Netflix and Verizon are arguing over interconnections between their network. Here’s a snippet from something sent from Netflix’ lawyer to Verizon’s:
To try to shift blame to us for performance issues arising from interconnection congestion is like blaming drivers on a bridge for traffic jams when you’re the one who decided to leave three lanes closed during rush hour.
You know who else blocked three lanes on a bridge during rush hour?
When your actions are the go-to metaphor for obstruction, it’s time to re-assess your Presidential ambitions.
Patricia Kayden
Even without the bridge scandal, Christie’s chances were slim.
SiubhanDuinne
@Patricia Kayden:
Obligatory “I see what you did there.”
Baud
Netflix watches House of Cards.
Linda Featheringill
COMPLETELY off topic:
In the pictures of the ISIS massacre of Iraqi troops
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/06/15/these-dramatic-images-show-apparent-mass-execution-of-iraqi-soldiers-by-isis/?hpid=z1
The “troops” are all wearing civilian clothes. What is happening here?
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Linda Featheringill: I wore civilian clothes when I was off-duty during the time I was in the army.
Face
@Linda Featheringill: Josh Marshall had a blurb up the other day saying that ISIS was the only AQ off-shoot ever booted from AQ….for being TOO brutal and indiscriminate with their killing. That’s saying something, I think.
I suspect the Sunnis are about to exact some revenge, and it will be akin to what the Russians did to captured Germans in WWII.
C.V. Danes
@Patricia Kayden:
Exactly, although the bridge scandal will be ancient history by then.
Professor
@Linda Featheringill: It is phony, don’t believe a thing in the picture. Have you seen the mass graves? Do you think anyone would post a picture of war atrocity on the internet? This is the Internet and people do some DUMB things as a ‘show off’.
Linda Featheringill
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name):
Ah. Okay. Maybe ISIS caught the troops unawares. It sort of looked like ISIS had rounded up all the males in the surrounding villages and executed them. But perhaps they are innocent of that crime.
Thanks.
C.V. Danes
This arguing and finger-pointing between Netflix and Verizon is only going to get worse as net neutrality goes away. And its not just Netflix. How many people have had their home connection surreptitiously throttled by Comcast or Time Warner?
Linda Featheringill
@Professor:
I would be pleased if it were phony.
C.V. Danes
@Linda Featheringill:
The sad thing is that we have been down this road before. These pictures are merely meant inflame the populace into supporting sending troops back into Iraq. Whether they are real or fake is irrelevant.
geg6
Jeebus. Christie is truly toast. LOL!
Professor
@C.V. Danes: I agree with you on this point. Once we lose the concept of net neutrality, we are screwed. If they can screw a large entity like Netflix, what chance has a little guy/gal got?
Chyron HR
So how much did the gigantic media company spend lobbying for net neutrality, since it’s so integral to their business model?
I don’t have an answer, but I’m going to guess… nothing.
Karmus
Little doubt here that Christie’s presidential aspirations are headed down the drain, yet this comment makes me think: Who else’s actions are rife with obstruction? The GOP in Congress and Christie really do deserve each other. He’s kind of like their King Plug.
Ben Cisco
@C.V. Danes:
Yeah, this is scattering feed around the yard for the chickenhawks to feed on. Them, and their courtesans in the FerengiMedia.
cleek
@Chyron HR:
hard to say exactly, but it wasn’t zero.
TaMara (BHF)
Well that started my morning off with a chuckle (the original post, not the Iraq discussion, just to be clear).
nitpik
That wasn’t a metaphor, btw…
Culture of Truth
It’s not just ‘obstruction’, it’s mismanagement, partisanship, vindictiveness, and corruption.
flukebucket
You guys have probably already discussed it somewhere but this Stonekettle guy is just kick ass good.
Yatsuno
@Ben Cisco: War pig HUNGRY!!! FEED! FEED!!!
Plus Grandpa Walnuts is all out of little blue pills & has a blond intern to chase.
The Other Chuck
I want net neutrality as much as anyone else, which is why I think Cogent (Netflix’s main ISP) needs to pay Verizon for the traffic they’re carrying. NN can only work on the basis of equal exchange, or at least reasonably equitable. Cogent, however, is dumping tons of traffic downstream, but still demanding to be treated as an equal peer under their old peering arrangements.
Net Neutrality is a great thing, but Netflix might just be the worst case to to make for it.
The Other Chuck
@Face: I thought it was Boko Haram that AQ decided they didn’t want any association with anymore?
Maybe it’s both. AQ is watching helplessly as ultra-extreme spinoffs run amok and burn the world. Kind of like the Republican Party I suppose.
JPL
I commend Christie for losing weight and finally being concerned about his health. Of course, his motives for wanting to lose weight seem suspicious but good for him anyway.
In a few years, maybe we won’t have Christie to mock anymore. That would be good news!
M31
@Patricia Kayden:
Even without the bridge scandal, Christie’s chances were slim.
The only way you’ll ever see the words ‘Christie’ and ‘slim’ in the same sentence.
Amir Khalid
Meanwhile, Governor Harkonnen is confdently predicting that this will all blow over.
The Other Chuck
@JPL: At any rate, he’ll be a smaller target.
raven
@The Other Chuck: It was Procol Harum
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Yatsuno: Agreed. And just in time for another round on the Sunday shows.
Villago Delenda Est
@Yatsuno: The solution for Grandpa Walnuts’ problem is the French Solution.
Amir Khalid
@JPL:
It will be good news, of course, but Chris Christie will be a lesser man for it.
Tony J
@Villago Delenda Est:
“The solution for Grandpa Walnuts’ problem is the French Solution.”
That sounds unpleasantly sexy.
Suffern ACE
@Tony J: Is it like the French Mistake, only more Hetero?
Botsplainer
I’m not a net neutrality fetishist. Frankly, Netflix is too damned cheap; we could all benefit from spending more time interacting in meatspace.
Randy P
@C.V. Danes: Might be the thing the nation remembers Christie for, long after he’s retired to host a drive time radio show in Hoboken. After all, I’m still hearing Al-Gore-invented-the-internet “jokes”
Belafon
@The Other Chuck: I might agree with you if the ISPs were upgrading their networks constantly and Netfilx were eating up available bandwidth. But they are not. Netflix isn’t bringing down the internet, and the ISPs are doing as little as they can get away with on upgrading hardware.
We invented the internet, and yet we’re not at the top of the bandwidth chart.
Gin & Tonic
@The Other Chuck: This. Cogent is known (notorious) in the business for overselling their capacity and always trying to make their issues somebody else’s problem.
What’s little-known to a lot of people is the concept of “peering”, where the very large carriers will interconnect with each other in various locations at no direct cost. The equipment they use to do so is expensive, however, and is designed for symmetrical data flows. If the volumes of traffic through these interconnections are more or less the same in both directions, everybody benefits. If the volumes are not more or less the same, then the carrier who has to spend more to build out capacity to deal with your traffic will want to be compensated.
scav
For the warhawks, another blast from the past (for some, might stll be a little early in the day for this comment upon same). As for the non-flying cooked fowl, even with a belly band, would you voluntarily get between Christie and something edible?
Suffern ACE
@The Other Chuck: Yeah. Kind of like the Republicans who claim they aren’t part of the T-Party, although you can’t really tell their policy positions apart.
Oh look. Here’s the soon-to-be-unaffiliated with al Quaeda’s Somali franchise spreading their love.
MomSense
@Linda Featheringill:
I can’t speak to the veracity of the photos, but I have heard that Iraqi troops are wearing civilian clothes under their uniforms.
The Other Chuck
@Belafon: There’s plenty of blame to spread around, but the network provider that’s done the least to upgrade capacity might very well be Cogent. There’s a reason their rates are rock bottom, and that’s because they go out of their way to make their traffic someone else’s problem.
⚽️ Martin
@JPL:
Most people that need to lose weight are fully aware of why they need to lose weight. But most people need some kind of additional motivation. I know quite a few guys that were provided extra motivation by their wives. Some people are competitive and need to turn it into a game to do it. Don’t be too critical of the crutches people use to succeed – they’re generally meaningless. I mean, nobody decided to lose weight in order to get the ‘good job’ message from their Nike app. Christie’s motives may have been nothing more than an arbitrary deadline, and a deadline to run for president is as good as any.
What matters is that he’s doing it. Plenty of better reasons to criticize the guy.
Villago Delenda Est
@Randy P: Did you also know he’s fat? I’ve heard that, too.
Villago Delenda Est
@⚽️ Martin:
Odds are very good that he’ll still be an obnoxious, vindictive asshole even when he’s svelte, for example.
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense: Usually it’s the other way around, to establish that you’re not a spy or a terrorist, you’re a soldier acting on orders.
Ben Cisco
@flukebucket: Yes. He should be added to the blogroll.
Achrachno
@Linda Featheringill: They had stripped off their uniforms in an attempt to flee. Trying to look like civilians.
The Pale Scot
@The Other Chuck:
The thing is, I am paying my isp, be it comcast, verizon or whatever, to provide 5, 10 20 mps of access to the internet, the ISP is trying to say well ya, but we don’t really expect you to use it. Is utube suppose to pay comcast because I watched Scottie pup videos all day? I have already payed for that bandwidth. The ISPs want to have a gym membership type of business model, where people buy, continue to pay for it, but don’t use it. Or the common analogy is UPS charging Amazon extra above the actual shipping cost because “they are profiting from our service”.
D58826
Amb. Ryan Crocker, in full CYA mode, criticized Obama for pull out in 2011. He seems to have forgotten that there was a life and history before Jan 20, 2009 and he was part of it. Obama pulled out because of the SOFA that he and Bush negotiated in 2008. Remember the flying shoe incident? That is when Bush and Malaki signed the agreement.
Even if we had kept 10k020k troops in Iraqi for 100 years, exactly what would they be used for now? If the 1 million man Iraqi security force can’t handle 10k ISIS rebels, what will the American do? OH wait, they will be placed between the ISI troops and the Iraqi army, so they can get shot at by both sides.
Well at least the Iraqi’s won’t be killing each other then.
SiubhanDuinne
@flukebucket:
He sure is. Somebody (sorry, can’t remember which commenter) put this up here a day or two ago. And as of this morning it seems to be going viral. At least three separate lefty sites I follow on FB have put up links to it.
MomSense
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah but I think they are trying to pretend to be civilians and not troops.
srv
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/clinton-beats-obama-every-issue-poll
D58826
@SiubhanDuinne: It was also posted on KOS abbreviated roundup today
⚽️ Martin
@Achrachno: Which should be a lesson for the rest of the Army – they’re better off fighting back.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@D58826:
It’s amazing to me that the people who got it wrong on Iraq from the very beginning aren’t being mocked out of public discourse. The losses in al-Anbar province happened for a number of reasons, some of them religious and some economic. The US could mount all of the drone strikes and air attacks it could afford and the situation on the ground will not change. The neocons and the Bush administration fucked up that country, now they’re offering their sage advice on how to save it. They should eat shit and die for their perfidy.
Gin & Tonic
@The Pale Scot: But the issue isn’t really you and what level of service you paid for. The issue is “upstream” from you, at the point where the big boys interconnect. The design decisions (with major budgetary implications) driving those interconnections were made on assumptions of more-or-less equal traffic flows, and so, say, Comcast and Verizon can connect to each other and assume that that’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, where money VZ spend on equipment to carry traffic coming from Comcast will be balanced by sending traffic to Comcast (who has to buy equipment to handle it.) In the meantime reality intruded and the Internet became a lot more like broadcast TV, where you have “content networks” and “eyeball networks,” with the traffic flow being from the first to the second and nothing in the other direction. Now the eyeball networks are in a similar position as trucking companies having to have their trucks return empty. The economics have changed.
SiubhanDuinne
@D58826: That’s probably where the other sites picked it up.
I used to check the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup every day, but a few years ago I got out of the habit and never even think about it any more. In fact, I never go to Kos at all any more unless someone here links to a specific story.
raven
RIP Tiny Gwinn.
rikyrah
Tony Gwynn has passed away at the age of 54.
RIP, Mr. Gwynn.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@srv:
WTF? How can people decide that Clinton would do better on any of the issues mentioned when she hasn’t actually stated what she’d do?
⚽️ Martin
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
The country was already fucked up by having to live within bounds that someone else drew up. That shit never flew in Europe and untold wars were fought to determine where the line ought to be. Still are, witness Crimea.
The only reason that Iraq held together over the last few decade was because you had strongmen like Saddam in there. He held the place together by force, and we decided that a group of people that themselves never formed a national identity would voluntarily do so once we gave them the chance. It might have worked if the neighbors weren’t interested in stoking regional politics, but all of Iraqs neighbors play that game – every one of them – along ethnic and religious lines that all apply to Iraq. And they all know that they have a limited economic future. There’s only so much oil in that ground and once its gone, they’ve got pretty much nothing. So they’re going to fight endlessly over that little bit of economic hope for their clan, until its gone and then they’ll stop fighting because there won’t be any point any longer.
Gin & Tonic
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: “The grass is always greener…”
Gin & Tonic
@⚽️ Martin:
Is that the future? Should it be?
scav
@MomSense: Not all battlefields / warzones are alike, and relying on heuristics and rules of thumb / behavior developed elsewhere under different circs can be utterly useless. I’m sure you can think of logical reasons for and against wearing uniforms during street operations. I can think of some arguments for and against wearing uniforms when using flintlock musketry and firing upon command while arranged in tidy ordered rows of standing army infantry. I can think of reasons for or against wearing distinctive identifying insignia / clues to allegiance when attempting to escape battle though an uncertain civilian populace. My bet is there are people making all of those choices currently as they best see fit, rightly or wrongly as individual cases prove.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
@rikyrah:
That is really sad. I always respected him as an opponent.
FlipYrWhig
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: The backup QB is the most popular guy in town.
raven
@⚽️ Martin: T.E. Lawrence: So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.
⚽️ Martin
@Gin & Tonic: No, didn’t mean to suggest that it should be, just that it’s an artifice to begin with. It’s a bit like taking to random adults off the street and calling them a married couple. They may decide that they belong together, but they more likely will not because they weren’t involved in the decision.
Iraq may need to be 3 countries with some kind of super-national sharing of oil. But we didn’t give them a choice like that. Establish a profit-sharing based on the populations of the 3 countries and an exchange the oil is sold on (regardless of which of the 3 countries produces it). Cost recovery goes back to the producer nation and the profits are split according to the formula.
I’m sure there are countless problems with an idea like that, but constantly strapping the Iraqi factions back together doesn’t seem like a viable solution. There’s no notion of ‘Iraq’ – nothing for people to connect to. It took a while for the US to get that thing, so maybe they just need more time, but they seem to be working quite hard to avoid getting it.
D58826
We can’t protect our kids in school from nuts with a gun but we can solve the problem in Iraq if only the Kenyan usurper secret Moooslim had a backbone. We really really need that asteroid strike so we can start with a clean slate.
schrodinger's cat
So according to Ross Douthat and many others right here Iraq is doomed because it is not religiously and ethnically homogeneous. The example of Europe is being trotted out to make the case
that only ethnically homogenous countries make it in the long run. What does that say about the United States or India for that matter?
So are you guys conceding the wingnut point that that ethnic and religious diversity is going to be our doom.
Villago Delenda Est
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: These twits are not being mocked because they’re part of Sally Quinn’s “in crowd”. They sit at Sally Quinn’s table in the lunch room. One does not mock the “in crowd”. No matter how fucking stupid they are, how wrong they are, how smarmy they are. It’s just not done. Especially by the vermin of the Village, who prize their seats at Sally Quinn’s table above all else.
FlipYrWhig
@⚽️ Martin: Isn’t that basically what the UAE is?
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat: Ross Douchehat knows about as much about history as he does about human sexuality.
Bupkis.
Morbo
@Professor: On the contrary, putting pictures of their atrocities online shows their donors that they get results. As long as they don’t turn on the local Sunni population (no guarantee if you’ve followed them at all) there is no such thing as bad PR for ISIS.
D58826
@schrodinger’s cat: Nonat at all just that it doesn’t happen over night. It took centuries and buckets of blood for the kings of France and England to get the unruly barons under control. Even here, the great hero of the south Robert E Lee chose his state over his country in 1861.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv: She may not have balls, but at least she isn’t suffering from a melanin surplus.
MomSense
@scav:
The reporting is that they are peeling off their uniforms and leaving them behind as they flee.
FlipYrWhig
@schrodinger’s cat: Maybe they need to develop a secular national identity on their own terms, rather than having one prefabricated for them. Even Italy and Germany haven’t had those for very long. Great Britain might be devolving after 400 years of union…
Ash Can
@raven:
@rikyrah:
That just has me in tears, and I’m a die-hard Cubs fan for whom the Padres have been a pain in the ass on a number of occasions. He was such a great person and great ambassador for the game, besides being a great player. So heartbreaking that he passed at such a young age. So unfair.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: Oh, gawd, the man was a fucking giant. Well, not a Giant, a Padre, but you know what I mean.
Far too young to pass.
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense: Yeah, it seems they didn’t want to be identified as stooges of those Zoroastrian fire demon motherfuckers, if I can mix several culture’s epithets.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@schrodinger’s cat:
Always knew Douthat was an ill-informed dickwad, but ignoring the entire Classical Period as well as the Middle Ages is a new low for him. It seems that those who forget the past are doomed to become op-ed columnists.
⚽️ Martin
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah. It came about differently, though. I don’t know that the various groups that formed UAE had these unresolved vendettas to resolve, disputed religious sites, and so on.
I think the UK killed off the window in which that would have been easy.
MomSense
@Villago Delenda Est:
Please let that become a rotating tag.
Suffern ACE
@schrodinger’s cat: It will be as long as there are players who wish to make it so. Seriously, the reason Lebanon’s civil war lasted until the country was completely destroyed is that every state in the region decided it was in their interest to supply arms and training to different groups. Once one has unlimited access to arms and, in the case of Iraq, you can rely on any number of foreigners to come in an supply actually fighters, partition looks a wee bit more compelling.
SatanicPanic
@rikyrah: Well that fucking ruins my Monday. Damn. Tony was our greatest. Loved that dude
rikyrah
American Voters Need To Realize The Terrible Urgency Of 2014
[….] Are Democratic candidates and especially Democratic leadership so incapable of connecting the dots that a sane and literate electorate will sit out this critical election? Yeah, apparently. We have leadership handpicking candidates who won’t galvanize the base and refusing to provide support to non-incumbents unless they are sure-fire winners. Our candidates pussyfoot through campaigns, terrified of offending Republicans who would never vote for them anyway. All in all we have a party which is unwilling or unable to bludgeon voters with the truth. [….] There isn’t a natural constituency the Republicans have not insulted, annoyed, or outright harmed in recent years yet many seem blissfully unaware of it.[….]
There are 89,727 career and 137,037 non-career employees of the U.S. Postal Service. At least that many more adults probably depend on their paychecks. They all have heard that their livelihood is in danger but do they know why? If it was made clear that a Republican law is forcing USPS to fund employee pensions for 75 years over a period of ten; that this is a badly disguised plan to kill the USPS to the benefit of UPS and FedEx, big donors to the GOP; and that Republicans are now angling to use that pension money to erase the deficit in the Highway Trust Fund, do you think they would sit at home on November 4? Hell, they would probably drag their spouses, parents, and half the neighborhood to the polls with them.[….]
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/06/15/american-voters-realize-terrible-urgency-2014.html
SatanicPanic
@Ash Can:
well, at least we’re beating someone
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Thank you for a much needed afternoon laugh.
D58826
Lindsey Graham has joined the noun, verb, 9/11 crowd. But at least in the short run this seems like the greater threat:
Not another complicated 9/11 style attack but a bunch of small Boston Marathon/London subway style attacks. One or two people and a couple of back packs of explosives. The Brits went about their business after the subway bombing but I’m afraid in this country we will declare martial law and have a military coup. After all the Kenyan is really a mooslim terrorist at heart and the right has been screaming the mooslims are coming, the 12 foot tall mooslims are coming. ..
Ash Can
@SatanicPanic: Heh! I’ll never forget 1984!
Thanks for the chuckle; I needed it. Every team should have a Tony Gwynn. If there were any justice, he would have lived to be a hundred, imparting baseball knowledge and insight and cheerfulness all the way.
Suffern ACE
@D58826: I don’t think that is a foolish concern.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@The Pale Scot: The problem reduced to one sentence. Great job, sir or madam.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@D58826:
Remember the D.C. Beltway Sniper? The potential for carnage has always been in place.I’d guess that the only thing holding back the terrorists is the fear that Western reaction would result in their respective countries becoming a bombed-out no man’s land.
Gene108
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
The back-up QB always seems like he’s going to step in and lead the team to victory, because things are not so great with the current starter.
SatanicPanic
@Ash Can: Hey we’re both on team underdog!
FlipYrWhig
@Gene108: Great minds, etc.:
Jane
How do they throttle your home connection?
Mine keeps jumping to someone else’s router, so I’m wondering.
Xboxershorts
@The Pale Scot:
1) Youtube (actually Google) maintains it’s very own content delivery network as close as possible to the requestor’s destination. When I worked at a major Data center for Time Warner Cable, Google had an installation that stored and distributed content at our location. And in NY, Buffalo, Syracuse, Cleveland, Cincinatti, etc…etc. Google/Youtube content does not cross peering or transit points. The idea behind Content Delivery Networks is to take advantage of a feature in DNS that allows the Content Delivery network owner to redirect your request to the closest existing cache of the content requested which is usually hosted in a regional data center owned and operated by the ISP the request came from. Google/Yahoo/Akamai Content Delivery is a totally different animal than Netflix.
Here’s the Wiki on Content Delivery networks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
2) Netflix traffic is not cached this way, it is maintained at major internet exchange points in NY City, Newark, NJ, Atlanta, GA, Ashburn and Vienna, VA, Chicago, Dallas, Miami…etc….Netflix expects your ISP to do settlement free peering (at a cost to the ISP) directly with them otherwise your request will cross Pay-Per-Megabyte transit through a tier 1 carrier like AT&T, XO Communications, or Level3. As the popularity of Netflix and especially Netflix HD has soared, so have the costs of delivering that content to you across pay per megabyte transit. This is an extra cost your ISP did not have just 3-5 short years ago….
3) You aren’t really paying for guaranteed bandwidth and likely never were. You are paying for capacity from your Cable/DSL modem to your ISP’s edge. Period. Even if your ISP imposes a cap on data consumption, that is still not the same as guaranteed bandwidth, especially to or from an off network site.
Trollhattan
@D58826:
Suspect the “New Model,” if you will, is illustrated by the Mumbai and Nairobi mall attacks. The Holy 2nd Amendment actually makes similar assaults easier to accomplish here than those two countries.
RareSanity
@The Other Chuck:
This is exactlywhat Verizon and Comcast would love for consumers to think is the answer, when in reality, it’s complete and utter bullshit.
The downstream data is being paid for by the customers of Verizon and Comcast, through their monthly internet service price. Both Comcast and Verizon are trying to “double dip” and get both their customers, and the content providers to pay them twice for the same data, going in the same direction.
It would be akin to them asking Google to pay them “peering fees” because their users use that search engine more than Bing.
It doesn’t matter how much data Netflix is sending to Comcast/Verizon, because it is not using Comcast/Verizon as a “hop” to some other location. It is data that is being requested by customers of Comcast/Verizon, that are already paying thos companies to deliever that data.
The peering philosophy you’ve outlined only applies with the peer isn’t the actual endpoint for the data. It’s when they are acting as just a point to the final destination.
In essence, Comcast and Verizon themselves are requesting all this data, because they are providing internet services to people. They are consuming data that they are requesting, not shuffling it off to any third party for consumption.
Comcast and Verizon are responsible for providing the service that they have sold to their customers…period. Whether those customers spend all day on Netflix, YouTube, or some porn site is not relevant. They bought “internet” access, and that’s what Verizon and Comcast need to provide.
Netflix has offered to peer directly with both Verizon and Comcast, by collocating their own servers in Verizon and Comcast’s data centers…for free. Both have refused to allow that to happen. The reason is that doing this, will only speed up the inveitable situation for both…having to actually upgrade their networks to meet the change in user demand for data that has grown beyond just surfing the internet for “static” webpages.
If Netflix is allow to collocate servers, Comcast and Verizon would no longer be able to blame Netflix, or its CDNs, for the poor performance users are seeing. The blame would fall directly on them for “overselling” the services that they are overcharging all their users for.
Please don’t continue to spread this mentallity. It is the users of Comcast and Verizon’s internet services, that are “paying the freight” to have those bits delivered. Comcast and Verizon are trying to get paid twice, while continuing to hide that they can’t possibly provide the service they have sold to customers, without large scale upgrades to their networks.
They don’t want to upgrade (fully in the case of Verizon) their networks to fiber-to-the-house (FTH), which would render this argument moot, because their would be plenty of bandwidth to go around…and also be very expensive for Comcast/Verizon.
Robert Sneddon
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Internet provision isn’t a gym membership. It’s an endless upgrade cycle, installing hardware and server farms and cabling at a cost of tens of billions of dollars and then doing it all over again five years later with new kit costing more dollars that delivers ten times the traffic for the same dollar cost per month to the consumer. There’s no point having fibre to the home and 100Mbits/second or even gigabit/second connectivity for the consumer if the other end of the fibre ends up in ten-year-old switches and the upstream from the switch frames to the backbone is provisioned for the days of 256kbit consumer speeds.
Streaming hammers this sort of setup, continuous high-data-rate traffic that can’t be shaped to give everyone on the switch a fair share without ruining the video playback, making it jerk and de-rez. The only solution is another turn of the upgrade hamster-wheel, another ten billion bucks of new sparkly bits and thicker pipelines to the backbone but the ISPs can’t raise their prices to their consumers to pay for this without a lot of screaming.
The ISPs are looking at the streaming services to pay for the mega-traffic their customers are pumping though the ISP’s switch frames and the backbone connections. The streamers, obviously, don’t want to pay the real cost of this and neither do their customers. Either the ISPs shape traffic and ruin the streaming download experience or the streamers pay for the extra traffic capability the ISPs have to install to cope with the load. Coming soon, 4k video streaming, four times the current HD video data traffic over the same switches and backbone provision. It ain’t gonna be pretty.
NonyNony
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Um, that would be an actual benefit to most of the terrorist types we’ve been up against, since part of their stated purpose is to radicalize Muslims in the Middle East against the West. Every country we turn into a bombed-out hellhole in retaliation for their attacks here is another poster child for why people in the Middle East need to radicalize against the West.
It’s more likely that the thing holding them back is that previously they were looking at “sending a message” by targeting pieces of symbolism. The WTC attack killed a lot of people, but it wasn’t chosen as a target because of the number of people that could be killed – it was chosen because it was a giant symbol of Western Economic Power. Just as the Pentagon was chosen as a symbol of Western Military Power. Those strikes were propaganda strikes to tell the Powers That Be in the US “Fuck With Us And We’ll Fuck With You” – as well as to tell the people on the streets in the Middle East that the West was possible to fuck with.
If they’ve decided that they want to send a message to the average US citizen instead of to the Powers That Be, then they’ll take a different tactic and I’m actually worried that they might be successful. Our security people seem all concerned with protecting “infrastructure” – worried that a terrorist attack will take out a major airport or communications system or whatnot – that they’re missing the point of most terrorist attacks. Which is to cause terror. The damage to infrastructure is incidental – useful if you get some, but not the point of the exercise. Terrorist attacks are a violent form of propaganda first and an attack second (or possibly even lower in priority).
Belafon
@Xboxershorts: Question: Once the infrastructure is set up, how does it cost more for a million packets to go from LA to my house versus one packet?
Belafon
@Robert Sneddon:
Especially since we look at every other developed country and see that they are providing higher data rates at a cheaper monthly cost.
RareSanity
@Gin & Tonic:
This is not an accurate statement.
Comcast/Verizon are not acting a “peer” to Netflix (or its CDNs) in the “conventional” definition of the role.
It is Comcast/Verizon (acting as a proxy for its customers) that is actually requesting the data. They are not merely acting as “waypoints” for the data on the internet at large. When Tier 1 enters into a peering agreement with another, it is under the assumption that when they are acting as an internet waypoint, the data will be about equal in both directions…these agreements really keep the internet functioning.
But that’s not the relationship Comcast/Verizon have with Netflix. The customers of Comcast/Netflix are paying monthly to Comcast/Verizon, for them to deliver the data they are requesting. It just so happens that the amount of people requesting data from Netflix is higher than Comcast and Verizon can/want to provide with their current networks.
They have a choice, either pay to upgrade their networks so that they can actually provide the service their users are paying for every month…or, tell their users the truth, that they can’t provide the service they promised, and deal with the fallout from that.
They need to stop hiding behind Netflix to cover up their own shortcomings…or get out the damn ISP business.
MazeDancer
@flukebucket:
StoneKettle guy is just plain dazzling.
Sure, he’s using twice as many words as he will once he goes pro, but he can write. Also think. Hope he’s for real.
And if he can talk as well as he writes, MSNBC better get up to Alaska and sign him.
Maybe everyone else had already known of him, but I had missed the buzz. And how come this little piece of delicious obvious hadn’t been served up before (or maybe I missed that, too):
Xboxershorts
@Belafon:
TW Cable began upgrading their peering at the locations I mentioned long before Netflix became a player in content delivery.
In order for TW Cable to have upgraded sufficiently to allocate enough capacity at each of these locations, they would have had to see that trend opening up. It didn’t exist at the time so now, that they’ve completed this capital outlay in excess of 100 Million, it’s already out of date….
The same thing happened when Peer to Peer networks came on the scene in the late 90’s….the application to provide that kind of traffic appeared well before the hardware to support it was in place.
I’m not advocating for or against, I no longer work in the Cable industry, I’m trying to add some insight though and am kind of on the side that says using Netflix as an example of the fight for Net Neutrality is not quite an accurate depiction of what the Net Neutrality fight is about.
A better example would be Comcast and their Content side, NBC Universal.
Comcast can place all their NBC Universal data content in a fast lane and then put the likes of ABC, Viacom, CNN etc….into a best effort lane.
RareSanity
@Robert Sneddon:
Well that’s not necessarily true. They have been postponing the inevitable (fiber-to-the-home) for too long, and now it is biting them in the ass. Once they upgrade to FTH, there is no more upgrading until the time at which a new technology eclipses fiber.
It’s a “one time” cost, that can amortized over several decades. There won’t be any viable technology replacement for fiber…in any of our lifetimes.
They have been booking billions in profit (each quarter) over the past decade, mostly protected by local monopolies that would not allow for competition.
If they had allocated that money and resources, over a 10 year timeframe (starting in 2000, for example), the upgrades would already be in place and this wouldn’t even be a discussion now.
The problem is that they are unwilling to accept “profitable” over “insanely profitable”, in order to reinvest in their infrastructure. They have only allocated whatever the bear minimum is to keep up their unsustainable profit magins, to apease traders on Wall St with irrational expectations of neverending “growth”.
MattR
@RareSanity: Well said. Can’t think of anything to add to that.
SiubhanDuinne
Here are a couple of pieces of good news on the gun front:
1. Two grieving fathers look for common ground on gun violence. Richard Martinez, father of one of the Santa Barbara victims, and Peter Rodger, father of the shooter, who also died, met today and announced they will look for ways to work together to reduce gun violence.
2. The Supreme Court has upheld a law prohibiting “straw purchases” of guns.
Baby steps are still steps.
RareSanity
@MattR:
It’s just amazing how Comcast and Verizon have been able to successfully shape the discussion, where it completely excludes what their customers are actually paying them to provide.
I’m paying Comcast ~$60 a month, and so are millions of others…when is someone going to ask Comcast and Verizon the important question?
What exactly are your customers paying you for every month, if it is not to deliver the data they are requesting?
Also, if a user primarily uses their internet plan to access Netflix, and you want Netflix to pay for that delivery, shouldn’t that customer pay you less every month, because Netflix is essentially footing the bill? If not, how can you justify both your customer and Netflix paying you to deliver the same data?
Gin & Tonic
@RareSanity: They [consumers] bought “internet” access, and that’s what Verizon and Comcast need to provide.
Correction. The consumer bought “best effort” Internet access. If you want QoS and SLA’s, you have to pay for them.
Xboxershorts
@RareSanity: The existing model of the ISP is to provide you, the customer, a set capacity from your Cable/DSL Modem to the edge of their network.
There was never any guarantee of any service, all content is provided as best effort. If that content lives within your network such as a CDN’s regional data center cache, then everyone is usually happy. But if you have to cross into someone else’s network, there is no way to guarantee delivery.
You describe the internet we’d all like to have. But the technology to build that is extremely expensive to implement. As such, there will never ever be any guarantee of capacity beyond the edge of your ISP’s network.
This is almost certainly a bitch fest between Netflix, It’s carrier (who really is held in low regard by most anyone who does internet backbone work) and the ISPs. In think Netflix and Cogent have been somewhat disingenuous here because cogent really does like to shift costs that the carrier has usually been responsible for in the past.
Berial
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking the Netflix-Comcast/Verizon issue is over peering. Peering is when you have data being passed along your network to someone else’s network. For example, from a backbone provider in the NE to a backbone provider in the SW via a Comcast network in the middle of the country.
What the Netflix issue is about is data requested by Comcast or Verizon’s customers. This data is NOT being sent somewhere else. It is terminating at Comcast/Verizon’s customers homes.
If you own a reservoir and people want your water you have to have pipes to their house to deliver it. In this case you have to have an interface with a middle man between the drinkers and the reservoir. If the interconnect on one side or the other is adequate but on the other side it isn’t then the drinkers are being shafted by the side that isn’t keeping up.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@RareSanity: Fine, but then Comcast and Verizon are going to start charging YOU for the internet traffic between Netflix and their servers instead of just from their servers to you. Whoever you want to blame, this is some combination of the customer and Netflix wanting to get full service from the ISP while only paying for half of it.
RareSanity
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m already paying for all of that, regardless of what the fine print of their service agreements state…more than anyone else in the developed world for equivalent service, as a matter of fact.
They are simply not delivering service equivalent to their pricing, relative to the market at large. Although they want me to think they are, so they can keep charging me the price as if I were getting it. That’s why the service agreement is irrelevant…what they are “selling” me, is NOT what is outlined in their service agreement, and also NOT what they are actually providing to me. The service agreement you are referring to, is merely legal cover for when people start complaining about getting shafted every month.
If what they are selling me is a neutered internet service, then I need to be charged accordingly.
Now they want to extract even more money from content providers…for what? Are they going to be using that money to upgrade their networks to a level that can actually handle all that they are selling?
Nope, they’re just going to keep pocketing it, just like the Bells did with the Universal Service Fee, and continue to provide the bear minimum of service…and blame everyone else for the problems, and pay for lobbyists and politicians to provide blanket protection for their bait and switch scheme.
Gin & Tonic
@RareSanity: If you think you are buying more than what the seller is contractually obligated to sell you, then I can’t help you very much. Obviously you don’t feel all that strongly about it, because you continue to pay the monthly charge voluntarily. This is Econ 101.
RareSanity
@Xboxershorts:
The fact that Netflix has offered to peer directly with Comcast, with their own equipment, at their own cost, removes Cogent or any other CDN from the discussion.
Once they refused free peering, directly with Netflix, the excuse of “well Cogent sucks”to gone. The discussion then moves from “a bitchfest from Netflix”, to extortion from Comcast.
If direct peer equipment is installed in Comcast data centers, the only remaining bottleneck can be between Comcast and its customers. So instead of Comcast working on that bottleneck…which exists independent of Cogent or anyone else…they want Netflix to pay for them to NOT have to address their oversold, over capacity network…and take the blame for it as well.
RareSanity
@Gin & Tonic:
ECON101?
There are local monopolies that where, at best, consumers in the US have two choices for “broadband” intenet service. The service that is offered by either entity, is priced so ridiculously higher than any other developed nation it is astounding. The service provided is also subpar when compared to other nations, while commanding that exorbitant price.
What exactly about that situation is taught in this ECON101 class you speak of?
The two competitors in each market charge the same prices, for the same subpar service, all while benefitting from government protected monopolies that have excluded competitive forces, for damn near a century now in the case of the phone companies…and cable companies have been protected for almost 4 decades.
What does that ECON101 class have to say about supply and demand, and it’s affects on the quality of goods and services, relative their prices, in government controlled monopolies? How about when those monopolistic entities use the government to forcefully limit competition, when the factors that lead to those monopolies are clearly outdated?
You can kiss my ass with your condecsention, like anything having to do with internet service in the United States finds ANY basis in simple economics…because it doesn’t.
Gin & Tonic
@RareSanity: From February 23:
Gin & Tonic
@RareSanity: And yet you pay it. So it’s worth it to you.
Let me ask, how many letters on the subject have you written to your congressional representatives? Your state PUC? How many comments have you filed with the FCC on their NPRM’s?
RareSanity
@Gin & Tonic:
I written many letters, as well as submitted several public comments on behalf of myself and my employer. I have also contacted my Congressional representatives several times on this subject.
I work in the wireless industry, and have for over 15 years, as an engineer and now manager of engineering. I deal with issues relating to the FCC and its regulation daily. I have also participated in several TIA/EIA standards bodies.
So again, you can take your condescension and shove it up your ass. I know exactly what I’m talking about, and actually work in the trenches with it daily.
What about you with all of smug, self-assurance on the subject?
And yes I pay it every month, because the alternative is no broadband access at all. At what point does a person accept that the only solution is either eat shit or don’t eat?
Why can’t I pay for the bullshit I get now, while actively working to make it less shitty?
RareSanity
@Gin & Tonic:
And in that agreement, Netflix is paying Comcast’s extorion demands because it has no other choice at this point.
Netflix has people cancelling their service, due to the bullshit way Comcast manages its network. They’re paying it, while trying to force change in the situation…just like I am with my home broadband connection.
So I guess Netflix should just eat shit or don’t eat as well, right?
You eat shit and be happy with it, I’m not that type of person.
Berial
A blog post from Netflix and their POV:
“It is true that there is competition among the transit providers and CDNs that transport and localize data across networks. But even the most competitive transit market cannot ensure sufficient access to the Comcast network. That’s because, to reach consumers, CDNs and transit providers must ultimately hand the traffic over to a terminating ISP like Comcast, which faces no competition. Put simply, there is one and only one way to reach Comcast’s subscribers at the last mile: Comcast.
There cannot be an “intensely competitive” market when Comcast alone sets the terms and conditions for access to Comcast subscribers. Comcast can simply refuse to provide capacity to any network at any time, constraining the ability for Comcast users to use the services they want. Comcast’s ability to constrain access to Netflix can be clearly seen in the following chart, which shows how Netflix performance deteriorated on the Comcast network and then immediately recovered after Netflix started paying Comcast in February. ”
Follow the link for the chart.
Gin & Tonic
@RareSanity: I’ve been responsible for voice and data services, carrier contracts, SLA’s, etc for nearly two decades. You’re not the only one who know what he’s talking about. My active participation has been more on the ARIN and IETF side.
Xboxershorts
@RareSanity:
My experience in a backbone/peering engineering department for TW Cable suggests that Cogent should never ever be taken at face value with the things they say to the general public.
Comcast has the customer base to legitimately suggest they should peer at multiple locations via multiple 10GB ports.
Netflix would never, ever pay for upgrade to existing Comcast peering routers, line cards, added ports, riser cables and more that are needed to establish any new peering session. Let alone a network the size of Comcast which stretches already from New England to Florida to the Pacific Northwest and California. We’re not talking a single peer anymore, we’re talking establishing new peering at NY or Newark, NJ, DC Ashburn, Maybe Atlanta and or Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Denver, Seattle and San Jose.
If new line cards capable of doing backplane switching in excess of 100GB/s are needed, the cost for just a single new peer can easily exceed 1/4 million dollars.
Now, Comcast SHOULD be doing this kind of investment anyways. But it is expensive and it is time consuming and it is manpower intensive and I understand why Comcast would balk at initiating a project like this that deals strictly with a single content provider and only that content provider.
J R in WV
@srv:
Well, yeah, but the whole media world has spent the past 6 years attacking President Obama for still breathing. No one has bothered to attack Hil but Terry Gross on Fresh Air since Obama won the nomination!