these generally work is you just pay for the port on the switch at the exchange and traffic directly. See:
Purchasing a port on public peering fabric isn't the same as buying bandwidth from a transit provider. It's a great way to get traffic to your users much cheaper than you could via transit which is why people do it. The issue is eyeball networks - Comcast, FIOS, Time Warner etc. may choose not to do so because they went to seek rent in the form of "paid peering" from these same content providers that their users paid them to get access to in the first place.
So are you accusing them of malicious throttling or that they just have bad peering agreements that configuring a different network path ends up being faster?
Is there a difference between the two? See my other comment. I'm suggesting they have bad peering agreements and choose not to do anything about it. Most likely they are waiting to extract money from YouTube. Seems like net neutrality is in question again.
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but how would the ISP take a 1080p stream and downsample it to 480 on the fly, without man-in-the-middling HTTPS?
They don't. HTTPS doesn't hide who the connection is to. How would a network route packets if it didn't know the recipient?
Once they know you're connected to Youtube, they just limit the bandwidth on that connection. The Youtube video player will detect this and automatically downgrade to a lower quality until it finds one that fits within the bandwidth profile. Netflix does the same thing, which is why after buffering sometimes the video looks like crap and then gets better after 15 seconds or so. It buffered a lower quality until it figured out it could send higher quality again.
EDIT: I should add, this is why VPNs are sometimes used as a "solution" to such bandwidth shaping. You are hiding the true recipient by purposefully man-in-the-middling the connection with a peer you (hopefully) trust. VPNs are also popular for connecting with business networks, so it's generally not "safe" for the ISP to shape bandwidth to any VPN as aggressively.
> The Youtube video player will detect this and automatically downgrade to a lower quality until it finds one that fits within the bandwidth profile
Ahh, this is the key point I missed, thanks. So it's a problem with the video player itself trying to "decide" for you the quality you want. Couldn't this be worked around with things like youtube-dl?
The video player deciding what quality you want is a good thing. The user wants to watch a video live, as it goes. You don't want to be interuppted every 30 seconds with a "buffering" message, or wait 10 minutes at the start for it to entirely download.
Youtube-dl would probably work, because it will would download the high quality video as a file, and your ISP would make the download take longer than the video.
> The video player deciding what quality you want is a good thing
It's an extremely annoying thing actually, especially when it changes after I manually set it to 1080p. This is why I use mpv to watch stuff from youtube nowadays.
It's probably a coincidence, but just this weekend for the first time ever, I noticed my YouTube streaming at visibly lower quality (my provider is Cox). It happened all weekened, intermittently. Nothing else seemed slow, and numerous speed tests (both from official "speed test" sites including Netflix's own Fast.com, and by moving large files between my network and AWS) all showed well over 100Mbps. I don't know if it was being throttled somewhere, Netflix's service was overloaded, or if there was some other weird problem happening on my network that affected Netflix and nothing else. But it was bad enough that my wife who is usually oblivious to audio/video quality actually brought it up.
I used to have FiOS is one of the few places in Cambridge that offered it.
It was the first time in my life that I'd been wishing for Comcast. 320p videos could barely load, and the lag in certain MMORPGs was unplayable (we're talking 500-1000ms delays)
It got better after a while, but google had some stats by ISP for Youtube, and FiOS in my area was like 1/10th of the speed of Comcast on average.
Let's say you live in NYC but you're using a DNS server (resolver) in Seattle. When your client performs a DNS query, you may get a response that directs you to a server/CDN/whatever in or near Seattle as opposed to one closer to you in NYC. Then, the data (streaming video) is traversing the country to get to you, passing through many more (potentially congested) interconnects/links on the way.
Reality is a bit more complicated than this simple example but such an issue is certainly not unheard of (and inspired mitigations such as RFC7871, for example).
Both Google and OpenDNS use anycast addresses for their DNS servers that are very likely to route though a 'local' server. I think ISP games are far more likely to be the root cause here...
Note this is Verizon Wireless, the cell service company - not Verizon Fios, the home ISP company. They are both under Verizon Communications, but as far as I can tell this "test" only affected wireless customers.
I have gigabit Fios and my Netflix connection is always throttled down to 150 Mbps. I wish there was something I could do about it because I actually do watch 4K content.
But really...it's still pretty good so I don't care enough? This is probably why they do it.
Even if you're being throttled down to 150Mbit for Netflix streams, their 4K content is usually 15-20Mbit with their recommended throughput being 25Mbit. You can comfortably stream 6 Netflix 4K streams even at 150Mbit.
It was really a great move on Netflix's part to make their own speedtest site, allowing their customers to audit their providers specifically on their Netflix connection.
Why don't we have smart routers doing this? I wish my router could tell me "the fastest connection I have observed this month is 10mbps". Basically doing a non stop speed test. Im sure I could set it up myself, but I'd like an easy to use package.
They throttled users to 10Mbps to Netflix. The article states this shouldn't be an issue streaming a show at x resolution. I have 5 people and four TV's in my family. It is common to have 4 different shows going on Netflix. We all have different schedules and can't always watch the new OITNB on the same day.
If I'm paying Netflix and paying Verizon for 40+ Mbps wouldn't this impact us? Shouldn't I be able to watch four shows at once if I pay my bill on time?
Changing "Verizon" with "Verizon Wireless" doesn't change the argument:
> If I'm paying Netflix and paying Verizon Wireless for 40+ Mbps wouldn't this impact us? Shouldn't I be able to watch four shows at once if I pay my bill on time?
> We are implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in our network to transmit data files in a more efficient manner to allow available network capacity to benefit the greatest number of users. These techniques include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing the video more appropriately for the device. The optimization process is agnostic to the content itself and to the website that provides it. While we invest much effort to avoid changing text, image, and video files in the compression process and while any change to the file is likely to be indiscernible, the optimization process may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device. For a further, more detailed explanation of these techniques, please visit www.verizonwireless.com/vzwoptimization.
Resizing the data, changing the video compression, and potentially changing the text(!!) is not the data that I, the customer, asked them to deliver nor is it what I'm paying them for. Let me and my device worry about requesting the bits... And Verizon wireless can worry about sending me those bits at 40Mbps without worrying about how our why I want them and certainly (!) without modifying what the server sends to my end application. That's exactly what net neutrality is fighting for!
I perfectly understand the argument they're making (the link you provided is superfluous). It's just total BS; a red herring.
Why? I'd understand not wanting AT&T or Verizon to buy either of them, but I don't see how a T-Mobile & Sprint merger would make things much worse. Seems like that would make them a more viable 3rd alternative to the big two, which is something I'd really appreciate. I just went back to Verizon because the service I was getting from T-Mobile just wasn't good enough.
I can't think of a time where customer experience, user experience or overall quality of a company improves after a large merger like this. Less choices for the consumer typically translate to more power for the companies.
> > I am more sad reading that T-Mobile and Sprint are potentially merging.
> Why?
I am not festizio, but the news makes me sad because I find T-Mobile's customer service and stick-it-to-the-big-carriers attitude both delightful, and my memories of dealing with Sprint (only ever landline, so I have no idea of the mobile quality) are terrible. On the other hand, your point:
> Seems like that would make them a more viable 3rd alternative to the big two, which is something I'd really appreciate.
seems like a good argument for why it could at least be a mixed blessing.
I'm working from Copenhagen right now. A valid-for-one-month 30GB data + 600 unlimited minutes on Lebara SIM card is $15 (and that includes free international calling to, e.g., USA or Brazil or wherever), and I can re-up at any time. I've been using SIM Card + mobile hot-spot to access the internet, web, VPN, AWS, etc. from a number of places. Speed is very good. I wish it were like this in the US.
Coverage in my home area of North Carolina (the Triad != Triangle) is quite good, Verizon is kind of expensive. It's a lot better than coverage I had living in the SF Bay Area -- whenever I go there I still find so many dead zones.
Just found out today ... came to Amsterdam from Copenhagen, and no, the data plan and phone both do not transfer without the additional setup I think is described in a sibling comment here.
Still, I used a lot of data, was well worth it. I'm not sure what Amsterdam Lebara / Lyca prices will be or what kinds of data packages they'll have, didn't seem as promising when I look briefly online. So perhaps Copanhagen was a one-off great deal, I'll see tomorrow a.m. when the SIM card stores open again.
Looks like roaming is available but you need to apply with a domestic debit/credit card and the rates don't seem very good http://www.lebara.dk/roaming
I have worked at a mobile ISP before. I don't know what VZW is doing here, but there are a few reasons you might run an experiment. Most often for me it was to troubleshoot a technical issue.
To try to get an idea of user behavior we would run "experiments" on previously collected data, i.e. rely on natural experiments - not change things and then see what happened.
In every case the experiments I was part of were to see if we could improve user throughput, not degrade it.
Probably testing something like Tmobile's bingeon. Mobile bandwidth is tightly rationed but video providers to a terrible job being efficient. It's one of the few legitimate uses of throttling IMO.
The main difference is the lack of a natural monopoly for wireless isps. Switching providers is actually possible so if you disagree with your providers throttling you have other options, unlike in the cable industry.
I'll try. I asked people in a reddit thread about this same issue why they don't just switch to another cellphone network. The general reply was "Verizon's coverage and reliability is a lot better than competitors." It seems to guarantee a general level of service (reliability and speed) Verizon has to put certain limits on certain data. I mean look at others. They are not throttling, but then they are not providing a reliable enough connection. Seems like the market is working. Current tech allows certain performance at certain cost. Verizon is doing a good job managing all the factors to ensure that most people prefer it's service, despite the throttling of YouTube. Mandatory NN in this context would deteriorate the experience for most users, while also increasing government involvement and the inefficiencies that come with that. Is there a flaw in my argument?
> You don't need to throttle to maintain reliability.
Sure you do. If you don't throttle Netflix to 10M, it will happily chomp away 25M of bandwidth. Add a bunch of such people nearby and suddenly the network became a lot less responsive for the people in your cell. My facebook will take a few more seconds to open, some guy on the edge of reception might not even get a usable connection.
> And you can get similar speed guarantees by balancing the available bandwidth across active users.
If the stream bandwidth keeps varying from 5 to 25M isn't that a bad thing? It's better to have a stable 10M stream rather than a variable unpredictable one.
Finally it all comes down to cost. Everything has a cost. Not throttling Netflix has a cost. It will maybe cause Verizon to deploy a few less cell towers in a year, maybe it makes them a bit slower to respond to areas needing more bandwidth or radios. Verizon has decided they want to cater to the users who value reliability over the capability to stream 4k on their cellphone. How can you fault them on that? When the tech catches up, you will be able to stream at 25M. Just like 10M on-demand video was unthinkable on a cellphone 5 years ago.
> Sure you do. If you don't throttle Netflix to 10M, it will happily chomp away 25M of bandwidth. Add a bunch of such people nearby and suddenly the network became a lot less responsive for the people in your cell. My facebook will take a few more seconds to open, some guy on the edge of reception might not even get a usable connection.
Let's say there's 40M of bandwidth in this situation, and other users are taking up 15M in total. The way to ensure responsiveness is by dropping the throughput down to something like 37M so that buffers don't fill up as packets arrive randomly. This would let you continue to use 22M for netflix with nobody else harmed. And importantly, if three people tried to use netflix at once, just throttling to 10M each would still result in an overloaded network. But giving them each a third of 22M wouldn't.
> If the stream bandwidth keeps varying from 5 to 25M isn't that a bad thing? It's better to have a stable 10M stream rather than a variable unpredictable one.
If there's enough use to intermittently drop your bandwidth to 5, then it'll happen with or without throttling to 10. Throttling can lead to more stable bandwidth than a total packet free-for-all, but it's not more stable than just splitting the bandwidth evenly among all the users.
I get upset when they call it unlimited data and then cap the rate you can download. if you can only download 1 unit an hour, you are effectively capped at 744 Units per month.
> People streaming HD video from cell towers is simply crazy.
Most people aren't objecting to rationing, per say. (Though, misleading advertising of available bandwidth does lead to disappointed customers.)
What most are objecting to is unequal provisioning of bandwidth. This incentivizes users to use a VPN (doubling aggregate bandwidth consumption) or use steganography to make the traffic look like voice calls (at significant reduction in transfer efficiency).
Everyone would benefit if service providers rolled out provisioning that incentivized application programmers to truthfully mark traffic using QoS / ToS ... unlimited bandwidth at lowest priority, limited bandwidth if low latency is required.
Instead, they're doing the exact opposite... encouraging P2P developers to encrypt the traffic and then use the ciphertext bitstream to drive an Nth order Markov model that makes it look like compressed voice or HTTP traffic... sort of LZMA in reverse. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game where even the cat loses in the end.
> Everyone would benefit if service providers rolled out provisioning that incentivized application programmers to truthfully mark traffic using QoS / ToS ... unlimited bandwidth at lowest priority, limited bandwidth if low latency is required.
So what you're saying is, I can run a few iptables rules on my phone and prioritize all my traffic ahead of everyone else's? Sweet.
QoS in a LAN is fine, QoS using untrusted devices just plain doesn't work.
By all means, have a great time with your high priority 56 kbps, you amazing haXX0r, you, while my background phone app install gets wildly swinging bandwidth between 0 and 2 Mbps, averaging 750 kbps. That's the reduced bandwidth portion of my comment. Give the application the ability to make explicit bandwidth vs. latency tradeoff decisions, or at least hints, that the routers otherwise need to make via heuristics.
Sure there is, it just wouldn't fly here. It's the same solution to the last-mile problem. You stop carving up the spectrum into tiny chunks. Government owns the tower and all spectrum coming out of it, runs the fiber back to a central pop, cellphone carriers tie into that pop and route traffic appropriately - (the access is sold on a per-tower basis to recoup the costs). Lowers the barrier to entry for new providers and should create actual competition based on services instead of based on who has the most money to buy up and sit on spectrum.
The only reason we even have real competition at this point is because the FCC blocked AT&T's acquisition of tmo. That NEVER would've been blocked in our current climate.
In layman terms, if we built domes and increased the pressure slightly by pumping in more air then we would have increased the amount of air around us and raised the limit on how much air we have to allocate.
Define "usable frequencies". You are making pretty ridiculous sounding claims btw. I would rather believe that we can max out cell tower wired connection bandwidth, than completely saturate radio frequencies. Obvious solution, as non-professional, is to use more towers/higher frequencies. Give more information, if you want people to believe you. Go technical and say how things really are, no need for that "layman" stuff.
Modulation is already taken into account when talking about channel capacity. If you don't have any kind of modulation you essentially just have a sine wave and can't transmit any data.
The number of bits per hertz is bounded by the amount of noise in the signal. There are natural sources of noise, so a noise free channel is impossible. The mathematical basis for this is the Shannon Hartley theorem if you're up for some reading.
Higher frequencies don't provide more bandwidth. It's the width of the channel that matters. A 20mhz channel provides the same bandwidth regardless of whether its centered at 100mhz or 900mhz. The main difference is the 900mhz signal won't travel through solid objects as well.
People sometimes turn to higher frequencies for more bandwifth simply because there's more spectrum available because it's far less useful. For instance, cell towers sometimes communicate with other cell towers using frequencies around 60ghz. The downside is you need direct line of sight on frequencies that high, so it works for tower to tower, but not tower to phone.
But is forcing infrastructure upgrades via legislation really going to be a value add for the economy? Is hi def video streaming really that important?
Hi def isn't, but expansion is. Our economy is based on growth.
Is it really a value add for the economy for Verizon to turn a higher profit which they funnel to their executives? Or do you think that money would be better spent buying infrastructure which requires thousands of jobs to build?
Why force it by legislation? Verizon could instead let the infra sit stagnant and overpopulated, and watch all of it's customers go to another carrier who upgrades their network to handle the traffic. The market can handle this just fine. All those in favor of net neutrality just want the carriers to be forced to treat bits like bits, not some bits being more special than other bits. Common carrier doesn't force infra expansion.
Just want to point out to sibling comments that "The cell towers cannot support the requested bandwidth" was the argument used to prevent companies from making phones with full web browsers.
Well, yeah. But that ended with Net Neutrality. Now we will see a while new wave of companies either secretly or openly defying Net Neutrality while the FCC's power is gutted by our government.
Oh, but our elected representatives totally have our best interest at heart /s
Limiting Netflix is a poor way to approach that; they should instead be limiting users on the tower, dividing up the bandwidth there, regardless of what you're accessing. If capping flows at 10M helps, then they should apply it to everyone.
It's a little more complicated than that. If I click a link to an article on medium, I want 100Mbps to download it, but then I'm going to spend some time reading it, freeing bandwidth for others. There are all sorts of token bucket algorithms one can use, but like I said, a little more complicated. Identifying popular streaming services and ratelimiting them might be easier than tracking traffic usage per user per minute. And sometimes it's ok to let users download at peak speeds for more than a web page or two at a time. Maybe I download a new ubuntu ISO, which is a couple gigs and takes a while. I don't do that everyday, so the impact is minimal. It's not just that streaming video is high bandwidth, it's also very popular, and frequent, and long duration.
Ideally, we might offer users a baseline of 10Mbps all the time, and some quota of 100GB at 100Mbps regardless of source, and then people can choose what they want to download fast, but I think this would be a UX disaster.
This is a key issue. Do we want slightly more complex (per-customer fair queueing) equipment that is demonstrably fair or do we want fast and cheap kludges that are prone to abuse but trust us we swear they won't be used for evil?
In the particular case of something like Netflix, starting an HD stream then stalling and re buffering an SD stream might be a shittier user experience. How much data does Netflix download to measure bandwidth and for how long?
If I'm going to watch a show on Netflix, I want 100Mps to download it, but then I'm going to spend some time watching it, freeing bandwidth for others.
The speed will decrease during periods you'd think there would be heavy usage (mid morning/late afternoon, even slower in early evening). Then speed up dramatically in the late evening when most have gone to bed.
fwiw I see the same congestion-related throughput pattern on my copper cableco connection (fast.com reports much lower numbers in the evening and on the weekend vs early in the morning on a weekday). Typically I can still get full speed from my own servers though, implying the congestion is specific to the peering between my ISP and Netflix CDN nodes.
If your local grocery monopoly started rationing out milk to 250ml sold per day there would be protests, investigations, and 10 minute time blocks for it on the nightly news because the people would demand it. The internet just hasn't had this moment yet and it sucks because the momentum for this moment is building but it hasn't reached critical mass. I don't think this moment will happen for another decade at least.