This may be true, but the max bandwidth anyone can use is 10mbps. Using Netflix is not going to change that.
But it still requires more bandwidth to come into the neighborhood, or into the fiber ring, or into the central router itself.
If 1 person uses netflix at 10mbps, and 9 people are doing various things averaging about 1mbps, then they only need to have 20mbps coming in.
If 2 people are using netflix, then they need to have 29mbps coming in.
I am not sure what you are missing here. Are you thinking that there is a direct 10mpbs connection between you and the host site? That’s not how it works.
The more people simultaneously using the 10mbps connection, the more bandwidth needs to come into the neighborhood, and the more bandwidth is needed.
This is even more the case with cable systems, where you don’t even get your own connection to the router, but is instead shared between everyone on the street.
If you still don’t get it, I could try to explain further, but it starts getting into fairly technical territory about quams and such.
You could say this about anything that would make a corporation more money but be harmful to society that’s currently illegal. “Do we really need a law against dumping toxic waste into streams? No one is dumping toxic waste into streams [because it’s currently illegal], so is this a real problem or an imaginary problem?”
Why do you think ISPs are spending their bribe money and effort to kill net neutrality if they aren’t planning on doing things to enrich themselves that are against the public interest? They bribe people to enact laws all the time that hurt the consumer, like the state laws they use to pre-empt competitive or public ISPs. They have a long history of using bribes to work against the interests of their customers.
The supermarket analogy simply doesn’t work. The internet is not limited in the type of content you can experience, and trying to shoehorn the idea into one does a disservice to what the internet is.
If you must force the analogy, the internet is revolutionary in part because it would act like a supermarket with unlimited shelf space, where anyone could get their product placed on the shelf and any consumer could find that product. Obviously that works nothing at all like a real world supermarket, and so the analogy sucks.
But even so - even if I concede that your analogy makes sense, which it doesn’t - why would we want to go from the most free, most revolutionary market ever created and cripple it into a traditional market? Why is taking away what makes the internet such a revolutionary free market a desirable outcome? You say that’s just how markets have always worked, but part of what makes the internet great is that it breaks apart the old market paradigms.
What you and other advocates suggest is that we take away that revolutionary part of the internet, that everyone can access any product or service or information in the world, and make it like the worst of the old markets - where a few major players can control who can put their product or service on the market at all, and decide which choices the consumers have. The internet has been great and revolutionary specifically because it does the opposite of this - that it empowers new players to reach the market and consumers to have an infinite amount of choice. Why do you want to throw that away because that’s how it used to work? Clearly the way it works now is better.
We have a working, successful model now, that demonstrates better than anything before it that the free market is a successful force for human good. And the only people who want to change that are the people who would enrich themselves greatly from controlling the market (ISPs), and libertarians who want to throw away the greatest demonstration of the free market in action in the history of mankind.
If you read my posts, I’ve a substantive response to the question of strong regulation on certain industries. It is unfortunate that you posed the exact same question that I’ve already responded to, as though it is a real “gotcha.”
Why is Netflix spending its bribe money to implement net neutrality if they aren’t planning on doing things to enrich themselves that, as far as I know, might be against the public interest?
Criticizing who is spending money to influence policy doesn’t tell us who is right on the substance. In 2014, Google spent more on lobbying than Lockheed Martin, and almost exactly as much as Comcast, according to this cite.
This isn’t poor defenseless stream against big evil ISPs. It’s Google (650 billion), Netflix (60 billion), Amazon (450 billion) vs Comcast (180 billion), Charter (90 billion), Time Warner (80 billion). Why do you think Google, Netflix, etc. are so big on net neutrality? It’s because it benefits them tremendously.
You’re simply wrong, here. There is not enough ISP competition in existence. Phone data plans with their limited radio spectrum bandwidth and usage caps are not a practical substitute for a home internet solution, and there are sizable areas of the country where there is no broadband competition available at all - simply one provider. In most other areas there are two, but often a very half-ass competition like poorly implemented DSL which is very sensitive to the distance you are from the nearest telecom office.
Second, google fiber was a failure. The consumers absolutely loved it - millions of people were wishing that they were going to be the recipients of google fiber. Everyone wants a good ISP, because almost no one actually has access to that in their own markets.
Google had the money, the legal team, the technical knowledge, and the drive to get google fiber out there are as far as they could. And they decided it was an intractable problem. The existing telecom companies made it too difficult to enter markets. They bribed state legislatures to make sure google couldn’t compete, and there were other difficulties in laying a new telecom infrastructure because it’s complex and expensive.
You bizarrely point to google fiber as proof that if ISPs are mistreating people, someone will come in and save the market. Except that google tried, and no one is going to have a better shot at it than google, and google failed. They gave up. They stopped trying to expand.
Counting on competition is simply not a viable option without some major revolution in how our politics work. The telecom industry is the biggest briber in the US, with the greatest amount of donations. They are firmly entrenched in our legal system. Stories about attempts at public ISPs and ISP competition constantly fail because of this. You might say that that’s not how it should be, but that’s how it is. As I challenged Sam Stone earlier, why don’t you work on creating a market in which competition can happen before you rush in to kill our protection from the real-world existing market that isn’t that? Saying “oh, competition will solve it” is disingenuous, because it’s clear we’re not in a place that will allow it to happen.
So what libertarians will say is that we should allow ISPs to do anything they want, and we should have infinite competition. Together this will result in something good for the consumer. And then the ISPs put hundreds of millions of dollars towards making the first one happen, and hundreds of millions of dollars against the second one happening and doubly screw consumers, and libertarians will shrug and say “oh well, we tried to have both, but for some reason we took away neutrality protections and didn’t increase competition”
It’s bullshit. Creating an environment that can foster competition is the way more difficult prospect. So let’s see you work on that one first, because you take away our protection from the abuses of a market without much competition.
People have been listing all of the problems that will come if net neutrality is ended, to which your response is essentially “well those aren’t happening, so they’re all hypothetical” - well no shit, all the problems that are currently prohibited aren’t happening. People have told you the consequences of losing neutrality, and you’re attempting to dismiss them.
Because it’s literally in the interest of every company in existence except the ISPs themselves to have network neutrality. Every company wants to be able to put their product out on the internet and have everyone in the world be able to access it. Netflix is more involved than, say, a mail order popcorn company because they’re going to be the first target of ISP changes in the event that we don’t have neutrality, and their business model might be irrevocably damaged.
On this one it’s literally every consumer and every non-ISP business vs the ISPs. It’s giving a handful of companies the power to determine who can make it to the market and what freedom consumers have to see the world’s information, products, and services. This serves no one’s interest but the ISP itself, and libertarians who think the freedom of ISPs to control the world’s information is greater than the freedom of all other business and all consumers to have access to everything.
Google (650 billion) failed in their attempt to create an ISP against Comcast (180 billion). How can that be?
Because Comcast has had decades to control legislation across the country to entrench their own position. They’ve had decades to build up their own infrastructure in a complicated mess of easement rights, construction, etc. And their entire business model is based around implementing and controlling this infrastructure, whereas Google’s primary business is elsewhere.
Saying that if ISPs abuse their power some other big companies will save us is simply false, as has been proven by google fiber’s failures. Google tried to take on Comcast. Consumers desperately wanted google fiber - people were literally moving their entire fucking lives to areas that had google fiber for that reason - and those who got it were thrilled - and yet google fiber still failed because of the legislative tampering emplaced by decades of entrenchment by the ISPs.
Maybe Sam Stone is right. Maybe when we lose neutrality protection and Comcast starts deciding what information we can see and not see, and what products we can and not have access to, Elon Musk will fly some rogue internet ballons which we can tune into like someone with a ham radio behind the iron curtain who can get little snippets of the truth in there.
Wouldn’t that be awesome? If we went from everyone in the world having access to everyone else in the world, something that has been wildly successful, into counting on eccentric billionaires to save us with fucking high altitude internet balloons so we can again access the same things we all have access to today? It’s like being in a cyberpunk dystopian future is a goal here. I can’t believe I have to defend “everyone having access to every information, product, and service in the world unhindered” as a concept, given that we’re living in a world that it has revolutionized.
Basically, yes.
Sure, as video streaming became more popular the ISPs needed to accommodate that. Thing is, as you can see from the graph in my link above, they were accommodating the traffic just fine when they decided to stop being accommodating. Once Netflix paid up they were able to instantly handle the traffic just fine again.
Sure. Comcast is a business and they need to cover costs and hopefully make a profit. So someone has to cover those costs to handle the higher bandwidth needed.
In the end the cost is always on the consumer. If they pass the cost to Netflix then Netflix will pass the cost to its customers.
But consider what Comcast did here. Of the two (Netflix or the consumer) it should be the consumer who bears the cost but Comcast went after Netflix.
Netflix has already paid for their internet access (and paid a lot but not to Comcast). Comcast owns the last mile though so stands between Netflix and the Netflix consumer. Netflix has no responsibility for that last mile and as the consumer you bought a certain amount of guaranteed bandwidth from Comcast. In short, the pipes are paid for. If you do something different like running four video streams 24/7 then Comcast should talk to you about paying more…not Netflix.
It’d be like you ordering all your things from Amazon and the higher flow of UPS trucks means the police start closing roads and ask UPS to pay money if they want to hope to meet their delivery promises.
So why go after Netflix instead of the consumer? Because Netflix is a competitor. Netflix Has Almost 4x as Many Streaming Subscribers as Comcast has Cable Subscribers. Cord cutting (dropping cable and streaming video) is scaring the cable companies. But with no net neutrality Comcast can price Netflix out of the market and keep cable attractive and/or make Comcast streaming services more attractive.
Since the consumer has little to no other choice of ISPs they cannot go to an ISP that would treat them better.
What is being missed here is in the focus on the consumer end. For CecilsBlog-dot-net, with all its fancy graphics, videos and stuff to work, it must have adequate bandwidth to provide a satisfactory subscriber experience. If CecilsBlog cannot pay enough out of pocket to keep its packets moving smoothly across the 'net, instead of constantly being side-tracked for high-priority packets to move past, the end-user experience will suffer, whether they are on 1Mpbs, 10Mbps or 1Gbps. The user cannot pay their gateway enough to compensate for how the backbone pipeline owner chooses to prioritize traffic.
Which is to say, CecilsBlog has to pony up to get better flow priority for their data. Since they cannot do that out-of-pocket, they either have to move to a subscription model, start stacking their service heavily with ads, or probably a bit of both. Which means the end user’s experience will suffer one way or the other. If CecilsBlog posts a lot of muckraking that offends the companies that control traffic (or their parent companies), the price for them to get past 56Kbps could become steep indeed. And since there is only one source server (or even just a few), the ISPs themselves do not have to do packet sniffing, because that will happen at the source end.
Is it fair to prohibit selective traffic management? The backbone managers claim that they need to be able to do that. That e-mail your aunt sent you is probably less important than the packets of data that make up a teleconference stream – but it could also be critical information that you need ASAP, and the backbone manager has no possible way to know, short of examining the content. That opens up an entirely fresh can of worms (disguised as peanut brittle).
The upshot is that we can expect more advertising, to help pay the extra vigorish for backbone stream access, higher subscription fees and much more in the way of fund drives. This will make the internet increasingly unpleasant to use, but it will be the frog in the pot, progressing so gradually that we will end up accepting it as the status quo and forget about how it used to not suck nearly as much.
Google Fiber “failed” for a lot of different reasons. Blaming it on the existing telecoms interfering is far too simplistic. Yes, they did some underhanded things in a handful of places, but in most of the places Google Fiber rolled out the competition was fair. There simply wasn’t the demand to cover the immense cost of laying new fiber. In some markets, legacy ISPs simply beat Google to market or offered lower costs.
That’s simply not true. Verizon, for example, offers 5-10 mbps and a cap of 22gb a month before that’s slowed. For most consumers that’s a practical substitute.
And that’s the current state of the art. 5G is coming in the new few years which should increase that by an order of magnitude. This is really the biggest reason Google Fiber “failed”. Running a cable to a house in a reasonably dense neighborhood is going the way of the dinosaur. Sooner rather than later we will see providers offering wireless internet at speeds rivaling cable or fiber.
I do not have a lot of knowledge about the ins and outs of companies paying for internet upload capabilities but I have some questions about how that works.
I pay for an internet connection that is rated at X download capacity and Y upload capacity. Does Netflix do essentially the same thing? If so, it seems that they would need to have massive upload capability and would have to pay for it. Isn’t this where ISP can “hold Netflix accountable” for the amount of data they use?
This is a question for anyone, not just k9bfriender specifically.
Netflix has many data centers around the country, and around the world.
Each of these data centers is paying a pretty high price to be connected to the backbone of the internet. Depending on their arrangement, they probably do pay per gigabyte transmitted.
But that is the ISP or whatever arrangement they have with that part of the internet, it is not necessarily (and probably is not) the same ISP that is delivering the content to your home.
Google fiber picked the low hanging fruit - areas that were underserved by local ISPs, who had relatively easy access to lay infrastructure (either they could buy up dark fiber or easement rights and such weren’t too complicated to arrange), and where local and state laws weren’t yet sufficiently hostile to keep them out with some fighting. It was harder than they expected to be able to lay down what they did.
But they ran out of low hanging fruit. They had to move on to areas in which those factors had bigger costs. They weren’t as successful on the legislative front as they hoped, failing to circumvent or repeal laws designed to keep new competitors out. There was enough friction against it that they decided to give up.
If a highly motivated google can’t break in to the ISP market with a product consumers have an extreme desire for, it’s not likely anyone can by traditional telecom infrastructure.
What? For grandmas that only check their e-mail, maybe. 22gb is almost nothing. That’s 7 hours of Netflix streaming a month. Or 3 hours as 4K devices become more common and people want to stream that way. Almost the same number with youtube. And that’s the allotment for the entire month - no more checking google maps or facebook or news sites or anything for you.
Or are you going to try to make that “most consumers” don’t ever watch a youtube video or stream something on Netflix?
It also sucks for gaming as radio modems add latency to the whole process. But I guess the “average consumer” to you probably doesn’t game, either.
Over the air radio bandwidth is always going to be very limited in comparison to fiber optic wiring - there’s just less room on that medium for the data. 5G will have higher peaks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to have sustained bandwidth for normal home use. The data networks in the US hold it together now because they’re only serving mobile data needs - home demand is much higher. If people started leaving the cable/fiber ISPs for a mobile ISP, and tried to use their traditional home data usages over the phone/radio network, the whole thing would come crashing down pretty quickly.
Two reasons. (1) They are different ISPs. Netflix paying Internets R Us a ton of money doesn’t do anything for Comcast. (2) It’s a lot cheaper to have one 100 GB/s connection than 10,000 10 MB/s connections.
I didn’t think of this. It’s pretty simple.
And that’s exactly how it should be. Right now everyone, whether they use Netflix or not, pays for the infrastructure to transfer that data. No one cares about cutecatpix.com because that’s like 0.0000001% of all traffic. Netflix, on the other hand, is 37% of all internet traffic in the US and Youtube is another 18%. As I said before, there are three options. (1) Split the cost over all internet users, (2) have ISPs charge Netflix users more, or (3) have ISPs charge Netflix.
Yeah they don’t. And no, you don’t know what you are talking about. After 22 gb it’s not no more google or facebook. It’s your packets are transmitted at a lower priority than other users. It may not be ideal, but it is a real constraint on ISPs. They simply can’t get away with the nightmare scenarios people give.
When you connect to your ISP, you get on its local network, and when it recognizes you, it assigns you an IP address (those numbers that look like 127.0.0.1) which it uses to route traffic to you. Most ISPs have big swaths of IP addresses that its users can “lease” for internet connectivity.
You sent out a packet, probably less than one K, to somedomain•net to get to one of their pages. Your ISP contacts a DNS to convert somedomain•net into the IP address that that server uses, so that the packet you send out will go to the right server.
Your packet bounces around dozens of servers until it reaches the target, where the request is hopefully handled properly. The server then sends packets of data (usually larger ones) back to your IP, which bounce around many relay servers until they get to your ISP and then to you. For every packet somedomain•net sends to you, it expects to receive a reply packet from you, “yeah, I got #47, send me #48”.
You can apply to your ISP for a “static IP”, which means that all your internet traffic uses the same IP address: this is useful if you want to operate your own little server, and you could register ilovemevol1.xxx with the domain registry so that all traffic to that domain name goes directly to/from your own computer (assuming you have a proper server set up, and assuming that a bunch of people would want to see that).
A site like Netflix already has a handful of its own static IPs, registered with the DNS servers, so it basically bypasses the local network scheme that you use and access the network directly. They pay for their own pipeline(s) to the backbone network, which handles their traffic blindly (until net neutrality goes away and the backbone managers get to decide how to prioritize them).
IIUC, the backbone pipelines are owned by large companies like AT&T and CenturyWhatever, so major ISPs have fairly easy access to source throttling.
The “average consumer” doesn’t use any streaming video, game, or otherwise use much bandwidth? That’s ridiculous. You’re trying to pretend that little old ladies that check facebook twice a day are the norm. The average broadband user uses 190gb per month, almost an order of magnitude more than what you claim is adequate.
I notice you ignore about 90% of the points I make in my post, because you don’t have an answer for them. I wonder, have they changed your mind any, or are you just blowing past them, knowing you have no response?
From a quick googling, Verizon seems vague on how they handle throttling past the cap. It may have changed recently, but AT&T used to throttle you at 128kbps and T-Mobile at 64kbps. Remember 56k dial-up modems? Those are the same units we’re talking about. And these days it’s basically unusable for standard web browsing - it would only be useful for very light data loads.
You ignored my other point. Right now, people don’t do most of their bandwidth-intensive tasks on mobile. If they come home and watch a youtube video on their phones, they do it through their home wifi (which then transmits on their land ISP’s network). Or they use a PC, tablet on wifi, etc. Or people will typically download games or do big updates while on wifi.
If the land based telecom companies were to start losing companies to the mobile networks, all of that home-based intensive traffic then goes up on the mobile network, flooding it. There is simply a limited amount of radio spectrum bandwidth available. You can’t increase it past a certain point by building more towers, because if the cells are too closely overlapped then the interference from some networks using the same frequency interferes with nearby cells.
We can have as much land-based bandwidth as people are willing to lay fiber, but there’s simply a limited amount of electromagnetic spectrum available to the mobile networks, and we’re already taxing it. Shifting a fraction of wired high bandwidth telecom to the mobile networks would slow the whole things down dramatically.
If half of land telecom customers left for wireless-only data services, we’d probably have to cut down peak bandwidth available to users by about 95%, and probably reduce data caps by at least 50%. It’s not a practical substitute for wired telecom.
But we pay to have that capacity. It doesn’t matter if it’s netflix, youtube, or mydumbvideo.com, I am paying to have that video streamed into my computer.
Most people use netflix or youtube, but some people use cutecat as well. Some people use message boards like Straight Dope.
So, yes, the charge for netflix’s capacity should be distributed over all people with high speed connections, just lie the charge for youtube and catpix is. Just because one video streaming site is a tiny portion of the traffic does not mean that the aggregate of video streaming sites is as well. As you noted, youtube and netflix make up about 55% of internet traffic, but the rest makes up the other 45%. Why should netflix users subsidize people using a different streaming service?
If you don’t want to pay to subsidize netflix’s connection, then you don’t want to pay to subsidize any video streaming connection, and that’s fine, you can get yourself a low speed connection that cannot stream video, and you will not have to.
I don’t address them because they are riddled with factual inaccuracies and fail to make a cogent counter argument to my original contention. Take this for example:
It’s just totally wrong. We are three years away from when the major carriers are planning to roll out their 5G networks. That promises an order of magnitude speed improvement and is faster than what most of us have for wired internet. The idea that we are already taxing the electromagnetic spectrum is ludicrous and the exact opposite of reality.
Or we can get rid of Net Neutrality, have Netflix pay for the load they cause, and I get to keep my high speed connection.