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Is Verizon Already Slowing Netflix Down?
hondo77 points out a blog post by Dave Raphael, who noticed some odd discrepancies between two different Verizon broadband connections he has access to. His personal residential plan and his company's business plan both went through the same Verizon routers, but his residential plan is getting unusably slow speeds to places like AWS. He suggests that Verizon is already waging a war on high-bandwidth services like Netflix after the recent court decision against net neutrality. His discussion with a Verizon service representative seems to confirm this, though it's uncertain whether such an employee would have access to that information.
Most people support Net Neutrality because they think things like this will not happen.
So then, under the net neutrality rules you need to explain why what Verizion is doing would not happen.
What will stop Verizon from doing this? My canceling my phone service and telling them I'm switching to T-Mobile because of cloud throttling.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://bgr.com/2014/02/05/veri...
“We treat all traffic equally, and that has not changed,” a Verizon spokesperson told BGR in an emailed statement. “Many factors can affect the speed a customer’s experiences for a specific site, including, that site’s servers, the way the traffic is routed over the Internet, and other considerations. We are looking into this specific matter, but the company representative was mistaken. We’re going to redouble our representative education efforts on this topic.”
It is still unclear exactly what was causing the issues that Raphael described, but it’s apparently not any form of bandwidth prioritization. Instead, the issue may relate to congestion specific to the Amazon servers or connections that Raphael was testing, but nothing has been confirmed by Amazon.
I almost admire your optimism.
Because it would be illegal, and they would be subject to legal repercussions, unlike now. What part of this do you find confusing?
They're confused by the part that conflicts with their ideology.
Why would anyone believe what a low-level CSR tells them in a chat session? This is like when an eBay CSR claimed that eBay did not allow the sale of Bitcoin mining rigs a few weeks ago. The person didn't know what they were talking about.
Not to mention this is Verizon, who can't tell $0.002 from 0.002 cents. Engaging them on a topic of any complexity is sure to lead to hilarity and/or frustration.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Because it would be illegal, and they would be subject to legal repercussions, unlike now. What part of this do you find confusing?
The part where Verizon is demonstrably doing something to cause this. "slow speeds to netflix" can be explained a lot of ways that don't involve content based throttling. Short of a subpoena for exactly the right router configuration (good luck, they have about 20,000) you can't.
"Confirmation" from a Verizon spokesperson that Verizon isn't throttling access is more than a little like the fox guarding the hen house and asking the fox to "confirm" that the hens are all present and accounted for. That's not to say that Mr. Raphael's assertion is necessarily correct either, but he does provide additional evidence to support his claim, whereas Verizon is merely providing "assurances", as far as I can tell since the BGR article provides no details beyond the brief spokesperson statement.
Evil is as eval("does");
Because, ISPs have long worked on a model of oversubscription in order to rake in huge amounts of money, while not giving a damn if you get anything resembling the claimed performance.
They just want more and more subscribers paying a monthly bill, but they've mostly all failed to invest in any new capacity in a long time.
In the real world, this would be analagous to going to a hotel and discovering they've got more people than rooms and have therefore installed rows of bunk beds like a military barracks.
Services like Netflix are just highlighting that they're selling more than they have, and leaving the customers short-changed.
They were the ones telling us about all the multimedia experiences we could get on the interwebs, and then the first to start bitching about how much bandwidth the stuff they used in their advertising actually costs.
And, since many ISPs are also cable companies these days, they also want to ensure you use their premium services to watch anything -- this way they can get more money out of you, starve out a competitor, and if they're really lucky charge both you and Netflix for the bandwidth.
Telecoms are largely a pyramid scheme these days in terms of actual capacity, and they know it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Proper net neutrality legislation would require (under penalty of fines) an ISP to not throttle one service for another.
Verizon is not throttling A service. They are throttling "cloud providers", which means no specific service is throttled, just anyone pushing data through Amazon - that's the whole point of the article, that his data rate is also impacted because he uses AWS.
There is no way you can write a law that will stop Verizon from doing what they are doing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sure you can stop them. You can revoke their Incorporation Charter.
One thing we seem to have forgotten is that Corporations are creations of the state, and thus subservient to the state (ostensibly).
The problem is, that when HARM is done, we have never simply revoked Corporate Charters. If we start doing that, then CxOs and boards will take their fiduciary responsibility a little more seriously.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The first 2 hops in his traces don't match up...
This AC is correct. IF you read the fine article behind the article referenced in this story it is CLEAR that the guy's home connection has at least one more hop. I would assume that after 4PM, many home users would be showing up and cranking up Netflix (or other online activities) and putting stress on the first router which is NOT involved in the business connection.
So, this is apples and oranges... Or at least just congestion on the home connection that doesn't exist in the business one.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Because it would be illegal, and they would be subject to legal repercussions, unlike now. What part of this do you find confusing?
The part where Verizon is demonstrably doing something to cause this. "slow speeds to netflix" can be explained a lot of ways that don't involve content based throttling. Short of a subpoena for exactly the right router configuration (good luck, they have about 20,000) you can't.
Yes, you can obtain this evidence.
You don't go searching through 20,000 routers to figure this out.
Instead, you ask and obtain the network speed results from 2,000,000 Verizon customers through a public crowdsourcing campaign.
Either the hard evidence will clearly show that speeds are being throttled, or the public backlash alone with a campaign like this will force Verizon to "fix" it, else they lose customers. A lot of customers.
Either way, we can get the evidence. You just have to think outside the box.
Net Neutrality states that all data must be treated equally. That means if I purchase a 20Mb connection, I should be able to allocate that 20Mb connection to any service I want without the ISP throttling it down. If Netflix lets me stream at 20Mb, but for some reason I can only get 10Mb because it is throttled by Verizon, well then that breaks Net Neutrality. Obviously there is a lot of things to take in, like router, modem, and infrastructure, but if there is obvious evidence showing my connections to a particular service is treated differently, it would be illegal under Net Neutrality.
if you search on the internet, netflix is pushing it's own CDN with the condition that they don't pay the regular CDN fees. most of the big ISP's haven't signed on which is why netflix is slow on their networks. the pipes to the CDN provider are probably maxed out like the issue with Cogent a few years ago
business scuffle with two companies trying to lower their costs of business. not like netflix is the angel here either.
This is the second time you've posted about this here as if you have some sort of inside information.
It's not a rumor, and it's not newsworthy. Netflix announced this shit a year ago when they started touting "Super HD". https://signup.netflix.com/ope...
Netflix gave ISPs 3 options:
A: Peer with us at favorable rates and we'll allow your users to access our higher quality streams and help make sure shit is routing efficiently.
B: Drop our content boxes directly on your network and we'll allow your users to access our higher quality streams and pay you fair rates.
C: Don't peer with us at lower rates or let us store content on your network, and we'll name and shame you as not fully supporting Netflix.
Once all the major ISPs agreed with A or B, Netflix opened up "Super HD" to (almost) everyone. They now have a lot of those distributed content boxes and favorable agreements, and are effectively a CDN.
I didn't say there was a law. I said it was possible to have a law like this. The problem is, we have gutless Republicrats and Demicans in office, who get a large chunk of campaign funds from non-person entities.
I'm a libertarian, and the greatest threat to our democratic republic has been from campaign contributions by people/entities ineligible to vote for a candidate / Proposition. My solution for this would be to require ALL campaign contributions be from ONLY people eligible to vote for said candidate/ballot measure. I wouldn't prevent XYZ Corp or ABC Union from campaigning, just not directly giving money to the candidate. I would also make campaign contributions unlimited if they are by eligible voters in the election.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"This word you keep using...I do not think it means what you think it means" -Inigo Montoya
Competition does not lead to monopolies. Competition and monopoly are literally antonyms; they are the opposite of one another. So let me ask you this...if not competition, what would you propose to prevent a monopoly?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I know there's a precedent, but it's a silly one. An ISP participating in Open Connect improves the product of both companies. The ISP reduces the traffic on their network and Netflix performance is better for that ISPs customers. Charging for caching the content would be like trying to charge for peering, the revenue it might be worth is nothing compared to the savings from reducing the load on the network.
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"The Premium package gives you access to all your streaming favorites like YouTube, Hulu Plus, Netflix along with dozens of foreign movie sites you've never heard of.
The Friends & Family package gives you access to the people you want to keep in touch with, when you want to keep in touch with them, over your favorite NSA-sponsored proprietary social networking site: FacePalmSpace.
Our Adults-Only package allows you to stream all your favorite German Scheiße porn tube sites!"
Don't think so? Bookmark me, wait a couple years, then come back and mod me "Insightful".
If it's directed towards Netflix, yes it was.
Only because the FCC is hindered by Congress and can't put ISPs in the common carrier category they belong in. So Verizon looks at traffic and says "oh, sorry about Netflix being slow, have you seen our TV deals?!"
But please, be more enraged on behalf of abusive corporations. I'm sure they appreciate it.
I also am a libertarian/conservative-leaning voter who, I believe, has to have a similar view to you. But on Net Neutrality, the freedom of the people cannot be protected by giving freedom to an oligarchy. In the modern day, the people are not only subject to the limitations of law. More and more, they are subject to the rules set by corporate oligarchies. In the US, unlike in Korea, there is a gentlemen's agreement amongst internet providers to limit the speeds that we should expect. The capitalist idea of personal property has been perverted over the last 30 years by the use of EULA's that is prevelant, which teach people that they only own their computers to the degree that MicrosoftApple tells them they can.
If you would prefer a company that provides freer computing or freer internet service, there's really no where to run.
Unless you exercise your free-market right to go shopping for a new government. Brazil is looking pretty good to me.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
For what it's worth, we just did this with our Family plan (ditch V for Tmo) - and, can verify, 2 weeks of normal 4G data usage on TMo totalled about 20 Meg, setup as a mobile hotspot and give the kids tablets with Netflix - ran through 480 Meg of data in like 5 minutes - I don't think there's any throttling going on there...
Because it would be illegal
Why?
What was the rule or regulation or law from Net Neutrality that made what Verizon is doing illegal?
I want someone to be specific because my point is this Verizon action has NOTHING to do with Net Neutrality, and would not be stopped by any Net Neutrality rules that the FCC put forth before they were told to stop.
So I repeat; HOW WOULD VERSION NOT BE ABLE TO DO WHAT THEY ARE DOING?
There is no current authority by the FCC (which they recently admitted) that allows them to enforce net neutrality. Even before that admission, what they had in place would not have worked as net neutrality, and was certainly never legally challenged and upheld in any court to cement it. Until ISPs are classified as common carriers, the FCC will not have the authority to enforce any level of net neutrality - which a former FCC chairman has recently stated. I have not said, and do not believe, that we have ever had any level of net neutrality. I am advocating FOR true net neutrality. That doesn't mean that what Verizon is supposedly doing doesn't violate the spirit of what people want net neutrality protection against, however.
That doesn't mean that what Verizon is supposedly doing doesn't violate the spirit of what people want net neutrality protection against, however.
That's exactly my point. What people want is this.
But it's not what they are getting, it was never what the FCC proposed, it's not what they will ever do. And yet people are all up in arms because the FCC is not allowed to control ISP's even though it will do nothing in the SPIRIT of why people want Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality is a hollow label simply used to sell a bad product.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, it could be worse: it could have continued long enough for regulatory capture to set in.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Comparing a residential account and a business account? I don't see a story here.
I guess "Slashdot Beta Tourette's" is the winter bug going around this year...
We made one, but the data being returned kept dropping out for some reason.
Dark Reflection
No, they are confused by an unclear description of "net neutrality".
I've seen some places (non-fox news) describe "net neutrality" as "Enforcing traffic to be at equal speeds"... which is not the case. People using that description would be against it because they believe it would mean all web traffic would be slower, to match the speed of the slowest server... That reeks of "All must be fair, so we must race to the bottom" and "Everybody gets a trophy" that many people disapprove of.
If you inform them that Net Neutrality is against throttling speeds, and having customers get what they paid for... then most of those against, turn sides.
I see it as we either need to enforce Net Neutrality, or enable a free market, where we have more than one or two choices for broadband (or any other utility).... If we had 10+ ISP's to choose from, this wouldn't be an issue, one would not throttle, and that would force the others to compete. But we don't have a free market... and too many of those in power (both in government, and the big TelComs) would lose money to allow a free market.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Then why does his office connection that goes through the same router not see any of that congestion? RTFA and get back to us.
The different accounts subscribe to different service tiers. This is like complaining that your cheaper 768Kbit account cant stream Netflix HD but your more expensive 5Mbit mid-tier account can.
The business account is probably paying several hundred per month, and for that the account gets a different level of service, perhaps one that doesnt degrade so much during prime-time.
I'd be pretty pissed off if my $200/mo business plan was treated equal to your $65/mo residential plan, that your $65 gives you the "Net Neutrality" right to fuck me out of the better connection that I am paying for.
"His name was James Damore."
1, 5, 10, 100 difference services. It actually makes it worse if they're intentionally throttling MORE individual services. Each service affected under "cloud" is affected individually.
Why is this not yet ranked +5 insightful.
I recently moved to a place where I can't get Comcast (thankfully). Even though I'm out in the country instead of in town -- everything is so much better. Youtube and Netflix don't buffer like they did with Comcast, they just play. My internet bill went from $75/mo to $50. So better and cheaper. Of course it could have been different as there is only one provider here too, but I got lucky this time and my provider isn't such an ass as Comcast. But that's just the luck of the draw.
You simply can't treat a monopoly like a free market -- these terms are antonyms and reality demands different treatment. Believe me, if there had been competition, I would dropped Comcast faster than a fetid turd, but there wasn't and so I bitterly paid my bill and sucked it up.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I agree...the blogger has two data points, connects them and thinks its a "trend".
If you look at the traceroutes at the bottom of the blog, which he seems to believe make an argument for his point, the top two IP addresses are different between business and residence. The "residential" route could simply be overloaded due to everybody firing up netflix when they get home.
The OP has a genuine beef that he should get better bandwidth to Netflix, but he would have made a much better argument if he would have posted speed results to YouTube, dslreports, and other diverse sites not hosted on AWS....
Until then just two data points connected by a straight line...
You are incorrect about the FCC's authority to enforce Net Neutrality. YES, the courts DID strike down the FCC, but they also told the FCC EXACTLY how to properly frame their enforcement to get it to stick. Go read up on it before just talking out of your butt.
How many banksters went to jail for tilting the entire fucking world economy over a cliff?
Oh yeah, zero.
You can even launder money for terrorists and drug cartels and be punished with nothing but a partial deferral of your annual bonus.
As Matt Taibi put it:
http://www.rollingstone.com/po...
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If you inform them that Net Neutrality is against throttling speeds,
Except that isn't what net neutrality is about. Net neutrality has nothing to do with residential and business accounts getting different data rates (which is the complaint in the original article.) It isn't about residential users seeing congestion because there are too many other users on their net segment. One hundred people on your net segment all browsing media-rich websites while you're trying to watch a movie on Netflix and your movie stalls isn't a violation of net neutrality. And it isn't even about the throttling of speeds when you overrun the limits on your data plan.
It IS about preferential treatment for certain data SOURCES. And this is going to be something that is hard for a user to prove since it will take more than "netflix sux but youtube still rocks", or "netflix at home sux but netflix at work rocks". And it will take a LOT more than some undocumented alleged rambling from a front-line tech support person.
And, I dare say, you will still have a lot of people who disapprove of net neutrality if you tell them that it would prohibit their ISP from giving their Netflix stream priority over someone else's web browsing. "So what if it takes five seconds for their web page to load instead of one, if them getting it in one means my Netflix hiccups?" (Perhaps this displays why using Netflix as the quintessential argument FOR net neutrality is a poor idea, since it is easy to dismiss it as just selfish people who want their movies to run without interruption even if it means everyone else's network experience suffers.)
or enable a free market, where we have more than one or two choices for broadband (or any other utility).... If we had 10+ ISP's to choose from, this wouldn't be an issue,
Well, unfortunately, we've already seen that a totally free market won't result in 10+ ISPs because there won't be enough money to keep all of them in business. Even back in the heyday of dialup ISPs our area only had three or four at best (not counting the AOLs of the world, which I wouldn't call a real ISP anyway), and they tanked because they couldn't keep customers when faster access came around. Heck, some parts of this state had NO ISPs until the state stepped in and provided it as a kind of "extension service". The one local ISP that survived the transition resells DSL for the local telco, so even that "competition" isn't really competition.
No, to get those 10+ ISPs there will have to be heavy subsidies, and that creates something very different than a free market.
What you should be pissed about is that you have to pay for a "business plan" in the first place. Back in the 90s when telcos started selling DSL and other high speed services to residential customers, there was not any difference. I had a 384k DSL feed at home that was just as fast as the 384k DSL feed at the office.
The limitations are completely arbitrary and 100% due to the fact that the telcos and ISPs are cheap bastards and will do everything in their power to avoid upgrading their infrastructure.
Our cable (and hence cable modem) went out for a day recently (we use Cox). My wife set up a mobile hotspot from her T-Mobile phone in a spot in which she had LTE service and went about her life as normal, meaning streaming Netflix in the background while she works. It turns out that at LTE speeds, Netflix feeds you rather high reception, and you can go through a 2.5 GB limit in less than two movies. So, she was throttled for the rest of the month to 2G speeds.
Supposedly they do not throttle on the unlimited plan. They are very clear on the 2.5 GB plan that they will throttle after the cap (but will not charge extra) and they did in fact throttle (and I was fine with that--that was all we paid for, and in the typical month is faaaar more than enough). On the unlimited plan, I question how much Netflix streaming they would really tolerate.
Equality of any kind between traffic on a home residential connection and traffic on a business connection has nothing at all to do with Net Neutrality. All Net Neutrality says is "you can't do company-specific throttling". Verizon wasn't, they were (apparently) throttling all cloud sources equally (obviously as a way to throttle Netflix without targeting Netflix), which was legal under the rules.
The rules weren't well thought out.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Uhhh...you never actually worked helpdesk, have you? Or even dealt with them for any length of time? Let old Hairy clue you in, helpdesk guys usually don't know a damned thing that isn't written on a little sheet sitting in front of them and "pulling stuff out of their ass" is pretty much SOP. Hell when I used to have to deal with the Hughesnet helpdesk for several rural customers I HAD TO TEACH THEM because they didn't know the basics of how their equipment worked! I don't know how many times I got "I didn't know you could do that, we are recording so would you please walk me through it step by step so I'll have it when a customer has that problem?" from the Hughes guys and this was tier one! Tier 3 had one answer and that was "reboot" LOL.
So while i don't know if Verizon is fucking Netflix and it wouldn't surprise me if they were you REALLY can't go by the word of a helpdesk guy because they know less than nothing in most places.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Verizon screws with Skype too. I was trying to run Skype at a friend's place. The latency was terrible, making the program unusable. So I fired up a connection to my VPN service, which in theory should increase the latency, because it is an extra hop. Running through the VPN fixed the problem, and I could use Skype.
You are looking only at one side of the link. There's two sides.
What will stop Verizon from doing this?
Netflix pays Verizon for 100Gbps upstream links at various peering points in the country for whatever Verizon wants to charge. If Verizon doesn't provide 100Gbps from those links because of a bottleneck on Verizon's own network, Netflix sues them for breach of contract. It's Verizon's job to guarantee Netflix that 100Gbps throughout Verizon's network. Repeat for Netflix on AT&T, Google fiber, TimeWarner/Comcast/whatever cable network.
If Netflix doesn't want to do this, then their Verizon-based subscribers will have shitty service. At that point they will either deal with it, or cancel Netflix, or cancel Verizon and switch to an ISP that Netflix does have a traffic contract with.
How does Net Neutrality play a role? Verizon can't refuse to offer Netflix access to their network, or artificially slow down Netflix's traffic on their own network once there is an agreement between Netflix and Verizon. I'm not sure if net neutrality also specifies that Verizon can't charge arbitrarily high prices for network bandwidth to certain companies. That is a good question.
You have it backwards, it's the large ISPs that are subsidizing the politicians.
When you get a good provider, you shouldn't hide who they are. If they are being decent, then you should give them credit where it's due. Who are you with now?
ISPs can still throttle torrents to ensure voip traffic moves through.
No! If I dedicate all my bandwidth to torrents and you dedicate all yours to VoIP why should you get preferential treatment?
The only fair solution is for an ISP to do per-subscriber shaping within their network. Each subscriber gets throughput relative to the bandwidth that they paid for. Traffic type shouldn't matter when comparing traffic for two different subscribers.
If an individual subscriber wants to prioritize VoIP over torrents they can do that on their own equipment (or have the ISP do it for them). But that should affect only the traffic for that subscriber, and should have ZERO impact on any other subscriber's traffic.
What it involved in the case of the original reporter was a connection that would show high speeds with some data sources such as Speedtest.net, but at the same time show very low speeds with other data sources, notably Amazon AWS. (Throttling Amazon Web Services affects many online services, a notable case being Netflix.) The reporter's work connection, also through Verizon, did not exhibit the same selective slowness.