AT&T Exec Calls Netflix "Arrogant" For Expecting Net Neutrality

jayp00001 (267507) writes "'As we all know, there is no free lunch, and there’s also no cost-free delivery of streaming movies. Someone has to pay that cost. Mr. Hastings' arrogant proposition is that everyone else should pay but Netflix. That may be a nice deal if he can get it. But it's not how the Internet, or telecommunication for that matter, has ever worked,' writes AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of Legislative Affairs, James Cicconi. Mr. Cicconi took issue with a blog post from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on the importance of net neutrality.

Comments

It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Your customers pay you, as their provider, Netflix pays their provider, and it's between you and their provider to determine who, if anyone, pays who, based on the flow of traffic.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Qwerpafw]

Put another way:

* Netflix pays for their bandwidth
* Customers pay for their bandwidth

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

People aren't paying for "Internet except for Netflix" and Netflix isn't paying their bandwidth costs for "Internet except for consumers."

AT&T, and other providers, should have no right to put up walls. If there are issues of peering, those should be working out at the peering level, and not at the application/service or individual business level.

The news about Apple being willing to pay for AppleTV to have a "special line" to consumers is particularly worrisome and strikes the core of the problems with anti-net neutrality positions: they create unfair markets with barriers to competition. Netflix may complain, but they can (and do! with Comcast) pay if they have to. Apple can afford to pay the gatekeepers as well.

But some new startup (Aereo, for example) or small business? They can't and won't be able to pay those gatekeeper tolls to reach consumers. And they'll be prevented from competing or disrupting.

Big business will thrive in an anti-net neutrality world. Honestly, it might even help Netflix in the long run as barriers to any competing service will be high. But it's anticompetitive and small businesses and startups alike will be prevented from innovating, and maybe even be driven out of the market by an inability to pay these tolls.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Lloyd_Bryant]

Your customers pay you, as their provider, Netflix pays their provider, and it's between you and their provider to determine who, if anyone, pays who, based on the flow of traffic.

What, you mean that someone who pays his ISP for a connection to the Internet shouldn't have to pay extra if he actually wants to use that bandwidth? I'm pretty sure that'd be classified as communism, or terrorism, or whatever the 'ism of the month is.

ISPs will fight tooth and nail to keep from becoming the "dumb pipes" that true net neutrality would make them. Because then they wouldn't be able to siphon off the profits of companies that have actually innovated themselves a business in the Internet space, rather than just continuing to make a buck off of their infrastructure semi-monopolies.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[udachny]

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Alain Williams]

I think that everyone agrees, that. The point is who pays for the carrying of data between the providers. OK: what I pay my ISP should also pay for them to fetch/send my bytes onwards in the Internet as well. I will cost my ISP less if I choose to download something from a local mirror than if I grab it from the other side of the world. Netflix are aware of that and have the Open Connect Content Delivery Network, but that won't solve all the probelms.

Between them Netflix and YouTube made up more than 50 percent of peak downstream Internet traffic in N America, so it is a significant issue.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

time to take away their roads.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Shadow99_1]

Not just that, but from what I've seen in other news bits... The consumer side ISPs want to charge their customers, Netflix, and Netflix ISP... So they are being paid triple for the same bandwidth. How exactly that is supposed to be 'normal' is left up to the craziness of those saying such things.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[ZombieBraintrust]

No it is like phone calls. The person who initiates the call pays. They pay because they are the one who is creating congestion. Netflix is not generating any traffic. AT&T customers generate the traffic when they open thier browsers and start downloading movies. It is not Netflix desision that AT&T charges all its customers the same thing. Netflix should not be punished because AT&T promises high speed connections with unlimited access. That is AT&T's fault.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy

No it doesn't. 10 GB of traffic uses up exactly the same capacity each time it's streamed regardless of whether it's a movie or cat pictures.

If you charge more for heavy trucks you have to charge all trucks.
You can't just charge wall-mart trucks double because you don't like them.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[bluefoxlucid]

Their large problems are as thus:

Firstly, they can only charge those who peer to them. NetFlix using a Tier 3 provider would resell AT&T, who would charge the Tier 3 provider for bandwidth, which would essentially charge NetFlix for bandwidth. If NetFlix picks another Tier 1 or Tier 3 who resells a different Tier 1, AT&T can no longer charge NetFlix; they're stuck with their peering deals between Tier 1 providers.

Secondly, not being allowed to charge NetFlix for bandwidth passing through another Tier 1 peering arrangement means they need to compete on a market with all players--they can't make a move against NetFlix due to their negotiating position (inexperience, high amounts of capital and less inclination to squeeze out a favorable deal, business criticality, etc.), rather they must deal directly with all of their Level 1 peers and all of their Level 3 resellers and direct clients. If they make up a cost schedule that NetFlix will submit to but Google will not, then Google will argue down the cost schedule and they will bill NetFlix less; if they refuse to budge, Google will move to another Tier 1; and if they try to shift the costs onto a stratified consumption model and increase the cost at the lower usage levels, their lower usage clients will move to a Tier 1 without big players who charges less.

In the end, they don't want a level playing field. The providers want a playing field where they can extract maximum profits from the weak, particularly the rich and weak.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[bluefoxlucid]

But they're only shipping packets. It's more like NetFlix is driving eighteen million motorcycles and doesn't want to be charged five times as much per motorcycle; in fact, they should pay less due to bulk rate discount.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, so should the road owner (AT&T/Comcast) be charging the owner of the eighteen-wheelers that come onto their roads (Level 3, etc.), or the company whose freight is contained within those trucks (Netflix)?

Netflix pay Level 3 to deliver the freight. Level 3 pay AT&T to use their roads. Netflix only use AT&T's roads through Level 3's service, so why should Netflix have to pay AT&T directly?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[oh_my_080980980]

Dude you're a freaking moron. As has been stated Netflix pays for their bandwidth and Customers pay for their bandwidth. AT&T wants to double dip. And if you think that's o.k. is AT&T going to refund the billions of tax payer dollars given to the telecommunications industries to roll out their fiber cables??? Hmmm....douche.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[alen]

google has done direct peering with ISP's for years now, you are way behind the times. not only that, but they own buildings where different network providers peer with each other

google has so much internet backbone they own they are moving into the last mile ISP business just to use up the bandwidth they have

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Ioldanach]

Put another way:

* Netflix pays for their bandwidth * Customers pay for their bandwidth

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

In a typical peering arrangement, both sides of the link pass roughly equal amounts of data to the other side. Netflix, however, gives Cogent so much data that the peering links are lop sided. Cogent delivers a lot of content, and receives very little. In such an unbalanced situation, the side with more data to serve typically pays a transit fee for the use of the other network.

Cogent doesn't want to pay the transit fee. If they had to pay the transit fee, they'd have to pass that along to Netflix, and Netflix would have to raise the rates they charge their subscribers.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Burdell]

Netflix pays for their bandwidth

Well, but they don't always, at least not as much as anybody else. Several times in recent years, Netflix has switched bandwidth providers to "wanna-be tier 1" networks; that is, networks that are not as well-connected as they'd like to be because they don't really meet anybody's requirements for settlement-free peering. These providers see Netflix as leverage against their bigger competitors and appear to have sold Netflix bandwidth at well market prices in order to strong-arm competitors to provide new network interconnects.

Large networks don't just peer with anybody. There are costs involved in each additional turn-up, both for hardware ports and for the management side. They also don't just peer at a single or few locations (since that can allow outsider actors to cause drastic changes in internal network bandwidth utilization); they require other large networks to peer in a bunch of different places. Some of the smaller networks can't afford to do that, and want to dump large traffic hogs like Netflix at already congested peering points, and then complain that the big guys didn't bend over backwards to help them.

I've worked for small to very-small ISPs for over 18 years, and I definately don't hold Netflix blameless in this. They do things they know will impact their customers and then blame the other networks for all problems (and they aren't the only one, just one of the biggest in recent years).

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[MightyMartian]

A road largely paid for one way or the other by taxpayers.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[alen]

because direct peering with ISP's means netflix can go around level 3 and cogent and save money

it's not like they are paying AT&T and comcast and also paying their Tier 1 providers. netflix is now connecting straight from their data centers to the ISP's on dedicated fiber links and bypassing the Tier 1 networks all together

some idiots can't seem to understand this

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[zerosomething]

Between them Netflix and YouTube made up more than 50 percent of peak downstream Internet traffic in N America, so it is a significant issue.

If we had true net neutrality Netflix might be the only content you could get at a reasonable speed, it would be cached all over the net. Content form Vimeo would play second fiddle to the Netflix congestion. I might not even get the content because my 18 neighbors are all watching 18 different shows on Netflix. Net neutrality doesn't solve this nor does providers paying for access.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[OneAhead]

I'm not sure this is what you and GP are alluding to, but the elephant in the room here is the "metered internet" option. You know, like you get a higher electric bill if you use more electricity, a higher water bill if you use more water, like you used to get a higher phone bill if you would make more phone calls, and like the ISPs have higher costs if their customers consume more bandwidth. Ironically, a lot of US customers are vehemently against metered Internet, even though the current system amounts to some form of "socialism", and metered internet would be fairer and would arguably allow for more competition between providers, making internet cheaper for everyone except the few % bandwidth hogs. Incidentally, metered internet would also defeat all those whiny dissonant anti-net-neutrality arguments the ISPs are making.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Monoman]

AT&T can't meet their customer's demand so they are charging the other end (Netflix) for being too popular. Yeah that sounds about right.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[frinsore]

But the connection between providers isn't the justification for the deal with Comcast. Netflix wanted to put their servers inside Comcast's network using their Open Connect Content Delivery Network that you link to. If Netflix had been able to do that then the amount of traffic carrying Netflix data coming into Comcast's network from other Providers would have dropped considerably, which should have saved Comcast money. However according to this LATimes article Comcast wanted Netflix to subsidize the cost of moving traffic through Comcast's internal network.

Basically Comcast feels they're undercharging their customers for the amount of bandwidth that their customers are using but instead of raising the cost of internet access they want Netflix to pay for it since most people are using Netflix.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[unrtst]

... Netflix are aware of that and have the Open Connect Content Delivery Network, but that won't solve all the probelms.

That DOES solve the case in point. AT&T are just finger pointing and trying to latch on to a cash cow, while gaining an unfair advantage in customer pricing.

True net neutrality helps the little guys everywhere. Netflix noted that on the service side, as others have here, that if big companies have to pay for connectivity to the last mile to the users, small services will be hurt. It also makes absolutely no sense (services already pay for their internet access; customers already pay for theirs; there's lots of middle men, and those guys are trying to get around each other and get profit from customers on the other side).

The other side is that a competing ISP would also have trouble. If AT&T, for example, was charging all websites for their bandwidth to the end users, then at some point they really don't have to charge the end users anything. Where's the balance? How would a new ISP charge his customers?

The ISP tiered pricing is simply wrong if their network can't handle their customers requests. The cheapest possible plans often get you very good download speeds (ex. 15Mbps for the first 12months at $14.99/month for time warner). That's the problem right there. Their standard fee for that is $35/month, and $15 will only get you 2Mbps... which is still plenty for most people.

I'm all for cheaper and faster internet access, but if it's a problem for them, then they should put the squeeze on their customers, not the services their custom wants. Netflix is a selling point for the ISP; something they should, if anything, be paying MORE for to get improved quality for their customers.

The only reason they should want to squeeze netflix is, IMO, because it competes with their other services - TV. That's anti-competitive through and through.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[The Grim Reefer]

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.

Except we paid for the road. They got the money to build the "information super highway" Instead we got a standard 4 lane highway that was designed for traffic from a decade ago. And it didn't even go to all the places it was supposed to.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[bferrell]

This same sort of thinking is what brought about the interstate commerce commission rules for railroads.

They though that if you made more the carrier should too.

The government slapped the carriers once before (railroads). It's time to slap the telecom carriers too

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

And they pay for that bandwidth. And the providers they pay either peer with, or purchase bandwidth from the providers between you and them. Why should that bandwidth be paid for twice? There is no problem here. Honestly, there's not. That's why it hasn't been solved yet.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[phayes]

AT&T keeps saying that Netflix, which is the company that most of their clients are paying more to get faster Internet access to, has to pay more because Netflix sends more data than they receive.

It's funny but I've never seen a single AT&T statement that they should be paying money to blackblaze, crashplan, & the other cloud backup providers. It's strangely hypocritical because AT&T is clearly sending a lopsided amount of traffic to the cloud backup providers.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's simple, AT&T should increase their subscription costs to pull them more in line with actual costs for keeping the infrastructure running flawlessly, or decrease the advertised technical parameters of their end user connections, or both. Blaming it on Netflix doesn't seem fair.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[mellon]

That would be true of the major cost of providing internet service were the per-packet cost. But in fact the major cost is in installing and maintaining the lines. Next is the cost of running packets through them. That cost breaks down into network management, energy, and infrastructure. In point of fact, there is no real additional per-packet cost. What costs is having enough capacity to carry the packets. So when I buy a network connection that promises 20mbps of capacity, presumably the ISP has 20mbps of capacity for me. At which point you have to ask yourself, what does it matter whether I use the whole capacity or only part of it? Either way, I'm paying for my 20mbps, and I should get to use it.

Of course, the ISP doesn't actually reserve 20mbps for me, at least in the U.S. They figure that for every N customers that are paying for 20mbps, they will have to configure 20mbps of capacity. This is where your talk of socialism comes in: if I actually use my 20mbps that I paid for, and you don't, then in theory you are subsidizing my network use, because there's only 20mbps between N of us (where N could be 10, 20, or even worse).

But even that isn't correct, because it doesn't account for profit. How much of the $80/month I spend on my 20mbps connection is cost, and how much is profit? Suppose N=20. Suppose the profit margin is 90% (which it probably is). That means that 20mbps of actual capacity costs the ISP 0.1*80*N, which is $160. So the ISP is charging the customer $1600 for $160 of bandwidth. They could deliver as much as ten times the bandwidth before their profits went to zero. Chances are that the point at which I am getting Netflix, you are getting Netflix, and all our neighbors are getting Netflix is well below that cutoff, because we typically don't all watch at once.

But even that analysis is wrong, because in fact your ISP does already have 20mbps capacity to your home which is not shared, and is not amortized across other customers. The capacity that is amortized across other customers is core bandwidth: the bandwidth that happens at the peering point, and between that point and the ISP's network distribution center near where you live. That bandwidth is really cheap compared to the bandwidth they have already delivered to the edge of the network: to you.

So in fact it's quite likely that they can deliver full Netflix bandwidth to everyone and still make a profit. So where's your socialism in this picture? It isn't there, unless you mean corporate socialism: government-sponsored monopolies that deliver money-printing profits to those that own them, because we have no choice—we buy Internet from the local monopoly ISP, or we don't get Internet at all. And because we have no choice, Netflix has no choice. They can't go with the ISP that offers them cheaper transit, and use that to drive customers to that ISP, because in most markets there is no that ISP. There is one ISP, zero competition, and a lot of people overpaying for internet service.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[nine-times]

Or more to the point: You can't just charge Walmart trucks because you own Target, and you want to use your ownership of the road as leverage against your competitors.

That's the real issue.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[kasperd]

metered internet would be fairer

The problem is that you do not have complete control over what amount of traffic flows over your line. Paying according to the amount of traffic which other parties could be driving up, is not an acceptable situation to most customers.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[hinchles]

I wonder how AT&T would feel if Netflix, or Amazon or hell even google/youtube decided that AT&T should pay them for consuming their provided content....

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

It would the the flipside of what AT&T is doing here, and it would be just as wrong. I'd be cool with it if they both agreed to pay each other, though; the amounts would zero out and we'd be right back where we started. Well, except for the higher prices we'd all have to bear to cover the cost of them invoicing and paying each other for nothing. But, then, they'd agree, behind closed doors, to forgo that whole process and keep the inflated billing rates, after the fact.

Maybe I'm just a cynic.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[suutar]

They should be charging the person who ordered the sofa (me), just like they charge me for everything else that comes down that road. The only reason that truck is there is me, so just go ahead and bill me. What they're trying to do is bill UPS and make UPS bill me, which will hopefully make me mad at UPS instead of making me mad(der) at how much they're overpricing the road.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Trepidity]

On U.S. mobiles phones, interestingly, both sides pay.

On European mobile phones, on the other hand, only the caller pays, but they pay a non-neutral rate, which varies depending on the type of device the recipient has: calling mobile phones is more expensive (in some countries, much more expensive) than calling landlines.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Fieryphoenix]

Doubtful AT&T can't meet their customer's demands. Congestion is not an issue.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly...a 10GB download can be sent in bursts of varying from 100mbps to 1kbps. Someone streaming a movie expects a constant few mbps and will complain otherwise.

The need for a real-time guarantee does reduce the flexibility of the service provider.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does 1GB of HD video do more 'damage' vs 1GB of cat pictures?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[thaylin]

They dont pay both sides, like ATT wants.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[ZombieBraintrust]

Such an arrangement would benifit content consumers over content creators. It would allow nations and ISP's that don't produce content to tax those that produce content. There are whole countries that want to use the peering setup as you described to fund their infrastructure. They want American companies to pay the whole bill.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Dogers]

I'd love to see what AT&T would say if one of those companies suddenly piped up :)

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[NormAtHome]

Exactly and in the end the consumer is going to end up paying more as the various services have to raise their rates to offset the additional costs.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Appropriate? Yes. Correct? Almost. When the data is on Netflix's network, it's in a Netflix truck. When it reaches their provider's router, it gets moved into their provider's truck and they pay their provider to deliver it to the end user. When it arrives at, say AT&T's network, in the Netflix's provider's truck, it is the provider, and not Netflix, who is asking AT&T to complete the delivery; and Netflix's provider is paying AT&T to do this.

Think of it like FedEx SmartPost. You drop the package off with FedEx, who passes it off to USPS, who then delivers to your recipient. You don't pay USPS for their leg of the delivery, FedEx does.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[amiga3D]

Bullshit! I pay through the nose for internet access with a bandwidth cap. I pay! I want what I paid for and that's my bandwidth. When these greedy fucking money grubbing bastards charge Netflix and whoever for delivering content to me on bandwidth that "I" PAID FOR then they basically double charged me for the same service. NO! It is NOT acceptable. I hope James Cicconi's asshole grows shut. Fuck him. I'm fed up with these bastards. They overcharge us then go back and overcharge us again. If you think that's okay you are an idiot.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[schnell]

NetFlix using a Tier 3 provider would resell AT&T, who would charge the Tier 3 provider for bandwidth, which would essentially charge NetFlix for bandwidth

Kinda sorta. Here's the problem which makes the situation a little more nuanced than it appears at first. Think of this more like one of those occasional disputes you see where "DirecTV stops carrying ESPN because ESPN jacked up their rates" or something like that. One side wants to pay less, the other side wants to charge more, and it's tough to easily pick out who the good guys and bad guys are in that kind of situation.

Netflix buys most of their bandwidth from Cogent. Cogent has historically been the Wal-Mart of bandwidth - they sell dirt cheap but scrimp on quality to do it. The Tier 1 ISPs have said to Cogent, in effect, "you are not our peer. You will buy bandwidth from us rather than getting it for free," and Cogent doesn't want to pay. That constrains the bandwidth between Cogent and the Tier 1s (which Cogent is definitely not).

Netflix has only gotten involved because, as Cogent's #1 customer, they are feeling the pinch of Cogent's bandwidth crunch. Remember, Cogent is no stranger to peering disputes. The Tier 1s have said to Netflix, in essence, "we aren't upgrading our bandwidth to Cogent for free, and if you want your customers to have better performance you can connect to us directly instead of going through Cogent. Oh, and by the way, you're a content provider (albeit a huge one) and not our ISP peer so don't expect to get it for free, either."

It may sound like a Net Neutrality issue, but settlement-free peering vs. purchased transit has been a contentious issue since the mid-'90s if not before, and it has always been sorted out among the ISPs rather than being regulated by the government. Peering and its market dynamics have always been one of the most sensitive topics among ISPs, but it has almost always been dealt with inside the industry without exposing its gory details to the public - just like how you rarely hear about those "cableco vs. content network" disputes even though those negotiations are always going on... you only hear about it when the crap really hits the fan.

It's a perpetual issue that pits the Tier 1s vs. the Tier 2/3s, and always will be: the smaller ISPs want free peering of course, and the bigger ones don't want to give it away. The Tier 1s argue that they have to pay for a much larger network infrastructure than the Tier 2/3s so they are in effect subsidizing the networks of the smaller ISPs if they peer for free; the Tier 2/3s argue that they shouldn't have to pay to connect to other networks when the end result is (theoretically) better service for everyone.

It is a dangerous and very slippery slope to cast peering as a "Net Neutrality" issue because it invites the government to stick its nose into a topic that the world's ISPs have quietly managed among themselves for many years. "Settlement-free peering for all" sounds good at first blush but creates a dangerous precedent potentially for content providers to be considered as networks. What if CNN.com decides it doesn't want to pay for bandwidth anymore and wants all the ISPs to peer with it as a network for free? What happens when bobshardwarestoreintuscaloosa.com makes the same request? Where do you draw the line? Why should any business pay for transit bandwidth when it is providing content that users want to see? You could theoretically see the whole cost of the Internet flip onto the consumer ISPs if you follow the model to its furthest conclusion.

Another side note - it's not entirely true that "subscribers pay for their Internet, and content providers pay for their hosting." Larger ISPs factor in the revenue of paid transit to their business model - and they *always* have, since the earliest days of the commercial Internet - so that is in effect

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[suutar]

I don't think it's really a peering issue, much as they want folks to think it is.

• In normal peering operations, traffic flows both ways in approximately equal amounts. Netflix goes to residential accounts; residential accounts can't run servers. Given a lack of servers, anyone expecting a residential account individually or a collection of residential accounts in aggregate to have anything resembling equal upload and download is being stupid.
• In (most) normal peering operations, traffic can be on the network whose endpoints are not on the network. Virtually all Netflix traffic on ATTs network has an endpoint in ATTs network - the subscriber.
• In (most) normal peering operations, traffic can be initiated from either side. Netflix isn't going to send me video streams without me requesting it.

No, this isn't a typical peering situation. They shouldn't be trying to ding Netflix for sending more than they receive, they should be trying to ding me for requesting more data. But they don't want to do that because they want to keep pretending they charge less for data than the other guy. So instead they try to charge me _through_ Netflix (they know durn well that the only person Netflix can charge to pay this fee is me, so it's coming out of my wallet either way) in the hopes that I'll get mad at Netflix instead.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Right and that peering would be between AT&T and Netflix's provider, not AT&T and Netflix. Netflix pays their provider already; if, as a result of the peering imbalance, Netflix ends up costing their provider more, then it is up to that provider to negotiate a better contract with Netflix to compensate for that. AT&T should never collect a penny from Netflix unless Netflix is connecting directly to AT&T's network.

To put it another way, peering only considers one level when determining where a packet originates. That is to say, it doesn't matter of Bob passed the packet off to Joe to pass along to Mary, as far as Mary is concerned, the packet came from Joe; as far as Joe is concerned, yes, the packet did come from Bob, but Mary didn't accept the packet from Bob, Joe did, so Joe gets to charge Bob for the delivery and Mary gets to charge Joe for the acceptance. Bob and Mary don't even need to be aware of each other.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[amiga3D]

They can't find a way to double fuck you over cat pictures but when you want a movie they have another source of revenue they can hit. If they charge you for bandwidth and then charge Netflix for the same bandwidth you already paid for it's win-win for them. Free money for AT&T! At the expense of their customers who they could give a flying fuck about. You exist to line James Cicconi's pockets with money and have no other reason for existence. I remember back in the 70's how AT&T fucked over their customers until finally they got torn down by an Anti-Trust suit. 40 years later it's time for a repeat.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Xipher]

What about when there isn't a provider between Netflix and AT&T? This is the case when Netflix wants to peer directly with an ISP and offers caching appliances that the ISP can host inside their network. This removes the "provider" from Netflix.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the costs are relatively tiny (like in the thousands for companies that routinely drop millions on infrastructure).

Also you cant honestly expect us to believe that Cogent thinks it can strong arm Verizon, ATT, and Comcast... for what.... some extra peering connections?. Cogent market cap is like $2B vs Verizon's $200B. And The ISPs are the ones demanding extra money.

Not to mention Netflix provides their OpenConnect CDN box for free.
https://signup.netflix.com/ope...

So yeah. I have heard it the other way around. That large providers wont open ports as a way of dragging their feet and putting the blame on others. Notice also they aren't complaining that Netflix is not following peering guidelines by peering at the appropriate places, they are just straight up asking for money. If this was purely some kind of bad network management on the part of Netflix/Cogent, why is that not the complaint? The complaint we hear from ISPs is they "have to pay their share" which is saying they think double dipping is appropriate.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Cogent doesn't want to pay the transit fee. If they had to pay the transit fee, they'd have to pass that along to Netflix, and Netflix would have to raise the rates they charge their subscribers.

And that would be fine, honestly. AT&T wants Netflix to foot the bill for this, when in reality, as far as AT&T's peering is concerned, the data is coming from Cogent and Netflix may or may not even exist. That's what the problem is.

It's inconsequential that Netflix will ultimately pay for the bandwidth; the point is that Cogent should pay AT&T and Netflix should pay Cogent; Netflix should not ay AT&T, nor should AT&T expect them to.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

Netflix has vast peering arrangements. My company peers with them for our residential customers. It's the only way you can get "SuperHD" content.
I suspect what's going on here, is that ATT's customers are pressuring them for SuperHD (peering-only) content, and NetFlix is saying to ATT: "Sure, just peer with us, and they can have it!"
I suspect that ATT is pissed that they would be forced to peer freely with a mere content provider (as well as perhaps lost revenue for any other lopsided peering arrangements the traffic may transit to get to ATT), and are telling Netflix that if they want to enable the chunk of their customers on ATT to have the higher-bandwidth content, the Netflix can pay ATT for the peering link.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[maccodemonkey]

The news about Apple being willing to pay for AppleTV to have a "special line" to consumers is particularly worrisome and strikes the core of the problems with anti-net neutrality positions: they create unfair markets with barriers to competition. Netflix may complain, but they can (and do! with Comcast) pay if they have to. Apple can afford to pay the gatekeepers as well.

It's worth noting that the Apple/Comcast rumor is quickly being debunked, but let's peel this onion anyway, because this is a tricky one, even for Net Neutrality people.

The rumor was Apple was negotiating for TV channel streams from Comcast, much in the same way a cable box get's a steam of Comcast's content. Is this something new and alarming? Of course not. Comcast has been doing this for years. Companies such as NBC, ABC, HBO, Fox, Time Warner, etc etc have been paying to get a prioritized pipe of years. It's the pipe all your normal cable channels come through. It's entirely independent of your internet pipe, and prioritized.

Would you accuse HBO of violating Net Neutrality because they have a higher priority than YouTube on Comcast's wires? Well, probably not, because HBO's traffic is not internet traffic. Apple getting access to their own feed of Comcast's live channel content would probably be related to Net Neutrality in a very similar way.

Eventually once cable tv traffic looks more like IP traffic and H.264 streams, this may get more of a examination. But it's generally accepted, even with Net Neutrality, that Comcast's internal non-web traffic doesn't fall under Net Neutrality. It's like saying cars and trains should follow the same laws just because a set of tracks runs next to a road.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

No, this is more like charging Netflix for their own non-congested vendor entry into the ATT Super-Mart (customer-base).

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[future assassin]

If an ISP advertises a package and I pay $50 for 25mbit down and 500GB of traffic pert month I'm paying to transfer and send any data I want (as long as its not breaking any local laws) not just the approved by the ISP Data.

Therefore when I connect to Netlifx I dl data with the bandwidth and traffic I paid for. If ATT infrastructure can't handle the evolution of internet technology they need to take some of those profits and instead of dividends keep up with the technologies.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[GameMaster]

AT&T can't meet their customer's demands while making the dramatically increased profits that they desire. There, fixed that for him.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

That would make AT&T the provider, would it not? Nice try, though.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[alen]

Its who they pay

Apparently its ok for netflix to pay cogent or level 3 to send data to comcast or AT&T

But if they connect directly to comcast or AT&T, INSTEAD of the traditional transit networks its somehow bad

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

No. ATT is not double-dipping.
Netflix is pressuring ISPs to facilitate free-peering with them by offering a tier of service that is only available to customers of theirs who have ISPs that peer with Netflix. It's called SuperHD. I setup my company's link with them.
It is "free" for both sides (interconnect costs excluded, of course).
ATT doesn't believe they should provide a wide-open highway into their network to Netflix for free.
Personally, I don't even see this as a case of net neutrality. If net neutrality is forcing ISPs to accept peering arrangements with anyone, then take me off the list of supporters.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

Those companies aren't pressuring ATT for a free-peering cross-connect.

Freedom is a well-informed sheep ignoring the banshee calls of well-armed, yet ignorant ones.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

That's all fine and dandy; then AT&T customers who want access to that content can move to another provider. My ISP was literally the first on board for SuperHD peering; Netflix provides the equipment, the uplink (bandwidth), and the content, at no cost to their peer, why should they be paying to provide this?

But, that's not actually the issue here. AT&T wants Netflix to pay them for their data that hits the AT&T network via their peering agreement with Cogent. Figure that one out... Netflix pays Cogent, AT&T users pat AT&T, AT&T peers with Cogent; if there's an imbalance in that peering agreement, that's between AT&T and Cogent, not AT&T and Cogent's customer.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[postbigbang]

This isn't telephony. It's a data communications issue, upon which rides both time-sensitive data (audio, video) and non-time sensitive data. AT&T's arrogance is that of Southwestern Bell's (remember, this is not the AT&T of old) vision for profits.

It's a monopolistic view. It's the old "we own the highway" versus "we gave you rights of way because you were a municipal and regional utility". I say we reclaim the rights of way, and meter AT&T for their belligerence. That'll fix it for everyone.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[ScentCone]

It's simple, AT&T should increase their subscription costs to pull them more in line with actual costs for keeping the infrastructure running flawlessly, or decrease the advertised technical parameters of their end user connections, or both. Blaming it on Netflix doesn't seem fair.

How is that not fair? External networks like Netflix are hugely disproportionate users of ISP's infrastructure. Who should be "blamed" for that flood of traffic if not hte ? If those specific sources of traffic, on the other side of a peering relationship, weren't there, this wouldn't be an issue. A handful of traffic sources are burning up the lion's share of the bandwidth, and making money off of their customers while doing so. Why should an AT&T customer who doesn't drink from the Netflix firehose have to subsidize the people that do? Let Netflix and AT&T work out those costs, and let the people who actually consume the traffic pay the tab in the form of slightly higher prices for the entertainment they want from Netflix. Expecting their neighbors pay for it, instead, is pretty jerky.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[rsborg]

You know, like you get a higher electric bill if you use more electricity, a higher water bill if you use more water, like you used to get a higher phone bill if you would make more phone calls, and like the ISPs have higher costs if their customers consume more bandwidth.

Let's see the equivalent of the public utility commissions, or FERC, and then we calk talk about metering. I don't trust AT&T to play straight with metered billing.

AT&T is the same company that was alleged to have randomly pushed data usage on iPhones that were off [1]. My wife who was until recently on AT&T had several months where her account would get slapped with a data charge late due to unexplained usage late in the cycle. After a year or so of this abuse and a couple of hundred dollars later we finally all switched to TMobile non-contract, and strangely (hmm) have never seen the data usage with the same pattern (not that it would matter now - at worst she'd be bumped to 2G speeds, not billed for an extra allotment of data). Couldn't be happier since the switch. TMobile is great, and compared either ATT or VZ, has much better service and aren't jerks. If you get decent TMO signal where you are, I highly recommend the switch.

To this day, AT&T still won't explain to you the data specifics - it's hard to correlate what's on the bill detail vs. what's on the phone log.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[sjames]

Electricity and gas are metered based on what causes costs. That would be 95th percentile of the RATE, not the transferred bytes.

They already have tiered plans based on the (largely unattainable in practice) peak rate.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Replace "Comcast users" with "customers of ISPs who have partnered with Netflix to provide content" and I'm on board. As it is, those of us with non-asshole providers already get more bang for our buck, because we can access SuperHD content and typically don't deal with the dropped connections users of other ISPs have to face, as a result of the content being served locally.

AT&T doesn't want this, though, because they don't want to reduce incoming traffic (which they could do by letting Netflix put their equipment in AT&T's facilities, which they'll do free of charge), they just want to charge more for it.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

I'm the senior network engineer at an ISP. Your assertion of no-cost is utterly incorrect.
Here in the Seattle area, cross-connects typically happen at the Westin building. I assure you it's plenty expensive for cross-connects before you even factor in equipment (multiple 10Gbit optics and line-card ports).

The issue is actually that ATT wants Netflix to go chew cud in response to Netflix saying "You should peer with us for free."
http://www.reuters.com/article...

"“Netflix believes strong net neutrality is critical, but in the near term we will in cases pay the toll to the powerful ISPs to protect our consumer experience. When we do so, we don’t pay for priority access against competitors, just for interconnection,” he wrote, in relation to the ongoing debate over the future of net neutrality and paid agreements between Netflix and Comcast."

You're being caught up as sheep in a war between capitalist organizations. This isn't even an issue of net neutrality.
ATT isn't asking Netflix to pay for traffic transited into their network.

"In his original post, Hastings said internet service providers should give content companies adequate network connections for free, and singled out Comcast for supporting "weak" internet traffic rules."

Regardless of your *opinion* on costs, forcing an ISP to interconnect with someone else is *not* net neutrality. Net neutrality is simply the buzz-word being used by the combatants to rally their supporters.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Dcnjoe60]

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.

Except this isn't about cars and eighteen wheelers. A bit is a bit is a bit and it costs just as much to send 1GB of data as it does 1GB of movie. AT&T wants to charge more to popular services instead of charging more to the consumer of those services. Their thinking is that Netflix can pass on the higher fee whereas if they raise their fee to the consumer for the added bandwidth, the concern is that the consumer will go to a different provider and they don't want that.

We wouldn't need net neutrality if there were true competition. But there is not. The only real consumer choices are DSL through your phone company, a regulated monopoly or cable modem through your cable company, another regulated monopoly. Have mediacom and want comcast, too bad, not an option. Don't like your DSL provider, too bad, there, too.

Maybe it is time to look at the information highway like any other highway. Highways are built and operated by the government for the benefits of all citizens and businesses. Maybe it's time to get private interests out of providing public infrastructure.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Adriax]

Plus, no ISP would want to drop their revenue. So expect a static "line maintenance" fee pretty close to what you already pay and a per gig rate that brings a normal user up the rest of the way.
Of course "normal" usage would be calculated by cutting out the extreme data users (as defined by people who use 100x or more the data as the lowest user, which would probably be an inactive connection or a restaurant that logs maybe 100meg a month running credit cards). Sure that would account for 90% of their customer base and make any statistician vomit, but that's irrelevant and should not be discussed by right of trade secret laws and DMCA takedown prenotices and you will be sued and thrown into liars prison so be scared and be quiet before you get labeled a terrorist for interfering with god given right to profit.

Yeah that last bit kinda ran away from me.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[sjames]

The ISPs will be paying less than $4/Mbps committed rate with 5 nines uptime. However, what they sell you has no commit and little or no uptime guarantee.

They do have infrastructure costs, but that costs the same whether you use it or not.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[sjames]

Not overselling 100:1 is what fixes that problem. Failing that, fair queueing can make it work.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

I never said there was no cost, I said there was no cost to the peer, the party who is not Netflix, that Netflix foots the bill for it, or, to put it another way, that Netflix pays and AT&T (or whichever peer) does not. My ISP peers with Netflix in this manner; I've had many a conversation with the CEO of my ISP, who, of course, was directly involved in setting up this peering. In fact, my ISP was literally the first ISP to jump on board for this. According to my, in my opinion very reliable, source, Netflix pays for the rack space, the power, the backhaul, and the interconnect between their equipment and ISP equipment, including paying for rack space and power for ISP equipment and, in cases where the ISP does not have appropriate equipment in place already, is willing to pay for part of that, as well. In the case of my ISP, they've been growing rapidly for the past few years, so they actually had equipment in place already, but if they did not, Netflix would have covered it.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Also seems like that article is putting a spin on what Hastings said.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[kasperd]

Metered internet billing + ISP-side customer-controlled firewall: what we need.

Sounds like a good idea. But I don't expect to ever see it happen.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[wyattstorch516]

Why should they charge the user more? If I download an equivalent amount of data from various sources around the Internet that don't overload the ISP am I going to get charged more? The ISP last mile network is what end users pay for, that is not where the congestion is here. If Netflix is having problems they should be complaining to their ISP not mine. If they can't get the QOS they need then they need to find a new provider.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[JASegler]

Okay let's say it is a road.

Netflix paid company A to move X trucks across the road.
Consumers paid company B to receive Y trucks to their house.

It is between company A and B to sort out what they will pay between each other.
If the cost is too high for company A they are free to pass the increased cost onto Netflix.

Just like NetFlix is free to go to company C to get a better deal.

To put this into a more concrete absurdity.. Let's say you have a gated community with an HOA. Guard shack, the whole works.
The HOA could pass a rule that in order for any packages from Amazon to be delivered Amazon must pay $10 per package to the HOA.
It is their road they are using. They can't get it unless they go by the guardshack, etc.
Just as absurd as Netflix paying the consumers ISP to get their internet traffic delivered.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[thaylin]

Yes it is bad. It is like us having to pay ATT, Sprint, TWC, Comcast, and every other network just so I can transfer data from my computer. In other words it is counter to everything the internet has been since we did away with pay per minute connections.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

I see our disconnect.
Again, I am a senior network engineer at an ISP who does have Open Connect connectivity.
They do not pay for a rack, they do not pay for a backhaul. They do not pay for anything in fact. All connectivity is our responsibility.
There are 3 tiers of Open Connect, simple free peering, peering + caching hardware, and just caching-hardware filled via transit.

We connect via BGP to the caching hardware, and we connect via BGP to Netflix over the peering link.
I wouldn't call anything in the arrangement high-cost (in fact, it's a benefit to us, we save transit bandwidth, and we're small enough for that to matter)

I'm not going to call you a liar regarding what you say about CEOs, but in my position, I've sat at conference tables with every large ISP operating in the Seattle area. I also setup our Open Connect system with my bare hands, every single aspect of it (Yes, that is all the ISPs responsibility).

I'm not making this up. I also don't consider it a bad deal. But I refuse to call the refusal to play an aspect of Net Neutrality.
The article isn't spinning Hastings words- those *are* his words. He believes every ISP out there should peer with him for free. From a logical perspective, I'd say he's pretty much right, and the deal is more than resonable. I simply refuse to acknowledge he has the right to force me into the arrangement.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[wyattstorch516]

Its 10 Mb/s to the ISP, not 10 Mb/s to every single server on the face of the Earth. If Netflix can't get the traffic to your ISP fast enough then they need to find a provider who can.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[thaylin]

And in the real world I dont pay on my end for them to access roads, if we wanna compare it to the real world, the suppliers pay for all of that.. So is ATT going to give us the internet access for free to measure up with this analogy?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[phoenix_rizzen]

Since when does Netflix have their own datacentres? Everything Netflix does is hosted in the Amazon cloud.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[ScentCone]

Because internet traffic is internet traffic is internet traffic. It doesn't matter if that traffic is Netflix, Bittorrent, email, youtube, World of Warcraft, etc.

But this particular kind of use of it absolutely dwarfs everything else. Streaming media is a huge payload.

And, come on now, tell the whole story. For AT&T to be able to deliver Netflix's data all the way to the home routers of their customers, they also have to maintain arrangements with other carriers to handle that data as it comes in from Netflix. Those peering arrangements are not free, just like maintaining that last mile to their end user customers isn't free.

Meanwhile, the guy who buys bandwidth and uses it for a less Netflix/YouTube-centric array of connections absolutely is going to be asked to contribute to his neighbor's entertainment costs if the GP has his way and AT&T raises their rates across the board to deal with the behavior of a subset of users and remote content sources.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[VTBlue]

It's actually not their road. Each step of the way, local state and federal government has allowed them to build, often times with significant subsidy and tax breaks. We have sanctioned their monopoly/oligopoly, and now it's time to break it up.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Adrian Lopez]

If net neutrality is forcing ISPs to accept peering arrangements with anyone, then take me off the list of supporters.

Net neutrality does not force ISPs to accept peering arrangements of any kind, nor is Netflix demanding ISPs be forced to do so. Netflix wants traffic that goes through an in-between ISP to be treated the same as all other such traffic. They don't want to pay a premium to not have their traffic artificially crippled by AT&T once it enters their network.

But, of course, you already knew that. Next time, try your weak arguments on a less educated crowd.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Adrian Lopez]

In a typical peering arrangement, both sides of the link pass roughly equal amounts of data to the other side. Netflix, however, gives Cogent so much data that the peering links are lop sided.

That's something for the peers to negotiate between themselves. AT&T can negotiate a better peering arrangement with Cogent, which would then be free to raise prices on Netflix. That's the way to do it without violating neutrality.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[alen]

you do have to pay, you pay your ISP to upload data to the cloud or someone else
used to be that every business had an ISP or paid a tier 1 network directly. with netflix and youtube doing over 50% of the internet traffic it only makes sense to send data directly to ISP's

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Very interesting. I might just have to call him on that next time I talk to him, then. It's also possible that this was the case for this ISP, given that they were the first on board; it may have been stipulated that Netflix would foot the bill in exchange for being allowed to use my ISP as a testbed for the platform. It may also no longer be the case, I haven't spoken with him in nearly 6 months at this point.

It does appear, now, that they only provide the equipment.

That said, what Netflix is actually offering is a way to offer your customers a feature which they do not charge more for, which may not be available through competing ISPs (e.g. I pay Netflix $7.99/mo whether or not I have access to this feature; and if I was with AT&T or Comcast, my other two ISP options where I live, I would not have that feature, SuperHD), as well as a way to greatly reduce the amount of data you have to serve to your customers from external sources, by providing free hardware and access to their CDN, from which you can serve Netflix data to your customers. So, then, even if they don't pay for backhaul, rack space, or power, I'm not sure why any ISP serving any significant number of Netflix subscribers would *not* want to participate; surely, the upkeep on the Netflix equipment costs less than the equipment and transfer required to serve the same data from an external source?

Clearly, I don't know all of the details, so if I've left anything out or gotten anything wrong here, please correct me. I don't see where they're forcing anyone to do anything, here; it's not cost-effective for them to serve SuperHD content over Cogent, so they cam up with another way to do that, for ISPs who wish to make the feature available for their customers.

The net neutrality issues effectively have nothing to to with Open connect or SuperHD, though; AT&T is bitching about the amount of traffic coming over Cogent's links and trying to get Netflix to foot the bill for some of it, since most of it is theirs anyway and Cogent isn't playing ball. That is, plain and simple, not to right way to go about it. Cogent, not Netflix, is AT&T's customer, and Cogent is who should be paying AT if that's not happening, that's between Cogent and AT&T, not AT&T and Netflix. If Cogent needs more money from Netflix in order to pay the higher rates AT&T is seeking, then that is between Cogent and Netflix, not Netflix and AT&T.

There are two separate issues at play here, and it is important to keep them separate.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Enigma2175]

This isn't telephony. It's a data communications issue, upon which rides both time-sensitive data (audio, video) and non-time sensitive data. AT&T's arrogance is that of Southwestern Bell's (remember, this is not the AT&T of old) vision for profits.

It's a monopolistic view. It's the old "we own the highway" versus "we gave you rights of way because you were a municipal and regional utility". I say we reclaim the rights of way, and meter AT&T for their belligerence. That'll fix it for everyone.

Who is "we"? The people? The people have no power, how are they going to reclaim these rights of way? The government? The government won't do anything because of the way campaigns are financed and the corrupting influence of power. The government gave the telcos BILLIONS of the people's dollars to build out high-speed networks - which they have obviously failed to do.

The problem is that nobody (outside of the narrow /. demographic) gives a shit about this. Heck, we can't even make them care about the NSA listening to their fucking phone calls, do you really think you can make enough people care about this issue to exert political pressure?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[postbigbang]

It's my belief that there are many, many more than just the slashdotters that are of the belief that the communications shenanigans are tough. If you don't speak up, you give tacit silent approval. So, speak up. Educate the populace regarding the history of utilities, monopolies, and how this affects them. Then do it again. That's why I posted. That's why you posted. Don't give up.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Adrian Lopez]

But instead of buying more bandwidth, or purchasing from additional upstream providers, they yell about other people's networks not having enough andwidth.

Wrong. Netflix is "yelling" about being charged extra for bandwidth that Netflix's own provider has already negotiated with AT&T.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BitZtream]

You'd be wise to just ignore Mr 'I'm a senior network engineer' because I'm a former network admin for an east coast telco and he's pretty much described it exactly as greedy assholes want it described rather than reality. He's twisting reality and words. He probably works for AT&T or Comcast by the sound of it.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

You've got the gist of it. And yes, it is a beneficial deal (at least for ISPs our size- this is why we did it)
I could however see ATT believing it's in their monetary interest not to provide a competitor with a free superhighway into their network,
and I support their right to make that decision as long as it means they're not discriminating.

I have looked for evidence that ATT is trying to gouge money from Netflix for the Cogent bill. I can't find any. Link?
I have seen plenty of places that make that claim, but when the links are really followed, they invariably end up at [ISP] saying: If you want off a congested link, you can pay for a direct connection.
I deal with congested links to ATT and Comcast every night I'm on call. I reroute through different providers and adjust my announcements to make them take different paths to my customers. It sucks, but It's pretty apparent it isn't deliberate (the congestion isn't consistent, and we're no Netflix), other than a deliberate decision not to fix their congestion problem- probably because their customers don't have real choice)

The real problem here, until I read of actual violations in the spirit of net neutrality, is simple ISP monopoly. It's what needs to be fixed. Verizon, Comcast, ATT are maintained congested links because they don't *have* to upgrade them. Why should they? where are their customers going to go?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BitZtream]

No, they are being told that they will suffer because the ISP isn't going to bother to fix their congested backbone links.

If the ISP does its job and has adequate bandwidth for its customers, there is no reason for Netflix to peer with them directly, they just transit the Internet as normal.

The ONLY reason Netflix should co-lo CDN boxes or Peer with an ISP is to BENEFIT THE ISP BY NOT HAVING TO PAY FOR AS MUCH INTERNET BANDWIDTH.

As a customer, I paid for full speed to the Internet, I did not pay to use their over subscribed service which they refuse to upgrade because its far more profitable to exploit others.

I already paid for ALL THE BANDWIDTH MY ISP USES. Thats what I'm paying for, bandwidth to the Internet. If they provide the bandwidth they sold me, they don't need to peer with Netflix or any one else. They'd be fucking morons, but they don't have to.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Enigma2175]

AT&T & Comcast don't own the road, they only own part of the road. They have a deal with another road system (Cogent) that cars from their systems can drive on Cogent's roads and cars from Cogent's system can drive on their roads. Netflix already pays Cogent for their road access and the end-user already pays AT&T for road access. If AT&T has a beef, it is either with their customer or Cogent, not with Netflix.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[beltsbear]

except that this is an issue where AT&T wants a payment from a Tmobile customer calling an AT&T customer. So there are THREE payments. The AT&T customer, the Tmobile customer and an extra fee that AT&T wants to charge the tmobile customer other than their regular service charge from tmobile.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[jxander]

The solution seems simple. Separate the bandwidth providers and content providers. Neither CNN nor Bob in Tuscaloosa provide any connectivity, so they wouldn't be a part of network peering agreements and would have to pay some ISP for that connectivity. If they wanted to get into the ISP business and start providing connectivity, it would have to be an entirely separate entity from their current offerings.

Of course, this would mean splitting up a lot of the current ISPs that are having their cake and eating it too (selling you bandwidth, and then selling you content along that bandwidth) but it's the best option in the long run.

Or even simpler, just kill the geographical monopolies. Where I live, there is exactly 1 (one) option for High Speed Internet. They've been adding fees and charges by the boatload for the last several years, while happily pointing out their monopoly when I call. Most recently they added a modem rental to my bill, for absolutely no reason. I have only ever used my own modem. Even better, the addition of a modem rental negated the automatic payment that I'd setup, so I stumbled into a bevvy of late fees which were never refunded, despite the ISPs admission that the original rental fee was in error. I also incurred a fee for speaking with a person, and another for not using their automated phone system to pay the bill (which only accepts check routing numbers as payment method, no credit cards, debit cards, etc.) There was a fee to reestablish the automated payments, and to "reactivate" the account, even though service hadn't been interrupted... The best part though, I was charged a "restocking fee" on the modem.

So you'll forgive me if I don't see the need for a deeper view quite yet. The ISPs are enjoying their status as de facto monopolies, and are more than willing to piss off (or piss on) their customers to squeeze out a few bucks. I can only imagine the lengths to which they'd go, if they thought they could shake down Reed Hastings near 1,000,000,000 net worth.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BitZtream]

Yes, it makes sense ... for the ISPs ... no one else gives a shit because traffic is traffic.

The issue is that the ISPs want to sell me the ability to use said bandwidth ... but not have a pipe thats fast enough to actually provide it ... so if I want to use netflix ... they have to have a special ... not overloaded because the ISP is a bunch of cheating assholes standard lines to the Internet where they QoS video to all hell and back.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[NeutronCowboy]

The problem is that ATT uses its position as both a Tier 1 provider and as a consumer ISP to play both sides of the argument: on the one hand, they're arguing that Netflix sends too much traffic their way to get peering agreements hashed out, and on the other hand, they artificially constrain their upstream data by restricting how much and what customers can upload.

Because of this, there is no way for anyone to peer properly with ATT: they can always create traffic conditions that will suit whatever argument they want.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Adrian Lopez]

You and AT&T are employing what is known as a "straw man argument". Netflix doesn't want free peering arrangements. Stop intentionally misrepresenting their position.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BitZtream]

AT&T isn't the road owner. I am. They built those roads with government handouts from my tax dollars. Same for comcast.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[JMJimmy]

And game traffic which is even more time sensitive is somehow different?

The fact is that Netflix drives demand for AT&T's services - especially the higher capacity ones. They're bitching about having to invest in more capacity even though they're able to oversell what capacity they do build. Someone has to pay for this investment, that is true, and it's the customers who are paying $65/mo for 45Mbps connections and the $10/50GB beyond the cap. Interesting fact though, according to AT&T themselves:

"In fact, less than 2% of AT&T High Speed Internet users utilize more than 150GB per month." - AT&T Broadband FAQ

So, if the vast majority of users are using less than 150GB/month that means, on average, it's less than 5GB/day of traffic - by their own advertising that means that they are serving 98% of their customers at full capacity for 16 to 232 minutes a day (16mins@45Mbps, 232mins@3Mbps).

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[jxander]

The very existence of Netflix has revealed the truth of the Emperor's new Clothes : ISPs have been promising bandwidth MASSIVELY above their actual capacity. Now that ISPs are feeling the pinch of customers demanding what was promised to them, they're lashing out at the perceived cause of this pain

It would be as though a city metro system sold million and millions of tickets MORE than what they could actually handle, but it was never a big deal because no one really used the metro all that often. But when a reason to use the metro comes up, the whole system is clogged, not functioning properly and basically ceases to function at all. Would you expect the Metro to take the blame? "Yep, our fault, we'll fix it" ... or blame whatever sparked sudden interest. Even if that impetus, whatever it was, only existed to aggravate the metro's over-sold lines, the metro is still ultimately at fault for overselling.

ISPs have been massively overselling their lines for years. Making billions of dollars on the promise of speed and throughput that they KNEW was nonexistent and completely untenable if anyone actually tried to use it. And now people are using it. So who do you blame: Netflix for being popular? Or the ISPs for selling you empty promises and lies, with full knowledge.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Yeah, I'm lucky enough to have my choice of ISPs where I live now, but I've also lived in places where I had to fight tooth and nail to to any better than dial-up; when DSL finally did become available, the service was crap. Through AT&T, the same provider who had given me rock-solid performance in two other locations before then. What a lovely, fun position we've worked the market into, eh?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Actually, what he's saying isn't too far off from my understanding of reality. I see him playing devil's advocate a lot, but in the end saying that it is beneficial for ISPs. And I can see both sides of it for hybrids (ISP and content provider) like AT&T and Comcast, in that they don't want to make things easier on a competing content provider, even if not doing so damages them more in the long run. On one hand, the ISP side wants it, because it means a better experience for their customers and lower operating costs (less off-network bandwidth, just for starters); on the other hand, the content side will never allow it, because it means fewer TV subscribers. In reality, the ISP side is right and the content side is missing the point, which is that people who don't want to pay them for TV service simply aren't going to, no matter how badly they hamstring their company's ISP wing.

When you look at it form the perspective of the internal struggle within one of these media hybrids, it actually becomes a comical story about David taking a break while Goliath strangles himself to death.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Enigma2175]

And, come on now, tell the whole story. For AT&T to be able to deliver Netflix's data all the way to the home routers of their customers, they also have to maintain arrangements with other carriers to handle that data as it comes in from Netflix. Those peering arrangements are not free, just like maintaining that last mile to their end user customers isn't free.

Nope, those peering arrangements are not free, generally AT&T gets paid since it is a tier 1 network. They are also already getting paid by their customer (and also by the government) for maintaining the last mile infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the guy who buys bandwidth and uses it for a less Netflix/YouTube-centric array of connections absolutely is going to be asked to contribute to his neighbor's entertainment costs if the GP has his way and AT&T raises their rates across the board to deal with the behavior of a subset of users and remote content sources.

Companies and people have been screaming about this for years, well before Netflix was a company. Unless the industry switches (back) to a usage model it will always be this way. AT&T is free to bill their customers (and their network peers) whatever and however they like, but they shouldn't be able to charge their customer's customer.

I think the reason many people have a problem with this is because they are already getting gouged by these companies for internet, cable TV and phone service. The cablecos provide terrible customer service, little network maintenance and a product where you are forced to buy a bundle of crap you don't want to get a few things you want (A la carte pricing, anyone?) and in exchange for this they have been granted monopolies and a captive customer base. They are making money hand-over-fist with enviable margins and the greedy fuckers want MORE? Fuck them.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[budgenator]

Their choke point is the last mile, those poor old twisted pair copper DSL just can't handle what's expected of modern broadband. AT&T has plenty of fiber in the ground and on the poles but from the DSLAM to the house it's twisted copper.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Expecting their neighbors pay for it, instead, is pretty jerky.

If you read carefully, you'll notice that I've never argued that people not using the bandwidth should be paying for those who do. Meaning that your rant, while valid, is completely misplaced as a response to my comment.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[ClickOnThis]

It seems the postal analogy is better than the car analogy.

At one time (19th century?) when you mailed an international letter, you might have to affix postage for all the countries the letter went through. Not any more.

In effect, AT&T is trying to make Netflix pay for "stamps" to send "letters" into their system, even though most other "letter-senders" don't have to. (Of course, AT&T already charges its customers to receive the "letters" so whatup.)

But really I think AT&T is trying to set up its own cyber-fiefdom, and charge "import duties" to competing content-providers like Netflix.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[kimvette]

> On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

It's flawed though. Semipermanent tractor-trailers and other large heavy vehicles destroy the roads while passenger cars introduce near-zero wear. However, a router or switch is worn out solely based on how long the capacitors have been powered up - it doesn't matter if it is at 100% of potential throughput or at .00000001% it is going to die in just about the same timeframe - especially since many switches over around 97% to 99% CPU utilization whether under heavy traffic with QoS, VLan tagging and other traffic shaping features enabled, or near-idle with no advanced features enabled.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[budgenator]

If Netflix is directly connected to AT&T's network, it should be relatively easy to throw up a banner that says "AT&T U-verse may not be capable of providing a complete user experience" to AT&T customers. Netflix would SOL without customers and AT&T would be SOL without content.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[R3d M3rcury]

Arguably 1GB of cat pictures don't need to be delivered immediate, whereas 1GB of video does.

If each cat picture takes an extra half-second to load, it's annoying. If each video frame takes an extra half-second to load, it's unwatchable.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

* Netflix pays for their bandwidth
* Customers pay for their bandwidth

Not quite. Netflix pays for their bandwidth and usage. Customers only pay for their bandwidth, not their usage.

The ISPs who promised to ship these customers unlimited volume of data at fixed costs are now blaming Netflix for actually developing a service popular enough to force them to make good on that promise. The big ISPs have written cheques their networks can't cash and are now extorting Netflix to make up the difference.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Adrian Lopez]

Nope. Go peddle your bullshit somewhere else. I ain't buying.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[tlambert]

You pay for access to the network of your provider and this has nothing to do with the provider - supplier communications.

Can I have another provider, then, please?

What do you mean "There's an infrastructure monopoly due to rights of way, and they won't let Google hang fiber optic cables on their telephone ples" ?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

^-- +1

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[schnell]

why can't providers like Netflix do the same and appeal to the customers directly, show them other options for bandwidth elsewhere (if available), provide numbers of the ISP, etc.?

They certainly could and that's an interesting idea for a model. If ISPs could differentiate themselves on the quality of their Netflix connection, then it would be economically smart for them to do so.

Unfortunately, for the most part in the US "real" competition among broadband ISPs only exists in technologies covered under the 1996 Telecom Act. Under that Act, the incumbent telco is required to provide CLECs fair access for DSL or other copper-based technologies but not for fiber.

That makes some sense given that the telco is incurring a very high cost to build out the infrastructure, dig and put that fiber in, probably $5K+ per household given my somewhat wild guesses. (I recall that figure coming from a Verizon 10K filing a while back detailing why they were cutting back on FiOS rollouts, but I'm too lazy to look it up.) That means it takes an unacceptably long time to pay back at $50/month for Internet access, and far far longer if you are reselling fiber access to other ISPs and only collecting $10/month or so). Cable access is franchised at the city/county level so you only have one option. Satellite Internet provides choice among multiple providers but it's still satellite Internet, so the laws of physics guarantee you crappy latency and the economics of satellite guarantee you a low upload speed.

So I think your idea is great and ISPs differentiating themselves by the quality of content access would be a good market driver. Unfortunately, in the US at least, most consumers can only choose between one cable Internet provider, one fiber provider (if they have that) and multiple DSL over copper providers (which offer far smaller data rates than fiber or cable) - not enough to make the competition meaningful. Google Fiber et. al. may show up to make things more interesting, but honestly any new fiber/broadband run to the home with all-new physical plant is such an expensive proposition that I wouldn't expect to see much penetration anytime soon. Google itself is slow-rolling its Fiber To The Home buildout to select areas where the municipal government is in effect willing to subsidize it (their cross-country dark fiber buildouts do nothing to help the last mile) so that should tell you something about the hard economic realities of the situation.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

From Netflix's blog:

"This weak net neutrality isn't enough to protect an open, competitive Internet; a stronger form of net neutrality is required. Strong net neutrality additionally prevents ISPs from charging a toll for interconnection to services like Netflix, YouTube, or Skype, or intermediaries such as Cogent, Akamai or Level 3, to deliver the services and data requested by ISP residential subscribers. Instead, they must provide sufficient access to their network without charge. "

ATT *does* provide sufficient access to their customers, from their perspective- the only perspective that matters between them and Netflix. What ATT does *not* provide is a link that is large enough for their customers. This is not a matter of net neutrality.
What ATT does *not* provide is a special link to Netflix for free to circumvent ATT's shitty connection to Cogent.
So, to summarize this brilliance, ATT should be *forced* to provide adequate pipe to their customers, where adequate is defined by third-party people with no stake in the company, or even relationship? Wrong answer. I'm sure even you can figure out why that will not work.
ATT's customers should be able to leave, because ATT sucks. Netflix should not be able to force crony regulatory rules down any company's throat demanding specialized relationship, or even any kind of treatment of their customers.

Your willful ignorance hurts to see. I am goddamn glad people who think like you don't actually run the Internet. Or anything important. You'd legislate my local TV station into being forced to broadcast any kind of signal that any kind of device within range of it could pick up.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Bengie]

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.

Different tpyes of traffic cause different types of damage? WTF are you talking about? Explain to me how 3mb/s of video streaming is different than 3mb/s of P2P or 3mb/s of any other type of traffic.

People don't pay for types of traffic, they pay of bandwidth and expect to get it.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Bengie]

because direct peering with ISP's means netflix can go around level 3 and cogent and save money

it's not like they are paying AT&T and comcast and also paying their Tier 1 providers. netflix is now connecting straight from their data centers to the ISP's on dedicated fiber links and bypassing the Tier 1 networks all together

some idiots can't seem to understand this

At least in the case of Verizon, Netflix said Verizon wants to charge more for peering than Level 3 charges for transit. How does that fit into direct peering saving money?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[kqs]

Okay, so should the road owner (AT&T/Comcast) be charging the owner of the eighteen-wheelers that come onto their roads (Level 3, etc.), or the company whose freight is contained within those trucks (Netflix)?

Using this analogy, *I* am the one paying AT&T to allow freight to be delivered to my house on their roads. Neither the provider of the trucks, nor the providers of the cargo, should have to pay AT&T because I already did. Doesn't matter if the trucks contain the latest Bond flick, or lots of pictures of cats.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[dgatwood]

ATT's customers should be able to leave, because ATT sucks.

AT&T's customers would need a viable alternative first.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[gwstuff]

Exactly. But now could you phrase this in a way that blames someone, rubbishes something someone else says, and most importantly appeals to the vested interests of someone influential. Then you might have chance of being heard.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Adrian Lopez]

Netflix wants "sufficient access to [ISP networks] without charge", but that doesn't have to mean peering. Netflix doesn't want ISPs neglecting indirect routes to content in order to push services like Netflix into connecting directly to their networks.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[gwstuff]

If it's their 'road' then Netflix is a bright, shiny city in the distance. It (and others like it) ARE THE REASON that people are on the road in the first place. Asking them to pay is like charging a city to pay for road usage just because it is a source of traffic. It is inevitable for companies that thrive at one time to decline and give way to others at another. For the system to continue to function, small, new destinations (startups, duh) that are detours from the main road need to be given a fair chance to succeed in an environment in which they can compete with the big players.

Without this process of constant replenishment, when the bright cities become old, dilapidated and defunct, people no longer have the reason to use the road. Everyone loses, except for selfish executive ass-holes who screwed everyone, all but knowing what was going to happen and sailed away with the money on their yachts laughing.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[frozentier]

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.

OK, so this is AT&T's road. HOWEVER, it's customers are paying to drive whatever vehicle they want on that road. Sure, you've got millions of request from Netflix to stream a movie, but you have millions of end users paying AT&T to be able to do that. I'm on Time Warner's Roadrunner. I pay them every month to use their networks however I see fit, and there is no exemption in that agreement regarding what that content is. So why should Netflix have to pay, too? TW has already been paid once for that bandwidth.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[whois]

The dynamics have changed somewhat. Mainly because ISPs became monopolies when dialup died. Remember Earthlink or Mindspring, Speakeasy? Or Netzero? Big old ISPs that nobody uses now because they were merged into global conglomerates or went out of business.

In the old days Netflix could say "hmm, we're an outbound only company with lots of cash and nobody will peer with us.. why don't we buy an eyeball company and balance our traffic so peering is fair"

Now there is nobody to buy, unless you want to buy some giant companies.. or get bought by one of them.

Also, ratio based peering was a model that made sense in the old days because it was the easiest way to determine fairness amongst multiple providers. Even in/out means you aren't stealing my eyeball customers and I'm not stealing your server customers right? Or at least we're stealing both in equal amounts?

Now that argument doesn't hold true when you're talking about Amazon or Google or Netflix, or Rackspace or anyone else doing cloud business. They aren't eyeballs and don't want your eyeball customers. Most of the time if you talk to them directly they'll peer based on your inbound traffic from them. The same applies to CDNs like Akamai or Cloudflare. Again, they aren't getting in the residential market and aren't your competitor so why not peer to ease congestion?

Ok, so big monopoly telcos that do both content and customers don't understand this, their arguments are pretty feeble.. "it costs big $$ to peer!" Well, run a dark fiber down the street and peer out of joes basement peering for $10/xconnect .. "but optic costs!!".. are cheap if you're doing 10gig MM or SM with no fancy wavelengths. "Port costs?" Same.. buy cheaper gear.

The only question is if netflix and friends end up flinching and paying to connect to AT&T and Comcast, then nothing will change.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[alexborges]

Its not appropriate: bytes arent cars. Bytes are bytes, 8 bits the last time I checked, and they dont 'damage' anything. For example, ISP's promise to the customer 1mbit on delivery, and they charge for it. Netflix's ISPs (they are probably many and/or all of them) promises, for example, 1tbits/s and charges for it. If there is enough infrastructure to comply with the promise, then why would you need to charge any of your good customers anything?

Thats the thing: its called oversuscription. They NEVER have the infrastructure to actually give all that bandwidth to everyone that pays them. It used to be you only had 30% of the absolute full use of your network. I dont know now, but that used to be the number back in the day (it worked fine with phonelines for example). That model, now that demand of bandwidth is growing much faster than they expected, needs to change. Simply, they didnt expect that people would actually demand, en masse, what they bought. And now they want us to pay for it and we will, because somebody has to and it sure as fuck isnt going to be them.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[alexborges]

Your low ID attests to your wisdom, oh elder of the internet. It cannot be said any better (or in a shorter sentence for that matter).

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[alexborges]

How about you guys actually plan for your infrastructure to meet demand and charge accordingly. What needs to go, or be aggressively and intelligently modified is the oversubscription model.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[BronsCon]

Well, that would certainly be ideal.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Pinhedd]

>AT&T, and other providers, should have no right to put up walls. If there are issues of peering, those should be working out at the peering level, and not at the application/service or individual business level.

It is strictly a peering issue and it is being worked out at the peering level.

In order to keep their operating costs low, Netflix decided to go with the lowest cost bandwidth around, Cogent. Cogent is great for getting data between datacenters on the cheap, but not-so-great for getting huge volumes of data to end consumers. As a result of Netflix growth and the rollout of higher bandwidth video streams, Cogent began dumping tons of traffic onto other ISPs with which they have peering agreements. Peering agreements are mostly informal and involve exchanging X quantity of traffic for Y quantity of traffic where X and Y are reasonably close to each other. As long as the peering agreement is fair, there's typically no money involved, so the sender of the traffic keeps all the revenue. The amount of traffic originating from Cogent has smashed into the limit of the peering agreements that Cogent has with various consumer ISPs. The bulk of this traffic just happens to originate from Netflix.

The cost of expanding the interconnects to handle all the added cogent traffic would fall entirely on the consumer ISPs, but the revenue for doing so would end up entirely in Cogent's hands. The consumer ISPs perceive this as being rather one sided and unfair (a matter of debate and opinion), so they're dragging their feet and refusing to bolster the exchanges or expand the peering agreements with Cogent unless Cogent foots some of the bill.

This is not a net neutrality issue at all. Netflix is not being treated any differently than any other traffic source. The dispute is between Netflix's upstream ISP and consumer ISPs. Netflix only got involved directly because Netflix is Cogent's biggest consumer, and is indeed the largest source of internet traffic by volume in the world right now.

I'm certain that many consumer ISPs would love to create "Internet + Netflix" packages, but doing so would be a flagrant violation of network neutrality. Instead, they have to bite the bullet and treat it the same as all other traffic which means downloading all of the costs of delivering it onto all of their customers equally regardless of whether or not they actually use it. The workaround is to shift some of those costs onto the source of the traffic (Cogent) who in turn would shift those costs onto the source (Netflix).

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

I'll leave the math behind why that's completely impossible to you.
But for whatever it's worth- I wish we could.
I don't think you personally would settle for 40kbit/sec internet.
We have ~10k residential customers, from dialup to gigabit fiber, and 5 datacenters of colocated customers.
I expect that if I were to tally the max-throughput of every customer connection we have, split it into 10G links to our cheapest transit provider, the aggregate MRC for the lowest commit we could get would be around our net yearly income.
And really, our network doesn't suffer from congestion. We *lose* customers if it does, so we keep up with actual use of the links. I'd argue that's a far smarter design than the one you suggest.

I suspect you think we make a lot more money than we do- or you'd like small ISPs to no longer be in business.
(Though realistically, a large one would suffer this problem as well.)

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[amiga3D]

I pay for access AND bandwidth. Bits are bits whether they form a movie or pictures of birds or powerpoint presentations. I bought bandwidth to move bits no matter what they form when they arrive on my system. Where in your foolish head do you get the idea that they have the right to say some bits are different from other bits? "We sold you X gigabits of transfer but you can't use it for things we don't want you to." This idea is wrong! You are wrong! You and Cicconi can go to hell. I paid my money, I want my service. You act like they are doing me a favor, fool.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[amiga3D]

They mean they bought up your Congress and you're fucked. Bend over and spread 'em. Some fucking idiots think this is Capitalism. I call it graft and corruption.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[amiga3D]

He's fucking me. Don't you get it. Me and all his other customer.....uh, consumers. I think his asshole already grew shut and that is why he's so full of shit.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[laird]

"AT&T can't meet their customer's demand so they are charging the other end (Netflix) for being too popular. Yeah that sounds about right."

OK so you don't understand how the internet works. AT&T has plenty of capacity. And as an ISP, they're in the business of getting paid to deliver bandwidth. Netflix buys cheap, low-quality bandwidth from Cogent, and now they're trying to force ISPs to give them direct transit (i.e. better performance than Cogent can provide) for free. If Netflix wants better performance, they can buy it like everyone else. Trying to use their market muscle to get better terms than anyone else isn't Net Neutrality, it's the OPPOSITE.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[laird]

Wrong. Netflix is trying to get direct transit to AT&T customers FOR FREE FROM AT&T. Every other content company has to pay for transit to deliver their content, but Netflix thinks that they can use their market muscle to get preferential treatment, which is the opposite of Net Neutrality. Sleazy.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[alexborges]

I believe you, but i think youd agree that arround that, lies the problem. Its not an easy problem, but I dont think liberally charging whomever is to blame for extra demand than planned is a good solution either. Thats why I say '*or* be agressively and intelligently modified is the oversubscription model'. Hey, if we all have to pay for the extra demand, then we should: be transparent and fair about it and maybe it can be handled.

And yeah, maybe some small ISP's can't handle the increase in demand and yeah I feel shitty for thiking this, but hey, the market is obviously different than what the current model can handle.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[laird]

You can buy dedicated bandwidth - that's what businesses buy, and it costs far more. What consumers buy is peak bandwidth.

The difference is:

Dedicated bandwidth is expensive, business-class service (i.e. what you buy if you run a real content site). If you buy 20 Mbps, you own the 20 Mbps and nothing can interfere with it. And you pay 100% of the cost for that capacity, whether you use it or not, because that's the cost of reserving the capacity on the ISP's network. And if you go over 20 Mbps you pay for the overage.

Shared bandwidht is cheap, consumer-grade service (i.e. what you get for $29/month). If you buy 20 Mbps, that's peak bandwidth, so you can get *up to* 20 Mbps, but you're not guaranteed anything (i.e. no SLA, no penalty for outages, no guarantees at all). The reason that it's cheap is that it's shared bandwidth, meaning that if lots of people are using their bandwidth at the same time, their traffic can interfere with yours, so you get less performance.

If you want dedicated bandwidth, be prepared to pay for it, just like real businesses do. If you want cheap bandwidth, live with the trade-offs that keep prices low.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[jthill]

Except it's not appropriate. None of the traffic characteristics you mention have _any_ analogy in network traffic.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a monopolistic view. It's the old "we own the highway" versus "we gave you rights of way because you were a municipal and regional utility". I say we reclaim the rights of way, and meter AT&T for their belligerence. That'll fix it for everyone.

You need to separate AT&T and Comcast from the physical infrastructure, break them apart into AT&T Service and AT&T Cabling. The Cabling company owns the physical wires but has no service, no phone, cable, or Internet, they just wholesale to someone else who will provide that stuff over their wires.

There, you now have a competitive marketplace where new startup ISPs can spring up constantly without being buried by the last mile installation cost, and consumers can easily switch between multiple providers within 5 business days.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, you can.

Tesla, Uber, and AirBNB are all learning that in America you are allowed to lobby against innovation. If you have the biggest bank account--and a few politicians in your pocket--you get to make the laws. http://time.com/31828/the-government-is-a-hitman-uber-tesla-and-airbnb-are-in-its-crosshairs/

This isn't just an AT&T vs Netflix problem. It's more deeply rooted in how we're allowing companies to selectively knock over each other. The real scary part about this is how often it occurs without any kind of query or interest from the general public.

Lastly, AT&T sells 'minutes on the wire'--that's all they do. They have an MPAA/RIAA mentality for their business model--they don't want to change at all, and anyone who tries to leave the business model gets punished. These folks may need a swift kick in the ass--selling bandwidth isn't a stable model unless... it's a shared-monopoly ... enforced... by the government. Oh wait... Well, at least the first part is true, eh?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[bickerdyke]

Right. But that's exactly what we have right now. A 16MB/sec DSL line is more expensive than a 6MB/sec line. So the consumers are already paying more if he wants to be connected to the road by a driveway tha's wide enough for an 18-wheeler.

Same on the provider side.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[bickerdyke]

But that traditionally has been handled between the peering networks and not by anyone connected to those carriers. And if they want to have direct access, they can pay that carrier for multihoming their datacenter. That's also nothing unusual.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[docwatson223]

As a Network Architect, I can tell you that the CAPEX for that 'road' - and all of the equipment for it - was paid by the Telco/Cable consumer years ago so any objections that AT&T/Comcast may have is just flat-out greed at this point.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[docwatson223]

When your cross-connect is a $30.00 piece of fiber jumper cable into a switch that is replaced once every 7 years, the cost should be minimal. Even the CAPEX to replace those switches was paid for years ago by the Telco customer.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[hhw]

I call BS. We're at the Westin as well, and x-connects in the 19th floor meet-me room are free, while x-connects between floors are a one-time build cost. even if you don't have your own space and are leasing lines from a data centre, they're only $50-$200/mo. Powered equipment may not be permitted in the meet-me room, but there is nothing that would stop you from putting some passive DWDM muxes in there so you could even run 40-80x 10Gb-100Gb links over the same fiber. The only way I see x-connects being expensive is you're using Equinix, but that would be your own business decision, and not inherent costs to peering.

Also, 10Gb optics sourced directly from China where they're manufactured can be purchased for less than $100 for LR optics, or less than $1000 for DWDM optics, which is peanuts for a one-time cost. Sure, line cards and therefore physical interfaces are expensive, but that's why public peering exchanges like the SIX (Seattle Internet Exchange) exist so you can peer with many different networks over the same interface. If you are doing enough traffic over a link to justify private peering however, your equipment costs should be built-in to your business model, and whether it's peering or other traffic shouldn't matter.

Although I do agree with your assessment that this isn't a net neutrality issue, it most certainly is a case of large eyeball networks trying to double-dip on charging for bandwidth, and criticism of them is well deserved.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

Incorrect.
We don't own buildings, we don't own meet-me-rooms. ISPs are renters, like anyone else. xconns cost money. We rent connectivity up to the meet-me-room and we pay through the nose for it. Fiber runs between floors are surprisingly not cheap. We pay for power to switches, we require new switches when capacities are reached. The cascade of cost that is incurred, the trickle of network upgrades required for capacity increases is not free. Network engineering is not cheap.
I also take exception with you trying to tell me what our money has paid for, and what it hasn't.
Do you have *any* idea how much bandwidth even small ISPs are passing these days? Nothing we purchased years ago is even relevant post-netflix.
Our traffic grew 100% last year without an appreciable increase in customer-base. And no, we do not make enough money to replace out all of our network gear every few years. Not remotely close. I think you greatly overestimate margins.
Sure, you try to make do where you can, moving to bonding solutions, then intelligent traffic-steering, multi-path, etc, but in the end, it comes down to more and newer hardware with more exotic optics and switching fabrics. Network hardware isn't cheap, and I can't just brush off some juniper I bought 7 years ago for my new 20gbit xconn over to Netflix.
Why exactly did you make that comment?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[hhw]

Netflix does most of its heavy lifting through its own CDN boxes running FreeBSD + nginx, which it will place on ISPs' networks for free, although the ISP would be responsible for the space and power. They most certainly do have their own data centres though, with infrastructure that goes well beyond Amazon.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Monoman]

"OK so you don't understand how the internet works...."

I've been around a while so I'm pretty sure I have a good enough understanding of how the Internet and companies like AT&T work. This whole thing is a money grab by AT&T (and others). Once they set a precedent there is little to stop them from shaking down others like Netflix and anyone that offers a service that competes with them.

"Hey uhhh, how ya doin? That's a really really nice Internet biznesss you got going there. I would really hate for something to happen to your traffic. I tell ya wut. Today is your lucky day. We just happen to offer insurance for people like you to make sure nuttin happens to those pretty little packets of yours."

Now multiply that times every decent sized ISP and peering provider.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Electricity Likes Me]

Except this isn't the case: you're paying for bandwidth. Which implies, ok, maybe an average over time - but they don't have the ability to drive an ADSL connection to be suddenly faster. No-one would care if downloading a whole movie did nothing and then came down in 1-second - that's easy to work around.

The reality is they're not supplying you with the bandwidth you paid for, and trying to double-bill you for it.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

The vast majority of AS presences within the Westin sublease space. But you know that, right? I suspect you also know that none of them (that I'm aware of) offer use of their patch-panels at one-time cost.
You've fallen into the same hole as the previous person. You don't get to dictate what costs are reasonable for other people. You also don't get to prioritize where my money goes.
We peer privately, publicly via the SIX, as well as multiple transit providers. Our hardware is limited, and our budget far more so. Capacity increase at an edge begs capacity increase network-wide. Our business model is to take care of our customers in a way that is profitable to us. We have succeeded thus far. Being forced to offer free peering with people we don't want to peer with at the rates they want to peer at could definitely REALLY cause a hiccup in the current formula.
Of course ATT's budget isn't limited like ours is, but how is that relevant? how is that your business? How does forcing them to accede to the demands of Netflix not fuck me as well?
It is not double dipping to tell someone if they want prioritized connectivity into your network, they can pay for it.
It's a matter of large eyeball networks maintaining shitty links because they know their customers won't bolt.
I'm not justifying their practice, I'm arguing *vehemently* against thinking this is net neutrality, or that rules under the banner of "net neutrality" to solve *this* problem are anything but devastating for smaller people, who are satisfying their customer bases perfectly adequately.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[msauve]

BS. ATT wants to charge both ways. It's a matter of whether to charge for the data received (requested) or sent. That's already been decided, in both Internet and traditional telecom. To have a phone, one pays a small access fee. When you originate a call, that's when usage charges kick in. Similarly, it's ATT's Internet users who are originating requests for service from Netflix, and it behooves ATT to service their customers, not try to double-dip by asking Netflix to also pay for transport of that data.

No, Netflix is not using ATT as a transit network, they're just delivering the data ATT's customers have requested.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Bengie]

"Direct Transit" is an oxymoron. Use the word "peering". Peering is a fraction the cost of transit.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[nhat11]

Well if it was under government control will it be better like public roads?

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[docwatson223]

I'm sorry, I was thinking Co-lo since my experience has been 'zero-distance' between ourselves and various carriers. My frustration has been being charged insane CAPEX and recurring charges for a 20' section of fiber to a carrier-class switch. Given the number of customers, it's obvious that the number of folks at the location have paid for the equipment, engineering, etc.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Gr8Apes]

But this is where they are wrong - AT&T doesn't "own the highway". In fact, we the taxpayers own said highway as we paid the telecoms huge sums of money in the 90s in the form of tax incentives for said highways that were never delivered as required. Perhaps we should repatriate the highways back to the municipalities, and the services that AT&T and other provide would be the only thing we pay for.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[sociocapitalist]

On U.S. mobiles phones, interestingly, both sides pay.

On European mobile phones, on the other hand, only the caller pays, but they pay a non-neutral rate, which varies depending on the type of device the recipient has: calling mobile phones is more expensive (in some countries, much more expensive) than calling landlines.

Here in France it's normal to not pay anything beyond a fixed monthly fee to call fixed or mobile lines.

There is a provider here called 'Free' (http://mobile.free.fr/) who sells mobile service (no subscription required) for 20 euros a month that includes unlimited mobile calls to France, the US, Canada, China and a few other countries - and in the same 20 euros unlimited fixed line calls to 100 countries (no doubt including those already listed). Ah, and 20 gigs of 4G data as well, still in the same 20 euros.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[hhw]

The issue is not about ISP's being forced to peer with content providers like Netflix whether they like it or not. It's the major eyeball networks like Comcast and AT&T deliberately avoiding upgrading peering capacity, so that they can strong-arm Netflix into paid peering agreements instead. Let's not forget that Comcast is also trying to pressure Tier 1 transit providers like Level3 to pay for access to their eyeballs now, even though the miles of fiber in the ground that they operate, and thus their share of transport costs, pale in comparison. As a smaller provider, you should most certainly want to peer with any content network with a significant amount of traffic to your network, as you would have to pay for transit otherwise. There is no way you'd be paying more for cross-connects than you would for transit, and the equipment costs are irrelevant because you're doing that same traffic regardless, whether it comes through a transit or a peer. Your traffic levels aren't going to magically increase when you start peering, unless your existing transit is congested, which is something you should most definitely want to avoid.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[suutar]

The end users (collectively) pay for more than just the last mile; they pay for the whole thing. Yes, if everyone stopped downloading from netflix at primetime and downloaded the equivalent amount of data from 500 different sources, it's still the same amount of data and it's still going to overload ATT's unmaintained pipes. But ATT wouldn't have a single target to try to gouge, so they'd pretty much have to recover improvement costs from their usual sources - their customers.

I don't really think they should charge the user more. I think they should man up and make the network improvements they've been collecting money for for the past decade or more. But I think if they do need to charge more, they should just do it and not try a pr-spin end run that winds up not saving their customers anything.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[iamhassi]

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.

Ok, but if you charge the 18 wheeler more, how long before you decide to charge the pickup truck more? or sedan? or maybe make a special license so only 18 wheelers with your license can use the road and no one else? How long before they go after Youtube? Or Amazon Video? Or Facebook? Or Google? Or XBox Live? Anyone can make an argument that some service or website is "using more than others so you should pay more" but we're already paying for the service, we pay for the internet, what we decide to do with it is our business, whether we have unlimited or a 5gb cap or metered, if we want to use all of it for netflix instead of youtube why does that matter? Customers of these ISPs are paying for the net-neutrality already, they don't need to charge more. There will always be some website or service or something that uses a bit more than everyone else. If they start charging Netflix then they'll need to start charging Youtube, and then etc, before long they're charging every website or service that uses the internet that we're already paying for.

No other utility functions like this. The electric company doesn't say "oh you're using electricity for a air conditioner? We charge extra for air conditioners". No, they say "here is your electricity, use it as you see fit, whether it's a A/C or a dozen bitcoin servers or an electric car, we don't care how it's used, you are paying for that electricity." Internet should work the same way, they should charge us whatever they want to charge us and let us use the internet anyway we want, whether it's netflix or youtube or amazon prime.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Bengie]

I live in a small city with a population below 20k and surrounded by miles and miles of farms and trees and our small privately owned local ISP is able to source all of their bandwidth as transit from Level 3 and Global Crossing(Level 3 owned). They do no peering of any kind and can afford to sell dedicated 10/10 for $40/month and 30/30 for $60/month. They do not complain about transit costs for Netflix because it's cheap. If you, as an ISP, cannot get your peering prices below that of transit, you shouldn't be peering. Buy more transit and leave it to the big guys to handle peering.

And before you say anything about small ISPs are subsidied, my ISP has proudly proclaimed that they have turned down all government broadband grants/loans and are building out their fiber network on their own dime, which includes miles past the city limits into the country side.

I live in a poor city with lots of unemployment, and yet our small ISP can easily make money selling dedicated bandwidth from Level 3 to residential users and not doing any peering to reduce costs, while still being cheaper than Charter Communications in many cases.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[martyn1807]

Netflix are evil themselves. Sounds like epic justice to me. This is the same Netflix that wants DRM to be part of HTML5. Forcing open source of web standards....

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[DamnOregonian]

No, no. I'm not complaining about our transit or peering costs.
Never was.
I'm complaining about a third-party lobbying for control over my upstream and peering connections, when that is a decision between me and my aggregate customer base.

Giving those third-parties that control could easily make my peering and/or transit costs untenable and out of my control.
Today, maybe Netflix wants 20gbit of bandwidth into my customer-base, maybe tomorrow Akamai does (We peer with both).
The decision on the size of my links with them and my upstreams should be mine, not theirs. Only my customers should be able to influence that, and that's all up to how good I am to my customers- though my customers are free to leave if I suck.

And before you say Netflix isn't doing that, you're wrong. They are. Links are available above.

You may also be the perfect example of what I said was actually the problem- monopolized customer base.
You have a local ISP successfully competing against Charter- how? Wireless? You're certainly not putting your own lines in the ground.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[RatherBeAnonymous]

No, not really. Most customer facing ISPs are really there for one thing - they connect customers to tier 1 and tier 2 backbone providers. This costs a fair amount of money and creates choke points for their customer's traffic. Along comes Netflix and says "Lets peer!". They connect their networks and neither party charges the other for data transfer. The ISP pays less to the backbone providers and saves money, and Netflix pays less to the backbone providers and saves money. It is a win-win.

But, AT&T doesn't like this arrangement. AT&T is a major ISP AND a tier 1 backbone provider. Netflix is potentially taking money out of AT&T's pocket by peering with ISP's that use AT&T's backbone. When Netflix asks to peer directly with AT&T's using Netflix's usual ISP agreement, from AT&T's perspective, they would be giving away backbone transit services for free.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Cederic]

It's easier to just hack the ISP's QoS rules and prioritise my own bandwidth. No need to rush home from work that way.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[lsatenstein]

Put another way:

* Netflix pays for their bandwidth
* Customers pay for their bandwidth

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

People aren't paying for "Internet except for Netflix" and Netflix isn't paying their bandwidth costs for "Internet except for consumers."

AT&T, and other providers, should have no right to put up walls. If there are issues of peering, those should be working out at the peering level, and not at the application/service or individual business level.

The news about Apple being willing to pay for AppleTV to have a "special line" to consumers is particularly worrisome and strikes the core of the problems with anti-net neutrality positions: they create unfair markets with barriers to competition. Netflix may complain, but they can (and do! with Comcast) pay if they have to. Apple can afford to pay the gatekeepers as well.

But some new startup (Aereo, for example) or small business? They can't and won't be able to pay those gatekeeper tolls to reach consumers. And they'll be prevented from competing or disrupting.

Big business will thrive in an anti-net neutrality world. Honestly, it might even help Netflix in the long run as barriers to any competing service will be high. But it's anticompetitive and small businesses and startups alike will be prevented from innovating, and maybe even be driven out of the market by an inability to pay these tolls.

Are we going to need to build a second internet? We have highways and backroads, so why not have an alternative internet. Let the big boys get off the one we have and go to their own for that kind of traffic between major cities.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[ToPAz3in6]

No, an 18-wheeler pays more because they are more cargo, wheels, surface contact, emission, etc.... But they also are paying closer to the same rate as cars on a Per-Wheel basis. Same as net-neutral laws. Netflix pays their ISP's per GB of bandwidth, so do users and every other connection. There might be some bulk-rate discount applied, as I'm sure 18-wheelers don't always pay exactly 4.5x a 4-wheel car, but to charge Netflix more per GB (which is what AT&T is going for) absolutely IS unfair. Also, if users are using Netflix and "hogging" all their bandwidth for video streaming and don't have any bandwidth left to use on another service or, gasp, torrents... Then they aren't using any more bandwidth than they were when they were downloading torrents.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Hentai]

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.

Wait, the internet is back to being like a truck? I thought it was a series of tubes.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[mellon]

Nope, my 20mbps commercial service from Comcast was _exactly_ the same as my 20mbps home service is, except that I got a static IP address and had to deal with their horrible CPE router instead of using my own very nice CPE router. If you think about it, what you said doesn't even make sense, unless Comcast Business has a completely separate infrastructure to Comcast home, which would be much more expensive, and which I saw no evidence of. We are talking about peering here, and they are charging Netflix for peering, not me, so that's the same whether it's a business connection or a home connection. And the business connection, which did certainly come with a better SLA, cost about 20% more.

You may be talking about a dedicated peering arrangement, but that's not in any way analogous to my home connection—indeed, it's what Netflix is being double-charged for, according to TFA.

Re: It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[spectrumlogic]

Funny...just when none of us believed Mr. Ciccone's arrogance could be surpassed...AT&T attempts to pull off a "righteous" argument? This from one of the very few companies to have ever been "broken up" in a federal anti-trust action. Should we wait for the 'ol "sheer magnitude and frequency" allegations in an attempt to whip up support...or simply expect it to begin raining cats. I would feel sorry for them (and their installed base of imperfect, but profitable contracts) ... but I'm gonna go with finding it amusing (mixed with a little sweet "turn-about, fair play"). This appears to be jealousy that they are no longer in the cat-bird seat of arbitrary and capricious rate setting...with a side of determination to get back in the position they pay their lobbyists/attorneys/politicians to keep them in. So...YES INDEED...I agree we need to level the playing field, sir...just not how you envision it. Any service, profession or industry that enjoys past or present public protection/incentive must submit to rate and profitabilty regulation...since you hold righteousness so dear. We should also consider re-setting the return-on-investment (ROI) calculation for lobbyists, and political contributions...that such a calculation exists...is a symbol of pervasive abuse, a sad reminder of how far from our core values we have strayed and a bold, taunting statement of your regard. Since we are talking equity, Mr. Ciccone...yours is the arrogance that offends...you are not as safe (or insulated) as you want to believe...your carefully laid plans could easily become illusions as well.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct.

[Maritz]

Netflix buys cheap, low-quality bandwidth from Cogent, and now they're trying to force ISPs to give them direct transit (i.e. better performance than Cogent can provide) for free.

The guy who knows how the Internet works thinks AT&T is a transit AS in this scenario. It's their customers who requested the traffic from Netflix. Their PAYING customers.

Not how it works?

[sqorbit]

"But it's not how the Internet, or telecommunication for that matter, has ever worked,' Hasn't that how the internet has been? If someone calls me to play a song they wrote over the phone should they pay a fee to provide me that entertainment over the phone?

Re:Not how it works?

[Ioldanach]

"But it's not how the Internet, or telecommunication for that matter, has ever worked,' Hasn't that how the internet has been? If someone calls me to play a song they wrote over the phone should they pay a fee to provide me that entertainment over the phone?

They had to pay for their phone connection and you had to pay for yours. (We'll ignore the possibility of long distance charges.) If they went with a cut rate provider, though, their end might be choppy and not provide you with quality entertainment.

Re:Not how it works?

[mevets]

AT&T (nee Bell) played a pivotal role in the development of packet switched networks. The combination of excessive long distance rates and circuit congestion spurred the development of least cost packet routing.

Maybe they are trying to help spur technology that will take them out of the picture completely.

Re:Not how it works?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not how the internet has always worked.

Traditionally, the internet worked on tiers of providers. Tier-1 backbones were the top dogs, they had the most connectivity - and had both content producing and content consuming customers. As a result, they had roughly equal distribution of traffic patterns.

Then you got these low cost Tier-1's. Specifically, Cogent. These guys obtained Tier-1 status, but their traffic patterns have been historically tilted towards content production. That is, they push more data out of their network than comes in. Additionally, because of the way routing protocols work, they tend to transport that data to the shortest AS-Path, and then to the shortest hops within their network. This is efficient, but when it comes to providers like cogent (and fuck it, even level-3 and xo) the result is that these guys transport relatively little amounts of the traffic on their network, and instead just tend to dump it on other, real backbones.

So in essence, what they've managed to do is act like a re-seller, without having to pay for it. Well, not exactly... Because their traffic distribution is so incredibly lopsided, they tend to have to pay settlement for that traffic. Real Tier-1 backbones have connections that are virtually settlement free.

However, these parasitic backbones don't want to pay settlement, that eats into their profits. So what they do is they let their vocal customers, Netflix, bitch for them. Netflix goes out and complains about performance, to try to get the real Tier-1's to augment capacity with the parasites for little or free. Why would they do this on behalf of these other companies? Simple, to keep rates down. They have had for a long time a name and shame approach. But the reality is, there's no shame in it: parasitic tier-1's work just like internap, they have POPs, and customers who mostly push data out, and then they drop it off the closest network to their POP. There are two differences:

1) Internap POPs *paid* for access to the tier1's
2) These guys have a faux network to pretend like their real tier-1's.

Of course, Netflix doesn't stop at just the help the parasitic tier-1's get lower costs, thereby they themselves get lower costs route. They have their power play: you don't have to give the parasitic tier-1's free transport anymore. The way past this is you host Netflix's CDN in your network, for free. So instead of just giving free transport away to the parasitic tier-1's Netflix wants you to give them transport, power, hosting, cooling, the works for free! What a great deal right? Oh and also they might offer commercial hosting solutions for others content on that same CDN. So you know, you pay for the transport of the data not just for their costs, but for their profits off of others transport.

So folks, here how it is and how it's always been. When you had two entities on the internet exchanging data, both end-points typically paid for that transport. Unless, of course they were backbones, in which case peering agreements based on even traffic distribution took care of that.

Netflix, and providers like cogent have found a way to get around paying their fair share of the transport costs.

This is *not* a matter of net neutrality. This is a matter of backbones, distribution of traffic, and peering agreements. Agreements that have been the way they are since the beginning of the internet when backbones peered with backbones who carried similar amounts and distribution of traffic.

Finally, netflix and/or their backbones can take steps to even out traffic flows. Mostly, though, that would involve the backbones having a much more even distribution of traffic which requires that they get more enterprise and home customers. Possibly by lighting up fiber to the neighborhoods... But they're not willing to do that, and why? Because that costs money. A lot of money. A metric shit ton of money. You know who is investing in money for that? AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc.

Re:Not how it works?

[laird]

Exactly. The deal here is that Netflix is paying for very low quality bandwidth (Cogent) and now they want AT&T to give them higher quality bandwidth for free.

WE pay

[btpier]

Doesn't my monthly ISP bill pay for that delivery already?

Re:WE pay

[jwhitener]

Playing devil's advocate here: your monthly ISP-A bill pays for packets you request and send on that ISP-A's network. ISPs cannot control what happens outside their network. If Netflix was down, you wouldn't call Comcast and say "you guaranteed me access to the internet, netflix is on the internet, fix it!!". Likewise, if tomorrow Netflix suddenly required 200Mb to even work in standard def, it would be unreasonable to ask Comcast to suddenly meet that demand. It would take time to build up the network.

Now Netflix happens to host their service on another ISP-B. Say ISP-A's network is able to handle X units of traffic. But in the last year, ISP-B has been trying to push 2X units of traffic into ISP-A. Who's responsibility is it to pay for the new infrastructure required to handle 2X? Historically, most ISPs have had pretty equal traffic sharing. So peering arrangements were made that said "since are in/out traffic is equal with you, we both agree not to charge each other".

So what am I paying for?

[asmkm22]

What exactly does my cable bill give me then, if not access to services on the web?

Re:So what am I paying for?

[geek]

What exactly does my cable bill give me then, if not access to services on the web?

I'll give you a simple example of what the Telcos want this to be like:

My wife and I went to a new wine tasting place here in town. They touted the fact they have more wine tasting machines than anywhere else in the world. You walk up to it, insert your payment and choose the oz you want and the type and you get it in a little tasting cup. Sounds simple right? It should be except that you can't use your debit or credit card and the machines don't take cash. You have to purchase a card from them to use the machines. Just the card, you have to then put money on the card after you've purchased it.

AT&T want you to think of the connection they give you as that card. They then want to charge you per site or service beyond that. You pay for the priviledge of being their customer. It's the same racket gym's have been doing for decades with their "initiation" fees they claim they need to process your paperwork and somehow cost 100$+.

Want to be their customer? You have to pay for it. Then you get to pay for it some more.

Re:So what am I paying for?

[Ioldanach]

What exactly does my cable bill give me then, if not access to services on the web?

It gives you access to services on the web, but they have to pay their connectivity bill, too. If the company they chose doesn't have a good connection to your company, though, then your experience with that company will suffer.

In Netflix's case, they chose Cogent, and Cogent wants to take advantage of peering arrangements that presume data will cross their links to other providers in both directions equally, but they want to send far more data than they receive. But they don't want to pay the transit fees that would normally incur.

Re:So what am I paying for?

[Just Some Guy]

Presumably Cogent knew this when courting Netflix as a customer. How is Cogent's arrangement with AT&T (and every other individual ISP on the planet) any of Netflix's concern?

For various reasons, I'm stuck with Comcast. I don't know and don't care what agreement they have with Telstra when I'm emailing stuff to my friends.

Re:So what am I paying for?

[jwhitener]

I've posted on both sides of this issue... out of curiosity.

Why wouldn't a system work where the only money involved be the customer giving money to an ISP? Netflix pays Cogent, Cogent is under obligation to be able to output as many packets as Netflix is willing to pay for. I pay Comcast, Comcast is under obligation to deliver to me as many packets as I pay for.

Is a large part of my ISP bill being subsidized by transit fees?

Movies, and all Internet traffic is paid for.

[rujasu]

The consumer is paying for it. That's why we pay the bill, and that's how ISP's make billions. That's how it has always worked. AT&T apparently is cheesed off about not getting two bites of the apple.

How DARE you suggest...

[Anonymous Coward]

that we DON'T double or triple charge for the same bits being transported. I laid these wires with my bare hands! Signing papers is hard work! My yacht won't pay for itself!

I already pay you AT&T

[gurps_npc]

When I pay you to provide me internet service I am paying you to do a service.

I don't pay you to provide me only the cheap internet, I pay you to provide me the entire internet. I don't pay Netflix to do that, I pay YOU to do that.

So YOU are the one that has to build the internet to provide me the service that YOU pro missed to supply me. No, you can't blackmail other people I do business with to help out. I have already paid you, you can't charge them for services I already paid for.

I'm already paying AT&T to deliver Netflix

[kaplong!]

I'm already paying AT&T to deliver Netflix. Seems to me the carriers expect to be paid twice for the same service, once by the source (Netflix) and once by the destination (me).

Re:I'm already paying AT&T to deliver Netflix

[alen]

you're paying for internet
if netflix's network provider is having problems it's not AT&T's problem

Re:I'm already paying AT&T to deliver Netflix

[pr0fessor]

Netflix already pays for service at their data centers and you pay for service at home. AT&T want to charge Netflix for traffic that passes through their network to non-AT&T customers in addition to getting paid by Netflix's service provider for handling the same traffic.

Re:I'm already paying AT&T to deliver Netflix

[TubeSteak]

FTFA

Interestingly, there is one special case where no-fee interconnection is embraced by the big ISPs -- when they are connecting among themselves. They argue this is because roughly the same amount of data comes and goes between their networks. But when we ask them if we too would qualify for no-fee interconnect if we changed our service to upload as much data as we download** -- thus filling their upstream networks and nearly doubling our total traffic -- there is an uncomfortable silence. That's because the ISP argument isn't sensible. Big ISPs aren't paying money to services like online backup that generate more upstream than downstream traffic. Data direction, in other words, has nothing to do with costs.

**in other words, moving to peer-to-peer content delivery

AT&T + friends just don't like provisioning more bandwidth for companies that don't directly make them money.

Nonsense

[fredprado]

The user already pays for it, both to AT&T and Netflix.

Re:Nonsense

[GodfatherofSoul]

This is the *entire* point of the net neutrality debate. Businesses want to reserve the right to gobble up subsidizes to build out our internet infrastructure, but want reject the responsibilities of being a common carrier and turn around and double charge both the content consumers *AND* producers.

Well, *someone* here sound arrogant, anyway...

[pla]

there is no free lunch, and there’s also no cost-free delivery of streaming movies. Someone has to pay that cost.

So the $80 a month I pay my ISP goes to what exactly? Oh, riiight... All those rural infrastructure improvements you've fought tooth and nail against. Got it.

Guess what, Jimmy? Without the likes of Netflix, we have no use for your "internet" that goes nowhere. Perhaps you could go read up on this idea on your Compuserve account.

Re:Well, *someone* here sound arrogant, anyway...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

So the $80 a month I pay my ISP goes to what exactly?

Your free lunch.

The deep, deep irony --actual classical irony -- here is that Cicconi does believe in cost free delivery and free costs. We know that because that is exactly what they promise to their customers.

Netflix is not the cause of recent video traffic volumes on the web. The cause is "all you can eat" unlimited monthly usage rates which have become the industry standard. It was agreed in the 1980s that ISPs would operate on an "end user pays" model, but at some point in the 2000s, ISPs move towards an "All you can eat" model where the end user pays only for the connection, and not the volume of traffic they actually upload/download.

So when customers actually do start downloading all they can eat, where does the blame lie here? At Netflix, who have already paid cogent handsomely to upload every single byte of every single video they stream? With the customers, who paid up front for a connection which said "unlimited, all you can eat downloads", and then proceeded to do so? Or does the blame lie with the ISPs and telcos, who wrote millions of unlimited download cheques that their networks now cannot cash.

So Mr. Cicconi , If your customers are downloading too much data, charge them for the cost. If you can't do that without losing customers, then you can't compete, and its time to step aside for ISPs who can. Netflix does not enter into this equation. The internet is based on an end-user pays principle and if you AT&T want to have end users using without paying, that's your problem and nothing to do with Netflix, Youtube, the Pirate Bay, Facebook or anyone else. Don't extort others when you've bitten off more bytes than you can chew.

Classify 'em as Common Carriers under Title II

[QuietLagoon]

Cogent: Reclassify ISPs As Common Carriers Under Title II

In a bit of a clever public relations dance, Cogent has issued a press release stating that while the company refuses to pay companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast new peering tolls, they will pay the costs incurred by those companies to ensure there's adequate capacity at interconnection points. Cogent has been at the heart of more than a few debates over settlement-free peering, usually when the levels of traffic exchanged aren't equal. ...

Both ends get paid for already

[msobkow]

The customer pays for the client end. Netflix and other companies pay for the server end.

But the greedy pigs at AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc. want to gouge people by triple-dipping with fees for the middle.

Re:Both ends get paid for already

[geminidomino]

A comment which shows you understand the realities of neither capitalism, nor starting an ISP.

Here we go...

[MrSome]

His comment shows exactly where these ISPs want to take the internet.

It's not about paying for an internet connection so you can get what you want... no no.

They want you to pay for an internet connection to get what they want to give you.

Fed Ex and Amazon

[gurps_npc]

Using the same logic, Fed Ex is slowing down my Amazon purchases over $25, because while Amazon pays for the shipping, I have refused to tip them.

Oh wait, no they are not, because Fed Ex is not run by greedy idiots trying to charge twice for one service.

Re:Fed Ex and Amazon

[mdielmann]

And what you will see is that you pay about 100 times what you paid before and a semi truck pulls up to your house rather than a mini-van. Because you pay per piece (with possible bulk reductions) for material objects. But that's not the deal that Comcast and AT&T have made with their customers.

Re:Fed Ex and Amazon

[Mike Buddha]

Oh wait, no they are not, because Fed Ex is not run by greedy idiots trying to charge twice for one service.

Well, actually it is, and they would if they could get away with it.

AT&T will likely regret this.

[Last_Available_Usern]

AT&T has quite the sack to go on record with this statement. I can only assume they hope other ISP's will get on board and try to somehow make this an acceptable thought process. A few points...

1) Where the consumer goes on the internet is their own business.
2) If the consumer is using more bandwidth then your business model allows, adjust your rates to the consumer to match.
3) You can't build a toll road between a gambler and the city of Vegas and then charge both the gambler and Vegas for their travel.

Re:AT&T will likely regret this.

[Anonymous Coward]

No they won't. This government belongs to them not you. Best you remember that.

Double-dipping

[nctritech]

This is the problem with removing net neutrality: the service providers will be double-dipping. Each endpoint pays a service provider for a certain level of connection to THE ENTIRE INTERNET, and the only speed limitations should be the lowest level of upstream/downstream bandwidth paid for by one endpoint or another.

Without this "hands off" approach, service providers can say "pay us for a certain amount of speed accessing THE ENTIRE INTERNET" and then say to Netflix or others "pay us to be allowed to send to our customer at a certain level of speed, even though you've already paid another provider for the same thing." That means that the end customers ARE NOT receiving what they paid for unless the sender pays the tariff.

This should absolutely be fought tooth and nail, because in the end ALL costs fall upon the end consumer. I, for one, would be more than willing to set up something at my end that helps Netflix host its streams in a distributed fashion as is done with torrent downloads.

Re:Double-dipping

[Gothmolly]

Netflix streams from AWS, and offers ISPs a sort of staging platform where popular content can be cached within the ISP network, eliminating the peering issue. Many cable providers refuse to implement it.

Re:Double-dipping

[nctritech]

I was somewhat aware of this problem as well. That's why I would have no problem running a "Netflix daemon" on my machine that would use a relatively small portion of my bandwidth to cache Netflix data. If enough people did the same it would render the platform you describe entirely obsolete.

Re:Double-dipping

[kaiser423]

Sign me up to act as a mini-CDN inside of the ISPs. Of course, barred by TOS but the ISP is complaining about the traffic being too asymmetric, so let's just even it out a bit....

Re:Double-dipping

[rkohutek]

Interestingly, as a tier-2/regional operator, these cache devices are hard to get because they fill a certain role. We have worked with Netflix to try and get the caching device, and it just doesn't do any good if you have less than 3-4gbps of pure Netflix traffic. It does not work because the caches have to ... populate the cache! They do this regularly, and the do it overnight -- but it is an absurd amount of data, especially when there are multiple bitrates. I am told that the cache runs > 1.5gbps to populate, almost nightly. So if you don't push significantly more than that, it is not a cost winner.

As a transit provider/local ISP/bandwidth buyer, 3+gbps is a lot of traffic. We found it mildly more attractive to buy a 10gbps wave to a Netflix-available peering point and peer directly with them than to buy 2+gbps of transit from Level3/Cogent/HE, especially factoring in last mile costs.

Also of note, my own traffic engineering testing shows that Netflix *strongly* prefers Hurricane Electric (as of last fall), then Cogent, then Level3.

There is a really horrible hole between 1gbps and 10gbps of consumption that there isn't a good solution for. Netflix knows about it, but it is a very difficult target to hit -- it may be cheaper to buy transit, or it may not be, but hardware isn't the answer. This same situation exists for all CDNs - limelight, edgecast, akamai, L3.

As usual, peering is the answer. Our customers pay us to bring them Netflix ... so we buy a wave and backhaul it hundreds of miles to satisfy them. It'd be ridiculous for me to charge Netflix when my customers are asking for it!

Re:Double-dipping

[laird]

Yeah, I built that network, it grew to over 150m users, and was acquired. :-)

Netflix should charge fees back to customers

[hawguy]

Netflix should charge back whatever fees they pay to Comcast back to their customers that view content via Comcast. This lets the customer see the true cost of their ISP.

Why should users of Google and other ISPs that don't charge fees to Netflix subsidize Comcast subscribers?

Re:Netflix should charge fees back to customers

[alen]

since comcast is charging them less money than cogent did, they should get a discount

Re:Netflix should charge fees back to customers

[NotSanguine]

Either way AT&T/Verizon/TWC and maybe Comcast will win and beat Google in the crony capitalism environment we have Silicon Valley type CEO's will win

There. FTFY.

Landlines

[mepperpint]

I would like to introduce Mr. Cicconi to a device called a 'Telephone', particularly a variant colloquially termed a 'landline'. Historically 'telephone' companies, such as AT&T, would sell users a 'landline' to which they could connect a 'telephone'. These services included a basic connection charge as well as usage charges. In the event that a connection was made form one 'landline' to another, the party that initiated the session was charged for the usage of the session. This is exactly the treatment that Mr. Hastings is proposing.

In particular, I would like to note that while some providers charged users based upon usage, other providers allowed for a fixed cost plan where the subscriber paid a flat payment independent of their usage. These sorts of unlimited plans are exactly what AT&T, Comcast, etc. are selling as an ISP to their customers now, so they have no business trying to extract usage fees from Netflix and they have no business telling us that we're asking non-Netflix customers to subsidize the connections of Netflix customers. We've paid the fees that AT&T, Comcast, etc. demand for unlimited usage, so they need to provide it without whining about how they're not getting paid twice for the same service.

Re:Landlines

[Kjella]

I would like to introduce Mr. Cicconi to a device called a 'Telephone', particularly a variant colloquially termed a 'landline'. Historically 'telephone' companies, such as AT&T, would sell users a 'landline' to which they could connect a 'telephone'. These services included a basic connection charge as well as usage charges. In the event that a connection was made form one 'landline' to another, the party that initiated the session was charged for the usage of the session. This is exactly the treatment that Mr. Hastings is proposing.

That's who takes care of the bill. If you operate a call center, do you think all the phone lines are free because you only get incoming calls? If you call abroad, do you think your carrier gets to pocket all that money? No, they in turn have to pay the other side of the connection for the privilege of going through their network. Of course both sides will try to keep as much as possible of that money leading to peering disputes.

Data caps

[NapalmV]

I believe it's about the data caps. Netflix wants them removed, AT&T basically says that users going over 150GB/month should foot the bill for infrastructure upgrades (as opposite to *all users* including those that do just e-mail and light web browsing). Seems fair to me.

Re:Data caps

[the_povinator]

This is not an argument about pricing mechanisms for Internet providers; I think we all agree that charging people more for more data is reasonable. The issue is extorting people like Netflix just because they can.

Re:Data caps

[NapalmV]

Mhh. If it's not about data caps then it's about QoS and netflix wants some preferential treatment over other internet data publishers:

http://bgr.com/2014/02/25/verizon-att-netflix-streaming/

At which moment AT&T pointed out that business class costs more than economy.

Re:Data caps

[fullmetal55]

How do you get that from them demanding NETFLIX pay AT&T for the right to provide AT&T customers with their service?
It's not about AT&T customers footing the bill, it's about NETFLIX footing the bill... which is not right.

Speaking of which there is no free streaming being requested, the customers are ALREADY PAYING FOR IT... what difference is streaming 2GB of video vs downloading a 2 GB ISO?

yet they claim there is a difference. Even though I paid for that 2 GB ISO just as I paid Netflix for my monthly subscription. I'm not expecting Valve, Microsoft or any 3rd party to pay my ISP for the right for me to download a file. I expect them to pay THEIR ISP for the bandwidth I use to get the file from their servers to my computer.

Netflix has never claimed to want data caps removed, they want traffic throttling removed. Specifically they want ISPs to stop throttling traffic coming from them as they are doing now. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with Caps, and everything to do with throttling.

Re:Data caps

[wiredlogic]

It isn't about data caps. They don't even want to provide the contracted service to their customers who stay below the caps. AT&T and Comcast just want to double dip by singling out the biggest source of incoming traffic and making up special pricing rules for them. Never mind that that they would have to serve up the same amount of data if Netflix's volume was hypothetically split among 1000 equal competitors.

Re:Data caps

[laird]

It's not "extorting" Netflix. The deal is that Netflix buys low quality bandwidth from Cogent, and now they want to strong-arm AT&T into giving them direct transit (i.e. building a dedicated network for Netflix) for free instead of paying for higher quality bandwidth.

Re:Data caps

[laird]

Valve, Microsoft, etc., all pay their internet service providers for the bandwidth to deliver their content to their customers.

The trick here is that Netflix wants to get their upstream bandwidth for free, which is to say they're asking for preferential treatment over every other content provider because of their market muscle.

That's the opposite of Net Neutrality.

More Corporate Greedmeisters

[sdinfoserv]

As an American, I really get tired of billionaires arguing with millionaires about money.... All that happens is I get screwed.
- the US has fallen from 16th in 2012 to 31st in 2014 for broadband speed...
- pro sports tickets are almost unaffordable to the average person
- US healthcare is the most expensive per capita in the developed world and is ranked 33 for infant mortality

We need to get of this 'we;re great, capitalism solves everything' fox news mantra and look at what's actually happening.
Otherwise, at some point, there's going to be just 2 jobs left in the US. The guy who owns everything and they guy who cleans his toilet.

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[MrSome]

Cmon man... If it wasn't for capitalism, we'd all just sit around going, "I'm not going to try hard at anything, cause I can't get rich doing it."

Isn't that the pro-capitalist-free-market-deregulate-the-world chant?

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[Gothmolly]

Your points are unrelated, and only 1 of the 3 examples you cite has anything to do with capitalism (even that is a stretch).

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[geekoid]

Infant mortality is a horrid example. Every country considers infant mortality a little different.
In the US, anyone born with any signs of life, who then die counts toward that statistics. In some country's, premature babies that are born, but die within 7 days don't count. Russia being one of them.
When you normalize the data, are IMR is actually much lower.

IMR also doesn't take into account fetal deaths; which is a very important metric when using infant deaths as an indicator of country quality.

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[geekoid]

He didn't say capitalism was bad, he said
"We need to get of this 'we;re great, capitalism solves everything' fox news mantra and look at what's actually happening."

And he is correct.

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[NIK282000]

You mean like right now? You don't get rich by working hard. You get rich by being born rich, by fucking over other people, by being really lucky or by being REALLY fucking smart. Of all of those cases only one of them involves hard work and not many people are born smart enough to come up with a real money making idea.

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[Kaenneth]

Why not root for a minor league team instead?

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[Xyrus]

You mean like right now? You don't get rich by working hard. You get rich by being born rich, by fucking over other people, by being really lucky or by being REALLY fucking smart. Of all of those cases only one of them involves hard work and not many people are born smart enough to come up with a real money making idea.

Pretty much. Economic mobility in this country is primarily down. The upper 20% control pretty much everything. Income for the middle and lower classes have been stagnant and or dropping. If you aren't already well of it is extremely difficult to become well off. If your family is already in a whole you are most likely going to stay there.

The economic statistics are depressing. And of course the upper crust fight tooth and nail to make it worse. It isn't sustainable, but then again they don't really care. It will be interesting to see how much longer this can last before the whole thing collapses.

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[Gothmolly]

Which is why you're a foe.

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[Bengie]

I don't see how making the 80th percentile is that hard, almost any two person house-hold would qualify assuming a useful college education for both.

Re:More Corporate Greedmeisters

[MrSome]

I feel like the sarcasm in my post wasn't thick enough. I was going for the tone of people I know that say things like, "If you tax the rich, nobody will work hard anymore cause they can't make any money." or "Regulation is BAD. Always BAD."

Which is utter BS but, when you're a capitalist you don't think that anything can ever happen without the incentive to get rich. As if people don't ever get curious and try to solve problems, simply because they want to try.

Backwards

[uvajed_ekil]

Dear AT&T, Cox, Verizon, etc. You seem to be missing the point. It is YOUR CUSTOMERS who want net neutrality. I don't think I am alone in saying I want to be able to use the bandwidth you sell me, and to be able to use it as I please. And I'm not talking about running a server or doing anything illegal. You are so, so lucky that there is no viable competition to your local duopolies. I think it is time that we (the voting tax payers that make your companies possible) work on that. I don't think you will be happy with the result once we get angry enough as a group to take action. If you compare the state of home and business internet service in the US to countries like South Korea or Latvia, to name only two, our current system is clearly not working, so it is time to try something else. Go ahead, keep gouging us while you can, I guess, 'cause ya ain't gonna like what is further down the road.

Re:Backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot on, except for this part:

And I'm not talking about running a server or doing anything illegal.

Why not? Running a server is part of "[using] the bandwidth... as I please". I should be allowed to do that. If I use "too much bandwidth", then they should make it clear up front what the limits are and how they charge for an overages. The word "unlimited" is not just marketing fluff. And illegal stuff wouldn't be even a tiny part of AT&T's problem, since as a common carrier, they wouldn't be held responsible for such actions.

It's high time they started selling a "dumb pipe" with no restrictions on what you can do, even including resale of service. Charge the base rate by the maximum speed, and charge the usage rate by the bit. For the base rate, for example, a $5/10/15 rate could set a 10/20/30 Mbit speed cap. For the usage rate, Amazon charges 3 cents per GB of transfer, and they're turning a profit. And any phrase that can be construed as equivalent to "unlimited" should be considered false advertising if used as an overall description for a product that has any limit on either speed or transfer.

Unethical

[hawkbat05]

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong here but the way I see it is Netflix already pays an ISP for its access to upload and download data and the end users already pay their ISP access to upload and download data. Both ends of the connection are already paid for, charging anything on top of this is basically charging for the same service twice. Netflix and the ISP's share the same customers, charging Netflix more means they'll pass the charges on to their customers this basically amounts to the ISP's increasing their prices/revenue by artificially restricting the supply.

For example if the ISP made a deal with Netflix that they can utilize X bandwidth at a rate of $Y/GB then Netflix is already paying for the data it sends. Putting another condition on that data and saying that you have to pay $Y+Z/GB if the data is providing something to customers is just a BS way of raising the price for businesses when it's not costing the ISP a dime more than any other data.

Re:Unethical

[guacamole]

AT&T doesn't want to charge Netflix extra for the same connectivity they get right now. What AT&T and other telecoms want to be able to do is to offer Netflix a higher priority (higher bandwidth and lower latency) service than what the rest of internet traffic gets for an additional fee. Netflix always refused this idea, and just hoped that telecoms upgrade their infrastructure which would benefit everyone at once.

I don't see a problem with telecoms charging Netflix extra for a higher priority service, but there is one big conflict of interest here. AT&T not only provides the pipes, they also provide the TV content with the U-Verse service. So AT&T is in direct competition with Netflix. Without net neutrality, AT&T is now in prime position to make sure that Netflix doesn't hurt their TV cable business. Either they charge Netflix so much that it stays uncompetitive, or perhaps Netflix stays competitive but AT&T will skim its profits through the fees anyways. Huge conflict of interest. FTC should look into this.

Re:Unethical

[Chirs]

I don't see a problem with telecoms charging Netflix extra for a higher priority service

I do. It violates net neutrality. Your netflix stream shouldn't take priority over my rsync backup.

ISPs should be allowed do traffic shaping on a per-subscriber basis regardless of traffic type. They can even be allowed to traffic-shape different types of traffic *for a particular subscriber* if that subscriber asks them to. But they should absolutely NOT be allowed to prioritize packets belonging to different subscribers based on traffic type.

Yea...

[anmre]

Senior Executive Vice President of Legislative Affairs thinks that some other company is not playing fair.

Apparently there is no free lunch, unless you're Ma Bell and have the resources to influence fucking Congress.

Start the supplanting already

[Average]

Google Fiber, meet Netflix. Netflix, Google Fiber. Amazon Web Services, you in? Apple?

It's time to start more overbuilding. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, Comcast or whoever already has the lines and could bump up to 300Mb plans for $50 at almost no additional cost (making them hard to compete against). But, until you build (and build at a much faster rate than the current Google Fiber projects), this is only going to get worse. You're currently dependent on not just a quasi-monopolist monster, but a wounded and irrational monster (because their TV profits are hurting). You have to bypass them.

It's ugly, I know. There will be communities with roadblocks (overbuilding is supposedly legal everywhere since the Telecom Act of 1996, but reality isn't so pretty). Sad, but true. We'll end up bypassing those communities, too. In every community that welcomes you, BUILD. Fiber is nice, but if you have to go DOCSIS/HFC (fiber to the block/neighborhood) with a better upstream split frequency because of cost, build that... coax is under-rated. But build. You can train high school students to lay coax. You can leverage massive discounts for buying 30 million identical ONUs. Build. Please. For the good of the country and the internet.

Re:Start the supplanting already

[Average]

Great and all. Marvelous.

The problem is, there's ALWAYS going to be "the next thing, it's in the lab now". Meanwhile, AT&T dutifully mails me a postcard each month inviting me to switch to the best thing they have to offer here. The exact same 1.5Mb ADSL they rolled out in late 1999 over JFK-era copper.

The SOTA will always keep going up. Nature of things. By the time we overbuild the top 100 metros (with two generations of improvement in the meantime), we'll presumably have off-the-shelf quantum networking components. Que sera sera. Or, if they don't do it, AT&T will be offering me 1.5Mb over copper in 2022. And increasing the chocolate, ahem bit ration to 50GB.

Re:Start the supplanting already

[mgcarley]

Happy to do it, but who will fund the initial build? Should I go out to every customer in town and promise them a future service in exchange for them signing up and pre-paying for it now? I don't know about you but that would smell of a scam to me.

Personally I think Google's progress isn't half bad, all things considered - and they have pretty deep pockets compared to many budding operators which I expect offers them some advantage.

For the record, I'd love to peer or host a Netflix box, but we're not pulling enough traffic from them yet, so for now my Netflix packets will have to come from Level3.

They want to be paid three times!

[wbean]

They are already paid by the end user and by the distributors like Netflix, who pay for their bandwidth usage. What the carriers want is to be paid three times.

Re:They want to be paid three times!

[Kaenneth]

Also by the taxpayers to build 'infrastructure'.

And payoffs from the NSA for building their secret rooms.

So between quad and quintuple dipping by my count.

Re:They want to be paid three times!

[Fnord666]

They are already paid by the end user and by the distributors like Netflix, who pay for their bandwidth usage. What the carriers want is to be paid three times.

Unfortunately stories like this just highlight how little even self-declared tech people know about how the "Internet" works.

AT&T Wants everyone to pay

[wolfguru]

As consumers, we pay for internet access to get the content we are interested in, not the content the ISP can make the most money delivering. If AT&T wants the content providers which are what drives consumers to subscribe to pay for the bandwidth it takes to provide than content, then AT&T should not be charging the consumer for delivering the content at the same time. It is quite simple, the telecom providers want to be paid twice for delivering the content; by the consumer and by the provider. It is purely greed and until the regulatory agencies are given the power to correct it, it will get worse for both provider and consumer.

Dear Comcast/AT&T/Verizon/Et al

[PortHaven]

I pay you $68/month for my broadband internet.

I don't give a damn about your whiny bitching, you deliver my content. If Netflix is the content I want, you !@#$ deliver it.

Playing these BS games is just you being greedy !@#$s.

The fact that my internet bill went from $35 --> $68 a month in a period of 7 years pretty much tells me you're just a bunch of greedy fucks.

So at this point, I am of the opinion we need to file a class action lawsuit against you for not delivering what we paid for.

And yes, your contract stating that said performance may not be available at all times, I don't think that will protect you. Because IMHO that's a good faith clause, that says hey sometimes shit happens. Sometimes bandwidth or connection will be down.

But in no way does that give you the excuse to have 0% uptime for providing service. And that's what you've been doing with your games.

AT&T - Fed wants their money back...

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what AT&T, the Feds want their money back - you know, the millions they paid out for you to improve your infrastructure, those same millions that you gave your execs as bonuses while doing nothing to improve your infrastructure.

Yeah, those millions. While we're at it, they're going to revoke your licenses to be in the communications business, that includes cable, internet, cellular and phone service nationwide.. Why you ask? Well, it's due to your own arrogance and incompetence. You pissed away resources to improve your status, doubled and tripled the cost for communications and now have the temerity to ask content providers to pay you to deliver data that they've already paid to have delivered, that your customers have already paid you to deliver...

Sorry Charlie, but you can't do that. That's extortion and blackmail, that puts you (along with Comcast, Verizon, Time-Warner) up for Rico Act violations, please enjoy your time in prison and your loss of all infrastructure, patents and copyrights, you'll have nothing left.

The good of the people will prevail.

Re:AT&T - Fed wants their money back...

[Bengie]

Guess what AT&T, the Feds want their money back - you know, the millions they paid out for you to improve your infrastructure, those same millions that you gave your execs as bonuses while doing nothing to improve your infrastructure.

Yeah, those millions.

"Millions"? Try tens to hundreds of billions.

It's their road

[PortHaven]

That I have paid $68/month to use at a given speed. And they are refusing me...and no there really isn't a capacity issue in most places. It's a bullshit greedy ass mo fo issue.

business as usual

[farble1670]

why is everyone so surprised and outraged? this is business doing what business does: maximizing profits. if there's no law saying they can't, they will. they are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing. if they weren't doing this, their board of directors should be fired. if you want to be mad at something, be mad at your representatives for not passing a law.

Re:I agree!

[hawguy]

As a Netflix customer who doesn't have to use AT&T, I strongly agree with your proposition.

If these fees stick, you can count on AT&T jumping on board too.

Between Netflix and Youtube

[PortHaven]

They're also the reason we're willing to pay $70/month for internet.

No.

[apcullen]

But it's not how the Internet, or telecommunication for that matter, has ever worked

It's not how you ever wanted the internet to have worked. There. Fixed that for you.

Re:Netflix pays for bandwidth and so do users..

[PortHaven]

Wait...when did they use ANY of that money to build thier infrastructure?

Re:Data is free

[PortHaven]

Damn straight, at $68/month it sure ain't free.

So you best be giving me the fucking content I want, lest I take a baseball bat to your fat executive head.

Honestly, this is the tactic they should take...

[PortHaven]

Netflix announces that Comcast customer's (and only Comcast customer's) rates will go up $2/month.

Someon is arrogant

[franblets]

And I don't think it is Netflix

Who's not paying enough?

[wangmaster]

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the ISPs issues.
1) Internet connectivity at the end user level is oversold. AT&T (comcast, timewarner, google fiber, [insert your ISP here]) does not charge in such a way that every single user can have 100% unfettered access to your bandwidth all simultaneously. It's just the way it works
2) Netflix may pay their ISP for their bandwidth usage.

Here's the disconnect. Netflix's ISP and [insert your consumer ISP here] do not share the same network. Thus at some point, the two ISPs have to cross some barrier. Now if all of [insert your consumer ISP here]'s customers are simultaneously connecting to Netflix at the exact same time for primetime hours, who's responsibility is it to ensure that the peering arrangement is fair? Does the consumer ISP need to pay to make sure that the peering relationship is such that all their users have the ability to stream from Netflix unfettered? Considering 1) above, is this fair to the ISP? They could do so, but to maintain their existing cost structure it'd likely mean that they may have a smaller pipe to another peer. Is it fair to users using those other peers or do they also have simply make sure ALL of their peers are able to fully pass 100% of traffic unfettered at peak times?

The simple answer is, if you expect the consumer ISP to allow full bandwidth to all of these sites, it's going to significantly raise the cost of bandwidth per end user. So we're complaining that consumer ISPs are demanding money from Netflix, but the alternative is to demand more money from the end user or eat the costs. We know eat the costs is never an option in the US market system :). So where's the money coming from? If the consumer ISP started charging people more for this, people bitch about being charged more rather than bitch about crappy Netflix.

Perhaps Netflix's tier 1 should pay for a larger peering pipe to the consumer ISP. But where's that money coming from? They're going to increase Netflix's rates, but even then, the consumer ISP would have to have the proper equipment to handle the larger peering pipe.

I don't really agree with the entirety of either Netflix or the consumer ISP (AT&Ts) arguments, but peering bandwidth has always been a balancing act, especially with multiple networks you have to peer with. This is why we have CDNs to begin with, and CDNs are paid for by the content producer, and they in turn either pay the consumer ISP to host their gear, or work with the consumer ISP to come up with a mutually beneficial decision. In some cases, the reduced bandwidth flowing through the peering reduces the ISPs costs that they can justify hosting the CDN equipment without asking for any money.

I do agree that it's wrong for a consumer ISP to purposefully lopside their peering arrangements to hurt a competitor, just like I agree that there's nothing wrong with the notion of paying an ISP to host a CDN appliance. Given our lobbying system, do you really think that net neutrality legislation will even begin to address the many nuanced aspects of this issue?

Re:Who's not paying enough?

[Todd Knarr]

This is what peering agreements handle, and they're already in place. Netflix pays it's Internet provider. That provider in turn has an agreement with AT&T wherein they pay each other for handling each other's traffic. The problem is that AT&T's mostly an end-user network, primarily clients who receive data with very few servers who send data. That means that at the peering point it's primarily the providers AT&T peers with who handle traffic for AT&T's network, with very little traffic bound for those providers handled by AT&T's network.

AT&T simply doesn't like the terms. When an AT&T customer requests data from Netflix, providers like Level 3 handles that traffic as it passes from Netflix to AT&T. AT&ampT has two choices. It can peer with Level 3 at the same exchange where Netflix connects and handle delivering the traffic across the AT&T network to their customers. This is usually relatively cheap, but it means AT&T has to build a larger backbone network. Alternatively, they can peer at points closer to their customers and let Level 3 handle the cross-country transit. This way AT&T avoids having to build a cross-country network to deliver data, but they don't like having to pay Level 3 for handling the transit traffic. They'd rather have Netflix picking up the bill for it. But why should Netflix have to pay to accommodate AT&T's decisions about how to build their network? This rightly ought to be a matter for AT&T to work out, deciding what the trade-off should be between the cost of buying cross-country transit capacity from someone else vs. building their own cross-country network.

Re:Who's not paying enough?

[wangmaster]

AT&Ts issue is that the ratio of inbound to outbound traffic between them and Netflix's ISP is significantly out of balance for AT&T to justify the costs of upgrading their network purely to accommodate Netflix (yes to be perfectly clear, it's to accommodate their own users' demand for netflix bandwidth) but once again, AT&T has not built out and priced their network to allow large unfettered access to a specific pipe all simultaneously and nor should a consumer ISP be required to do so. If you really wanted "dedicated" bandwidth, then consumers will need to be prepared to pay out their ass for it. So the question here is
a) is AT&T/[insert your ISP] doing enough to evenly distribute their bandwidth use across their peers.
b) if they are, who's responsibility it is to "pay" to fix the problem?

If AT&T is not doing their part to make sure their peering is properly balanced across all their points of peering and purposefully say starving Level 3 because of netflix, well yeah, that's a problem.

Peering agreements don't really handle this type of issue as they were traditionally built on cases where the ratio was much much closer to even. With large swaths of consumer ISPs that don't also host content, things have changed considerably.

Re:Who's not paying enough?

[Todd Knarr]

For A above, I don't think it's relevant. If AT&ampT thinks it's a better deal for them to unevenly distribute bandwidth, it's them that's paying for the traffic so I don't see any reason to second-guess them. As for B, if AT&T thinks the imbalance is a problem then AT&T should pay for the changes to their network. If their customers are simply requesting too much data, then AT&T needs to discuss rates with their customers. AT&T doesn't want to do that because they're scared if they raise rates they'll lose customers, but my thought is that if it's really that unprofitable to offer service at those rates then driving those customers to your competition is probably a good thing. Better it be your competitors selling $100 worth of service for $30 than you. That AT&T is afraid of driving customers away should be the big hint that they aren't losing money on the deal.

As an ISP customer I don't take flat rates for the cost savings. At eg. the rates Amazon charges for data transfer (and I'm assuming Amazon isn't losing money at those rates), I'd be getting off cheaper paying per gigabyte for bandwidth. I take flat rates to get a predictable, stable bill every month without having to worry that something weird will throw the bill out of kilter without warning.

Re:Who's not paying enough?

[Chirs]

Does the consumer ISP need to pay to make sure that the peering relationship is such that all their users have the ability to stream from Netflix unfettered? Considering 1) above, is this fair to the ISP? They could do so, but to maintain their existing cost structure it'd likely mean that they may have a smaller pipe to another peer. Is it fair to users using those other peers or do they also have simply make sure ALL of their peers are able to fully pass 100% of traffic unfettered at peak times?

Given that ISPs are essentially regulated monopolies, I'd suggest that they have a moral obligation to ensure that they have sufficient bandwidth to sites that are popular with their customers.

If large numbers of people want to connect to Netflix, it means that those people are not connecting to other places and the ISPs don't need as much bandwidth to those places.

Re:Who's not paying enough?

[HeckRuler]

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the ISPs issues.
1) Internet connectivity at the end user level is oversold.

THIS is how you start? Your sympathy derives from the fact that ISPs sold more than they could deliver? Holy shit dude, I don't think you're thinking straight.

It's just the way it works

That's just the way it DOESN'T WORK. Ok, look, once upon a time, people paid per minute because it was literally a phone line connection. Then the new kids came in, bypassed all that, and sold you a flat rate per month/2yearcontractwithateaserrate because the amount of data people could actually pull down was limited by technology. Bandwidth was a selling point, and people wanted their webpages to load faster, but by and far they didn't actually use all the connection they purchased. And so the ISPs oversold their lines. They marketed fat bandwidths still sold on a flat rate, and just hoped people didn't use it.
At the start, only a few geeks had the audacity to actually use the connection they paid for. And boy oh boy did the ISPs fight those dispicable few. As time goes on though, geek is becoming the new normal. Streaming videos is old-hat. Everybody does it. And it's called Netflix.

"It's just the way it works" is the cry of the old-busted business model. The gods of the free market shed no tears. Times change.

[netflix exists] ...who's responsibility is it to ensure that the peering arrangement is fair?

Some dudes at the ISPs contract division. They wheel and deel about these issues constantly. It's a contract. If there's an imbalance, pay up.

Meanwhile, it's Netflix's ISP's responsibility to make sure that other people on the internet (all of them) can connect to and get content from Netflix. That's what they're paid for.

It is consummer's ISP's responsibility to make sure that the consummers can connect to and get content from Netflix (and the rest of the Internet). That's what they're paid for.

Does the consumer ISP need to pay to make sure that the peering relationship is such that all their users have the ability to stream from Netflix unfettered?

YES. If you use more of the Internet than you supply, then you pay.
Imagine a world without peering. Everyone pays for everything they move. Comcast has no peering and must pay for EVERYTHING their user's request that isn't on their network. Likewise, Mediacom must pay to Comcast for everything that mediacom users request from sources in Comcasts's network.

Same damn thing happens even without a "peering relationship in such a way". But with more taxes.

Considering 1) above, is this fair to the ISP?

YES.

They could do so, but to maintain their existing cost structure it'd likely mean that they may have a smaller pipe to another peer. Is it fair to users using those other peers or do they also have simply make sure ALL of their peers are able to fully pass 100% of traffic unfettered at peak times?

I think if an ISP sells a service and it turns out that the service sucks ass because the ISP doesn't actually have the capability, then the ISP is at fault.
Oh, are you facing more usage? BUILD MORE PIPE.

if you expect the consumer ISP to allow full bandwidth to all of these sites,

I do. That's what I pay for.

it's going to significantly raise the cost of bandwidth per end user. So we're complaining that consumer ISPs are demanding money from Netflix, but the alternative is to demand more money from the end user or eat the costs

No shit. If more people use the Internet moreso than they do now, then the Internet will cost more money to maintain.
And if Comcast is ludicrously expensive, then that'll make a business opportunity for google fiber or another competitor to come in and eat their lunch. Comcast is trying to

We don't have capitalism

[PortHaven]

We have fascism, that is a close relationship between big industry and government, and a two class heirarchy.

That is what we have, it is not capitalism. If it were capitalism, then Comcast and AT&T wouldn't have received millions in subsidies to build out their networks. If it was capitalism, then anyone could start a wireless business. We do NOT have a capitalist system.

You Pay For What You Use

[Toad-san]

They're all missing the main point, the bottom line, the simple solution:

The customer (that's you, the Internet user) pays for what he uses. Bandwidth, total gigabytes, whatever. You wanna watch Netflix? No problem, Bunky: pay for it. ALL of it, including the bandwidth you gobble while viewing.

Your subscription to Netflix pays them for their procurement, storage and upload costs. Your subscription to AT&T (or whoever your ISP is) pays for your download bandwidth.

Simple. I don't know why they're making this so hard.

So what's that bill from AT&T for, then?

[Todd Knarr]

Every month, customers get a bill from AT&T for their Internet service. So, what exactly is that bill for, then, if it's not to pay AT&T for providing Internet service? That does, as I understand it, involve transferring data packets in both directions between my computer and Web sites so I can access the Internet. So, Mr. Cicconi, if what customers are paying you isn't in fact for providing that service, which is what you're saying when you say you're not being paid to let customers access Netflix (which is a Web site), then can you please provide a detailed breakdown of exactly what that bill is for and what service you are providing to your customers for each and every item for which you're billing them. Because if it's not for providing Internet service as advertised, I think every single one of your Internet service customers is entitled to a refund of everything they've paid for a service you haven't been providing them and possibly damages for your false advertising (claiming you're providing them with Internet service when you aren't).

And, Mr. Cicconi, if you claim you are providing your customers with Internet service and that's what that bill's for, please stop whining that you aren't being paid to provide Internet service when by your own admission you are being paid.

Re:So what's that bill from AT&T for, then?

[Shados]

Exactly. People and companies already pay from both side. You pay for incoming and outgoing, the other side pays for incoming and outgoing, and the providers who take that money then pay for peering agreements (if any, often they don't need to pay since those go both ways).

So paying for your outgoing pipe AND paying for the provider that delivers, when that provider is already getting money (or other benefits in lieu of money) for peering, is silly.

When it gets confusing is with CDNs and how those need to be handled...

Re:So what's that bill from AT&T for, then?

[Todd Knarr]

CDNs aren't complicated, they're just another Web site. Netflix hosts it's content on a CDN. Users request data from the CDN, the CDN serves it up, just like any other Web site. The CDN pays for it's connection through it's service providers. It's between Netflix and the CDN how Netflix pays the CDN for hosting it's files and the bandwidth the CDN had to pay for for that hosting. And the CDN may offer AT&T a deal: let the CDN install servers at AT&T's interconnect points and the CDN will handle the transit traffic from Netflix so AT&T doesn't have to worry about either building it's own transit network or paying someone else for transit. But that's an offer AT&T has to evaluate, deciding whether the CDN's terms and prices are a better deal than either of the alternatives.

I already do the same for my own personal Web site. I don't host it myself, I host it on Linode. Linode pays it's providers for bandwidth, AT&T customers request data from Linode instead of directly from me just as if it were Linode's web site, and AT&T doesn't know or care how me and Linode handle settling up for the costs Linode incurred. Linode's my CDN, but that makes no difference to AT&T and shouldn't.

Re:So what's that bill from AT&T for, then?

[Shados]

You touched the problem. When the CDN servers are inside the ISP's facilities. And often, the owner of the CDN servers is the content provider. So you have a content provider striking a deal with an ISP -directly- to have better service. Since its within the ISP's facilities, of course they're gonna have to pay something. So its gray area.

If CDN providers were their own, neutral, "dumb" entities in between, it wouldn't be an issue, but that's not always the case.

Confused.

[duke_cheetah2003]

As we all know, there is no free lunch, and there’s also no cost-free delivery of streaming movies. Someone has to pay that cost.

Aren't two people already paying the 'cost'? I pay for my internet connection and netflix pays their provider transit fees. I use EC2 as well, and you pay transit fees on all your data xfer. Isn't Netflix paying that too? And I'm paying my ISP.. so um, what's the problem here?

The first rule of PR war is be a hypocrite

[interkin3tic]

The first rule of PR warfare is accuse your enemy of whatever it is you are doing. If you're being greedy, accuse the other people of being greedy. If you're spending taxpayer money needlessly, accuse your political opponents of wasting tax dollars and then imply they're going to raise taxes. If you're committing a war of aggression, accuse the other side of being the aggressive instigators. If you burned down the Reichstag, say your opponents burned down the Reichstag.

The public, who wants a reason not to care, will take both of you saying the same thing, and will side with whoever it is they want to side with. They like believing the world is a just place, so they'll assume you're both assholes and ignore it.

Sadly, the reverse tactic does not work, we cannot accuse AT&T of only wanting what is fair.

Try net neutrality at home

[zerosomething]

So setup your home router to not give any priority to the data coming in and going out. Assume you have 6Mbps download service. Start up a Netflix HD movie for the kids, then setup that Windows Remote Desktop connection to the office so yo can work on that Access db. Then try to make a Skype phone call. Lets say you have training material you need to also look at from iTunes or YouTube. Hope you done also have VOIP and someone picks up the phone to call the mother-in-law.

Customer paying for bandwidth helps

[joe_frisch]

I know its unpopular but this situation is much improved if the customers paid by the GB downloaded. Then Comacst, ATT, etc would welcome new sources of bandwidth (like netflix or small startups) because they would get to sell more GB of data to the end users.

A monthly connect fee + a $/GB fee seems to solve a lot of this. It seems to me the root cause of the problem is that if customers don't pay for bandwidth, the ISPs have a financial motivation to ship less data not more.

Re:Customer paying for bandwidth helps

[duke_cheetah2003]

I'm good with metered internet, as long as the connection fee drops substantially. I don't pay a connection fee to AWS, I pay for the host and transit fees for data. So yeah, metered is fine, but that connect fee needs to be like... $5. Max. Plus equipment rental if you're dumb enough to go that route.

Re:Customer paying for bandwidth helps

[joe_frisch]

Yes, I think it only makes sense if the total company revenue is roughly constant after the change. Low data users would end up paying less, high users would pay more. It would even allow a bit more range in services offered.

It might make sense to have different data rates at different times. Then it would make sense for torrents to run at low-use times of day.

Deep Pockets

[FacePlant]

It is right and proper to extort money from parties with deep pockets.
This is just one facet of good old American Capitalism.

Of cousre they think that

[nurb432]

Mandated neutrality would cut into the potential blackmail AT&T can dish out.

Right.

[Lendrick]

it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road

It can be "their road" when they pay land owners for the lines through their property, and pay back the tax money that was given to them to subsidize its construction.

An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

Netflix is already paying a provider for bandwidth. You may or may not know this, Slashdot Libertarian, but as your bandwidth usage goes up, your bandwidth prices go up too. As such, Netflix is already paying extra money to run that 18 wheeler due to the wear and tear on that road. AT&T is trying to bill them extra because the truck is carrying a product that competes with them.

Is that their prerogative? No. They built their network on public dollars and on peoples' private property under the conditions that they would act as a utility. If they want to not act like a public utility, then they can come to me and pay me a fair price to run lines through my property (or better yet, since I don't use AT&T at all, how about I just cut their line? It's my property after all.)

Re:Right.

[amiga3D]

You can't do that. They bought your congress critters up so they could take and take and take but never have to give. This has nothing to with libertarian values whatsoever. AT&T are part of a cabal of corporations that rape the American public shamelessly by buying legislation to enable them to hold their market in thrall.

Oh, the Copper-Squatters club.

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

You know what's a nice deal if you can get it, Mr. Cicconi? Exclusive rights to use the copper wires connecting the residents in any particular district. AT&T and Comcast can start talking about nice deals when we see a free and open market for each physical media type in each region. Now go back to your copper-squatter's meetings and plot against your customers the way you do every day. Sorry Netflix beat you to the punch on the streaming licensing deal. Maybe if AT&T had believed in the future of broadband customers the way Netflix did, you wouldn't be embarassing yourself like this.

Re:Oh, the Copper-Squatters club.

[Average]

Straight letter-of-the-law, there's no exclusive right to lay copper wires anywhere in the US. No franchise agreements since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed are allowed to be exclusive. This theoretically supercedes state, local, and even HOA/apartment management policy.

Now, again, the reality on the ground is very different. Cities can make it very easy for a competitor to come in. Or they can make it almost impossible (not allowing access rights similar to the incumbents, demanding almost-instant universal coverage (while AT&T offers U-Verse on some blocks and 768/128 ADSL in poorer neighborhoods and calls it 'universal coverage')). But, that's on your local and state governments to get over (but, remember, Comcast and AT&T spend a lot of money to keep those roadblocks coming). The Feds opened up the market years ago.

Protection racket?

[dunkindave]

This sounds an awful lot like a protection racket:

"That's an awfully nice service you have there, it would be a shame if something bad happened to it!"

As I Told My Cable Provider

[CanHasDIY]

As I told my cable provider, "I am not paying you to spy on me, or limit what content I can access, or control how I access said conten. I am paying you for X amount of bandwidth over Y number of days, nothing more, nothing less. Let's keep this relationship professional, shall we?"

OK, so it didn't have all that much effect on my service, but I do feel a hell of a lot better throwing it in their faces every chance I get.

Insanity

[ecorona]

James Cicconi is a corrupt corporate elite if there ever was one. AT&T is trying to purchase T-Mobile. He's also claiming that consumers will be hurt and experience higher prices if the merge deal is blocked. This guy is head of lobbying efforts against net neutrality and for the T-Mobile merger. His points are quite easily debunked and if it weren't for the insane amounts of lobbying money being spent, even politicians would laugh at his face. Instead, politicians who agree and meet with AT&T should be voted out of office. I don't care if they're Democrats, Republicans, or any other party. It's insanity that anyone would even consider allowing AT&T to charge more for the type of content that is being served. As consumers, we need urgent protection from those that will keep the internet from progressing and fulfilling its potential. As consumers, we should pay for a gigabyte. If that gigabyte is a gigabyte of video or a gigabyte of a game download, it's none of their effing business. If I am a content provider, and I want to serve my video or games to consumers, why in the hell should I pay more because my 1s and 0s represent video? I will be the first mofo to volunteer to live on mars if net neutrality is destroyed. I firmly believe that this is the one issue that will wake the population up to kick the asses of those who, through lobbying, put the government in their pockets without giving a flying f what it will mean to society and technological progress for decades to come.

Corporate Rent-Sucker Double Think

[mutantSushi]

[Net Neutrality is] not how the Internet, or telecommunication for that matter, has ever worked,' writes AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of Legislative Affairs, James Cicconi.

Last I checked, Netflix has never paid such fees before, nor has anybody else. I.e. net neutrality has being how it has always worked. This latest racket targetting Netflix happened just months after an FCC Net Neutrality rule was over-turned by courts on a technicality. I.e. said rule was in force previously, and ISPs were following said rule. Fuck these rent-sucking vampires. Does this sort of thing happen in non-US jurisiction at all? Or is this just the US' latest gift to the world after software patents?

Re:Corporate Rent-Sucker Double Think

[mutantSushi]

Well hopefully Brazil is investing in a good air-defense SAM network as well...

Government ties

[ecorona]

Games Cicconi used to work in the white house. He is the dude they send over to promise campaign funds in exchange for getting government policy that suits AT&T's agenda. The fight of Net Neutrality is going to be the ultimate showdown between the people and lobbying efforts from the ultra wealthy. Who really wields more power in this country? Does choosing representatives really make a difference? Will the allure of $$$ always corrupt those we put in charge, no matter who we choose?

I can see why parent is marked insightful...

[tlambert]

I can see why parent is marked insightful... the more packets coming through a router, the more friction there is on the wires and other electronic components, the faster things wear out.

AT&T probably has an entire team of people who go around measuring wear and tear on routers and wiring using calipers.

Enjoy 8/month streaming while you can

[shrove]

Cable cutting and such is a temporary blip in the chart of increasing cable cost. You will pay for everything and "They" will know everything you watch all the time.

Enough People don't care enough to do anything about it.

I'm sick of these stupid analogies...

[brxndxn]

There is no way to morally or technically side with the ISPs on this one. It is a revenue grab - simple as that. These fucking horrible companies - mainly AT&T and Verizon - have been double and triple charging customers for data on the cell phone side and now they are trying to bring it to the wired side. For example, they charge customers for text messages differently than voice calls. They charge customers for a metered amount of data accessed through their cellphones and then another set of metered charges for accessing via tethering. It's bullshit. It's the same fucking data. It's encapsulated data packets..
Don't forget that the US has some pretty shitty home Internet connection speeds compared to our standing in the world as a 'technology leader.' Don't forget that the ISPs in the US have received hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars over the years to upgrade their networks. Don't forget that these companies are 'entitled' to your own property to run their data lines. Also, don't forget that these ISPs have relatively zero competition.
Also, do not forget that these ISPs run competing media providing entities. They would prefer to control your access to content - force you to watch commercials or pay monthly fees for channels - or force you to pay for 10 channels when you only watch one. When these companies are given an inch, they take a mile.
I write to my lawmakers telling them we need to look at gutting these companies - breaking them up and separating their media companies from the data providing part. Also, lawmakers need to understand that all data on the Internet is broken into packets. You can always tell who paid for the packets. In this case, AT&T and Verizon are trying to say they want more than the sending and receiving entities to pay for the packets - they want to charge extra for these packets to go in and out of their networks. Once that happens, they will just create more routes and more tolls.
I don't believe AT&T or Verizon deserve to exist as they currently do - they are putting the US at a huge disadvantage. Also, their CEOs are awful human beings.

Pot, Meet Kettle

[Cantankerous Cur]

And AT&T believes we should eternally pay the same rates for their slow/overpriced/unreliable service when they're not bothering to upgrade the infrastructure.

We're dealing with at least one delusion here.

AT&T should not expect Netflix to pay...

[jonwil]

Netflix already pays its upstream providers. AT&T should be asking THEM to pay when they deliver all that data into AT&Ts data networks.

No Free Lunch

[PPH]

Someone has to pay to use the public right of way to run their fiber optics.

but it *is* a net neutrality issue

[Chirs]

Given that they're specifically asking *Netflix* to pay extra. That's not just a peering issue, that's a type of traffic issue, which makes it a Net Neutrality issue.

It would be a straight peering/transit issue if the Tier-1 ISPs just told Cogent "your traffic isn't balanced, pay for the imbalance" without bringing up what type of traffic it was. In that case Cogent could pay the extra and then charge Netflix more for upstream. Netflix would then pass the costs on to their customers or would find a new ISP.

Re:but it *is* a net neutrality issue

[schnell]

In the old, old days (get off my lawn!) if you were a small ISP or web host you would just factor into your cost of doing business that you would buy transit from a Tier 1 ISP (MCI, UUNet, Sprint, AGIS[!]) who would deliver all your traffic to the rest of the Internet.

If you were cheap, you'd buy transit from a Tier 2 or Tier 3 provider who did the same thing - your customers would suffer longer latency but you'd save money. Those Tier 2/3 ISPs were paying the Tier 1s, et cetera, and factored that into their own costs.The Tier 1 ISPs recouped their network investment in part by the fees they collected from direct customers and indirect customers under those Tier 2/3 ISPs. When you moved up in the world, you bought transit from multiple Tier 1 ISPs to cut out the middlemen and get your traffic to the rest of the Internet faster.

Cogent has been trying forever to "jump the line" and get Tier 1 free peering, and it hasn't worked out so well for them. You either peer settlement-free (truly "peer") or you don't, and pay for it. There's no option, unfortunately, for differential payment. (BGP is BGP, and it would take a lot of work to try to DiffServ or partially bill for that.)

Netflix is suffering from the same desire Cogent and legions of Tier 2/3 ISPs have always had - to get free peering. It ain't gonna happen, but the only difference is that Netflix is trying to make this a Net Neutrality argument given their importance in the content consumption ecosystem. I'm not saying they're wrong, but it is a well worn argument that runs counter to the history of the Internet.

Re:but it *is* a net neutrality issue

[laird]

They're not asking Netflix to pay anything for transit that Netflix is buying through Cogent - they paid Cogent for that bandwidth.

AT&T is an ISP, who delivers bandwidth to customers. ISPs do peering arrangements with other ISPs because they exchange data with each other roughly equally, and it make more sense to exchange bi-directional traffic for free than to waste time and money billing each other for charges that would roughly cancel each other out.

Netflix is asking for a peering arrangement with AT&T. Netflix isn't an ISP, they are a content provider. Content providers pay their ISPs for transit to push data into the internet for delivery to consumers. And in particular, Netflix doesn't exchange balanced traffic with AT&T - they push a lot of traffic into AT&T's network, and don't receive any traffic, so it's a completely one-sided traffic flow. And that you pay for.

It's not an issue of Net Neutrality. Any content provider who wants bandwidth from an ISP pays for it. And there's no indication that AT&T is differentiating between Netflix' traffic and anyone else's, which is what Net Neutrality is about. If anything, Netflix is demanding preferential treatment over other content providers (who pay for bandwidth, and don't have peering arrangements), and they're trying to use their market power to push AT&T into giving them preferential treatment. Which is exactly the OPPOSITE of Net Neutrality.

Netflix isn't stupid - they know all this quite well. So Netflix wanting to peer with AT&T and talking about Net Neutrality is a bunch of BS hand-waving trying to trick non-technical people into complaining about AT&T, generating some faked-up bad PR to pressure AT&T to sell bandwidth to Netflix cheaper.

Re:but it *is* a net neutrality issue

[laird]

"Google" isn't a typical content company - in particular, they receive tons of incoming traffic, so their traffic is relatively balanced, not just pumping data out, which is what most content companies do, so they actually can be peers with ISPs. And they operate a high performance global network, so they can very easy connect to any major ISP via a simple connection at any major interconnect/peering point. And they also give racks of servers to ISPs to serve Youtube content (which isn't balanced) cached locally, which (1) Google pays for and (2) it saves the ISPs tons of transit costs. There's a pretty good description at http://blogs.broughturner.com/... .

Netflix, on the other hand, doesn't accept much incoming traffic, and isn't offering to fully cover the costs of building a delivery infrastructure. They're just asking to push out traffic through asymmetric connections completely in their favor.

not just balance

[Chirs]

Imagine if Netflix just tweaked their client software to send as much data upstream as it downloaded. Their network would then just drop the upstream packets on the floor.

At that point the traffic would be balanced, but I'm pretty sure the ISPs wouldn't be any happier...

I have no problem with metered internet

[Chirs]

Internet should be billed like my electricity bill--a certain fixed-cost amount per month to cover the costs of being a subscriber, and a reasonable cost-per-GB.

This is a closer fit to the real cost model of an ISP.

The problem is that the ISPs see metered billing as a cash cow and want to charge stupidly high amounts per GB.

Right of Way

[zenasprime]

Remove the Right of Way all these douchebags rely on for their business and lets see just how well they get along with this "no free lunch" bullshit.

not true

[Chirs]

There's nothing stopping ISPs from doing per-subscriber traffic shaping in a traffic-agnostic way. Thus, your neighbours could all be watching netflix and it would have ZERO impact on your Vimeo stream.

ha ha

[bbulkow]

I think I'm paying my ISP to deliver bits to me. That's who is paying - ME. If I'm not supposed to be paying --- LET ME KNOW!

so then netflix changes their client...

[Chirs]

So you're suggesting that if Netflix modified their client to send as much data back to Netflix as Netflix sends to them that the ISPs would be happier?

Somehow, I don't think so given that ISPs typically have crappy upstream bandwidth to begin with.

no control over speed

[Chirs]

I thought of this as well, but I figured it would probably be unworkable since people's home connections don't really have reliable performance, while AWS should have pretty good control over their bandwidth.

we already do

[Chirs]

In the end, I pay both Netflix and my ISP. Both of them (and any transit in the middle) are making a profit from that already.

Net neutrality doesn't mean no traffic shaping

[Chirs]

It just means that the ISPs shouldn't be doing traffic shaping by type across multiple users.

So if you want to watch a movie on Netflix, and I want to rsync my hard drive across the country, and someone else wants to something else, our packets should be treated equally based on how much bandwidth we've paid for.

I have no problem if you as a subscriber want to assign relative priorities to your packets. But those priorities shouldn't affect how *your* packets are treated relative to *my* packets.

Re: Customer paying for bandwidth helps roxy

[joe_frisch]

This is the same sort of problem we have with gas stations - how do you know you got 10 gallons, not 9.5, in a business with very small margins. Spot checks by an independent agency and very large fines would help. Maybe some company will make a router that is certified and will keep track. If you think you are being ripped off ,you can use one and find out - again this needs to be paired with large fines.

Reality

[TheSync]

1) In telecom [telegraph, telex, telephone] "sender pays" has been the rules on settlements. Just like a sender pays to put a stamp on a letter. Even when a customer of a CLEC 1 initiates a call to another CLEC 2 through an ILEC, CLEC 1 pays ILEC, ILEC pays CLEC 2. This is why there were many of these free teleconference systems, they are run by CLECs trying to get settlements by having more people call them long distance.

2) There was a brief period of the Internet where "no one paid" for the Internet because of government support, and the result was a typical tragedy of the commons - horrible congestion (the 56K NSFNet). Eventually the NSFNet had to classify traffic into high-priority terminal sessions and lower priority traffic like FTP.

3) The CIX came along to interconnect large commercial networks. These networks were generally exchanging equal amounts of traffic. Once you bought into CIX, you peered without settlements.

No-Pay peering with others that exchange equal amount of traffic with you in both directions makes technological sense due to symmetric bandwidth capacities of interfaces.

For example, a network service provider's 100 Mbps FDDI connection at the MAE-EAST provides 100 Mbps in both directions. It doesn't make sense to peer with someone who sending you 100 Mbps and only receiving 1 Mbps of your traffic.

Peering and/or settlement agreements between networks have evolved over time to balance the real-world business situation. For example, you might not want to charge as much to a customer that runs a huge, dependable software archive that your other customers benefit from. Similarly, today's cable providers probably should make Netflix pay less, but Netflix should still pay something.

I feel this is something the market should work out.

In the meantime, we need to figure out how to enhance competition in the local ISP market. A Federal law to make local monopoly franchises granted by government illegal would be a good start...

Re:Reality

[Average]

"A Federal law to make local monopoly franchises granted by government illegal would be a good start...".

Congress did that. In 1996. There is no local monopoly franchise in your local community. There is, de facto, an economic monopoly/weak duopoly. And in many cases, local governments are actively hostile to competition (because they make a lot from franchise fees from the incumbents and don't want prices to fall). But, what you're asking for? Happened. Is old enough to graduate high school this year.

He is right, no free lunch

[chrismcb]

He is correct, there is no free lunch. But I pay a LOT of money to download a bunch of stuff. I should get to choose where I download it from. If I want to use it all on netflix I should be able to, if I want to spread it around some for google, some for wiki, some for slashdot, I should be able to... But it sure ain't free.

Wrong approach.

[Karmashock]

Netflix shouldn't even be talking to these people. Literally not even answering the phone when they call.

Rather... Netflix should keep their customers and media informed of bandwidth throttling and then let those customers and the politicians terrify the ISPs into doing their jobs.

Understand, I don't like using the politicians to push companies around. Its using one evil against another.

That said, the ISPs have contrived a monopoly for themselves. There is but one phone company in most communities and one cable company.

The reason for this is largely down to leases on poles and tunnels that the actual wires run through. The ISPs have set up a system for leasing this space that really no one else can afford or process the paper work to buy. As a result, they have no competition throughout most of the country.

Very well... then they complain when they don't have enough bandwidth to process all the customers they forced to use their wires and no one else's wires.

THAT is a problem.

They either accept net neutrality OR they we reexamine all these deals they've cut with local municipalities and states and counties to find the details that ultimately sustain their monopolies.

no gigabit speed till Google shows, eh at&t?

[Dan667]

reading crap like this makes more sense why at&t is not taking care of their Customers and upgrading their network. They are too worried about screwing people instead of providing their service.

This guy's a complete fucking asshat.

[Chas]

These idiots (and just about every other major provider) has taken incentives from the government to grow their broadband networks.
What've we gotten out of it?

Higher bills.
Bandwidth caps.
If we're lucky, single-digit megabit (or less) connections being defined as "broadband".
The connectivity providers trying to shake down content providers.
And a bunch of cock-mongering suits voting themselves massive bonuses and pay raises with the money that was supposed to be used to build/expand/improve their network infrastructure.

And how many thousands or millions of subscribers are paying these people how many millions a year for this shoddy, ass-tastic service?
And they can't even do it right.

It's not as if Netflix is bombarding their network with spam or other unwanted traffic.
ALL traffic from Netflix is at the request of the conectivity providers' customers.

So why the hell are they willingly trying to cripple or shake down these content providers? THAT IS NOT WHAT WE ARE PAYING THEM FOR!

Re:Blu-ray By Mail

[BronsCon]

SuperHD. If you're on an ISP that wishes to provide it (e.g. by peering with Netflix or installing Netflix cache hardware).

not a tier 1? Who is Cogent buying from?

[raymorris]

> That constrains the bandwidth between Cogent and the Tier 1s (which Cogent is definitely not).

Some sources disagree. Who is Cogent buying transit from or paying settlements to? Do you have a source for that?

Of course many people would say that Cogent isn't top quality, but that has little or nothing to do with their tier. Tier 3 ISPs buy transit from tier 2 ISPs. Tier 2s buy transit from tier 1 ISPs. Tier 1 providers buy from nobody. As far as I know, Cogent doesn't buy transit from anyone. (Modulo the same types of location-specific deals ALL tier 1 providers have with each other.)

Level3 has the right alternative - bit/miles

[raymorris]

A user in California wants to download a video hosted in Texas. Both the user's ISP and and the hosting company have fiber lines from Texas to California. Whose lines carry the video across the country? Alternatively, maybe only one company has spent billions building a nationwide network. Whichever company carries the bits across the country is the doing most of the work. The other company should either balance that by carrying half of the traffic cross-country on its network, or kick in a few dollars to help cover the cost. That's Level3's new approach, and it makes a lot of sense.

Which DIRECTION the traffic is flowing really doesn't make any difference. The cost is in carrying the traffic, so Cogent should expect settlement-free peering if and only if they invest in a network that carries their share of the traffic, if the bit-miles are equal.

o

Other way around

[negge]

In Finland it's the other way around - it's much cheaper to call mobile phones than landlines. The fact that almost no one has a landline anymore makes it moot though.

Re:Other way around

[Trepidity]

To complicate things more, it looks like it might depend on whether you're calling from a mobile or landline. If you call from a landline, I think calling mobiles is still (much) more expensive. You can see that in the Skype rates, for example, because Skype originates its calls from landlines: Calling Finnish landlines from Skype is 0.04 EUR/min, while calling Finnish mobiles from Skype is 0.19 EUR/min (!).

Where is Comcast actually overcapacity?

[swb]

I believe that they're all *actually* oversold, but where exactly is Comcast's hard resource bottleneck?

Is it in whatever my neighborhood segment is (the block of end-user connections that terminate in a neighborhood-level fiber distribution node)? How many Mhz is my entire neighborhood allocated in the coax cabling that runs down the alley? Is it within my municipality (in between nodes and their upstream "super nodes")? Between "super nodes" and the metro-area central office(s)? Upstream from that?

I can see the physical limits of the coax -- that only has so many Mhz to allocate to TV channels, etc. Gimmicks like switched digital would indicate that this is real, that they already face allocation issues trying to deliver a hundred plus HDTV channels plus an equal number of SD channels, plus carry a lot of data traffic.

Internode traffic seems less limited; it's all their fiber and presumably when installing it they put it in enough to move tens of GBits of data even if its deliberately not all lit. Is it just at the peering edges or where exactly are they hard-constrained?

Simple explanation re metered billing

[ThatsNotPudding]

Ironically, a lot of US customers are vehemently against metered Internet,

Because we US consumers know innately if such a billing method were come to pass, the 'minimum balance due' each month - even if no device was even hooked up - would be within 90-95% of our current three-figure cable bill.

(it is stupid that beta requires me to type a new

[CauseBy]

That analogy isn't right either. You can charge more for an 18 wheeler than a 4 wheeler, and maybe you can charge more for a 20 ton vehicle than an 18 ton vehicle, but you can't charge more for an 18-wheeler 20-ton vehicle built by Mack versus an 18-wheeler 20-ton vehicle built by a competitor.

They're both trucks. They both carry the same thing, you should charge the same.

Netflix and its competitors all use IP packets. They all carry the same thing, binary digits, so you should charge the same thing. If someone sends more digits, then you can charge them more, but you can't charge more based on what order the digits are in (meaning, in the order of a movie instead of the order of a web page).

beta sucks

[CauseBy]

"Sorry Charlie, but you can't do that."

Alas. If only.

AT&T being dumb. Again.

[LinuxLuver]

If there was ever any doubt, we now know AT&T doesn't understand the Internet.... and spent want to. Customers pay to be connected. End of story. Apparently that's too complicated for AT&T.

It ain't Netflix that is arrogant...

[ibsteve2u]

It is AT&T that is "arrogant".

Comments such as this one make it plain that AT&T believes that they've bought enough members of Congress and enough of the FCC to be able to safely ignore those famous "free market" principles which would otherwise supposedly protect the American consumer from monopolistic practices - e.g., sending Netflix to the bottom of the priority stack on AT&T-controlled comm links.

The greatest arrogance lies in the fact that AT&T believes that they can publicly reveal - even boast of - the extent of the corruption that they've fostered without repercussion.

Time for Google to push a mass movement

[yenic]

I thought that net neutrality was going to be the status quo but it seems the tide has turned. Companies like Google are in big danger with this and should start a 'grassroots' resistance campaign as with SOPA. This type of stuff isn't probably going to cost the consumer more cash, just webservice companies.

We're going to get a lot less choices online. But perhaps the big boys like Google and Netflix prefer it this way, keeps competition out as well.

Re:It's not arrogant, it's correct - Maybe

[wolja]

And yet, AT&T wants more money because they think they have the right to charge Netflix more to pass through their tollbooth.

- it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road. On a road you can charge different rates for different types of vehicles, this is the same situation. An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

See, I even used an appropriate car analogy.

Talk about mixing your analogies.
Every single movie streamed from Netflix is paid for twice already.
Once to the customers IP and once by Netflix for domain availability and uploads.

So what you're saying is that providers need to e charged twice to provide something once. Your road analogy falls down there.

At a wild guess AT&T and the others are more analogous to Robber Barons who chrge for use of the Tollgate then steal your shit just down the road.

Re:Peering issue with both sides spinning it

[mellon]

Yup. BTW, I found it ironic that you mentioned enforcing differentiated service for users as a cost. I agree that it's a cost, but for some reason ISPs seem to think of it as a profit center.

AT&T wants to double and triple dip

[Baker65Baker]

We (the taxpayers) already paid for all their infrastructure upgrades and they are just sitting on the money not upgrading. Google fiber is showing that they are liars, it can be done and still make a profit. If they upgraded their infrastructure with the money we gave them they would have no problem with this traffic but they want to double and tripple dip.