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Is Streaming Video the Real Throttling Target?
snydeq writes "Responding to legal pressure over its throttling of P2P traffic and other dubious practices, Comcast says it will now punish the most abusive users rather than particular applications. Yet its pilot tests in Pennsylvania and Virgina, which would 'delay traffic for the heaviest users of Internet data without targeting specific software applications,' raise greater concerns over net neutrality, ones that belie a potential preemptive strike against the cable company's chief future competition: streaming video. 'Despite the industry's constant invocation of the P2P bogeyman, at present, the largest bandwidth hog is actually streaming video,' writes Mehan Jayasuriya at Public Knowledge. 'Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they're effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network. Is this anti-competitive? It sure seems like it.'"
It seems that promising too much in order to hook new users and then hitting the heaviest users (instead of fulfilling the promise)is a very valid business strategy lately.
So if I sign up with MLB to watch games which are not in my local television area, should I expect to get throttled by my local cable company because for 3hrs a week, I use a lot of bandwidth. The other hours of the week, I'm doing email and IM.
Isn't this taking away what people pay for? I know the main reason I got a faster internet connection was so I wouldn't have to wait for videos to buffer.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
... it's pro-retarded.
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I was just looking at the new Netflix Roku streaming service. To me this seems like a no brainer. $9/month for 1 DVD out at a time plus unlimited streaming movies and tv shows from there current selection. If Comcast was to start resetting connections while I was watching a movie that would really tick me off. Also don't providers realize that entertainment is moving more and more to the internet.
I watch most of my news stories on the internet, primarily CNN. I have noticed in the past week that the videos seem to be stopping midstream when it never did that before. I glance over at my gkrellm network monitor and see zero data coming to my box. Then it will pick up again after a short pause. Something has changed, not sure if it is Comcast or the video feed itself.
I'd be delighted to see streaming video killed.
We'd go back to "download the video to the client's hard drive, and play it back." Was that really such a bad thing?
Requiring a web-based client to stream content hosted on an external server, is, at the root of it, a form of DRM. When the server goes away (or deletes the link to it), the content becomes unplayable. This applies whether you're talking about YouTube's embedded flash player, or the hoops through which Windows users have to jump in order to save .wmv clips from TV news sites, etc.
And streaming is inefficient. You not only require a continuous throughput at a reasonably high bitrate, but after you've finished downloading your 20 megabytes of content for that 2-minute video clip, your client does you the favor of immediately deleting it. So the next time you want to watch the video, you get the joy of re-downloading it. WTF? In an age of $200 terabyte hard drives, that's ridiculous.
So bring on the death of streaming video, and let's get back to the good old days of File->SaveAs .mpg, .flv, .avi, .mp4, and a few minutes later, you can play the locally-stored content to your heart's content. Forever.
Like I said, cable companies... be careful what you ask for.
They want to control what we access, and when. The motive, of course, is money. But the collateral damage is our freedom.
If I had a choice in high speed internet companies, then they could throttle all they wanted. The problem is that I don't, Cox is the only game in town. They don't have any competition in the internet department, so by your reasoning they should be able to kill any service they don't like? That's murder, not competition, and it's not good for anyone involved except for a few executives who won't have to deal with the fallout of their monopoly being broken up by force.
To regurgitate, again: it's anticompetitive. because they use a monopoly in one market (internet access), which might be state-funded no less, to help their position in a different market, specifically streaming video.
This hampers competition in the streaming video market by making it impossible for online video sites to compete on equal footing.
People need to remember that the free market exists for a purpose - to allow the best product to win. These kinds of tactics completely destroy that mechanism.
Non-discrimanatory traffic throttling and bandwidth caps are in my eyes, the only workable solution for a balance between net neutrality and 'ISP over-saturation'.
If my telco/cable offers a rate based on raw bandwidth even if it is tiered more expensively during peak times, it still means they have more respect from me than specificly targetting any given application / company. At least then I pay for my access to a given service is directly relational to the amount I pay for their service, instead of having a divisor calculated based on how much Google payola's to my ISP.
If I download 120GB and my cap is 100, I should get throttled/warnings/charged/dropped based on my ISP's policies. If I want >200GB cap, I can pay more, or look for a carrier that is more bandwidth compatable.
The most important factor in this whole thing is transparency. If my ISP wants to meter me at a given policy, the policy should be laid out 100% in my terms of service. If 'changes' that affect my experience on their network occur, it should be reported -proactively-. It doesn't mean that I can change their mind, but it does allow me to decide if I want to change providers before they break my internet.
Bye!
most of the major ISPs either already provide video (cable) or are paying billions of dollars to offer video (verizon, att, etc).
the phone companies got hit by VOIP. and now the cablecos and the telcos are worried that some "video vonage" will come in and offer video at a lower rate over their own data lines.
this has been the game all along. come on in, take a seat.
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
MIT's Open Course-ware has videos (for some courses) of the entire semesters. I usually watch one or two per day, and they stream over an hour of .rm content each. So, I'm guessing that MIT is inherently evil for opening its fascinating courses for the public to view? Wait, MIT is trying to ruin the internet? OMG!!
Not to mention, I routinely download Linux images for Open Suse, Fedora, and Ubuntu for 3 different architechtures AND keep them up to date with patches. That's about 25+ GB (big B) of data/month in free software and video alone.
Damn, this free stuff is undermining the entire ISP's monopoly and forcing them to expand their networks... and charge me more money/month. Guess there really is no such think as a free lunch.
Can I get some sort of open source ISP please?
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"[..]the most abusive users [...]"
since when is USING a flat rate abuse? Goddammit, sell your bandwidth as "10GB per month" and shut up.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
FiOS is still in the "early stage" where customers are profitable and competition is low.
DSL was not throttled for early subscribers, it has now reached the point where it is cheap and the infrastructure behind it is getting too expensive to run if everyone uses it heavily.
This is problematic because the largest US ISPs are also big media companies.
Ideally, an ISP would be like a utility company. Pay a metered rate and the ISP moves data in the quickest and most efficient way possible. The ISP shouldn't care if broadband connections are used for streaming TV shows and movies. But many ISPs do care because they own TV networks and movie studios which are threatened by streaming media.
Look at Time Warner's plan to charge customers $1/GB if they exceed the monthly limit of 40 GB. Would you be surprised if Time Warner opens its own online store to sell movies and TV shows, one where downloads aren't counted against the monthly bandwidth limit? You think Apple or Netflix would appreciate that? And given the pitiful state of broadband competitiveness in the US, many consumers would be stuck with Time Warner...that or dial-up.
Just some of the many dangers of media consolidation.
You're not a broadband provider!
If you cant deliver the pipe... get out of the broadband industry because the demand for bandwidth is ONLY going to increase. It will NEVER decrease. We are a technological society, with more and more people using the internet everyday. The applications on the net are only going to increase the demand for bandwidth and speed.
Comcast, if you think you're having bandwith problems now... wait until 2011. Get off your ass and build for it, today. Stop punishing your customers, you have plenty of money as a business to provide the services that are demanded by your customers. AND YES... they are obviously demanded by your customers because the demand is too much for your network.
FIX IT.
How can a broadband provider see an increase in demand for bandwidth, and simply say... we're not going to increase our capacity? The demand is there because it is what is required by todays users.
You're not a broadband provider if you can not provide broadband. Comcast, you're a failure.
I am amazed on a regular basis by just how hostile Comcast is toward it's customers. Hopefully my cable provider doesn't start doing this crap too.
Then that's some good decades-old wiring. 50k is the best you can really get on dialup even in perfect conditions with pristine wiring, 33.6 without downstream tricks.
You're obviously trolling here, but it provides a good jumping off point for what I want to say, so I'll bite. First off, other people watching live streaming video online aren't likely to impact your connection. Satellite TV, Cable and over-the-air antenna don't carry every live video feed of interest to everyone, so that may be someone's only option to see a particular event live. Also, there are lots of legal services to get movies off the Internet--some dinky 2 bit operations you may have heard of called iTunes and Amazon.com. I can download a 2 hour standard def movie in about 20 minutes on my connection, which is on par with how long it would take to go to the rental store, minus the hassles and gasoline. And it's certainly not cheaper to rent.
Nobody's destroying the Internet--well, maybe the cable companies. You see, what's going to happen is we consumers might actually get what we've been asking for these past few decades--ala carte channels. Paying only for the channels and shows you actually want, and the cable company becomes a mere bandwidth provider akin to a utility. No more content, premium channels, pay per view, or any of that crap. You pay for the pipe to your house, and what you want to watch. Cable companies want to retain control and maintain their monopolies, so they'll fight this every step of the way. That's what the net neutrality fight is really all about. The cable companies don't want to relinquish control.
Anwser just one question. Why don't we hear about this stuff from companies offering DSL? It seems its ONLY THE CABLE companies that see any need to limit or throttle traffic.