Comcast CEO Brian Roberts Opens Mouth, Inserts Foot 343
lpress (707742) writes "At a recent conference, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts rationalized charging Netflix to deliver content by comparing Comcast to the Post Office, saying that Netflix pays to mail DVDs to its customers but now expects to be able to deliver the same content over the internet for free. He forgot to mention that the Post Office does not charge recipients for those DVDs. The underlying issue in this debate is who will invest in the Internet infrastructure that we badly need? Comcast has a disincentive to invest because, if things bog down, people will blame content providers like Netflix and the ISP will be able to charge the content provider for adequate service. If ISPs have insufficient incentive to invest in infrastructure, who will? Google? Telephone companies? Government (at all levels)? Premises owners?"
He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
That everyone has to pay for access to the Internet, including Netflix. They've already paid, but Comcast arbitrarily expects them to pay even more just because their own customers want to use Netflix, which makes zero fucking sense.
Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more, his analogy actually supports Comcast NOT charging Netflix, rather than the other way around.
Being a Canadian resident, if I want to send a letter to someone in Canada, I pay Canada Post to deliver it.
If, on the other hand, I want to send a letter to someone in a different country, say, the USA, or England, I pay Canada Post to deliver it. I do not have to pay the United States Postal Service or Royal Mail to deliver my letter sent from Canada.
In this analogy, countries and regional postal services are equivalent to ISPs. If I want to send a network packet (letter) to someone on a different ISP (in a different country), I pay my local ISP (postal service) to deliver it. Any ISP (country) beyond that is not my responsibility.
The Universal Postal Union (Score:5, Informative)
I want to send a letter to someone in a different country, say, the USA, or England, I pay Canada Post to deliver it. I do not have to pay the United States Postal Service or Royal Mail to deliver my letter sent from Canada.
Postal settlements for delivery abroad are made peer-to-peer.
The Universal Postal Union (UPU, French: Union postale universelle) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates postal policies among member nations.
In 1969, the UPU introduced a new system of payment where fees were payable between countries according to the difference in the total weight of mail between them. These fees were called terminal dues. Ultimately, this new system was fairer when traffic was heavier in one direction than the other. As a matter of example, in 2012, terminal dues for transit from China to the USA was 0.635 SDR/kg, or about 1 USD/kg.
As this affected the cost of the delivery of periodicals, the UPU devised a new ''threshold'' system, which it later implemented in 1991. The system sets separate letter and periodical rates for countries which receive at least 150 tonnes of mail annually. For countries with less mail, the original flat rate is still maintained. The United States has negotiated a separate terminal dues formula with thirteen European countries that includes a rate per piece plus a rate per kilogram; it has a similar arrangement with Canada.
Universal Postal Union [wikipedia.org]
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It should be a settlement between the major carriers, Comcast, Shaw, Verizon, Google fibre (Google as an ISP, not Google as SaaS provider)
Those are only mid-tier carriers really. The major carriers are the people who build national fibre backbones, trans-oceanic links, etc. The end-customer doesn't normally see them (unless they use traceroute) but they're there and they're important.
Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more, his analogy actually supports Comcast NOT charging Netflix, rather than the other way around.
Which in my case, i do. I pay Comcast a monthly 'delivery fee'. what is delivered is of no business to them, just like the post office.
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Which in my case, i do. I pay Comcast a monthly 'delivery fee'. what is delivered is of no business to them, just like the post office.
The post office may not care what is in the box but its charges are based on size and weight.
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No-one is forcing Comcast to offer unlimited data contracts to consumers. That's a business decision by Comcast and they should have to live with the consequences of their own decisions.
Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, but the mail doesn't cost more 'cause it goes to my aunt Emma instead of the billing department of the power company next to her.
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What's more, his analogy actually supports Comcast NOT charging Netflix, rather than the other way around.
Being a Canadian resident, if I want to send a letter to someone in Canada, I pay Canada Post to deliver it.
If, on the other hand, I want to send a letter to someone in a different country, say, the USA, or England, I pay Canada Post to deliver it. I do not have to pay the United States Postal Service or Royal Mail to deliver my letter sent from Canada.
In this analogy, countries and regional postal services are equivalent to ISPs. If I want to send a network packet (letter) to someone on a different ISP (in a different country), I pay my local ISP (postal service) to deliver it. Any ISP (country) beyond that is not my responsibility.
I made the same point back in March:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
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Exactly. This is a dispute between "carriers", where Comcast wants to stop buying transit from its bandwidth providers, and instead get transit for free from Comcast. Comcast wants Netflix to either buy transit from bandwidth providers or pay Comcast for the transit; By analogy to the postal service, imagine that you wanted to send a letter to someone in the US, but not pay either Canada Post or the USPS for it.
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You left out an important point. All those carriers are quite capable of mirroring the bulk of that content a instead of hassling with transit deliver a legal copy from their own servers (legal as in once licence in and one licence out). Netflix content is ideal for this as the bulk of the traffic is the same thing.
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His analogies are all around HORRIBLE. Another statement was that "since Netflix uses 30% of our bandwidth, maybe they should pay 30% of the costs".
When Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO) responded "if we pay 30% of your costs, we should get 30% of your revenue" Comcast had no further comment...
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That's technically true, but cbiltcliffe also makes the point that it's not his responsibility. cbiltcliffe doesn't care about the US postal service's fee. The Canadian postal service has given him a price for delivery of his letter, and he pays said price. His end of the transaction is done, and whatever agreement the Canadian postal service has with the US postal service is, that is the Canadian postal service's problem, not his. Whether or not the Canadian postal service's fee includes the US postal serv
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Charging more is not the problem. The problem is that the proposed model creates a two tier internet. The internet of the big companies that can afford the fee and thrive, and the internet of "us peasants" that will suffer.
Essentially, what it boils down to, is that they want to do to the internet what happened to other media: You will only be heard if you have the money. And last time I checked the first amendment of the US does not have a "for the rich" clause.
Re: He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that, in both cases, the sender/content provider has already paid. If there's an additional cost to transmitting the content across a boundary (different country or different peering service), then in both cases that has already been factored into the cost of sending it, and paid to the local provider (post office or ISP).
By Comcast's reasoning, the parcel sender should also expect a bill from any countries the parcel travels through, despite paying the full postage when sending. If Comcast wants more money for transmitting content, they need to take it up with their neighbour peering providers, not with the content producers or consumers.
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Yes.
It's called a PEERING arrangement, as in two PEERS talking to each other. If Comcast feel that they are not benefiting from the arrangement, they are free to terminate the peering and accept the traffic via. some other means, all of which will cost them more money.
Comcast would have to upgrade their networks, you say? Well boo hoo: it isn't the fault of Netflix that Comcast customers want their data. Comcast customers have paid Comcast to deliver them data. If Comcast are f
Re: He also forgot to mention... (Score:4, Interesting)
The main issue is that ISPs are allowed to oversell their capacity by many, many times, and they hope that nobody notices what they have done. Now that customers are using that capacity, instead of doing the ethical thing and fulfilling the promise they made to consumers, they are trying to find someone else to foot the bill for their sleezy business practices.
I think the best analogy is like fractional reserve banking. Imagine a culture shit where suddenly people stop leaving their money in savings, and instead store lots of money in savings, but then withdraw almost all of it periodically to spend.
Instead of changing their banking policy to remain solvent, the banks begin demanding that the most popular retailers pay them massive fees to accept the money that their customers are paying them, and if they don't, the banks will notify people that it is the stores not accepting their money. And for some reason, people believe them.
Not making a whole lot of fucking sense? Well, neither does the tiered internet thing.
Re: He also forgot to mention... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets try to make a better analogy.
Lets say the USPS instead of charging per parcel, instead charges each tax payer a base $30/month, but the customer is allowed 5 parcels per month. But you only get that deal if you bundle with their overpriced car insurance, otherwise you pay $60/month for 5 parcels. If you want to get more parcels, then you can get the 20 parcel per month for $100, for the first 6 months, then $150 after.
Since you need to get mail, you put up with this, then suddenly, after a decade of this highway robbery, Amazon starts offering this wonderful service that allows you to make use of your underutilized mail system that you pay so much for. Now you can order your regular things online and have them shipped without the hassle of going to a store or forgetting.
So lots of people start using this Amazon service. Amazon pays FedEx $2 per parcel to deliver to your city, where FedEx hands off to USPS, then USPS delivers it to you. After a while, USPS gets cranky that they're now having to deliver a lot more packages. Lots of people have upgraded to their $150/month package to get 20 parcels per month, but USPS can't handle it because they've never had this demand before.
USPS then refuses to accept more parcel from FedEX, which causes parcels to back-up and get delivered late. Amazon asks FedEx if there is anything can be done, but FedEx says they can't because USPS refuses all negotiations.
Eventually Amazon caves in and enters into an agreement where Amazon pays USPS $2 per parcel, but Amazon has to deliver the parcel to the city, then USPS will deliver it the rest of the way. Because Amazon was paying FedEx to deliver the package for them, Amazon now has to provide that service for themselves.
USPS customers are now paying increased Amazon prices, while paying exorbitant USPS prices. USPS's rational is that if the customers want to make full use of the service they've purchased from USPS, then the customer should have to pay even more, but USPS didn't want to raise their bill because customers wouldn't like that, so instead they indirectly increase their bill by charging the suppliers of what the customers want
All the while in another city, UPS(Google Fiber) is charging $50 per month for unlimited packages and even lets Amazon use their local warehouse for free, which helps reduce Amazon's and UPS's costs.
Lets put this all into perspective. Transit is priced about $0.45 retail, and costs even less. But lets give Comcast a bit of wiggle room and assume that on average, bandwidth costs $0.50/mbit. This is bandwidth that can reach anywhere in the world. Comcast oversubscribes about 20:1, which means that bandwidth is really about $0.025/mbit per customer. Comcast then turns around and charges $100/month for 100mbit, which only costs them about $2.5 in bandwidth. Then Comcast complains that Netflix is using too much of this bandwidth, because Comcast's network can't handle providing a measly 5mbit/s to many of their customers at the same time.
Comcast then gets this awesome idea, instead of paying for bandwidth, they should get paid for it! So not Comcast is making even more money, but making money isn't a bad thing in itself. So, what's wrong about Comcast wanting to make more money? Because Comcast is having their customers foot the bill for the infrastructure, then Comcast outright refuses to allow the customers to use the infrastructure to its fullest, then Comcast turns around and resells that same infrastructure for more profit to another company, while making no additional investments into the infrastructure.
The customer's didn't gain anything, they were only allowed to make more use of what they already paid for.
Imagine if you leased a 6 person van for the explicit reason to hold more of your kids and their friends, but then your car dealership tells Chucky Cheese that if they want you to be able to put 6 people into the van that you leased, Chucky Cheese will have to pay. Because... get this... 6 seat vans are expensive. No shit. Isn't that why you're paying a premium for a 6 person van over a 4 seat car?
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This really is the problem here. We pay for service and Netflix pays for service. The internet is a system of interconnected networks we each can access for whatever reasons we choose.
If Comcast is slowing bandwidth for certain providers based on the condition of payment from third parties, they are cheating their customers who paid for certain speeds. And no, the "up to" argument doesn't hold water because at no time can the up to be above what they limited the speeds to when they are purposely limiting it
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Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Informative)
I think you have this wrong unless I'm not understanding correctly what you mean.
If this was the case for you with your video game services then you already buying into some good data centers into the backbone and then later on some ISP's backbone link is congested they would then charge you extra to deliver your service to their customers even though you've already paid to be in the internet backbone in your data centers! It's ridiculous that any ISP thinks this is reasonable.
I've paid for my bandwidth, the service (Netflix in this case/your video game service) has paid for their bandwidth now Comcast is double dipping because it knows it can since it has a monopoly.
Have any ISP in any other country try this if there is competition I bet you they will not last long.
Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem was that Netflix didn't give a shit about some customers because they paid the lowest bidder to be their bandwidth host.
Concern with network issues is why Netflix has offered CDN appliances at no cost for more than two years [netflix.com] to ISPs. Comcast chose to refuse Netflix's offer to colo within their own DCs on their own internal network, which would have reduced latency and bandwidth costs to nothing. I tend to believe that Comcast is more concerned with Netflix's effect on their own content offerings, and pushing the additional costs to Netflix has the additional benefit of making *them* take the PR hit for any price increases that result.
Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, where's the upside for Comcast?
In a sane world, the up side would be that they got to keep their customers, who would leave and go to someone else if Netflix didn't work properly. In our world, they often have a monopoly on high-speed internet access within a market, and so their customers will simply have to suckit.
Comcast isn't treating Netflix any better or any worse than anyone else. Comcast has always been consistent in it's policy - if you want access to their network, you pay them.
And they and all other internet service providers should be prohibited from engaging in that kind of behavior. Content should be separate from transport. It is long past time to force ISPs to behave as common carriers. We forced the telcos, we can force the ISPs.
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Ok, and how many customers do you think are cancelling their internet service with Comcast just because of Netflix?
Very few, because of those who would consider it, few have any credible options, and many have no options.
You realize this is how the internet has worked since the NSF stopped off, yes?
Yes. And it has been a point of contention all along.
Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
If that were true, then Comcast wouldn't have a complaint about network congestion - it wouldn't happen.
Any congestion would only occur at the Netflix connection point. Thus, once again, Comcast doesn't have a problem.
If the congestion occurs at the COMCAST connection to the backbone, then COMCAST has a problem. Not Netflix. If Comcast wants to service their customers, they need to upgrade THEIR connection to the backbone - not force Netflix to pay a bribe to Comcast to NOT IMPOSE CONGESTION. This is commonly known as "extortion".
Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:4, Informative)
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A never went to bill the server, A went to C, because C was generating all the traffic, and C said fuck you, so server went to A and said here's the cash that C won't give you. C made it a server problem, in this case. Peerage is based on an even trade.. the problem is the trade isn't even
Re:He also forgot to mention... (Score:4, Informative)
I actually know quite a bit about routing. Enough to know that you don't call an interconnect a 'route'. A route is a destination prefix with a valid next-hop. But go right on ahead and think you know all about internet routing just because you read a blog entry or two.
And yes, you do let interconnects get congested if there's no business case for upgrading them.
I'm not saying I disagree with your opinion. As an operations wonk, it pains me to see capacity issues and my natural inclination is to fix it.
However, that shit costs money, and not lunch money either. This is when the business side interfered with the tech. Unless there's a good business case for it, those links aren't getting upgraded until there is.
In this case, there was no business case to do so. If Netflix was complaining about the quality of service because of the saturation on the Cogent interconnect, all they had to do was alter their routing policy to send the traffic for Comcast's prefixes out their Level 3 links instead. It's a trivial and often performed piece of BGP traffic engineering. Netflix decided not to do so (because Level 3 is a crapload more expensive than Cogent) and make a public stink about it.
Even after the public stink failed, Netflix *still* decided not to send the traffic out Level 3, opting to purchase direct links into the Comcast network (and, shortly thereafter, into AT&T's network as well. Strangely enough, people don't seem to have an issue with AT&T telling Netflix to go fuck themselves, just Comcast). That decision should tell you a couple things - Bandwidth ain't cheap. It's cheaper than it was 10 years ago, on a per mbit/gbit cost, but the amount of traffic crossing has scaled up even while prices have been scaling down. And it should tell you just how expensive Level3 is to actually use.
You're basically saying that, just because the Cogent link was saturated, Comcast should have instantly gone ahead and upgraded their links with Cogent, nevermind that the guys doing the complaining had links to another Comcast transit provider, who's links *weren't* saturated.
When bandwidth costs are the clear majority of your OpEx, you think twice about doling out CapEx and additional OpEx if there is another option. You would make a horrible network operator.
Re: He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the fact that Netflix is in all of those data centers. The problem is that Comcast is intentionally degrading their peering in those data centers meet-me rooms in an attempt to get more direct customers.
Furthermore, if you're large enough Netflix will actually supply servers that you can plug into your network to provide the top x percentile of content -- for free.
This is purely a Comcast wants more money and hates video competition issue.
Re: He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
NBC/Universal should be separated from Comcast/Xfinity as a condition of any more mergers/acquisitions.
Re: He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
NBC/Universal should be separated from Comcast/Xfinity as a condition of any more mergers/acquisitions.
NBC/Universal is not the problem here. The problem is that Comcast's Cable TV offerings make a lot of money (probably more than the Internet business) and as people move away from cable TV to Netflix and other streaming services their ability to ream their customers will be diminished.
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No, Netflix negotiates with the Post office for a fixed fee, and the customer pays that fee both ways. Do you live in a country were private firms magically get money to pay for services they provide, or do most people live in the real world where the customer pays for services provided?
N>klcertain fee, and cannot negotiate outside of that construct. The courts have said so.
However the Comcast is a private firm, so
Re: He also forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it makes a bit of sense for the average ISP - their fees are based on presumed overcommit rates and it's possible to break those assumptions if everybody pumps enough traffic. Everybody is stuck on fixed-rate billing so the grandma doing webmail pays as much as the 10-meg-up-24x7 torrenter when the costs are way different. I even heard an ISP owner say that customers couldn't understand usage-based billing (these are people who pay electric bills). Insistence on fixed-rate billing will inevitably lead to bureaucrats central planning the Internet. If you put emotion before economics, you'll get exactly what you deserve. A libre Internet will eventually require per-packet billed routing (fractional shatoshi?) but if everybody insists on a gratis Internet they won't get the libre one.
Comcast's anti-competitive bullshit is a red herring in the neutrality debate if you understand that what's really happening is that the overcommit gamble is starting to no longer pay off and they're mostly looking to soften that blow to their failing business model.
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most on point comment in the debate ever
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powertalk, not fact talk
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Lying by omission, actually. I.e. what you get from the big media outlets, too.
Classify net access as a utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be an absurd suggestion, but given that internet access is somewhat required to participate in society today, perhaps it's time to class internet access as a utility like water and electricity/gas.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Perhaps a more ideal solution would be for end-users to own the last mile of fiber
If it costs $2,000 to run the fiber from your neighborhood DSLAM-equivalent to your home NID - which in the US is a pretty common price - do you still think that would be worthwhile to you?
As it is, Verizon et. al. are paying that cost now and you are paying for it in inflated monthly connection fees but not in direct upfront costs. If most households had to pay for that upfront but got lower monthly bills, how many do you think would accept? Would it be enough for telcos to have a critical mass of customer
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That is not the issue.
The issue is you do not have free speech like the mega telecoms do with a fleet of lawyers, lobbyists, and rolodexes of your supposedly representatives. Free speech is something that can buy a lot of things that you and I can not afford. Notice I did not say money or bribery.
As long as we have a corrupt government we ARE FREAKING DOOMED.
We have corn with pesticides from genetically engineered crops whose pollen cross contaminates everything which in high enough doses causes infertility
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Well, time to crack open the fourth box?
Re:Classify net access as a utility? (Score:4, Informative)
Which is what all the big 'telecommunication services' plan to do anyway. FIOS and its kin will be maintained where they exist already, a pathetic fraction of the country, but not expanded. The cable companies plan to continue making their money on cable tv, hobble their internet access to prevent the internet from competing (excepting possibly those like Netflix that pay them specifically, but watch! Netflix may still get screwed despite paying) and the telephone companies plan to continue building out new *wireless* services where they can charge premium per mb rates, but no one besides google is expanding conventional unlimited hardwired internet service in the US either way. Google may only be lukewarm on network neutrality but they are _not_ one that would flee the field rather than comply. So in this case the damage of regulation could approximate zero.
Land lines are a natural monopoly and it's not like these lines were laid out in the first place without subsidy and privilege from the government, at all levels. In fact the taxpayer has already paid for an awful lot of capacity that he never received and never will.
Getting the government involved is almost never a good choice economically, but the 'almost' is still important, and natural monopolies are the biggest exception.
Re:Classify net access as a utility? (Score:5, Informative)
FIOS and its kin will be maintained where they exist already, a pathetic fraction of the country, but not expanded.
Well, frankly, yes. Verizon has said for several years that the cost of rolling out FTTH for FiOS was so high, and the adoption rate low enough, that they are done with expanding it for the foreseeable future. Verizon is a business, and FiOS just isn't making much profit. And that is with Verizon having no obligation to share its fiber with other providers, unlike the copper TDM network sharing requirements for UNE-P and DSL. If Verizon had to treat FiOS like a utility and/or line share, it would have been deployed in even fewer places or not at all. It sucks, but it's true.
To be treated as a utility generally means to be compensated in a "cost-plus" environment. You are allowed to charge consumers what it costs you, plus a little margin. Fair enough for water and electric, say, but those are industries where the infrastructure was built a long time ago and a need to upgrade customer-facing physical plant is not really an issue. Bu if you want to build a new power plant, or a sewage treatment plant, you have to go to a state/local Public Utilities Commission and ask permission to raise your rates to cover it, which can take a long time for review and approval. Imagine doing this every time you want to buy a new OC-3, refresh your CPE/modems, or install new wireless towers! Network upgrades will slow to a crawl. Being a regulated utility is good for steady state maintenance and uptime but bad for capital-heavy upgrades and investment.
People forget that even though the old "Ma Bell" phone network was regularly upgraded, that wasn't because of regulation. Ma Bell was actually a business with a regulated/utility portion (local phone service) and an unregulated portion (long distance and other services). For decades, the unregulated part of their business made enough money that it effectively subsidized the regulated local phone service infrastructure and upgrades. When Ma Bell was broken up, local phone service rates actually went up because the ILECs no longer had the unregulated, profit-making businesses to subsidize them. And it is entirely possible that the same thing would happen if ISPs were treated as utilities and were not using TV, phone or other high-profit services to subsidize Internet access.
Re:Classify net access as a utility? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if internet service were a regulated monopoly it could be much more efficient than it is now. Compare to water and power, which as regulated monopolies were required by law to continuously invest in infrastructure to provide service with good reliability and safety margins, in return for which they made a guaranteed profit. Then it was deregulated in many areas, but since the companies were still effectively monopolies, there was minimal competitive pressure so the companies slashed their investment in infrastructure, while jacking up rates, in order to maximize short-term profits. The result is worse service with higher prices because there's neither competition nor oversight. And high return for company officers and short-term investors.
For natural monopolies, competition doesn't force efficiency, so you have to have regulatory oversight. If you have neither competition nor oversight, you get screwed.
Re:Classify net access as a utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
My water pipes and electric lines have been working perfectly 24/7 for several years now. I have never been unhappy with the speed and quality of the water coming from my taps.
Countries like Japan, S.Korea and Sweden seem to have no problem providing an internet service as high-quality as tap water.
Meanwhile, US citizens pay $80/month for access to the village well.
Re:Classify net access as a utility? (Score:5, Informative)
You assume that in order for the internet to be a 'utility' it has to somehow be made available (instantly) throughout the entire United States. That's not how utilities are rolled out. municipal water is still missing in many, many areas of the country that use wells and septic tanks. The west coast of Florida comes to mind. Most of Montana. Heck, lots of farms w/o indoor plumbing well into the 1950's even if they had a well. Electricity - same way. Telephone same way - I was using party lines in the 1980's which was huge improvement over having to walk to the store on the main road to get make a call.
The OP isn't asking for 10Mbp country wide, tomorrow.. The ask is to start setting standards, start setting prices that include a capital improvement component and start rolling it out. Maybe it will even catch up and pass water!
And BTW Sweden has far less population density than USA, and more inhospitable terrain to cover...
And what about dense places? (Score:2)
In more populated locales of the USA, the density of people and of money is substantially higher than many places in Sweden or Japan, which nevertheless have much superior internet service to the USA.
Is internet really awesome and inexpensive in Manhattan or San Francisco or Philadelphia? No.
Internet is really awesome in the tiny number of places which have Google Fiber.
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Interesting observation. Have you ever been to Sweden?
From the CIA World Factbook:
Land area: 410,335 km^2
Population: 9,723,809
So, population density of 23.7 people per km^2
Unites States has 318,892,103 people on 9,161,966 km^2 of land, or 34.8 people per km^2.
(PS try http://simple.wikipedia.org/wi... [wikipedia.org] if this is too difficult too follow ;-))
Re:Classify net access as a utility? (Score:5, Informative)
No, not unless you would like your Internet access technologies refreshed and upgraded about as often as your water pipes or electric lines are. Which is to say approximately never.
In the past 10 years, I have never turned on my water tap and had no water come out. In the past 5 years (which is as far back as I have log files from my UPS), I've experienced 2 power failures lasting longer than a few minutes (I recorded 7 outages lasting less than a few minutes, but some of those were when I unplugged the UPS or turned off a breaker to do some electrical work), one was a regional power outage, and one was caused when a car accident took down a utility pole.
However, I experience regular internet outages, the last one was last week, and lasted for 3 hours, cable TV was fine, but internet (for me and a neighbor down the street) was out. It took 30 minutes to get someone at Comcast to realize that there was a problem, but they had no idea what was wrong, nor any ETA for a fix.
So I *wish* my internet connection was managed as well as water and power.
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Lucky you. I have had power outages that last for hours like a couple weeks ago. :(
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No, not unless you would like your Internet access technologies refreshed and upgraded about as often as your water pipes or electric lines are. Which is to say approximately never.
Verizon hasn't seen fit to upgrade the maximum speed of the DSL in my old neighborhood from the 3Mbps that it installed sometime in the last century. How can it be any worse than that?
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Excuse me? What backwater third-world country do you live in? The longest power outage I had in the last 2-3 decades was about 2-3 hours, and that was during a thunderstorm (that end-of-the-world kind). And I've never been in my life without fresh tap water (in perfect drinking quality, I may add).
Ok, I live in the dreaded socialist states of Europe, YMMD in the land of the free...
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It was an idea, not necessarily something I desire or believe in, but something that may be worthy of discussion (even if it's just to highlight why it's such a terrible idea)
Having said that, utilities are not necessarily defined as you describe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]. I'm not in the US so my perspective may differ from yours.
Perhaps you should google "snowden nsa" or something.
I'm obviously aware of the NSA and Snowden. But in reality, this spying/monitoring/surveillance (or what ever you want to call it) is going to happen regardless of who con
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This may be an absurd suggestion, but given that internet access is somewhat required to participate in society today, perhaps it's time to class internet access as a utility like water and electricity/gas.
Yeah, some day I could see it being a utility because ... I need to consume it every day to live and maintain sanitary conditions and shelter in the winter. Like the Telephone.
Oh, wait, Telephone isn't a utility. And the internet isn't either.
I don't want government providing me the internet, even local government. I don't think you do either??
Perhaps you should google "snowden nsa" or something.
By your logic, electricity isn't a utility either, nor is indoor plumbing. We all got along just fine for thousands of years without either one, didn't we? Geez Louise. If you're going to go for that false comparison, you might as well go all the way, no?
Re:Classify net access as a utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be an absurd suggestion, but given that internet access is somewhat required to participate in society today, perhaps it's time to class internet access as a utility like water and electricity/gas.
I doubt you would find anything that would lead to the destruction of Net Neutrality faster.
Please. Enlighten us. How exactly would reclassifying ISPs as common carriers [wikipedia.org] destroy net neutrality?
In fact:
What was that you were saying? Oh, that's right. Nothing.
Govermental oversight (Score:2)
takes its share to maintain a standard contention ratio that ISPs can retail their services on top of.
Connectivity should not be left in the hands of corporations with shareholders to please.
Re: Govermental oversight (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't need regulation, it needs competition. Can't wait for an alternative to ditch fucking Comcast.
Re: (Score:3)
Done right, regulation can increase competition.
And while we all hate Comcast and want them to be gone, what about who takes their place? Who says they wont be any less abusive of their customers, and perhaps even worse? Don't blindly wish for 'change', as you might just get what you are asking for, and regret it.
Re: (Score:2)
It's true that you can't get it by waiting. The question is how can we create the conditions which would result in it happening.
Backbone.... (Score:4, Interesting)
We need backbone resources or other tricks...
Mostly we need legal legislative backbone.
The last mile is owned by local monopolies.
That is the sad reality. These local monopolies are
also content service providers and do what they to
do feather their own nest.
The congestion is the backbone owners and providers.
Multiple issues dominate the congestion problems.
Access, distance, hops and hubs.
The likes of Netflix need to embrace one or more
flavors of p2p networking. A local neighborhood
can cache and redeliver most video frames from a
modest cache with modern crypto tools to contain
theft of service.
I think the likes of Netflix would do well do develop
an enhanced DOCSIS 3.x modem that also contains
a p2p client/service that can recast content to other
like service devices a hop or two away. It can also
begin caching the top two products on a wish list.
Proxy and p2p services are underused or vastly abused.
Worse than lacking sufficient incentive (Score:2)
Sounds more like they're actively disincentivizing [arstechnica.com] other motivated parties from solving these problems for their respective communities.
Comcast requires HBO for internet access (Score:2)
I am pissed off. I am moving into a new apartment and my choices are centuryLink DSL which AT&T throttles or Comcast. If I go with Comcast I need to pay for cable TV with HBO tier to gain internet access for $99 a month. I do not even freaking own a TV??!@
Now I am still downthrottled on top of that!
Re: (Score:2)
I am pissed off. I am moving into a new apartment and my choices are centuryLink DSL which AT&T throttles or Comcast. If I go with Comcast I need to pay for cable TV with HBO tier to gain internet access for $99 a month. I do not even freaking own a TV??!@
Now I am still downthrottled on top of that!
What if you got the DSL and a good VPN like PIA?
Will they throttle it if they don't know what it is?
Up until a month or 2 ago I would have said go with Comcast and get internet only. But now that they are intending to cap at 300 GB per month.... meh.
What about a comcast business account? How much does that cost? Is it throttled?
The good thing about comcast is that at the end of the day, it IS fast.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with AT&T DSL is that, no matter what you pay for, most of the bandwidth is downstream. You upstream bandwidth is artificially limited to 768K (of which you'll see 512K MAX) regardless of service tier. Which is, frankly, pathetic.
Re: (Score:2)
I have 100 Mbps Comcast bandwidth, and no cable TV or telephone. They don't try to force me to buy their other services, though they do send me a flier in the mail every so often. And the bandwidth is just fine - I've noticed no troubles with Hulu or Netflix.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a brand new apartment complex just built. SO yes this is a new thing since they have a monopoly and the supreme court said they could do whatever they want they simple are.
Invest with all the money I pay you scumbags (Score:5, Insightful)
My Comcast bill is $57.99 for 10Mbps internet only. I just got a couple of "threat" letters saying that my "promotional" pricing is about to expire and I will pay even more for their lovely service. Never mind that my promotional pricing actually ended six months ago.
They are already making money hand over fist off their customers. They should use that money to invest in their own infrastructure improvements.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You really missed the real cost. I worked for comcast and know what that cost is.
IF he rents the cable modem from them, that is a $3.00 profit on top of the $2.50 that the 10Meg tier costs the company after factoring in costs of even maintaining the drop to his house.
Yes $2.50 is what the TOTAL cost for each customer no matter what the bandwidth they use. Any tier above the lowest is nothing but pure profit.
Granted these numbers are for a larger area like Detroit Metro and are from 2009. The profit marg
Who owns the pipes? (Score:3)
It seems obvious to me that pipe owner has an advantage when it comes to deal with what and how can transit.
This can be solved by (1) regulation, (2) competition, and (3) public ownership of pipes, whether as personal property (in premise), associations, municipality, state or federal level
I see people dismissing first and third solutions because government involvement should be inefficient, but that is just ideology. Public service can be efficient and economically sound. Regulation can work. It just depends how it is done.
I hate federal involvement.... (Score:2)
But this has got out of hand, and the government should be stepping in and slapping these people down, hard.
They are there to protect the consumer/citizen from abuse, and need to step up to the plate and start doing their job.
who will invest? (Score:2)
Well Comcast is raking in billions, so why cant they?
Truth in labeling, truth in advertisement law. (Score:2)
If a restaurant advertises all-you-can-eat buffet, it must be all-you-can-eat. It can't say, "oh! no! every one is eating steaks and no one is eating my wilted lettuce, so they steak vendor must pay me money!". Comcast promised a certain bandwidth and unlimited content. It should simply deliver it. Or it should change the terms and meter the connection
Re: (Score:2)
The real dispute is between Netflix, Cogent and Comcast. What's really going on is that Comcast uses a very low quality bandwidth provider, Cogent. Cogent has the very bad habit of setting up peering arrangements with ISPs, then violating the terms of the agreements (which require Cogent to receive as much transit as it sends into the ISPs network, so they're helping each other out equally). Then the ISP either caps or shuts Cogent off for violating the peering agreement, and Cogent tries to use its custome
I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact they like to make it sound like they need to invest so badly in bandwidth is BS, only the last mile to the home is so expensive, and with them dropping all analog channel to the home that frees up lots of DOCIS bandwidth going forward so that should help allot. They do need to spend allot of money to drop SDV and go completely digital but they still put that off because they love to rebuild the whole network every couple years on the edge anyway.
But all the backhaul and backbone fiber connections have been getting increasingly cheaper, most routers had a max interface speed of 10Gbit's, but with 100 Gbit interfaces becoming more common, and the fact that all DWDM optical gear are seeing jumps from 10 Gbit per lambda to 100Gbits per lambda by just swapping out some hardware that is not free but still utilize the same physical fiber but basically make it 10X more for a small upgrade cost.
I am convinced they only cry about bandwidth costs because that is what they really sell now, and are afraid that its just going to keep getting cheaper and cheaper, which it is.
Re: (Score:2)
USPS is not a publisher. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Postal Service also doesn't publish a lot of material it mails for itself.
Comcast/Xfinity should be forced to separate from their content creation side. (NBC/Universal)
Brain Robots (Score:2)
SIMPLE SOLUTION (Score:2)
Buy Comcast stock. Get 51% in customer hands and vote in a NEW fucking board of directors. Capitalism, free market, and democracy.
Re: (Score:2)
If you bought Comcast in 2009, you'd probably have a different opinion :). https://www.google.com/finance... [google.com]
Go NetFlix (Score:2)
The hope is that in the future one can pay for content they want directly and don't have to buy bundles and packages.
The old-school co's are doing everything they can to prevent this.
municipal broadband is the only solution. (Score:2)
It seems the only way people in the US will ever get proper internet is from municipal broadband co-ops. We've made the mistake of granting monopolies to companies like comcast and cox and now we're paying the price in stifled innovation and increased costs.
Surely there is some mechanism our society could use to prevent these parasites from suing to prevent municipal broadband networks, and let the cable companies compete on something other than monopoly power.
Re: (Score:2)
The Model is broken (Score:2)
The Internet worked on the assumption that a provider would be both a content source and sink. Comcast is just a sink. It doesn't have to worry about its behavior damaging its ability to distribute content on the Internet, as it has virtually none. Yes, I know that some people host on Comcast Business, but that accounts for a small percentage of the traffic flow.
Add a surcharge. (Score:3)
He's an MBA, right? (Score:3)
Re:treat Netflix like a television network (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's fucking brilliant. Let's package Netflix along with 105 other online services we'll never use, all for only $125 a month.
Moron.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup. The customers pay for downloading from their ISP to their home. Netflix pays for streaming from their CDNs to their provider(s). What happens in between is the problem of the ISPs.
Comcast wants BOTH the customer AND netflix to pay for the download part. Thats where it gets messed up.
Re: (Score:3)
If you think that Comcast is not already planning on charging an extra "streaming fee" to the end customer, then you are insane.
Comcast is already drafting up a new shuffling of the tiers to give you a platinum tier that will "make netflix and other video services faster" that is nothing more than paying to disable the throttling.
They will triple dip, all of the executives and board members are having to change their suits 3 times a day because of the sheer amount of drool.
Re: (Score:2)
Haven't you heard? Don't put your dick in crazy.
Re: (Score:2)
Given the choice between dial-up and Comcast, I'll go for dial-up, every time.
+++ATH0
Re: Google is Nashville's only hope (Score:3, Interesting)
The ability to run a server is an overlooked part of net neutrality. The debate now is motivated by content providers who only care about downstream parity with other providers â" but real neutrality would also allow consumers to run their own servers including mail and web servers. That would open up markets for plug servers and turn the privacy debate on its ear. In the long run, it might even prove more important than content provider equality.
Re: Google is Nashville's only hope (Score:5, Insightful)
The ability to run a server is an overlooked part of net neutrality. The debate now is motivated by content providers who only care about downstream parity with other providers â" but real neutrality would also allow consumers to run their own servers including mail and web servers. That would open up markets for plug servers and turn the privacy debate on its ear. In the long run, it might even prove more important than content provider equality.
Just so. However, I'd go even farther than that. The last mile protocols (DOCSIS, ADSL, etc.) that have been developed mimic the Consumer (download)/Provider (upload) model.
This is a direct assault on free speech and free collaboration across the Internet.
Restricting servers is just another part of the process which limits the promise and potential of the Internet.
When everyone can have reasonable upload speeds, then everyone can host content, everyone can publish their creative output, each of us can share our thoughts and ideas with the world, the big content providers (including MPAA/RIAA, major newsotainment outlets, the eBays and AmazonMarketplaces of the world) will become less relevant, and we will become freer.
I know it's a pipe dream. But a fella can dream, can't he?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That loss is completely due to the pension funding liability congress placed on them in 2006, which will expire in 2016, bringing them back into the black with pensions fully funded for the next 75 years.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Comcast's infrastructure is quite good, and has minimal congestion. I've seen the charts.
The problem is that Netflix uses an ultra-low cost bandwidth provider, Cogent, and Cogent keeps its prices low by making free peering agreements with ISPs and then violating them, it's constantly getting either cut off or throttled by ISPs. The problem is easy to fix - either Netflix has to use a better bandwidth provider than Cogent (and they're all better than Cogent), or Congent has to either honor its agreements or