Reason To Hope Carriers Won't Win the War On Netflix 213
Nemo the Magnificent writes "A few days ago we talked over a post by David Raphael accusing Verizon of slowing down Netflix, by way of throttling Amazon AWS. Now Jonathan Feldman gives us reason to believe that the carriers won't win the war on Netflix, because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge nd we'll catch them if they try. I just now exercised one such tool, NetNeutralityTest.com from Speedchedker Ltd. My carrier is Verizon (FiOS), and the test showed my download speed at the moment to be 12 Mbps. It was the same to Linode in NJ but only 3 Mbps to AWS East. Hmm."
Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, one extremely popular destination on the internet is safe, because throngs of angry users will raise a stink. But what about all the small players who get throttled into oblivion before their innovations get a chance to have the kind of army of defensive consumers that Netflix has?
This is an information warfare[1] campaign where the Establishment is trying to make sure they stay there indefinitely, safe from all new comers.
[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4766259&cid=46193879 [slashdot.org]
Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest? (Score:4, Insightful)
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And if they grow big enough to appear on the provider's radar, they are so wellknown, it will be noticed if they get throttled.
I'm not sure you understood my point. My point was that without Network Neutrality, and with throttling, the Establishment can keep them from growing in the first place. Or did you understand that? If so, please clarify your point.
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Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest? (Score:5, Interesting)
if (trafficSource != VerzionOnDemand && trafficSource != Netflix) {
degradePerformance(); //slightly and randomly degrades performance
}
Seems relatively easy from a logic point of view.
Would anyone notice if they randomly started dropping UDP packets? Your average web user would see pages load just as fast. Statistical analysis would have to be very large scale and long term to notice a trend that couldn't be attributed to the normal fluctuations of speed and reliability of the internet. But home users could get a subtle difference in viewing experience for video from their ISP and a competitor.
In reality, ISPs simply need to slack on peering arrangements so their competitors are hammered during peak usage. Something Verizon has already been accused of.
This all leads me to think the real problem is the vertical monopoly/integration of ISP and content provider. If the government doesnt step in, we'll continue to see this war over and over just with ever shifting battlefields. Even with common carrier, we would likely still have ISPs pulling these tricks. regardless of whether they can charge Netflix more.
*obviously it's more complicated than the pseudo code above
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... If the video was delivered via UDP.
UDP for video calling, good idea. Nice and real-time.
For anything else, pointless. You'll need to deal with the dropped/out-of-order packets with no benefit, except maybe less RAM usage for buffering. I'd rather have quality video thanks.
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You're right, looks like most video services use a form of TCP with different strategies for chunking and ack'ing. Not sure why I thought video streaming was done using UDP. [pdf source [arxiv.org]]
Thanks for the correction.
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Won't stop them dropping random UDP packets to entice VoIP users to go back to fixed line though...
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Considering that they are doing their best to kill fixed lines and go all IP I do not see that happening. They might very well be tempted to somehow degrade experience for any VoIP service but their own, but then we are back at the Netflix situation.
But I am sure you could fix all that, end world hunger and save the whales with a custom hosts file...
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Actually it makes sense to use UDP. With TCP, when one packet is out of order / dropped you delay all remaining packets. With UDP you either forget about the packet if you wish and continue with the rest of the data. This is especially important for real time streaming or VoIP. Then again, if you only "stream" an entire file for replay, you can basically use clunked HTTP 1.1.
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Verizon signs-up Oracle to tackle Amazon in the cloud
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/011014-verizon-oracle-277603.html
Verizon Plays Catch Up with Cloud Computing, Storage Offerings
http://cloudtimes.org/2013/12/18/verizon-plays-catch-up-with-cloud-computing-storage-offerings/
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if (trafficSource != VerzionOnDemand && trafficSource != Netflix) {
degradePerformance(); //slightly and randomly degrades performance
}
*obviously it's more complicated than the pseudo code above
Probably not that more complicated, though - when you consider that my cable company already offers me a choice of *nine* different plans, ranging from 10-250 Mbps down, and 512Kbps - 15Mbps up, it's pretty clear that I'm already being throttled. It'd be pretty trivial (to the point that I would be amazed if they weren't doing it already) to add a bit of code that ups the speed to their Favored Partners.
I miss the good old days, where companies had to compete on speed (I remember dial-ups hyping that all t
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If what your doing on the internet, fits in the parameters set by the incumbent of what a good netizen does you'll be fine;
hanging out on an irc channel, no problem irc is just a den of hackers anyway back to dial-up speed for them, in fact lets just block any Well-Known Ports [wikipedia.org] for anything except plain vanilla ports like HTTP, POP, FTP, it's just stinky long-haired, neck bearded linux hippy using them anyways.
Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, one extremely popular destination on the internet is safe, because throngs of angry users will raise a stink.
Well, I wouldn't say that. For example, P2P was throttled because of its bandwidth consumption... and was rescued by the "user community", even though there was no large corporate interest behind it. But your point is taken: this could represent a huge barrier-to-entry for startups.
Folks, there is a simple solution to all this: pressure the government to classify ISPs as Title II Common Carriers, as they should have in the very beginning. (Corporate lobbying prevented it.)
Make them common carriers, and a huge set of problems essentially goes away overnight. Net Neutrality is built-in. Snooping (including government and corporate snooping) is prohibited. Etc. It may not be perfect, but it's just a vastly better world, all around.
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Sure, one extremely popular destination on the internet is safe, because throngs of angry users will raise a stink. But what about all the small players who get throttled into oblivion before their innovations get a chance to have the kind of army of defensive consumers that Netflix has?
Nobody is going to slow down some small player, because, well, they are a small player.
But slowing AWS blocks a boat load of people who go there for hosting precisely because the have become popular and they need to scale.
The point of the test mentioned in the summary is that it makes it easy to compare the various sites, side by side.
My results on that page is that AWS California gets 1/3 the speed as AWS Oregon, but linode Freemont is worse.
That argument makes no sense (Score:2)
The thing is, if anyone wanted to target anyone it would be Netflix, since that's where a huge majority of the traffic is, and also it theoretically competes with video offerings from other carriers.
So if you were to engage in ANY throttling, it would make way more sense to act against Netflix than anyone else.
If Netflix is safe (and it is) then so is everyone else.
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Um, AWS caters to anyone, just put your innovative project on an AWS VM, and you'll have no worries of throttling, everyone will think you're Netflix!
Maybe it's the Little Libertarian in me, but... (Score:2)
What about: Netflix defending it's own turf? Why must the government step into everything?
Now before you mark this as 'flamebait', consider this: What does Netflix and other providers have, that ISPs generally do not? A direct line of sight. Their own apps.
Consider: What if Netflix decided to provide an 'ISP test', presented to the user when playback is poor? Or, conversely, what if Netflix just pulled a 'Time Warner' and displayed something like: 'Your ISP purposely limits the quality level of your connect
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Exactly this.
People care more about their favored video service (Netflix, Amazon, iTunes) than their ISP.
The content providers need to show how the ISPs affect the speed, and who the best option in your area is.
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If the Telco's can get away with theft of $300 billion, they can get away with pretty much anything.
Welcome to Kleptocracy, Government for thieves by thieves.
http://www.newnetworks.com/bro... [newnetworks.com]
Fucks everyone else on AWS too (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end, I am unsure how the FCC lets this occur. I pay GOOD money to my shitbag carrier to get access to my content. If I pay for 50MBPS download, I don't give a fuck what content it is, I want 50MBPS.
I am unsure how the FCC lets this occur. (Score:2)
They are letting far too many things happen, they are either asleep at the wheel, or have been paid off. Either way, us consumers are the ones that are going to lose in the long run. The ones they are supposed to be protecting.
Wait. what? (Score:5, Informative)
The FCC wrote the Net Neutrality rules in the first place. It was the federal courts that struck them down, declaring the FCC doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality.
We're blaming the FCC now for...reasons? I realize "fuck beta" and all, but at least target your hate on a reasonable target. The FCC charged up this hill for us, and got shot down in flames.
What exactly do you expect they could be doing differently that would help?
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The FCC made the decision on how to classify internet service providers which lead to this being an option. When they tried to take back just part of their decision the courts said it they didn't have the authority due to how they classified ISPs. They still have the option of going back and reclassifying ISPs to give themselves the authority to enforce neutrality.
So yes we are blaming the FCC because they made the mess and thus far has refused to do what they have to (and the courts say need to and are l
Re:Wait. what? (Score:5, Informative)
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The other two respondents already answered, but perhaps not as clearly as they could have. The FCC had two choices - they could categorize ISPs as common carriers, or as information services.
Common carriers are like phone companies. They provide the lines, but they cannot control wh
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Well they clearly fucked up when they categorized internet providers which resulted in the ruling. I have yet to see an explination of their categorization that doesn't leave the FCC looking incompetent or corrupt. This court ruling seemed pretty inevitable and its not clear that there was a valid reason for them to not make them common carriers in the first place.
So there is some argument, but if the FCC responds soon enough (by re-categorizing internet providers) I think you have to give them the benefi
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Its not the fault of the FCC, the FCC said "ISPs must do xyz", the ISPs went to the federal court and challenged it and the federal court said "we agree with the ISPs that the FCC doesn't have the right to require the ISPs to do xyz"
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I wish I had a provider good enough to be called shitbag. :(
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In the end, I am unsure how the FCC lets this occur.
They tried but a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down their rules [reuters.com].
Two judges, with partial support from a third, said the commission has the authority to regulate broadband access but had failed to show that it has a mandate to impose the anti-discrimination rules on broadband providers.
Re:Fucks everyone else on AWS too (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs want to charge big content providers (like AWS and Netflix) for using more bandwidth.
But everybody has seemed to keep forgetting that bandwidth is already paid for by the end-users. This is just a way for the big ISPs to double-dip. That very definitely should be prevented.
And please, nobody give me guff about how people pay for "average data rates" and how Netflix saturates the infrastructure. U.S. customers already pay among the highest rates for some of the slowest service in the Western world. All because of the ISP oligopoly. U.S. cable companies have made record profits almost every year, and haven't been re-investing those profits in infrastructure in proportion.
Make them Common Carriers under Title II, and end the insanity.
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Yup. Wherever it leaves Amazons data center to whoever provides service to Amazon - thats it, Amazon has paid for their connection. Everything else is peering agreements or smaller services buying service from larger ones, up until it leaves the end-user's ISP and hits their cable/dsl/dialup modem/carrier pigeon/whatever, at which point that end user is payign their service provider for their traffic or rather right to access at a particular speed.
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and haven't been re-investing those profits in infrastructure in proportion.
Could you clarify this? In proportion to what?
Does it occur? (Score:2)
In the end, I am unsure how the FCC lets this occur.
First you have to say WHAT is occurring - no-one can say for sure right now.
Why does it occur to no-one that AWS might well be throttling significantly long transfers? I get slower results to AWS East over the NJ server too, on Comcast. But I still get plenty fast speeds to AWS, it's not like it's crippling - just somewhat slower. There could be a lot of reasons for that.
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Yeah, I wanna drive 90 MPH during commute on I-80 in SF Bay Area. Sadly, the congestion just won't let me. Ever stop to think, no one is throttling anyone, it's just congestion? Pipes are only so wide ya know. There is a limit, and it could very well be there's no malicious or spiteful intent, there's just too many of us driving on the net.
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You cannot expect the corrupt Telcos who stole $300 billion of US taxpayer money
to do anything remotely in the realm of honest.
Welcome to the Kleptocracy.
http://www.newnetworks.com/bro... [newnetworks.com]
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Nutshell. While your ISP can't control anything beyond their edge, your ISP or any of its links should NEVER be the reason, and your ISP should make sure the same is also true for anyone they link with. The core network shoul
Wrong Design (Score:2)
Nutshell. While your ISP can't control anything beyond their edge, your ISP or any of its links should NEVER be the reason, and your ISP should make sure the same is also true for anyone they link with. The core network should never be a limitation and only the end-points should be.
This would be a really bad way to design a network--it would result in building for tremendous overcapacity. Realistically, it is exceptionally rare that a customer will use his entire pipe for the entire month. Designing for that would be like designing a house with the assumption that one sumo wrestler will be living on each square foot of flooring.
Providers should be able to rely on certain historically tested assumptions when they size their pipes--like what is peak load for a suburban community with
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This would be a really bad way to design a network--it would result in building for tremendous overcapacity.
Most of the Internet is built this way already. The Internet backbone is mostly idle and under-utilized. About 80% of the fiber that was installed for the backbone has gone unused as technology keeps pushing data transfers faster and faster.
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Most of the Internet is built this way already. The Internet backbone is mostly idle and under-utilized. About 80% of the fiber that was installed for the backbone has gone unused as technology keeps pushing data transfers faster and faster.
Let's take round numbers - 100 fiber pairs between a pair of major cities, with 80 of them unused, and (say) 1Tbit/s on the other 20 pairs. That's 20Tbit/s of backbone capacity, and you might think of it as 80Tbit/s "unused". However, to bring those fibers into use, you need to sink the capital costs for the routers, optics for the 10 or 100Gbit/s ports, and the DWDM equipment. That's not a trivial cost, and people will need a business case for turning up new capacity.
It's a lot easier to upgrade the core
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You're arguing in favor of a 1 to 1 contention ratio. You can get such a connection today if you'd like it, you'll just have to pay a lot more for it.
I already have that and I pay $100 for 50/50. I get those speeds to every IX in the USA and Europe at all times of the day. I get less than 1ms std-dev of jitter from Chicago to LA during 8p-11p, ditto to Dallas and NYC, and about 3ms of jitter to almost all of Europe(London, Paris, Munich IXs) along with my 50/50. It's quite normal for me to be seeding 30mb/s to a single IP in the faster cities in Europe, that have 100mb/s connections as standard. I average 10GB-15GB/hour seeding during peak hours, and I c
Net Neutrality (Score:2, Funny)
Has already been abandoned by the FCC, so better get used to it.. Its only going to get worse.
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The FCC tried [reuters.com].
Two judges, with partial support from a third, said the commission has the authority to regulate broadband access but had failed to show that it has a mandate to impose the anti-discrimination rules on broadband providers.
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The FCC tried [reuters.com].
Two judges, with partial support from a third, said the commission has the authority to regulate broadband access but had failed to show that it has a mandate to impose the anti-discrimination rules on broadband providers.
You forgot to mention (if I'm not mistaken) how the court practically invited the FCC simply to invoke common carrier regulation as the legally proper way to achieve it's Net Neutrality anti-discrimination rules. While the "FCC tried", the FCC also _has not tried_ to reinstate Net Neutrality via its legal authority to regulate common carriers that way (vs 'information services'). The FCC, also, after a year and a lot of press, has never given me a single sentence of analysis of my 53 page Net Neutrality c
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Right, the court told them how to do it in no uncertain terms, and they effectively looked the other way.
So it sort of proves our point.
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Congress said don't do that [broadcastingcable.com].
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48 of 535.
Not exactly a consensus.
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Those are the ones who sponsored the bill. The article refers to many other who have made similar comments.
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The classification is the main issue [arstechnica.com]:
In the court case, the FCC said its rules aren't common carrier regulations because "Verizon is free to offer or decline to sell broadband Internet access service to any end user. Verizon need not hold itself out to offer service indifferently to anyone.
Re-classifying them as common carrier would open up a whole different can of worms. The FCC is waiting for Congress to change the rules [broadcastingcable.com].
Somehow that is OK, but god forbid any innovator in their own home makes a profit
They are only prohibiting commercial use of consumer grade contracts. There is no prohibition for the innovator getting a business line contract and making money at home.
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They are only prohibiting commercial use of consumer grade contracts. There is no prohibition for the innovator getting a business line contract and making money at home.
"commercial use of..." huh?? Are people who sell knick knacks on Ebay engaging in "commercial use of consumer grade contracts"? (yes, they are). Are people who agree to view advertisements on gmail in exchange for 'free' use of a service that costs money to run engaging in "commercial use of consumer grade contracts" (yes, they are). Network Neutrality was intented to prevent giving ISPs arbitrary power over such things. Without it, ISPs can charge consumers extra to visit, e.g. Netflix, or FoxNews, o
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None of those examples requires a server at the customer's house and therefore are not relevant. The restriction is about servers not browsing.
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None of those examples requires a server at the customer's house and therefore are not relevant. The restriction is about servers not browsing.
Actually, after a couple 5 year old kids started holding up protest placards in Utah, GoogleFiber backed off the 'servers' and made it just about 'commercial servers'.
If you want an example including a server- Quake3 server, making money for Id Software.
The point is that there is nothing about a server as opposed to a client, that makes it 'dangerous to the network' in a way that (back when we thought the FCC's Net Neutrality rule was enforceable, pre-verizon-ruling) can reasonably fall under the 'reasonabl
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Doesn't cost the ISP more to pass the traffic than it does to pass Skype client traffic.
Consumer grade prices are based on consumer grade usage. Consumers are people who sleep, have jobs, etc. Much of the time they are not using the net connection. There are basically physical limits on how much a person or small group of people can consume and that limit is far below the bandwidth limit. Contrast that with a commercial server that could be pumping out nearly bandwidth traffic 24/7. This high traffic costs money to support. That is why there is difference in pricing between consumer and commer
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The ToS is to scare off companies from making blatant abuse of their networks, but a few residential customers doing it is not an issue. Most ISPs can handle a few outliers, what they can't handle is an over-all shift of their entire user base. Regular users who host high data ser
Faster to AWS than Linode (Score:5, Informative)
I'm on FIOS with their 50 down/25 up plan. Linode in Newark is 48Mbps, AWS East is 60Mbps. Just saying that a particular path is slow doesn't mean that it's Verizon interfering - it's more likely something else that's causing the problem.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're out of date. it's not the ISP.
The slowdown is caused by NSA packet inspection.
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Google doesn't give Youtube the money to upgrade their infrastructure? Verizon's fault!
If YouTube is slow for you, it's not because it's slow at Google's end. This is why Google is starting to rate carriers by video performance, because they're tired of being blamed for what carriers are doing (or not doing). The rating project is so far only rolled out in Canada: http://business.financialpost.... [financialpost.com]
Please learn about IXP (Score:2)
Internet Exchange Points.
If you are a customer of a large nationwide ISP accessing a large content provider present in the same country, you aren't going to have to go through any 3rd parties, as your ISP will exchange traffic at the closest IXP (directly). There around 50 IXPs in the USA alone. Many Hundreds worldwide.
So the theory that the problem is elsewhere doesn't sound very credible.
If they have trouble connecting to the closest IXP, in all likelyhood you'll see a broad slowdown.
I know a thing or two
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Please learn about traceroute.
I don't have specific sites to go to (the site linked doesn't tell you what they're connecting to to test) but I have to go on the assumption that both AWS and Linode are eating their own dogfood. Going to Linode takes me through Level3 whereas going to Amazon takes me through Qwest. As soon as I've gone two hops (my local router, the other end of my FIOS link) I'm on divergent paths. By hop #5 (out of ~18 hops) I'm off the Verizon network.
But you're the expert.
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Verizon uses Level 3 or Qwest to get to AWS ?
Insane. Get off Verizon. Don't go back, ever. I know, impossible. Sorry.
I'm from Brazil. I thought Verizon was a nationwide carrier, are they ? Only small/medium ISPs do that.
The possibility is AWS isn't large enough to have carrier status. So Verizon don't want to peer (they want AWS to buy bandwidth) but they might have peering agreements with L3 and/or Qwest. And L3 and Qwest certainly have peering status with Verizon. So they follow the cheapest route.
But a c
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In Brazil the three largest national backbone carriers reject peering from anyone but the 10 largest other backbone carriers (not an exact number, but a list of rules that reject all but the pretty big ones). Foreign backbones also reject peering, but that makes a little more sense (I'll peer with you in Miami, but not in Brazil, otherwise I'm giving you a free link to my customers abroad, in Brazil I sell links).
Their strategy is if they reject peering (as a cartel), chances are fifty/fifty the other side
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The biggest issue with peering is no perfering one service over another, it's peering t
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I'm seeing faster speeds to AWS too, 60mb down from AWS California, about 35-40 on Linode Fremont. Charter cable here.
Not evidence (Score:3)
You can't make a trend from one data point, nor are all routes created equally.
I do believed that Verizon would do something sleazy like this, but this certainly isn't proof of that.
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Exactly. The vast majority of internet users (even those that can network their own houses and fix their friend's computers) don't know what a "hop" is or that there are usually a dozen+ computers between them and their internet destination. And if any of these links is slow, for whatever reason, there's going to a general slowdown. That makes it very difficult to determine if you're being throttled, if you're the victim of bad DNS routing, or if there's some random problem that you can't solve from your en
Low Standards (Score:5, Funny)
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The submitter typically dashes it off in a hurry, afraid someone else will get it in first. He figures the 'editors' can fix an odd typo or whatnot before posting. He has not been here very long, or he would realize they never do. They just pick one of the two dozen nearly identical submissions at random and post it, maybe with a snide editorial comment added, but they never proofread anything.
Generalizations usually fall down. I've had submissions reorganized before, and in one case had an additional clarifying link added. Just because something's mostly true doesn't make it always true ("never").
Public Exposure (Score:2)
Comcast not throttling? (Score:2)
Someone else mentioned that Comcast has to follow net neutrality rules for a few years regardless of court rulings. It's getting full speed to AWS during Primetime for me (single data point, but people keep saying it's an issue during prime time).
There's been much discussion lately about how to prove whether Comcast is throttling Netflix, or if Netflix is simply vastly over capacity and throttling everyone.
Netflix using and depending on AWS is quite the opposite of their claims lately (toward the end of 201
Not for me (Score:2)
On Comcast I get slower response to AWS East than the Linode NJ server.
But AWS is still plenty fast. I don't think anyone is throttling AWS, I think that the people who are claiming it does have a very small understanding of what is actually occurring with the network traffic.
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The video content isn't coming off of AWS. It's coming from the Open Connect Appliance Platform.
(I'm on the OCA team at Netflix.)
Hmmm what? (Score:2)
It's not Verizon, or if it is they aren't doing it to everyone. I get the same speed results hitting AWS anywhere that I get doing just about anything else. I pay Verizon for a 75 megabit FIOS connection that in reality usually does about 83, and that's what I just got hitting AWS East.
one way to win is choice (Score:2)
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Yeah, Google Fiber will be great for accessing YouTube and Google Maps. It might not be quite so effective for accessing services that compete with Google.
Google is no different from Comcast or Verizon or AT&T. Without governmental enforcement of net neutrality, carriers cannot be trusted to provide equal service to competing services.
impotence (Score:2)
"because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge nd we'll catch them if they try."
Oooh! Some geeks will "catch them". That must have these megacorporations (with Congresscritters on their payrolls) just shaking in their boots.
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It can actually work. The advent of cheap tests for lead and other toxins, of GPS for home survey work, and of cell phones for photographing criminal behavior have all altered what people or companies can do without detection and prosecution.
Cedexis (Score:2)
Sorry if this looks like I'm a shill...
At $werk we had a company called Cedexis come in to see us. They have a service where they 'ping' their customers infrastructure from end-user's web browsers. The idea being that $user on $provider hitting $cloud gets different service levels for different values of $provider and $cloud (where $cloud can be anything, including your own datacentres). Thus, if $provider == Verizon, then maybe using MS Azure is better than AWS. If that was the case, then Netflix could use
Net pseudo-neutrality (Score:2)
Am I the only prophet in the room? We will never have true network neutrality until the physical medium is fully publicly owned. Our telecom companies should be contractors to the common good, not infrastructure owners. That is the core problem: when they own the infrastructure, there's little we can effectively do with laws to regulate their behavior with it.
What we need is (Score:2)
Not only do we need apps and programs that monitor bandwidth being provided to different websites by service providers, but we also need a website dedicated to registering and amalgamating all such statistics in an open forum that automatically ranks politicians with respect to what they are going to do about it to increase speeds. Only when one can make political contributions and votes dry up at the first hint of bad news, will anything really change for the better.
Can't wait to test this at home... (Score:2)
The other day, I tried to stream 3D Netflix content. They list 6mbps service as needed. I did a speedtest from my laptop 50+, then from my LG TV 39+....
Yet Netflix informed me my connection was too slow. So I am HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS. And will be very curious to see if this confirms my suspicions.
http://netneutralitytest.com/ [netneutralitytest.com]
Comcast still net neutral (Score:2, Informative)
As part of the agreement made for Comcast to purchase NBC, they have to follow the FCC's net neutrality rules for 7 years regardless of what may come from court cases.
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Boycott? Really? Is that really necessary? Isn't it enough to point out the flaws, and, if the new site becomes inevitable and is no good, just leave then?
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Maybe it is necessary. I don't want Slashdot to die, but unless the beta site undergoes radical changes that is what will happen. I'd rather the decision to scrap it or do a major re-write to make it more similar to the classic site was committed to before taking the pressure off and risking having the site die when one day without warning classic is gone.
Bittorrent cost them more than Netflix (Score:2)
The reality is today's routers and fiber networks are one thousand times faster than 1995 at the same cost (from 155Mbps to 100Gbps). And price is dropping constantly.
They can save more money by dropping Cisco/Juniper and going open source than trying to throttle anything.
Trying to throttle 100Gbps backbone links is like trying to drink from a firehose. They should only throttle bandwidth they pay per Gbps (international links).
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Do you work for an ISP or a Carrier ?
Provisioning ratios are still in the range of 20Kbps to 500Kbps per broadband user.
Back in the 1.5Mbps ADSL times, ISPs provisioned on a 18:1 ratio, so 85Kbps per user.
Even as speeds increased to 10 to 50Mbps, bandwidth consumption didn't scale, so I bet those 50Mbps broadbands are provisioned at about 200Kbps per user or less (50:1 easy).
Users don't download all at once.
Most users don't do torrent.
The bulk of today's links are still 10Gbps. 100Gbps isn't very common yet
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Beta. (Score:5, Informative)
Dice doesn't own slashdot.jp? wikipedia: "currently owned by OSDN-Japan, Inc."
Correct, Dice Holdings does not own the Japanese Slashdot and Sourceforge brands or sites. These were split out and sold by VA Linux in 2007, before the sale of the American subsidiaries to Geek.net, and thus not part of the deal. That the buyers chose to call themselves OSDN is going back to the roots - by that time, OSDN had become OSDG.
As it is, Japanese Slashdot buys advertising space on Slashdot.org for Japanese customers from Dice Holding, and translate articles into Japanese. That's about as far as the cooperation goes.
Anyhow, at this time, slashdot.jp appears to be the bigger brother, with more traffic than slasdot.org.
Perhaps they can buy out slashdot.org too. I for one would welcome our new Japanese overlords.
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Untrusted Java app? No go...
Yes, Beta sux and I too will leave if it becomes the new default!
Re: (Score:2)
There's a selection of various tests for various types of throttling you don't have to use the Java one... http://www.measurementlab.net/... [measurementlab.net] - it's also a very well known and trusted site http://www.measurementlab.net/... [measurementlab.net]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
We pay over $5,000 per month for a 100mb/100mb connection because we're in BFE
Ouch.. wtf... Around here, Level 3 sells 1gb dedicated links for $6k/month.
Re: (Score:2)
.. and we have almost stopped using Akamai too for video. We serve it ourselves now.