Verizon's Accidental Mea Culpa 390
Barryke writes: Verizon has blamed Netflix for the streaming slowdowns their customers have been seeing. It seems the Verizon blog post defending this accusation has backfired in a spectacular way: The chief has clearly admitted that Verizon has capacity to spare, and is deliberately constraining throughput from network providers. Level3, a major ISP that interconnects with Verizon's networks, responded by showing a diagram that visualizes the underpowered interconnect problem and explaining why Verizon's own post indicates how it restricts data flow. Level3 also offered to pay for the necessary upgrades to Verizon hardware: "... these cards are very cheap, a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that's the case, we'll buy one for them. Maybe they can't afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that's the case, we'll provide it. Heck, we'll even install it." I'm curious to see Verizon's response to this straightforward accusation of throttling paying users (which tech-savvy readers were quick to confirm).
But scarcity! (Score:5, Insightful)
If people don't think bandwidth is a scarce commodity, how will we get them to pay through the nose for it?!?
No excuses left (Score:5, Insightful)
Too big to fail, too arrogant to concede, too greedy to care. This news is all the more reason to regulate.
PR needs to talk to tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Connect with a VPN (Score:5, Insightful)
According to tfa, they actually aren't throttling. Throttling implies that they are deliberately shaping traffic inside their network to limit your bandwith.
What they are really doing is deliberately creating a bottleneck at key peering locations through negligent inaction when it comes to upgrading infrastructure.
Small difference, I know, but very important when you actually talk about throttling, and likely the argument they would make if the FCC took them to court over it.
Re:No excuses left (Score:5, Insightful)
Too big to fail, too arrogant to concede, too greedy to care. This news is all the more reason to regulate.
But, but, but... regulation is the antithesis of the Capitaist way that our republican Democracy has weaned its children on since it was formed!!
I do tend to agree though - regulation of ISPs is probably the only way to deal with this.
Capitalist theory says that if an incumbent merchant/provider is too inefficient to provide a good service or if another potential merchant/provider thinks they can do a better job for a lower price, then that new provider will step in and provide said service. The threat of that is what keeps the incumbent lean and competitive, and the result is a competitive environment that is generally good for the consumer and rival providers seek to offer better deals to entice custom away from their competitors.
However, that theory assumes that there is a very low or non-existent barrier to entry into that competitive marketplace. Given the initial infrastructure setup costs and, in many cases, exclusivity contracts between providers and the municipal areas which would present the profits to drive services out into more marginal areas, the barriers to entry into the Tier 1 ISP market are prohibitive, to the point where you need to be a corporate entity the size of Google to be able to reasonably make the capital investment required.
As such, the local markets for each ISP more closely resemble non-competitive monopolies with the illusion of choice being provided by third party suppliers who typically have to by access to the resources from the incumbent monopoly - they get wholesale prices, and the consumer sees some small price reductions if the third parties can make enough money to operate by charging the consumer slightly less than the discount they got from the incumbent. But fundamentally, everything is still controlled by that original monopolistic provider, so services suck, progress is stifled because there is no incentive for change, innovation is discouraged, and the level of capacity/reliability is never going to be any more than "just barely enough so that we can maximise our profit margins".
Re:Answer needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Customers.
You're paying for a service, and nowhere does it say that they will discriminate against a particular service, such as Netflix.
It's obstructive business, against your customer's best interests, for no particular reason. It will also violate any given "net neutrality" laws that are / may come into effect.
Those laws are the answers. The reason for their existence is this sort of unnecessary posturing. And governments make companies do a lot of things against a company's best interests - all the time. It would be in the company's best interest to not pay tax, screw over its customers, not ship goods that have been paid for, be monopolistic, collude with others to enforce market prices, etc. The laws are brought in to stop that shit in the PEOPLE'S best interest, not the company's.
Not saying it's anywhere near perfect, but your post seems to want to back a corporation screwing over its customers and then (falsely) blaming its competitors and random third-party companies for that.
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
Level 3 doesn't pay Comcast for bandwidth. Why should they? Comcast customers have already paid Comcast for the links to their house and they're the ones pulling data from Level 3. Level 3's customers pay Level 3 to deliver to the edge of their network. As the Level 3 post points out, the cost for Verizon to add more bandwidth between the Level 3 network and the Verizon network is minimal.
Re:Answer needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Answer needed (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue with this is that its good for consumers but bad for investors, and we all know who our esteemed congress men actually represent.
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the issue is that Verizon is a last-mile network, and does not sell symmetric bandwidth to its subscribers. So, the typical agreement between providers - where they each send about the same amount of traffic to each other and upgrade the interconnects to handle that traffic - will not work between Verizon and Level 3. Verizon (and the vast majority of other last-mile providers, including Comcast) will NEVER have a balanced interconnection with Level 3, because the home subscribers can all download far faster than they can upload.
Really, it's Verizon's customers who are causing all this bandwidth usage, so it should be Verizon ensuring that their interconnects can handle the requested bandwidth. If anything, Verizon (and Comcast) should be paying Level 3 for additional download capacity... but we all know that is never going to happen.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:5, Insightful)
In what world do you live that Level3 is a "much smaller ISP"? Level3 is a global tier 1 ISP, FFS.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:5, Insightful)
Apples to oranges. Level3 and Cogent aren't last-mile providers; they're Tier 1 backbone providers. Tier 1 providers have things like peering agreements -- last mile providers do not. Last mile providers are (and sell) unbalanced connections, so it's impossible for them to ever have "peers."
A better way of thinking of it is that Verizon should be representing the interests of its customers, because Verizon is the gateway between the customers, and the rest of the internet. It's not doing that job -- it's trying to play both sides against each other. This is what middlemen do, of course, and they're entitled to do it, but as long as they have a monopoly (which they do), then there should be limits, oversight, and accountability.
Re:Answer needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Got anything better?
Remove the laws and regulations holding back community fiber projects.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is still the lack of competition in the market. If everyone had the choice between 4-5 ISPs, considering the popularity of Netflix, consumer ISPs would be paying Level 3 truckloads of money to ensure Netflix works flawlessly...and the roles may even be reversed (where Level 3 tries to gouge Verizon, since they'd know Verizon would have no choice or lose a ton of customers).
But since there isn't any competition, Verizon takes their own customers hostages...
Re:Answer needed (Score:5, Insightful)
"I want it and my government friends have guns..." Is this the best we can do?
The reason Verizon can stay in business despite having "very limited interest in what their customers want" is because of municipal and state granted monopolies, federal grants and subsidies, and the reason they even exist at all is because of a government approved corporate charter. Why is "government friends with guns" an acceptable argument for them getting their way, but not an acceptable argument against it?
Re:But scarcity! (Score:2, Insightful)
A better way of thinking of it is that Verizon should be representing the interests of its customers, ...
Nice sentiment, but, unfortunately, a public corporation's responsibility is to its shareholders and their interests - which is simply $$$. (and probably executives and cushy bonuses, etc...)
Re:Connect with a VPN (Score:4, Insightful)
What you're doing is using a VPN connections which has an different inbound interconnect than the one which the majority of Netflix traffic comes in on. Verizon is 100% correct. There's no throttling going on because the connection that is being "throttled" as you put it is actually at 100% utilization and congested causing dropped packets and bad performance.
Re:No excuses left (Score:5, Insightful)
Regulation for the public benefit = good. Examples: Public Utilities, Healthcare, Agriculture, Air Quality/Environmental Protection.
Regulation for the sake of Regulation = bad. Examples: 70,000 + pages of IRS Regulations and 30,000 pages of tax code written by special interests and bureaucrats.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:5, Insightful)
In what world do you live that Level3 is a "much smaller ISP"? Level3 is a global tier 1 ISP, FFS.
In a world where schnell and shill sound a lot alike.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't I want city-owned fibre? I'm a big fan of city-owned roads and city-owned sewer pipes.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a sentiment; it's a responsibility as monopoly holders, as I mentioned .
Re:Connect with a VPN (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not artificial because of the details of the technical implementation, it's artificial because it's a scarcity that would not be expensive or difficult to resolve. Drought is geographic scarcity that cannot be readily resolved; an undersized water treatment plant is systematic scarcity that can be resolved but would be expensive and slow; a faucet that's rusted half-closed is artificial scarcity.
Re:Answer needed (Score:5, Insightful)
+1. Politicians at the state level have been paid off by cable companies and ISPs to squash competition from local municipalities. The cities who got in before the legislation are loving their services. It is absolutely insane what money can do in the political process.
Re:No excuses left (Score:5, Insightful)
Also not terribly productive until you put reigns on it and channel that strength towards useful goals.
Regulations are the reigns by which the power of the free market is harnessed and made productive.
And like reigns...to much is bad, but none is worse. But nuanced conversations like this with 'but free market' morons in the current GOP are next to impossible.
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Costs should be driven by the party responsible for the traffic being on the network. In the case of neflix traffic, that's _me_, the end recipient. And I've already ponied up to the cable company to cover their cost to transfer the bits to me. The cable co just wants to double dip.
Re:ugh (Score:2, Insightful)
And government has a responsibility too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice sentiment, but, unfortunately, a public corporation's responsibility is to its shareholders and their interests - which is simply $$$. (and probably executives and cushy bonuses, etc...)
And a government's responsibility is to take action against a company which is committing wholesale fraud against its customers by selling them Internet Service which promises bandwidth speeds which they are then purposefully not providing in order to shake down their customers and companies trying to provide services to those customers more money.
A government's responsibility is to ensure that companies that are given government licenses and franchise agreements which restrict competition in certain geographic areas are providing the service that the people of that area want and need at a fair price.
A government's responsibility is to ensure that companies which get too big, hold too much market share and are too horizontally or vertically integrated are broken up so that there can be real competition and a real free market.
Re: Verizon's customers (Score:3, Insightful)
"it's Verizon's customers who are causing all this bandwidth usage"
Let's pause to re-read that: Verizon's customers. Ah yes, those people who pay Verizon $x each month for y mbp/s of bandwidth. Those foolish people who actually expect Verizon to deliver on what is being paid for.
And then Verizon passive aggressively acts like the problem is not of their own making.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:5, Insightful)
Prove it. At this point with stagnation or even reduction of service from the Internet providers it isn't at all clear that private companies are doing anything other than gauging customers with the exclusive franchises or licenses they are getting from communities in order to be the only one running wires.
All evidence is pointing to it being better for communities to treat wired communications along public ways as a public utility.
Much is made about the private capital that is used to invest in installing all these wires, but it is the capital of customers which is paying back those original investments. I would say the customers who are actually paying for this should be the ones that decide how they want their communications network managed.
Re:ugh (Score:2, Insightful)
And I'm tired of people who claim that anything but greed is a problem. The graph in the blog linked here clearly shows that there are no internal network problems at Verizon, everything is below 65% peak utilization - and those are only the metro and backbone routers, which are few and far between. Everything else is at ~50% peak utilization. No immediate upgrades are required, except the interconnect to L3, where both L3 and Verizon have spare capacity, and L3 has even offered to pay for the upgrade.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:2, Insightful)
a public corporation's responsibility is to its shareholders and their interests
You know, this used to mean something very complicated. It used to mean that the corporation was expected to plan ahead, to develop good customer relations, to develop an excellent public persona. It used to emphasize preserving the shareholder's capital and reputation, which is very different than squeezing every possible nickel out of non-managers. Somewhere along the way, people lost track the pride associated with helping to build big projects. "Fiduciary responsibility" stopped being about prudent behavior and started being about maximizing short term profit, which is very often the opposite of prudent.
Fuck all you mercenary bastards.
Re:ugh (Score:2, Insightful)
So why does running a VPN fix this? A To a CO there is no difference between Netflix or a VPN connection.
Re:Connect with a VPN (Score:4, Insightful)
If you read the Verizon page they are proposing a solution... Netflix should connect directly to Verizon and pay them.
This should be an argument between level 3 and verizon we wouldn't be hearing about this at all if that bandwidth was evenly split up between 100+ services.
Re:But scarcity! (Score:4, Insightful)
That long cycle worked fine for the telephone lines that serve your house. They served us well for a long time. The biggest flaw was that instead of managing the infrastructure themselves, they gave it to private companies to manage. Then, when they started abusing the monopoly, the government had to turn around and start requiring them to allow CLECs to use the lines. The phone companies, predictably, hated this, and did the absolute least that they could do to comply with the regulations, often refusing to fix problems with lines while blaming it on the CLEC (and vice versa).
All those problems would have been avoided if the government had simply maintained exclusive control over the lines and leased them out to third parties. That's how next-generation fiber networks in cities should be set up. The entire premise of letting a few companies maintain exclusive control over critical infrastructure is fundamentally flawed and can only lead to more of the same bulls**t we've had for the last two decades.
The only scheme that works is the public utility scheme, where the government owns the wires and private companies provide the service. We know this model works because it has worked with our interstate highway system and private shipping companies for decades. Is it perfect? No. The government historically hasn't charged those shippers enough money in gas taxes to cover infrastructure maintenance costs, resulting in some roads falling into disrepair. But that's mainly a problem caused by lack of a single management body that manages all of the roads in a region. Dozens of city governments working together isn't a great way to get things done except on an "It burns! It burns!" emergency basis. The solution to that problem, of course, is for all the cities in a metropolitan area to get together to form a non-profit corporation, and make that corporation responsible for the management and leasing of lines a la TVA.
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But scarcity! (Score:5, Insightful)
city-owned roads are much the same as they were 50 years ago, same for sewer pipes
What shithole do you live in where they haven't upgraded any roads in 50 years? Is your city shrinking in size because theres no way any city, with normal growth, has the same traffic it did 50 years ago. No roads have ever been made wider? No new roads have been added?
Your argument is bunk, its just your ignorance of how your city has dealt with the need for additional capacity either due stupidity or willfully ignoring the obvious upgrades that have been made.
Re:No excuses left (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about what you're saying, that anyone should be able to anything they want? Anything? or should there be some rules governing behavior? Unless you're in favor of wild west anarchy, you're in favor of *some* type of regulation on society and the blessed free market capitalism.