Slashdot Mirror
How 'Fast Lanes' Will Change the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Net neutrality has been looking pretty shaky in recent months. Netflix has started paying Comcast and Verizon directly and the FCC is saying that's perfectly fine. We may be witnessing a fundamental change in the nature of the internet. Timothy B. Lee at Vox explains how all of this works, and what it means for the future of the web. Quoting: '[S]ome of the largest ISPs now seem to view declining network performance not as a technical problem to be solved so much as a source of leverage in business negotiations. Another reason is that regulating interconnection is much more complex than a "classic" network neutrality rule. When all of an ISP's traffic comes through one cable, it's not too hard to write a rule requiring that the packets in that cable be treated equally. But it's harder to write a rule governing when and how ISPs must interconnect. Someone needs to pay for the cost of these connections, and the fairest way to split the costs depends on many subtle factors, including geography, traffic patterns, and the relative size of the interconnecting networks. A poorly written interconnection rule could create a lot of work for lawyers without actually preventing abusive practices.'"
Provider pays to provide information, customer pays ISP for access to internet and then has to pay a per view fee to view content at reasonable speeds. So long as there's money to be extracted, the consumer will be squeezed.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Break up the big providers to ensure meaningful competition. The end consumers wouldn't tolerate ISP's that deliberately provide crappy service if they weren't forced to because most areas only have one broadband provider.
"A poorly written interconnection rule could create a lot of work for lawyers without actually preventing abusive practices" Like they care... if it generates profits (and it will or will appear it will) they will do it... this is not about best use of technology or even fighting piracy or reducing latency... this is just about money and control.
http://www.quasarcr.com/
Whatever happens it will be constructed so that lawyers get their danegeld. And a non-trivial amount.
Every carriage agreement will require verifiable traffic levels and performance all of this will have to have minutly agreed upon measurement processes.
The whole notion is very B-Ark worthy. And will result in a lot of work for the providers.
Someone actually pointed out something I've been saying for a while. My point was that traffic shaping rules don't make any sense if an ISP peers with preferred providers of services. Say they want to provide quality VoIP. They don't need to shape competitors packets, they just need to keep their VoIP traffic off congested links. Duh! Net neutrality rules wouldn't have covered peering.
So now the government is talking about regulating peering. I feared this would happen once someone woke up to how the Internet actually works. I really don't see how any good can come of this. As I've stated previously, there was an article YEARS ago that pointed out that Yahoo! only paid for half of their bandwidth requirements. They had their own national network that they would deliver content directly to ISP's. It was a win-win because the traffic would stay off the transit links of both Yahoo! and the ISP's. They were connecting content to eyeballs. It wasn't traditional settlement-free peering, but it was a good thing. Nothing wrong with it. Peering is good. Why should the government get involved with this?
As far as Netflix is concerned, they painted themselves into a corner. They used a CDN (Cogent) that had settlement-free peering with many networks. Once Netflix started sending their traffic over those links it broke the settlement-free agreement. Netflix might have been in a better position if they didn't use a CDN and all their traffic went over transit. Then make agreements directly with the large ISP's that didn't involve existing peering ports.
I would expect Lawrence Lessig's MAYDAY SuperPAC could solve this.
As far as I can see, it aims to set up congressmen who will take money out of governing, and I bet it will also wipe out FCC corruption and reset pointers to net neutrality as a consequence of where I expect it will go.
https://mayone.us/
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/...
as long as the "slow" lane is "fast enough".
That's the problem - they are not creating any "fast lanes". They are artificially creating slow lanes to get more money. It's like if the state put down continuous rumble strips on all right hand lanes, and charged you extra for the privilege of driving in the left hand lane.
If nobody buys the fast lanes, then Internet will be neutral. So long as they don't get to block/redirect/attack traffic in the slow lane indiscriminately.
Learn to love Alaska
Sure, until they make the "slow" lane ever slower. Eventually everyone's paying extra for "fast" which started off as regular.
More regulations will just end up causing more exploitable loopholes. If someone will eat their lunch if they provide crappy service, they'll fix things sharpish.
There will always be some sort of peer-to-peer sharing mechanism. Interconnect or peering agreements have no power over me pirating the content. You do not want to play fair? You want to chose when and how I can consume content I paid for? You want to get money from three different directions and still give me crappy service? Then the only one earning my money will be the local ISP (grudgingly because I have no choice), and my VPN provider. If I have a direct route to give to the artist(s) involved I will do that. For the most part I do not even consume their content. I do not watch TV, I rarely watch a movie. I do listen to quite a bit of music and play some games, but I lean further towards truly independent and local more and more. Hopefully all will do the same until their back is broken.
Silence is a state of mime.
And then you create ultrafast lanes!
It's also important to keep the pressure on via the official channels, even if we're skeptical whether it will work. Documenting public sentiment and the government's consideration (or lack thereof) is a critical step on the path to better government. Please sign the net neutrality petition and reply to the FCC request for comments, and promote them on your favorite social networks.
The petition is almost up to half the needed signatures in about one week, but the signature rate has been slowing down with the weekend approaching as peoples thoughts turn to beer and barbecue. Please help give it a boost, and/or light it up again Monday or Tuesday, to keep the momentum going during the more active weekdays.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
As long as the "slow lane" still allows me my full bandwidth, I see no issues. The only difference is latency, but closeness to reduce latency comes at a price of the party that needs it. A game server may be willing to pay a premium to be closer and have fewer hops, but Netflix may not care about latency as long as their bandwidth is unfettered.
If the "slow lane" starts affecting my bandwidth, then the ISP is not holding up their end of the bargin. They must provide me uncongested access to all of their interconnects. Once the packet leaves my ISP's network, my ISP has no more control and therefore, cannot be directly responsible anymore. Although, they could be indirectly responsible, like making sure they use a quality transit provider or not using overloaded peers to get cheaper routes.
the problem is, they won't be selling the fast lanes to consumers, they'll be selling them to providers. like netflix and youtube. so prices will continue to go up for services, and the consumers (us) won't connect the dots.
as long as the "slow" lane is "fast enough".
No - just, no. That gives them the excuse to keep the paying customers at ~30mb/sec or so on a semi-permanent basis, while moneybagged interests could get massive boosts - paid for with government incentive funds. Meanwhile, the rural folks would still be borked back to dial-up or satellite.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I'm shocked... large ISPs (e.g. Comcast) would never deliberately load links to point of saturation in a bid to leverage access to millions of captive eyeballs.
In all seriousness TFA misses the larger point. It is impossible and foolish to even try and legislatively correct distortions arising from provider and content monopolies. The only viable solution is to deny monopoly status and break up large providers into little byte sized bits.
If only you are able to keep everyone from getting too fat then the problem solves itself as normal market forces keep the BS in check.
This is the part where APK starts posting how butt-hurt he is that everyone with an IQ over sixty can readily see he's just shilling. His product may or may not be malware; his approach to marketing by spamming /. is a sign - draw your own conclusions.
Call me the neckbeard prime but traffic shaping doesnt bother me much as its based on the notion that internet = future of infotainment.
movies: check them out, free, from my local library these days. And much better quality too (you get more independent films with better plot and writing than the crap hollyoaks delivers.)
music: If i like a song and can support the artist, Ill buy it from their site. I dont scrape along with a jolly roger screwing over every artist I see. Again, the library is your friend for some stuff.
e-books: never bought into this racket. Ill check it out from the library, read it at my own leisure, and not worry about the risk that my rented copy will be reposessed wirelessly without notice. Books i enjoy will be bought used from the local bookstore.
I use IRC, and my firefox is so incapable of showing advertisements its like a time machine to 1989. Hell, my hosts file wont even route most of it.
Also from most of the slashdot community: fuck your social networks.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is equivalent of showing a bad movie on an HD TV and a good movie on an old CRT. The audience will still prefer the good movie, and if you asked them about the picture quality most wouldn't have noticed.
Frozen grossed one billion dollars in first run theatrical release. Blu-Ray and CD audio sales have been strong.
If you can forgive the pun, I think it's long past time the geek let go of the notion that audio and video quality doesn't matter to the home audience.
This is the part where APK starts posting how butt-hurt he is that everyone with an IQ over sixty can readily see he's just shilling. His product may or may not be malware; his approach to marketing by spamming /. is a sign - draw your own conclusions.
That is right... they are making money with scarcity, the service will not improve
http://www.quasarcr.com/
The ISPs aren't creating "slow lanes." They're simply refusing to widen the freeway until they're paid to do so. It's like a multiple-item auction seller who, in order to increase the auction price, refuses to make more items available in the auction.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Provider pays to provide information, customer pays ISP for access to internet and then has to pay a per view fee to view content at reasonable speeds. So long as there's money to be extracted, the consumer will be squeezed.
This buys into the framing of the argument pushed by the ISPs. The content providers were already paying for their own connection to the internet. Now if content providers want to provide fast connections to their customers, then they not only have to pay their own ISP, but they also need to send money to every other ISP in the world. This fundamentally changes the structure of the market.
And you, as a customer, get a crappy connection to the internet unless the content providers pay. That's true regardless of what you pay your ISP for their advertised bandwidth.
If this goes too far, customers will eventually start suing their ISPs for false advertising. ISP customers are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, not a certain amount of bandwidth IF the content providers also pay.
I realize that this is not a popular subject and, to be honest, not one I'm 100% in love with either but it would solve a lot of problems -- and keep network neutrality as a top priority while providing for competition.
Simply (or not so simply) nationalize all of the copper, fiber, other wires that make up the internet today including all interconnects - everything needed for the internet to be the internet. Write in a complete HANDS-OFF policy (no piping the internet into the NSA's back room and then piping it back out) and figure out what each connection should be worth to a) expand and upgrade the system so that everyone, even those in rural areas, could have good speed (10mb/s in both directions minimum) and b) maintain what's already in the ground/on the poles.
Once you have the above number, allow anyone with the technical ability and resources to start an ISP in a region and then they can compete on price, quality, and service. Everyone would already know that each connection will cost $XX.xx because that's what the government collects; it is the +$YY.yy for the final price that would be where things get interesting. Some regions would still have higher speeds initially, but with enough people working on upgrading the system (the new New Deal perhaps?) then speed and availability will come.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
>Netflix has started paying Comcast and Verizon directly and the FCC is saying that's perfectly fine.
Yes, it's completely fine that Netflix now pays Comcast for direct access to their network, rather than continuing to pay Cogent for transit when Cogent couldn't handle the traffic.
Of course if you only read about this on the perpetually outraged SlashDot, you might have been seriously misled regarding the situation. I know I was.
If no providers buy the fast lane, then no harm will come to users or the provider's services.
Learn to love Alaska
The ISPs aren't creating "slow lanes." They're simply refusing to widen the freeway until they're paid to do so.
Funny. Customers pay their ISPs for an advertised bandwidth. Content providers also pay ISPs for advertised bandwidth. Yet, ISPs are still able to turn up the speed if content providers pay them extra. It sounds like ISPs are purposefully not living up to their advertising in order to extort money from people who aren't their customers.
They must provide me uncongested access to all of their interconnects.
No they don't. It all depends on your contract. If you have residential internet service they are under no obligation to provide you any service at all. Granted you could dump their service if it were bad enough. If you want guaranteed uncongested access to all their interconnects you'd need that stated in your contract. Those are generally considered "Business lines" and are your classic T1s, T3s, etc... and even those can have issues. But you have your contract to back you up should you have a problem.
Break up the big providers to ensure meaningful competition. The end consumers wouldn't tolerate ISP's that deliberately provide crappy service if they weren't forced to because most areas only have one broadband provider.
That's not a solution. That's like mowing the lawn; they'd just come back.
Proof: they started out small. That didn't stop things from getting where they are now.
The solution is change the rules of their business. How? By getting the FCC to regulate them as Title II Common Carriers, as they should have in the first place. Then almost all of these problems simply disappear overnight.
Common Carriers are not allowed to discriminate based on content (in fact -- wonder of wonders -- they are not even allowed to access that content to tell what it is). They are forced to charge a fair price while making a "reasonable" profit. Etc.
It's a far better situation all the way around.
Do that FIRST. Then worry about whether they need to be broken up, which doesn't address the main problem.
yes but if you're a provider trying to compete against another company the fast lane might be a good value if it gets you a leg up. of course they'll buy.
Tell ya what - you want to create a new standard? Fine. Get an RFC going. Until then, stop trying to break the internet for your own profit.
the slow lanes are a made up of a small minority of people who cut out cable TV and demand netflix to be crystal clear
most cable companies can't even send regular TV in full HD on every channel. even in NYC full HD is only on a few channels. some supposedly HD channels look worse than SD
most people like me don't care. cartoons look fine on netflix and that's good enough for me.
i'll take the current cheap service over a more expensive guaranteed speed that a minority demand. ISP's need to make a higher paid tier since only business accounts get guaranteed speed. the people ranting about this on the internet want the same thing as current cable TV super bundles instead in a different form. they want someone else to pay for their top tier service
CDN's and direct peering have been around for many years. networking best practices say to make as direct a path with less hops as possible.
and yet a few bloggers decided the internet needs to work the opposite way, with large content providers sending their content on longer routes through different networks just to comply with someone's idea of a fair internet
most people like me don't care. cartoons look fine on netflix and that's good enough for me.
i'll take the current cheap service over a more expensive guaranteed speed that a minority demand
The way this works is that they will degrade your current cheap service, and call the undegraded service a "fast lane". So you may not be able to watch your cartoons anymore, because your internet service will be slowed down.
Do you find that acceptable?
A very long time ago HowStuffWorks had an article I took as filler: http://computer.howstuffworks.... and even snubbed the thought of paying to view what one wants me to see, but it may be upon us. At which point I'll ignore anybody who request a credit card to participate pretty much what I do now.
Damnedest thing I found this with: a penny a page to view site:\howstuffwork
The \ was an accident and required.
THE SYSTEM working exactly as designed - ex
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You mean like in Georgia on I-85.
Netflix bought the fast lane. What do you suppose a would-be Netflix competitor should do, serve streams with 50% packet loss to Verizon customers?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Forget Netflix; most of the internet providers own their own content stores. The ISPs will just relegate Netflix (and others) to the "slow lane" while the in-house content gets the usable speeds. It would not matter if third-party content providers were to ignore Verizon/Comcast/etc.'s attempt at extortion because they would still suffer from the effects. The customers of the third-party content providers would get the unusable service while VerizonTV gets usable bandwidth. Customers would abandon Netflix in droves.
The problem can't be fixed by just ignoring it; even if content providers refuse to play ball, the ISPs will drive the third-party content providers out of business by giving the in-house content an unfair advantage. This will radically change the Internet from an open broadcast medium to one controlled by a small subset, just like print, radio and TV are today. Legal, technical, or economic sanctions /must/ be imposed to keep the network neutral. Or we need to accept the Internet as we know it today is dead.
I agree with your distribution but I disagree with how you define your first category & your numberic distribution
1. "those who dont care" is wrong...virtually ***everyone*** cares about getting screwed over by a corporation
the problem is the reporters, editors who chose news stories, and the non-tech people who read the information **don't undrestand that they are getting screwed**
and that's just the people who still feel it is within their power to change if they *are* getting screwed
that's your problem...you say they "don't care" but really they've "given up" or never were empowered in the first place!
2. "those who are against it" is figured like this: n - [guilty greedy fucks] - [those who are unaware of how it affects them] = those who are against it
THIS IS ABOUT EDUCATION...SPREAD THE WORD...**VOTE FOR POLITICIANS WHO FAVOR NET NEUTRALITY**....CALL YOUR CONGERSSMAN AND DEMAND REAL NET NEUTRALITY BILL IN THE HOUSE
did you hear me?
demand the Republican-controlled house pass a law encoding it...that is how our system is designed to work
what party opposes Net Neutrality?
always Republicans
Thank you Dave Raggett
That's why I said it should be regulated that this is the case, not that this is the current case.
In my case, my residential ISP actively advertises advertises that this is the case, that I get "dedicated" bandwidth to the Internet and I will not get congestion on their networks or to their transit provider, Level 3.
So the fast lane doesn't exist yet, and Netlfix already bought it. I'm not sure I follow.
Learn to love Alaska
If I wanted the same thing that cable TV provides, I'd buy cable TV. But this isn't about Netflix - they are just the first since they use so much bandwidth. Rather, it's about who gets to decide what is delivered to your computer at what speed. Today the argument is over Netflix. But tomorrow it could be CNN. Or Slashdot. Or YouTube. Or Facebook. It's bad for consumers because it will cost you more for the services you like and use and it discourages competition (just wait and see what "doesn't work" when Comcast decides they want to start a streaming video service).
What makes you think the fast lane does not exist? Netflix paid to avoid the 50% packet drop tax that Verizon inflicted on their traffic.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Incidentally, what is DNS fool? I've never heard of the DNS fool protocol.
Keep those ad hominem attacks coming - they tell the readers here exactly what you're about (and me, baiting the troll. Way too easy!)
What makes you think the fast lane does not exist?
That it's a non-existent proposal by the FCC. The fast lane, as defined by the FCC, can't exist until the FCC defines it.
Learn to love Alaska
The simple solution is to have municipal public exchanges that all ISPs must connect to. Then all services that are made available locally have to connect up to that exchange. This same model was used in phone service to break up local and long distance services many decades ago. It is also a model that is used for exchanges all around the world for co-location and interconnection between networks. This allows for a more regulated local connection, while allowing anyone to off "add-on" services to those customers. I would be able to tell my local ISP -- route all my traffic through the exchange to another service provider which provides interconnections to the rest of the world. Local cable TV, or phone service could then be able to connect up to the exchange and offer service. It would allow for more competition in offering services. For business this is already done with carriers like Cogent, Level 3, etc.
They're adding "slow lanes", and moving services that don't pay up into the slow lanes.
The whole thing is nothing but greed. The ISPs at both ends are already being paid for the bandwidth, but the ISP at the consumer end wants to be paid for it twice, once by the consumer and once by Netflix.
What you said is incorrect. how do i know? because every time municipal wifi is offered, ISPs are there to prevent it from happening. Case in point: in 2004, the legislature in Philadelphia was going through the motions to allow this sort of thing for inner city folk. Verizon arrived and, and with some help from their puppet then-mayor Randall, drafted up a bill to prevent this sort of thing and pushed it through the legislature. So, the ISPs don't agree with you at all about what they would prefer.
The ISPs aren't creating "slow lanes." They're simply refusing to widen the freeway until they're paid to do so. It's like a multiple-item auction seller who, in order to increase the auction price, refuses to make more items available in the auction.
The problem is that they actually advertise a certain bandwidth to consumers. If a turnpike charged you $2 to travel some length and issued a guarantee that you'd be able to maintain an average speed of 50mph, and then you found it was congested, they couldn't just point to the speed limit signs and say that it wasn't their problem.
When, in reality, the control ISPs have over our government, and the resulting lack of competition, is why broadband in this country is so expensive, and why the principle of net neutrality is on life support. You harbor the illusion that there exists a free market for broadband. There isn't, and our country's uncompetitive broadband scenario has unfolded as it chases the fleeting free market fantasy you just expressed.
Got it.
None of those look like enterprise users to me.
Wow! That's some userbase. I'm sure your software is well on its way to becoming an industry standard. Let me know when there's a set of best practices associated with it and I'll gladly consider it a worthless adjunct to just managing my own host files and/or using DNS.
ok, but if you want guaranteed speeds its going to cost the same as a business line. So $500+ a month. and I'm not kidding, that's what it would cost and the ISP would probably be losing money. They keep those rates as low as possible because the real profit is in services like Managed phones, VOIP, cloud storage, etc... I'm the head DBA for a major telecom's sales force so I know the numbers. Data lines are always sold at a loss. This idea people seem to have that they should be able to get 10mb\s+ of guaranteed bandwidth for under $50/month is laughable to anyone that works in the industry. That rate wouldn't even pay for the card you're plugged into back at the CO for YEARS. That's not even including all the intermediary equipment, cables, fiber optics, repairs, installs, manpower. It's a joke.
Now if the ISP can get you to pay them $100 per month to "manage" you phone system... which basically means you're using some software package they threw together and basically costs them nothing... now it starts to become profitable. Cloud storage, backup software, antivirus. All that stuff is basically free, or close to it for the ISP, so they can start making money off the customer. But if you're sitting there on a Resi line with no other services, and many customers aren't even in contracts anymore... they're losing money on you big time. If you're using netflix heavily? You're a huge problem for them, and likely generating support tickets with their other customers that are having latency issues and therefor costing them even more money. You don't have to feel sorry for us in the telecom industry, but we're certainly not raking in huge profits at your expense as many seem to think. My industry is dying.
Is it really too much to ask to be able to toss the cable and telco suits into a pit of fire, vat of acid, or both?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Data lines are always sold at a loss.
So they're being dishonest. You sell me a car that you say drives at 150 mph, I expect the car can go to 150 mph. I understand that it won't run at 150 mph every second I'm driving, but there are a lot of people that never see the speeds advertised.
You don't have to feel sorry for us in the telecom industry, but we're certainly not raking in huge profits at your expense as many seem to think. My industry is dying.
Bullshit. Looking at the past five years of financial data, I see that the big cable companies' value and returns have increased in leaps and bounds.
CDNs don't use fast lanes. Fast lanes are about preferential treatment at handovers. The Akami and Google CDNs are more about caching, with transmission to them at "slow lane" speeds.
Learn to love Alaska
IMHO that would sole the problem. Instead of making a complex bet on the custromer behaviour, ISPs should just provide access as cheap and fast as possible. Customer should take responsibility for usage.
Of course they're being dishonest. It's called advertising. You can dislike it all you want, but its the profession that got that first guy to buy the oldest profession in the first place.
Telecom is NOT cable. Cable companies are almost completely un-regulated. They get to pick and choose who to serve. Telephone companies cannot. The Cable companies have their own problems, but I've not worked for them so I can't speak with authority on that. I do know that Coax is a lot more problematic than copper, so I Suspect their maintenance costs are rather high.
There are "paid transit" links to the CDNs. Also, many providers have CDN caches on-site, which isn't represented in that diagram. Now, it indicates "paid" links, but doesn't indicate which side is paying.
Learn to love Alaska
Around here, Level 3 charges about $2 per mb for minimum commits of 10gb or greater which is nothing for an ISP selling 1gb fiber to residential, but residential users on average you can over-subscribe you trunk 20:1 without congestion. You could get congestion at a micro level because of a few high data users in a local area, but at the trunk, 20:1 should work fine.
/29.
This means you can purchase 100mb of dedicated bandwidth from Level 3 for $200/month, then resell 100mb to 20 customers, while guaranteeing not having congestion "on average"(I guess a port is "at capacity" around 80%, so really they'd need 120mb). Customer could have a burst of data usage, but that's why Level 3 allows burst data by charging on the 95th percentile.
You mentioned 10mb of dedicated bandwidth at $50/month can't be done and that's ignoring the port cost. Well, a chassis with 400 Active Ethernet ports that have 40km ranges and 4 100gb uplinks is going for about $100 per port. The port price is the same whether the user has a 1mb connection or a 1gb connection, because they're all 1gb ports and they always run at 1gb. The port cost does not change.
What about bandwidth? Well, 10mb of dedicated bandwidth for residential users is really only 0.5mb of bandwidth on average for the 95th percentile. So that's what.... $1/month for the ISP at a rate of $2/mbit?
I've talked to a senior network admin, he told me by "dedicated bandwidth", they mean you have non-blocking dedicated bandwidth within their local network, but their trunk and uplinks are sized to 3x general 95th percentile usage. $40/month for a 15/15 line and $60 for a 30/30. They do offer 50/50, 100/100, 200/200 and 1gb/1gb, but the prices start going up quickly after 30/30.
If you're having issues, it's because you're using old equipment. Modern 1gb fiber equipment is freaking cheap.
They actually don't have "residential" lines. All businesses get the same homes. They only have two tiers of service. Business, which is dedicated bandwidth, but you're not supposed to run proper general public servers; and Enterprise, which is a whole other ball game and is like any other company that sells commercial grade SLA'd Internet access. But I can get static IPs on my "residential" line, so fun times, $10 for a
I think your numbers are a bit off, both as far as the price of hardware vs ROI and as far as the "huge profits" are concerned - aren't Comcast and Verizon supposedly making 40-90% profit on multiple Billion dollar revenues? (Granted, for these companies this may be an overall company margin including all business units, not necessarily the margin on HSI).
In any case, my own companies are much smaller than them (so higher cost per customer for equipment and more expensive bandwidth because I'm not buying nearly as much as they are so I don't get quite the same volume discounts) and if it weren't for our expansion projects, we'd be doing pretty tidily.
And assuming people aren't dicks about bandwidth usage (eg hogging all of their bandwidth all of the time), we can even make residential services a little bit profitable without cross-subsidizing between plans (eg higher tiers aren't subsidizing lower tiers and vice versa). In the US, we'd be looking at something around 80% profit before equipment & overheads, and with a PON setup working out to under $1,000 per port (assuming brand-name gear, 10gb optics in the back and GPON for the customer-facing ports), our RoI really isn't as long as one might expect.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
I must be old. Old version, the ISPs pay CDNs to improve service to their customers and lower their costs spent on upstream providers. And ISPs thought that was a good thing. Now, you abuse your monopoly and customers to "monetize" the service you promise to provide. Charge multiple times for the same bit because your business plan sucks. I'm too old for this. And not psychopathic enough.
Learn to love Alaska
Hm. They manage to give extremely high speeds for significantly less than North America in places like South Korea and Japan. By comparison, we're getting ripped off.