Slashdot Mirror
Reason To Hope Carriers Won't Win the War On Netflix
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, 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
Even bigger issue is, if you are hosting your infrastructure on AWS, your customers will get slower service.
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.
Has already been abandoned by the FCC, so better get used to it.. Its only going to get worse.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
I got comcrap(comcast) and I guess I am not being throttled? AWS East test gave me the speeds I was signed up for tho Linode, Atlanta, GA shown a higher speed (like 20MB higher) So guessing ether AWS was just bogged down or something cause it be silly to think it is working in reverse :P
Here in Canada, Telus is one of the Big 3 service providers. I toured their central office, and their chief network technician showed me the new transmission infrastructure they were planning "because of Netflix". The increased traffic because of Netflix alone is costing the ISPs money, no doubt about it. It will end up costing us, as consumers. No reason to throttle if they're investing in bandwidth instead, just raise the cost.
I am Audience.
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Goodbye Slashdot. I'll remember you as you were, and not what you've become.
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.
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.
How do these articles with multiple spelling mistakes and typos keep making the front page?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Natural monopolies need to be regulated.
Dice doesn't own slashdot.jp? wikipedia: "currently owned by OSDN-Japan, Inc."
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 about this. I'm an expert on this stuff.
In all likelyhood, it is Verizon throttling AWS so they can charge a premium to keep their traffic unthrottled.
To be pessimistic 80% of US ISP bandwidth is the result of direct peering between two ISPs or and ISP and the data center where content is hosted (or mirrored). The fiber cable where data passes might be leased (extremely likely), worst case having a large L2 ethernet switch from the IXP between the two side's border routers.
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).
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?
I also have Fios, and I actually get faster download speeds from AWS east than I pay for (75/35). I'm getting 85.83mpbs according to netneutralitytest.com. Now I'm not saying that Verizon isn't doing this for anybody, but they certainly aren't for me.
Right. Because citizen activists publicizing how big powerful entities do horrible things when the government is too chickenshit to stop them really worked wonders in the case of the NSA's mass-surveillance program. Not to mention extraordinary renditions, offshore torture, firing DAs for not investigating bullshit "voter fraud," lying to Congress, lying to the UN, to the American public, etc etc.
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 x-thousand-users?
Put another way, everyone in NYC does not use 12 MBps at the same time. In fact, if they do, the RIGHT response is to not let it all through--because it means there's a *massive* DDOS going on.
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 2013), that they have a separate distributed network and offer to put netflix servers on-premesis with ISPs (as long as the ISP drops peering charges).
Given that Amazon has enough bandwidth to cover them, and given that Amazon isn't being throttled (at least by Comcast), then it appears pretty definitive that Netflix simply isn't increasing its AWS scaling as demand increases, despite posting record profits. Shock of shock, Netflix likes extra money rather than ensuring reasonable service for all of its paying customers.
Even if Verizon is throttling it any, Netflix is probably throttling it considerably harder based on recent reports and local tests.
Also, if the submitter is paying for FiOS and only getting 12mbit max... A( I'd better hope that's on the 15/5 plan, B( dear god, why is that as expensive as Comcast Blast! and only 15/5? Comcast is in the process of making the same tier 105/12 (currently 50/10). (I got 60mbit on all of the 'net neutrality' tests linked.)
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
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.
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.
Google Fiber has come to two US cities. People should be asking how to get it rolled out faster in other cities or how to get other companies that won't throttle to setup shop
they are going to lose a lot of people like digg did when they rolled out their redesign. I wonder why they are ignoring this self inflicted threat to their profits.
"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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
If only people knew how content delivery worked. Netflix don't deliver you the video from AWS, so worrying about the 'throttling' of AWS connections is slightly ridiculous.
Untrusted Java app? No go...
Yes, Beta sux and I too will leave if it becomes the new default!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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/... - it's also a very well known and trusted site http://www.measurementlab.net/...
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Throttling" between autonomous systems is common.
... always. ISP peering is market driven - that is, there is clearly "demand" for data from AWS, but Verizon is a monopoly which can afford to extort AWS to cough up money, and Amazon/whomever are reluctant to cave in.
Think of it as series of tubes, and between some places, the tubes are thinner. Usually wherever AS POP meet and the exchange arrangement is not settlement-free, but capped to some numbers in (either) direction. Or the port is simply running red-hot.
When two big ISPs refuse to reach a compromise on peering terms, it's usually the users who suffer. Think of the Sprint vs. cogent drama.
Commercial internet worked like that since uh
Net neutrality term is a bit of oxymoron in the light of this, as there was never one to begin with. The problem is simply lack of last-mile competition in the US, as those operators are not pressed by competition to provide quality bandwidth to end users from relevant places as needed.
Refusing to peer with competing service, and offering local service of their own is entirely legit as well. As long the consumer is given choice of different ISP to flee to....
Sique's assumption is that big bandwidth would be THE issue. It could just as likely be about content. If you give the carriers free reign on this, it could be used as a de facto form of censorship.
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 Cedexis to automatically route Verizon customers to Azure at the times of day when Verizon do their throttling, whilst leaving everyone else on AWS. It's actually possible to see what they would be doing for you right now on their website (they publish the core data publicly).
I realise this doesn't solve the problem, but it works around it. Solving the problem means telling Netflix their service sucks and you're leaving, whilst doing the same to Verizon. Once Netflix starts hurting, they'll start lobbying, and once $other_provider starts doing better than Verizon, maybe they'll rethink their approach. Maybe.
So we have tools to keep the ISP in check, but what keeps the ISP from playing the tools? Like the synthetic benchmarks for computer hardware and companies creating special cases for them, the ISP will do it too. Take for example a current tool, speedtest.net, it downloads and uploads a small file. However, Time Warner does a speed boost for the first Xmb( or seconds ) after which the speed drops. This does benefit to small amounts of data like email and webpages, but notice how it seems to handle that speedtest file quite well?
Hey, I liked your post when I saw it, enough so that I even put it in my signature. But I think you're overreacting. He's an idiot or misunderstood or something, but that doesn't mean you should jump all over him in an unrelated comment thread.
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 connection to Netflix. Here's their number, and here are other ISPs in your area who do not'...
Just an idea, and something the ISPs would have difficulty justifying.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
make sure your service is delivered through encrypted data packets. It's hard to analyse and nearly impossible to do so on the ISP's side. Lot's of vpn are growing and all vpn uses encrypted data and the more we advance in time and age then more encrypted data the Internet uses. So ISP's will have a hard time and they actually do have a hard time with encrypted data.
I know that Bell Canada ISP throttles their service after 2h30 pm with p2p protocol but if you encrypt it using a normal port like 21 for example or even 80 if you want to go extreme with hiding yourself then you could do it and you won't be throttled. Thankfully, I have a Universe which is a reseller of ISP under Bell's flag so I'm not throttled since the company I'm with have a contract that states they can't throttle it.
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
If /when overwhelming evidence is found that ISPs are throttling Netflix and other such services, those services could sue for anti-competitive business practices.
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.
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.
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/
Class action lawsuit, anyone?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
"The carriers won't win the war on Netflix, because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge and we'll catch them if they try."
Yeah, and then what? We'll all just cancel our internet and have no internet? That's likely. Given the choice between paying too much for crappy internet (what I have right now), and not paying and having no internet, I will continue to choose the former, thank you very much. Now obviously if a non-Verizon service were to come along and deliver on a promise of having internet that doesn't suck as much and/or was cheaper, I'd certainly drop Verizon in a second. But no such choice exists, and no such choice is likely to exist in the future the way things have been going. (I do have the choice to switch to Comcast. Big whoopdy-fracking-do, so much better, not.)
I must be lucky: testing from home at http://netneutralitytest.com/ my speeds to Linode Atlanta are between 35 & 45mbit/s whereas my speeds to AWS East are between 50 & 60mbit/s. Fairly consistantly (I alternated between each site 3 times).
Of course, I'm not with or carried by Verizon.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
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.
The problem with this line of argument is the old "correlation does not imply causation". The whole in your theory is that it absolutely is possible for 'ordinary' 'consumer grade' uses to peg the bandwidth as much as any server. People can leave a Skype HD video chat on 24/7. People can use rsync to mirror mirrors.kernel.org.
The style of argument you made has some connection the T-Totalers of prohibition. After all, if you can anecdotally point to some people who drank too much alcohol, and went off and murdered people, then why not make drinking alcohol illegal? The thing is, you need to make the rules and laws fit the actual problem. Don't block me from running a server just because you _assume_ I'll use more bandwidth than my neighbors. If the *real problem* is excessive bandwidth use- *make the rules and laws target that*. Making the rules target "commercial servers" instead of "levels of bandwidth use that kills everyone elses performance" only leads to a throttling of innovative _low bandwidth_ use of the internet that involves commercial servers.
The real issue is marketing bullshit and lies. ISPs want to market "unlimited bandwidth, no datacaps" because that sounds super awesome. The problem is that it is FRAUD. The internet, as described by FCC-10-201/NetNeutraly is "general purpose technology". If the cable companies want to sell me a "gmail pipeline", then market it as a "gmail pipeline". Don't market as "internet service", because without the ability to run a _low bandwidth commercial server_, it IS NOT INTERNET SERVICE.
Neither owns Barrapunto (Spanish for "Slashdot") and it is also not thinking in updating to beta. At least for now...
I think I just proved that it's not evil Verizon blocking specifically Netflix traffic.
I tried watching several things on Netflix and watched what IP's it connected to. Any IP that wasnt going over 2-3 MB (Megabytes) / sec I would block on the firewall.
After blocking off the NYC and Telia IP's, it started connecting to DFW, ATL, and SJ and loading streaming vids very quickly!
fast IP's /sj level3 1.5 MB/s
108.175.41.186 ipv4_1.lagg0.c111.atl001.ix.nflxvideo.net - ATL Level3 3-5MB/s
108.175.40.96 ipv4_1.lagg0.c001.atl001.ix.nflxvideo.net - ATL
198.45.62.163 ipv4_1.lagg0.c054.sjc002.ix.nflxvideo.net
198.45.63.154 ipv4_1.lagg0.c060.sjc002.ix.nflxvideo.net - sanjose / Level3
198.45.63.155 ipv4_1.lagg0.c061.sjc002.ix.nflxvideo.net
198.45.55.202 ipv4_1.lagg0.c153.dfw001.ix.nflxvideo.net / Dfw Telia
SLOW IP's
nyc
198.38.96.158 - Telia
108.175.42.193 ipv4_1.lagg0.c133.nyc001.ix.nflxvideo.net - nyc / Level3 500K
108.175.43.167 ipv4_1.lagg0.c107.nyc001.ix.nflxvideo.net - nyc / Level3 500K