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Netflix Trash-Talks Verizon's Network; Verizon Threatens To Sue
jfruh (300774) writes "If you're a Verizon broadband customer and you've tried streaming Netflix over the past few days, you might've seen a message telling you that the "Verizon network is crowded" and that your stream is being modified as a result. Verizon isn't taking this lying down, saying that there's no proof Verizon is responsible for Netflix's issues, and is threatening to sue over the warnings."
Since Netflix already paid off Comcast I'd wager they're willing to do the same for Verizon. However, Verizon is probably trying to bleed them for more than they're willing to pay. In other words, this is just their way of negotiating the contract down to a "reasonable" amount. (as if they should even have to make payoffs to the cable companies in the first place)
Considering Verizon owns(?) Redbox Instant, why wouldn't they throttle Netflix?
...over the sound of all its whining.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
I'll run a comparison with my current network (Verizon) and when Google Fiber finally drops in my area. I'm sure I'll find all the proof I need.
Right. Verizon isn't artificially limiting network speeds. Just like Comcast wasn't.
I have both Verizon FIOS and Netflix. Here is what I, as a user/subscriber, expect. I pay Netflix to stream movies. I pay Verizon to provide me bandwidth and internet/web access. I don't pay either of them to throttle my connection or do what they want to quality. I pay for X amount, and expect to get it. If Verizon cannot hold up their end of the deal to provide me a pipe, then they aren't doing their job.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
The evidence shouldn't be too hard to come by. For a while Youtube offered a page showing statistics for your ISP's streaming rate vs other ISPs in the same general area.
I was on FiOS at the time, and the streaming speed was pitiful (could barely stream 360p during peak hours on youtube), while the average in the area was significantly higher. Switched ISPs (yeah, I had a choice at the time), and sure enough, it was all better.
Haha this suit is never coming, they sure as hell don't want to be in a courtroom over this topic too much risk in having netflix expose them and others.
I can completely confirm Netflix''s claims. In the last month streaming over FIOS has become unbearable. Last week I couldn't take it and ordered Optimum. Streaming is back to normal and even latency and bandwidth to other services has improved. If you can, dump this bloated monopoly known as Verizon. Why did we break up AT&T to just to create a new monopoly 30 years later?
Well this seems like a fine "solution" to companies that are trying to get rid of net neutrality.
What if every big content provider started popping up such messages? Let the user know directly that their content is being delivered slower because their net provider is throttling the data.
As long as the content provider can accurately determine this is happening, then what can anybody do to stop them from saying it? Verizon can huff and puff about it but if its provably true can they legally do anything to stop it?
I bet people start caring about net neutrality real fast..
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I think what Verizon is saying is that instead of Netflix paying Verizon for a direct link between the Verizon (tier 1) network and the Netflix servers, Netflix is using a different Tier 1 provider which probably has a peering agreement with Verizon and therefore Verizon isn't making any money off the supply side, only the consumer side, which just isn't good enough for them.
Wrong.
Just a sample of median income over time,, race, etc (in 2004 dollars) (source):
1950 -- White men: $18000; White women: $ 7000; Black men: $ 9775; Black women: $ 3150
1980 -- White men: $28939; White women: $10741; Black men: $17390; Black women: $ 9944
2004 -- White men: $31335; White women: $17648; Black men: $22740; Black women: $18379
Not only has (inflation adjusted) median-- not mean! -- income risen, it looks to my casual eye like the disparity has massively dropped. It went from a 3:1 ratio for black men to women to 1.25:1; between blacks and whites it went from ~2:1 to ~1.5:1.
If you were to look at education over the past 100 years you would see the same trend. Im not sure where people are getting these "facts" about the dismantled middle class but theyre terribly wrong. All of this talk about class warfare can only be made by one completely oblivious to reality and history.
i take it you don't know how DSL works
Because now that they have paid Comcast. Netflix has the potential to claim actual financial damages, allowing them to bring a case all the up to the Supreme Court.
It's more complicated than that. Netflix's speeds on Verizon, or any other carriers, network are determined by peering agreements. There are multiple "Tier1" providers out there... these are the networks that interconnect all the ISPs. Random example: Level3
So you could have a 10gig agreement with AT&T and a 5gig agreement with Level3 and be doing fine. 30% of all peak traffic comes from Netflix. But Netflix has their peering agreement with AT&T so you're all good. Then, suddenly, Netflix switches peering hosts and goes to Level3.
In most cases the content provider would inform you ahead of time. You make peering agreements in concert with each other. "We'll both sign a peering agreement with AT&T for a period of 2 years" The big change with Netflix is they do not make agreements like this. They switch peers without notice.
So when Netflix switches peers they leave the ISP with a 10gig trunk to AT&T that's now severely underutilized. The ISP is reluctant to sign with Level3 because who says Netflix wont just switch peers again? The Tier1 providers are aware of this situation and are using it to their advantage. Particularly Level3. We've no idea what's going on here, but I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix is just as much to blaim her as Verizon.
Netflix has no financial incentive to be friendly with the ISPs and that's what this whole "Fast lane" is about. I don't like the plan but the ISPs concerns aren't just made up. There is a real and legitimate problem with Netflix and it's not just some conspiracy to prevent people from watching movies.
If Verizon wanted to offer the best experience to their Netflix subscribing users they would allow Netflix to install a streaming server in their server farm. This would save Verizon money and prevent the throttling that happens at the peer junction.
To illustrate imagine 40% of Verizon ISP customers are streaming a movie from Netflix. Without the streaming server the entire 40% have to traverse the backbone which Verizon pays a tier A provider like Level 3 for. Now Verizon, like most USA ISPs oversells the capacity they can accommodate because they don't expect everybody to use their full bandwidth portion simultaneously so to save money they also under purchase back end peering connections so that 40% of traffic just slammed all the connection going from Verizon to their tier A provider slowing traffic for everyone trying to access a connection not on Verizon's network. If you add the streaming server inside Verizon's network that 40% of traffic never leaves Verizon's infrastructure thus negating the need to upgrade their back end connection to accommodate the load. Netflix simply sends any new content to the streaming server when it becomes available. Now this scenario SAVES Verizon/Comcast/etc. money but they insist Netflix pay for the privilege of putting the server inside their network. The only reason they would pass up the opportunity to save money is if they also had a streaming service that competes with Netflix which could potentially make them more than they would save. VOD (Video on Demand) and RedBox Instant are just such services. This is why ISPs should not be content providers.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
They did this because Google and VZN were butting heads over whose fault the slowdowns were in several areas around the country (my area, Northern VA, was one of them).
Google supplied pretty damning evidence that VZN had some faulty hardware or was throttling and causing the issues, but VZN was still trying to shift blame to Google. After enough complaints and people leaving FiOS, the problems magically went away.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Netflix offers caching but Comcast/Verizon demand they pay for it despite the money they would save by hosting the cache. They're more interested in poaching Netflix's customers for their own streaming alternatives. This is what happens when Net Neutrality is not mandated.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
In the US, it doesn't matter if there's no proof that Verizon is responsible for Netflix's issues. As the plaintiff, it would be Verizon's burden to show that there is proof that they aren't.
You missed the "in 2004 dollars" part of the GPs post. In 1950s dollars, median income was below $5000.
Now, with income disparity increasing the middle class may well feel like they're worse off, but they really aren't. They are, however, relatively further behind the wealthiest.
$18k was middle class black in 1950, but once you adjust for inflation, that means in 2004, they should be making about $54k assuming a low 2% inflation,
Is your bias so thick that you didnt even bother to see if the number was already inflation adjusted? ..or are you so uneducated that you think $18K was a middle class income in the 1950's? Which is it? Disingenuous bias or tragic ignorance?
..but here you are, claiming that it was $18K before adjusting for inflation... disingenuous? ignorance? both?
The unadjusted figure for white males for the 1950's is $2,709
There is a reason that "the right" is doing better financially, and its not because they are holding you down. You are holding yourself down by not giving a fuck about things like facts.
"His name was James Damore."
So you could have a 10gig agreement with AT&T and a 5gig agreement with Level3 and be doing fine. 30% of all peak traffic comes from Netflix. But Netflix has their peering agreement with AT&T so you're all good. Then, suddenly, Netflix switches peering hosts and goes to Level3.
Level 3 has stated that this is common issue across the entire Internet, which is why Level 3 has an average peak port utilization of 37%. Level 3 has designed their network to handle large shifts. You can pay Level 3 to handle peering for you or you can do it yourself, but don't come crying when someone changes routes.
They are being enslaved willingly. So I do not care for them at all. If people want to give up their freedoms so they can be lazy and feels safe then fine. I just want these lazy pussies to stop trying to give away my freedoms and responsibilities.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
The whole concept of live streaming accross the internet has always been a stupid idea for pre-recorded non-live media consumption
Some people have already asked Netflix what they mean and Netflix has stated that their own network and servers are not over-loaded, so the issue must be on the other side.
Here's an analogy for you. I'm wondering why my mail is getting lost or delayed. So I watch each step of the process between my business and the post office. I see that the mail is always getting to the post office on the same day, never delayed or lost. Then I find that my customers are getting mail late or lost.
I would blame the post office.
Buffer bloat exasperates congestion by causing more extreme swings between over-saturated and under-saturated, but there shouldn't be congestion in the first place. Netflix is not attempting to send data at your full connection speed, except for the fraction of a second for initial buffering. Most of the time, they're only attempting to send 2mb/s
So when Netflix switches peers they leave the ISP with a 10gig trunk to AT&T that's now severely underutilized.
If the ISP is concerned about this, they can just ask Netflix for a caching box. Total cost to the ISP is a couple of ports in a switch, a few rack units, and power. I.e. approximately zero.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I live in a small city where the outskirts get high data rates, but those of us closer to the center get lousy service. Why? Old infrastructure. Verizon (now Fairpoint) refused to invest in it because they know the people living in this area have a choice between bad service from Comcast or bad service from Verizon/Fairpoint. Why bother upgrading it if the customers can't leave for something better? I bet this happens all across the US where there's older infrastructure and no effective competition. I hope someday that Google fiber or something similar will reset this mess we're in. The public utilities commission certainly isn't helping despite constant complaints from the people harmed by it.
lol, I wish that was the issues of being poor in the US...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Net neutrality always seemed so one sided unless you have an imagination like mine and apparently Netflix's. It's always stated as "demand money and there's nothing they can do about being throttled." Yeah, except you're the content provider and you can send whatever messages you want on-screen, in an e-mail, etc. One little "if you want better quality and buffering speed, switch to someone other than Verizon" message and suddenly Verizon is the one losing millions.
Had you actually clicked the link instead of staring at it you would have been greeted with several pages of peers.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The elephant in the room: Requiring streaming for every customer simultaneously with no option for offline playback is a broken model with respect to how the internet works.
Granted, since any customer can arbitrarily choose any item in the Netflix library for viewing, the capability for streaming in real-time needs to work decently well. In practice, however, only the things in "My List" are likely to be viewed by a given customer, so downloading to a local cache would allow playback at optimal quality without needing ideal network performance.
It seems to me the intense desire on the part of Netflix and the "rights holders" for full control, maximum monetization and the deep rooted fear that someone might figure out how to make a copy is the real reason this is even a problem.
I would have no problem with a Netflix client that incorporated some sort of DVR-like functionality so that items of interest could be added to a local queue (sorry - queue is a deprecated term - My Local List). That would be wonderful for situations where the available network is sketchy (eg. hotel, coffeeshop) or not present (airplane, campsite, beach, etc). Rampant sharing could be minimized by allowing only one (or a few) devices to have the locally cached content, and requiring a network connection to download or release a particular item. Or if that's too complicated, just allow a limited number of authorized devices per account that can cache the same content.
I think enough customers would take advantage of this to alleviate the problems caused by real-time streaming and take a lot of power away from the intermediaries.
So you could have a 10gig agreement with AT&T and a 5gig agreement with Level3 and be doing fine. 30% of all peak traffic comes from Netflix. But Netflix has their peering agreement with AT&T so you're all good. Then, suddenly, Netflix switches peering hosts and goes to Level3.
Level 3 has stated that this is common issue across the entire Internet, which is why Level 3 has an average peak port utilization of 37%. Level 3 has designed their network to handle large shifts. You can pay Level 3 to handle peering for you or you can do it yourself, but don't come crying when someone changes routes.
It is a common problem. But it was something that wasn't really done until Netflix pioneered it. Traffic moves all over, but Netflix is 33% of traffic. That's not just traffic moving, that's re-engineering your entire network overnight. The ISPs were just switching peers and following Netflix for a while but their network utilization is just too large to ignore now. The ISPs should have seen this coming and approached the FCC to enshrine the "Gentlemans agreement" they'd always had with content providers into law. But they hate regulation... so here we are. Now their solution is STILL less regulation in the guise of these fast lanes. It's insanity. They're shooting themselves in the foot. The most direct, common sense solution is to regulate how peering agreements are made. If you're creating 30%+ of all internet traffic and it's not even related to free speech you SHOULD be regulated.
Do you actually own your home? How about your car? You and not the bank likely owned them in the 50's and that is with a single income family.
You don't just have to factor for inflation, you also have to factor out manufacturing efficiency increases. A toaster today does not equate to the same value as a toaster in the 50's. A toaster in the 50's represents more labor and natural resources than a toaster today. A toaster today probably costs $10 but to buy something with an equivalent amount of resources as a 1950's toaster is going to cost at least $100-$200 today.
There is a form of hidden inflation where the reduced purchasing power of citizens in the western world is hidden by improving manufacturing efficiencies and reducing the quality of goods and services.
So while you might have two cars in the garage with your dual income and both mostly owned by the bank, your 1950's single income family counterpart's purchasing power would have them owning at least 4 or 5 modern cars.
You can buy partial ownership, but you can't buy partial control. Groups of people can buy partial control, but it takes large groups, and they have to act through delegated representatives....who generally figure that anything that produces more money must be good. (There are specialized funds with different values, but few of them are available as, say, retirement investments.)
If you don't have control of 5% of the stock, you very rarely have ANY influence over policy. Occasionally a decision will be close enough that a smaller block will become important, but not often. Usually if a choice is that contested, it will be deferred.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You throw aside the fact that the poor peoples lives are easier and better with statements about "improving manufacturing efficiencies". Like that means nothing.
You can not get it past your need to hate the rich that their investments into increasing their wealth are what made the "improving manufacturing efficiencies". Just because they got more out of it than the little guy in no way allows you to just throw out the very real improvements in their lives.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
The problem is the way they do their accounting, people pay a monthly rate no matter what, and every bit they deliver is written down as an expense. Verizon doesn't feel they are obligated to actually provide the service their customers are paying for. I'm not even sure what they think their customers are paying for. They will readily admit that 30% of their peak traffic is Netflix, but somehow it never occurred to them that some customers might be paying them $120/month so they can have access to Netflix. Also, if Netflix can deliver this service $8/month (most of which is spent buying content), it's hard to believe Verizon can't keep up with them for 15 times that amount! In reality, there's a bunch of shady nonsense going on here.
If Verizon doesn't like government regulations, they probably shouldn't be such total assholes to their customers. You'd think that the geniuses running that company would have the foresight to realize their monopoly is only secure as long as their customers are happy, but instead they are pulling this crap.
If you prefer a free market solution, we could pass a law requiring ISPs to charge per GB delivered. Then they'd get the message that their customers are paying for data, not whatever the fuck Verizon thinks they're providing. But either way, Verizon is totally in the wrong here.
I've heard mentioned that Netflix should adopt a P2P model using BitTorrent in order to circumvent ISP throttling. (Maybe I've got that wrong. I'm not terribly informed.)
But that got me thinking. Could we, and big providers in particular, sort of collectively force network neutrality on the ISPs by encrypting everything, so that it's impossible for the ISPs to know what the packets are, only that they're supposed to be delivered to such-and-such a place? Would that work? And what would it take to make it happen? Or is there a big reason why it can't be done that I don't know about?
It seems to me that the luxuries are cheaper, but the necessities are more expensive. My TV, computer, and other toys might be less, but my gas, groceries, medical care, and housing are going up like rockets.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I'm pretty sure that the GP meant "own" as in "not have a mortgage" where I'm positive the 66% figure in 2000 includes many people with mortgages. I don't think you two are talking about quite the same thing.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
On September 30, 2010, the Board of Directors of Hewlett-Packard announced the election of Apotheker as the company's Chief Executive Officer and President, effective November 1. During Apotheker's tenure at HP, the stock dropped about 40%, dropping nearly 25% on 19 August 2011 after HP announced a number of seemingly abrupt strategic decisions: to discontinue its webOS device business (mobile phones and tablet computers), to begin planning to divest its personal computer division and to acquire British software firm Autonomy for a significant premium. Over the months following Apotheker's departure, HP eventually spun-off the remaining webOS assets into a new subsidiary, Gram; backtracked on any plans to spin-off HP's personal computer division and wrote-down almost $9 billion related to the Autonomy acquisition, which it indicated was due to a lack of due diligence during the acquisition process under Apotheker.
Though Apotheker served barely ten months, he received over $13 million in compensation: a severance payment of $7.2 million, shares worth $3.56 million and a performance bonus of $2.4 million (seriously? performance bonus? despite the company losing more than $30 billion in market capitalization during his tenure.
In other news, HP laid off around 16000 employees just a couple of weeks ago (this in addition to several thousad that they've laid off over the past couple years) but hey, when these employees speak out against what's wrong with the system, knobheads such as yourself can go and tell them how they're just a bunch of lazy whiners who're unhappy simply because Mr. Apotheker, an honest to God hardworking individual, is doing so much better than them!
No...or yes. In corporate ownership control is vested in the wealthy (i.e., in the large investors). In a democracy theoretically all votes are equal, and each (represented) person gets only one vote.
The "or yes' is because the theory isn't well mapped to the implementation, and this is largely because of interference by corporations and other similar entities. (These days I think it's all corporations, but there used to be extremely wealthy people with similar power.) Note that in these cases the influence is managed by corporate management rather than by "owners", and often does things that the majority of owners would be apalled by, but usually not that the weighted majority of owners would be apalled by (where weight is measured by the number of voting shares that are held).
It's actually much more similar to an aristocracy than to a democracy.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Verizon leads the campaign to preserve the television industry in the United States.
As broadcast television and real-time cable approach irrelevancy, the incumbents in the video-distribution business seek control over cached video programming.
The right to charge extra would affirm Verizon FiOS as a cable television operator with the right to charge to carry even cached content.
Not coincidentally, real-time one-to-many propaganda operations like Fox News depend on this campaign to turn Internet providers into a small subset of the digital data transport industry.