Slashdot Mirror
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts Opens Mouth, Inserts Foot
lpress (707742) writes "At a recent conference, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts rationalized charging Netflix to deliver content by comparing Comcast to the Post Office, saying that Netflix pays to mail DVDs to its customers but now expects to be able to deliver the same content over the internet for free. He forgot to mention that the Post Office does not charge recipients for those DVDs. The underlying issue in this debate is who will invest in the Internet infrastructure that we badly need? Comcast has a disincentive to invest because, if things bog down, people will blame content providers like Netflix and the ISP will be able to charge the content provider for adequate service. If ISPs have insufficient incentive to invest in infrastructure, who will? Google? Telephone companies? Government (at all levels)? Premises owners?"
That everyone has to pay for access to the Internet, including Netflix. They've already paid, but Comcast arbitrarily expects them to pay even more just because their own customers want to use Netflix, which makes zero fucking sense.
This may be an absurd suggestion, but given that internet access is somewhat required to participate in society today, perhaps it's time to class internet access as a utility like water and electricity/gas.
Never happened. True story.
Why has no one brought up the perspective that "we the people" are already paying $100/mo for the service?
Just like water and power, internet needs regulation on a governmental level; a service utility provided at a fixed wholesale cost which the government
takes its share to maintain a standard contention ratio that ISPs can retail their services on top of.
Connectivity should not be left in the hands of corporations with shareholders to please.
Yeah, that's fucking brilliant. Let's package Netflix along with 105 other online services we'll never use, all for only $125 a month.
Moron.
We need backbone resources or other tricks...
Mostly we need legal legislative backbone.
The last mile is owned by local monopolies.
That is the sad reality. These local monopolies are
also content service providers and do what they to
do feather their own nest.
The congestion is the backbone owners and providers.
Multiple issues dominate the congestion problems.
Access, distance, hops and hubs.
The likes of Netflix need to embrace one or more
flavors of p2p networking. A local neighborhood
can cache and redeliver most video frames from a
modest cache with modern crypto tools to contain
theft of service.
I think the likes of Netflix would do well do develop
an enhanced DOCSIS 3.x modem that also contains
a p2p client/service that can recast content to other
like service devices a hop or two away. It can also
begin caching the top two products on a wish list.
Proxy and p2p services are underused or vastly abused.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Post office uses no tax money to run - thank you try again.
Yeah, that's fucking brilliant. Let's package Netflix along with 105 other online services we'll never use, all for only $125 a month.
Moron.
Sure, you can get Netflix - but that only comes in a package with 12 sites selling sex toys, 3 sports sites, and 5 online shopping sites (amazon not included, that's another package), for only $125/mo + applicable taxes. All other sites are blocked unless you pay for them, or pay for the $500/mo "unlimited" package that gets you all 300million websites on the internet.
Have you not been following the USPS saga lo these many years? Of course they are not publicly funded. Publicly regulated, yes, but they don't receive a dime of taxpayer dollars directly.
Netflix pays its ISP for the ability to send content. Comcast customers pay their ISP for the ability to receive content. I don't see the problem here.
Haven't you heard? Don't put your dick in crazy.
Sounds more like they're actively disincentivizing other motivated parties from solving these problems for their respective communities.
I am pissed off. I am moving into a new apartment and my choices are centuryLink DSL which AT&T throttles or Comcast. If I go with Comcast I need to pay for cable TV with HBO tier to gain internet access for $99 a month. I do not even freaking own a TV??!@
Now I am still downthrottled on top of that!
http://saveie6.com/
if ISPs could charge content providers the following things would happen:
a) start ups would get incentivized to go into the business of ISP
b) ISPs will be able to create very cheap basic service that will exclude few hight traffic services such as netflix, youtube, pr0n
c) obviously upon subscription to a service such as netflix the contents would become available, creating revenue for the ISP
d) youtube (and similar sites) would pay out of ad revenues, so no subscription is necessary; alternatively there might be tiered plans for the client that open access to free content sites like youtube. these models aren't incompatible.
e) ancle leo's fears are unfounded, indie shows would not be censored, ISPs aren't idiots they need to keep the basic service attractive
and, most importantly, this model accomplishes two important goals:
1) steady source of revenue that correlates to usage, which will fund infrastructure improvements
2) healthy competition, which is the ONLY way to keep comcasts of the worlds at bay without risk of stifling innovation
this is a classic sustainable win win. i don't understand why this isn't obvious to more people.
the alternative is playing straight into the hands of big monopolies. they'd MUCH rather deal with a government bureaucrat than competition. ask verizon of new jersey.
I want to send a letter to someone in a different country, say, the USA, or England, I pay Canada Post to deliver it. I do not have to pay the United States Postal Service or Royal Mail to deliver my letter sent from Canada.
Postal settlements for delivery abroad are made peer-to-peer.
The Universal Postal Union (UPU, French: Union postale universelle) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates postal policies among member nations.
In 1969, the UPU introduced a new system of payment where fees were payable between countries according to the difference in the total weight of mail between them. These fees were called terminal dues. Ultimately, this new system was fairer when traffic was heavier in one direction than the other. As a matter of example, in 2012, terminal dues for transit from China to the USA was 0.635 SDR/kg, or about 1 USD/kg.
As this affected the cost of the delivery of periodicals, the UPU devised a new ''threshold'' system, which it later implemented in 1991. The system sets separate letter and periodical rates for countries which receive at least 150 tonnes of mail annually. For countries with less mail, the original flat rate is still maintained. The United States has negotiated a separate terminal dues formula with thirteen European countries that includes a rate per piece plus a rate per kilogram; it has a similar arrangement with Canada.
Universal Postal Union
My Comcast bill is $57.99 for 10Mbps internet only. I just got a couple of "threat" letters saying that my "promotional" pricing is about to expire and I will pay even more for their lovely service. Never mind that my promotional pricing actually ended six months ago.
They are already making money hand over fist off their customers. They should use that money to invest in their own infrastructure improvements.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The ability to run a server is an overlooked part of net neutrality. The debate now is motivated by content providers who only care about downstream parity with other providers â" but real neutrality would also allow consumers to run their own servers including mail and web servers. That would open up markets for plug servers and turn the privacy debate on its ear. In the long run, it might even prove more important than content provider equality.
It seems obvious to me that pipe owner has an advantage when it comes to deal with what and how can transit.
This can be solved by (1) regulation, (2) competition, and (3) public ownership of pipes, whether as personal property (in premise), associations, municipality, state or federal level
I see people dismissing first and third solutions because government involvement should be inefficient, but that is just ideology. Public service can be efficient and economically sound. Regulation can work. It just depends how it is done.
But this has got out of hand, and the government should be stepping in and slapping these people down, hard.
They are there to protect the consumer/citizen from abuse, and need to step up to the plate and start doing their job.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That loss is completely due to the pension funding liability congress placed on them in 2006, which will expire in 2016, bringing them back into the black with pensions fully funded for the next 75 years.
Given the choice between dial-up and Comcast, I'll go for dial-up, every time.
+++ATH0
Well Comcast is raking in billions, so why cant they?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The ability to run a server is an overlooked part of net neutrality. The debate now is motivated by content providers who only care about downstream parity with other providers â" but real neutrality would also allow consumers to run their own servers including mail and web servers. That would open up markets for plug servers and turn the privacy debate on its ear. In the long run, it might even prove more important than content provider equality.
Just so. However, I'd go even farther than that. The last mile protocols (DOCSIS, ADSL, etc.) that have been developed mimic the Consumer (download)/Provider (upload) model.
This is a direct assault on free speech and free collaboration across the Internet.
Restricting servers is just another part of the process which limits the promise and potential of the Internet.
When everyone can have reasonable upload speeds, then everyone can host content, everyone can publish their creative output, each of us can share our thoughts and ideas with the world, the big content providers (including MPAA/RIAA, major newsotainment outlets, the eBays and AmazonMarketplaces of the world) will become less relevant, and we will become freer.
I know it's a pipe dream. But a fella can dream, can't he?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
If a restaurant advertises all-you-can-eat buffet, it must be all-you-can-eat. It can't say, "oh! no! every one is eating steaks and no one is eating my wilted lettuce, so they steak vendor must pay me money!". Comcast promised a certain bandwidth and unlimited content. It should simply deliver it. Or it should change the terms and meter the connection and charge by the gigabite of delivered content. It can't sell "unlimited" internet on one hand, and bellyache, bitch and moan when some customers actually take full advantage of the contract. We should go after Comcast using these old time tested laws and FTC.
Netflix and other content providers have nothing to do with it. It is a simple contract dispute between comcast customers and comcast.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The fact they like to make it sound like they need to invest so badly in bandwidth is BS, only the last mile to the home is so expensive, and with them dropping all analog channel to the home that frees up lots of DOCIS bandwidth going forward so that should help allot. They do need to spend allot of money to drop SDV and go completely digital but they still put that off because they love to rebuild the whole network every couple years on the edge anyway.
But all the backhaul and backbone fiber connections have been getting increasingly cheaper, most routers had a max interface speed of 10Gbit's, but with 100 Gbit interfaces becoming more common, and the fact that all DWDM optical gear are seeing jumps from 10 Gbit per lambda to 100Gbits per lambda by just swapping out some hardware that is not free but still utilize the same physical fiber but basically make it 10X more for a small upgrade cost.
I am convinced they only cry about bandwidth costs because that is what they really sell now, and are afraid that its just going to keep getting cheaper and cheaper, which it is.
The original analogy holds true, the sender only pays his ISP, his ISP then settles delivery charges with the carriers it touches.
Therefore it's not Netflix who needs to pay a second time, nor is it the home user. It should be a settlement between the major carriers, Comcast, Shaw, Verizon, Google fibre (Google as an ISP, not Google as SaaS provider), and not based on the end destination but on packets in vs packets out (the internet equivalent of weight from the postal service example). I'd be willing to bet this structure already exists anyway.
If your wanting to run servers, get a "business connection". It's a bit more $, but static IPs, not much RIAA monitoring, nothing blocked...
The Postal Service also doesn't publish a lot of material it mails for itself.
Comcast/Xfinity should be forced to separate from their content creation side. (NBC/Universal)
Would squeal like a stuck pig if the Post Office offered internet service. I'd much rather use the Post Office for internet service than his shitty company. The post office could charge half what they do for internet service and still make ONE BILLION DOLLARS. Just sayin.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Buy Comcast stock. Get 51% in customer hands and vote in a NEW fucking board of directors. Capitalism, free market, and democracy.
Comcast's infrastructure is quite good, and has minimal congestion. I've seen the charts.
The problem is that Netflix uses an ultra-low cost bandwidth provider, Cogent, and Cogent keeps its prices low by making free peering agreements with ISPs and then violating them, it's constantly getting either cut off or throttled by ISPs. The problem is easy to fix - either Netflix has to use a better bandwidth provider than Cogent (and they're all better than Cogent), or Congent has to either honor its agreements or pay for transit.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
In more populated locales of the USA, the density of people and of money is substantially higher than many places in Sweden or Japan, which nevertheless have much superior internet service to the USA.
Is internet really awesome and inexpensive in Manhattan or San Francisco or Philadelphia? No.
Internet is really awesome in the tiny number of places which have Google Fiber.
The hope is that in the future one can pay for content they want directly and don't have to buy bundles and packages.
The old-school co's are doing everything they can to prevent this.
Table-ized A.I.
It seems the only way people in the US will ever get proper internet is from municipal broadband co-ops. We've made the mistake of granting monopolies to companies like comcast and cox and now we're paying the price in stifled innovation and increased costs.
Surely there is some mechanism our society could use to prevent these parasites from suing to prevent municipal broadband networks, and let the cable companies compete on something other than monopoly power.
The Internet worked on the assumption that a provider would be both a content source and sink. Comcast is just a sink. It doesn't have to worry about its behavior damaging its ability to distribute content on the Internet, as it has virtually none. Yes, I know that some people host on Comcast Business, but that accounts for a small percentage of the traffic flow.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Netflix should add a surcharge to it's subscribers on Comcast (or any other ISP that decides to put up a toll gate). $.75 - $1.00 a month should do the trick, just let the customer know why they're being charged extra, so they can take the issue up with Comcast.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
If the network bogs down I'm blaming my ISP (which happens to be Comcast), not NetFlix or some other content provider.
The cable companies and the common carrier telephone companies are afforded regional monopolies on the rational that it would be unseemly or untidy to have 20 phone companies all running cable through the same neighborhood.
And because of that idiocy, we have ONE company in each area with total control and no competition.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Comcast has a disincentive to invest because, if things bog down, people will blame content providers like Netflix
Uh, no? When my Internet is slow, I blame my ISP first. Is that different for normal people or is the Comcast CEO living under a rock?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I honestly don't get this. So Netflix was using other network providers and hoping they'd get their traffic to Comcast customers in a timely manner and they were not. So Netflix works out a peering arrangement with Comcast to deliver traffic directly to Comcasts network and this is somehow bad? This is how the net has always been.
Think about it, if Netflix decided their sole connection would be to some ISP in Bulgaria, and their traffic was slow to Comcast customers how would that be Comcasts fault? You want rapid delivery, you pay for it. So now Netflix pays to directly connect to Comcasts network instead of using third parties. That's you know, normal.
So my question is how are some of these local co-ops doing it in turns of starting their own? I mean I am assuming I cannot start digging trenches and connecting all my neighbors but I would be willing to bet I could probably get my whole neighborhood on board if we start a co-op trench digging party if you want in on fiber. I am sure the lawyers would descend on us like a herd of buffalo but regardless I do not see it changing any other way short of people taking back the purchasing power since I know for a fact the ONLY choice I have for cable in my area is Comcast.
For some time MBA training has concentrated on offering the least while charging the most. Ethics, social responsibility, even just basic human decency have no ROI, so they've been thrown overboard. The goal is to control a market, then milk it for all it's worth. Part and parcel of that is letting QoS degrade while consistently undercutting your labor force. As the C-whatever, you make your quaterly bonuses, the shareholders are delighted, and the company gradually degrades until it is a mere shell. Of course, you've moved on and the collapsing hulk you left behind is someone else's problem. Then it's time for the government bailout. Welcome to the modern business model.
You would think that a company that runs a nationwide communications network would like how the Internet works.
Do they think Netflix gets all of its bandwidth for free? Do they think that Netflix walks in to a data center and says "Hey, we want 2Gbps of uplink speed, and we dont want to pay for it". Do business customers come to comcast and say "I want 1Gbps of Metro Optical Ethernet uplink speed; and I donâ(TM)t want to pay for it". I think not.
the reason Comcast does not get money from Netflix, is because Comcast gets money from the people that want to use netflix. This is how the Internet has worked since the good old dialup modem days.
Of course the dialup modem days where the days when competition existed in the consumer Internet user marketplace. Now days all the consumer has to choose from is 30Mbps from Comcast or 7Mbps from a phone company. If a company offered the same level of service/speeds as Comcast but could stream Netflix and Amazon Instant Video better; Comcast would have an incentive to operate on a even playing field.
Yeah, that's fucking brilliant. Let's package Netflix along with 105 other online services we'll never use, all for only $125 a month.
Moron.
Behold: someone's already thought of that: http://i0.wp.com/leadershipfor...
Wouldn't that make ISPs a "necessary public service" like MaBell once was? Let me pontificate:
If that's true, then ISPs should be heavily regulated to ensure reliable service is provided to the entire country.
Since Washington love to re-use past legislation (stimulus packages, gun control, etc) why not require so-called "nationwide" ISPs to provide broadband service down to the smallest farm in the United States? I believe we're already paying a federal tax which once offset this cost.
Other ways to make this happen:
Congress passes legislation that Obama/future President would actually sign. -- Unlikely unless 2016 is the Year of the Great Vote Out.
Obama (unlikely) / Future President (80% unlikely) could order the FCC's lobbyist chairperson to start requiring Broadband availability in the same way we once required AT&T to run copper phone lines to every house, farm, factory, and barn in the United States.
A massive anti-trust lawsuit turns over all existing right-of-way monopolies. This is the most likely scenario, but I don't know if our money-is-speech Supreme Court would take the case.
Thoughts?
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
This x 1000. I pay $65/month for an AT&T 12 Mb business UVerse account with 5 static IPs. Upload is a crappy 512K, but as you mentioned, there's no throttling and no ports are blocked.
512k? For allegedly a business connection? That's pathetic. That's beyond pathetic. That's so sad you should make a little miniature gravestone and stick it next to your modem.
I know it's a pipe dream. But a fella can dream, can't he?
A fella can do more than dream. A fella can contribute to the FreedomBox project. Money, code, trying it out on your mother-in-law, every little bit helps.
(Fine print: FreedomBox Foundation takes no responsibility for disturbances in your domestic tranquility due to software experimentation on your mother-in-law.)
I know it's a pipe dream. But a fella can dream, can't he?
A fella can do more than dream. A fella can contribute to the FreedomBox project. Money, code, trying it out on your mother-in-law, every little bit helps.
(Fine print: FreedomBox Foundation takes no responsibility for disturbances in your domestic tranquility due to software experimentation on your mother-in-law.)
That's an interesting idea. However, AFAICT that's all it is. In truth, there are many other things we can do:
1. Contact your municipal government about making the "last mile" a public utility serviced by multiple providers.
2. Contact the FCC and let them know that they need to address the issue of content providers owning ISPs and the "last mile."
3. Contact your municipal, state and federal representatives and let them know "You're mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore!" [With apologies to Paddy Chayefsky]
4. Contact your ISP and demand they change their liberty restricting, abusive contracts to allow server traffic from your site.
5. For those who are technically inclined, get involved in technical efforts to design NG "last mile" protocols that have synchronous bandwith, rather than the asynchronous mechanisms of DOCSIS and ADSL.
6. Convince your friends, relatives and neighbors to do 1-5 as well.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Not that the "FreedomBox" is a bad idea, it's a great idea! It can allow those who are being directly censored and oppressed to get the word out.
For the vast majority who are being covertly surveilled and their expression limited by the hegemony of content providers restricting our access to each other, having reasonable upload speeds and no restrictions on traffic will do more to promote freedom than any enryption/anonymization device.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Every day, every single day snatch up a Comcast employee, an executive or attorney if possible
And you fucking murder them in front of their families.
Indeed. Any service on Cogent feeding into Comcast has been affected, including video games like League of Legends, who made their own agreements with providers in order to route around Cogent.
Netflix uses less bandwidth than your MEPG-2 TV streams.
Yeah, that's fucking brilliant. Let's package Netflix along with 105 other online services we'll never use, all for only $125 a month.
Moron.
Haha, I know, let's package up the Internet using a paradigm that everyone outside of the cable companies and (some) cable channels hate and ask to have changed.
At least the cable system had some bare technological reasons why it developed the way it did. The current Internet situation is all political and due to a monopoly trying to ensure it maintains an iron grip.
Yes.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Please mod this way up. The "new cable mafia" is the ISP. This North Jersey mafia-style business, with their willing lemmings on the FCC amounts to nothing but CRONY CAPITALISM. It has to stop.
Remember when cable was relatively inexpensive, back in the 80's and part of the 90's? Back then, the cable company provided clear reception (read: bandwidth) and access to several dozen channels (read: content providers). The "cable business" was aggressively seeking content, because that's why people subscribed to cable. In those days, cable providers PAID CONTENT PROVIDERS
Roll the clock forward to the later-90's, the infrastructure boom was over and the local cable provider OWNS the last mile. Revenue growth from new subscribers stagnates. So, in true "pipe-to-the-knee-caps mafia style", cable providers turned to the content providers and said, "we own the 'last mile', NOW YOU HAVE TO PAY US, or we will not carry your channel/signal." Back then, they gave the SAME LAME-ASS EXCUSE: "channel-space (read: bandwidth) is getting scarce and we need money to expand our channel-space (bandwidth), otherwise we may have to cut you [content provider] out of the channel-line-up." (FLASH BACK: Remember the commercials from the "stations" like saying, "keep this channel as part of your basic package, call your cable company and bitch them out."?)
Shift your perspective just a little, do you think any of this would be happening if Netflix were a subscription service via the Cable Provider.... nope. Cause the troll would already be extracting the toll.
The cost of outside plant is amortized over 20 or 30 years.... and banks line up to underwrite large installations for established publicly owned companies.
I don't need the government "fixing" it with additional artificial and damaging influence. There was a time when copper was expensive and small coal-towns weren't going to get dial-tone. Those days are long gone. Let's back out of the telecom market slowly and rely upon (well litigated and settles) anti-trust laws to ensure we don't get hosed.