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Verizon's Accidental Mea Culpa
Barryke writes: Verizon has blamed Netflix for the streaming slowdowns their customers have been seeing. It seems the Verizon blog post defending this accusation has backfired in a spectacular way: The chief has clearly admitted that Verizon has capacity to spare, and is deliberately constraining throughput from network providers. Level3, a major ISP that interconnects with Verizon's networks, responded by showing a diagram that visualizes the underpowered interconnect problem and explaining why Verizon's own post indicates how it restricts data flow. Level3 also offered to pay for the necessary upgrades to Verizon hardware: "... these cards are very cheap, a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that's the case, we'll buy one for them. Maybe they can't afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that's the case, we'll provide it. Heck, we'll even install it." I'm curious to see Verizon's response to this straightforward accusation of throttling paying users (which tech-savvy readers were quick to confirm).
If people don't think bandwidth is a scarce commodity, how will we get them to pay through the nose for it?!?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Too big to fail, too arrogant to concede, too greedy to care. This news is all the more reason to regulate.
Was obvious people were going to figure out everything Verizon was saying is BS, and that they'd continue to get bad press about this. You'd think the PR droids spouting this stuff would talk to their tech people and listen. But they probably said "look, just give us a pretty graphic right?" "But, techs will see through your spin" "Leave that to us" "But it'll make us look even worse" "You don't get paid to deal with this" All too predictable, and the same techs are probably still being yelled at.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
According to tfa, they actually aren't throttling. Throttling implies that they are deliberately shaping traffic inside their network to limit your bandwith.
What they are really doing is deliberately creating a bottleneck at key peering locations through negligent inaction when it comes to upgrading infrastructure.
Small difference, I know, but very important when you actually talk about throttling, and likely the argument they would make if the FCC took them to court over it.
Customers.
You're paying for a service, and nowhere does it say that they will discriminate against a particular service, such as Netflix.
It's obstructive business, against your customer's best interests, for no particular reason. It will also violate any given "net neutrality" laws that are / may come into effect.
Those laws are the answers. The reason for their existence is this sort of unnecessary posturing. And governments make companies do a lot of things against a company's best interests - all the time. It would be in the company's best interest to not pay tax, screw over its customers, not ship goods that have been paid for, be monopolistic, collude with others to enforce market prices, etc. The laws are brought in to stop that shit in the PEOPLE'S best interest, not the company's.
Not saying it's anywhere near perfect, but your post seems to want to back a corporation screwing over its customers and then (falsely) blaming its competitors and random third-party companies for that.
Level 3 doesn't pay Comcast for bandwidth. Why should they? Comcast customers have already paid Comcast for the links to their house and they're the ones pulling data from Level 3. Level 3's customers pay Level 3 to deliver to the edge of their network. As the Level 3 post points out, the cost for Verizon to add more bandwidth between the Level 3 network and the Verizon network is minimal.
Sure. The content streaming from Netflix has been requested by Verizion customers. They've paid for access to the internet, which includes Netflix. They are the ones being throttled. Basically Verizon is trying to double dip here - get money from regular customers plus shaking down more from content providers. If Verizon really cannot handle the flood of Netflix content, shouldn't they raise the cost to the consumers to build out the Verizon network?
Sure, the governments should break up the ISP monopolies that restrict access to only one or two ISPs. They should also try to reduce any barriers to entry in the market for new competitors to spring up. This would increase competition and force verizon to better their service to retain their customers.
The issue with this is that its good for consumers but bad for investors, and we all know who our esteemed congress men actually represent.
Part of the issue is that Verizon is a last-mile network, and does not sell symmetric bandwidth to its subscribers. So, the typical agreement between providers - where they each send about the same amount of traffic to each other and upgrade the interconnects to handle that traffic - will not work between Verizon and Level 3. Verizon (and the vast majority of other last-mile providers, including Comcast) will NEVER have a balanced interconnection with Level 3, because the home subscribers can all download far faster than they can upload.
Really, it's Verizon's customers who are causing all this bandwidth usage, so it should be Verizon ensuring that their interconnects can handle the requested bandwidth. If anything, Verizon (and Comcast) should be paying Level 3 for additional download capacity... but we all know that is never going to happen.
Got anything better?
Remove the laws and regulations holding back community fiber projects.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"I want it and my government friends have guns..." Is this the best we can do?
The reason Verizon can stay in business despite having "very limited interest in what their customers want" is because of municipal and state granted monopolies, federal grants and subsidies, and the reason they even exist at all is because of a government approved corporate charter. Why is "government friends with guns" an acceptable argument for them getting their way, but not an acceptable argument against it?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
What you're doing is using a VPN connections which has an different inbound interconnect than the one which the majority of Netflix traffic comes in on. Verizon is 100% correct. There's no throttling going on because the connection that is being "throttled" as you put it is actually at 100% utilization and congested causing dropped packets and bad performance.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
It's not artificial because of the details of the technical implementation, it's artificial because it's a scarcity that would not be expensive or difficult to resolve. Drought is geographic scarcity that cannot be readily resolved; an undersized water treatment plant is systematic scarcity that can be resolved but would be expensive and slow; a faucet that's rusted half-closed is artificial scarcity.
+1. Politicians at the state level have been paid off by cable companies and ISPs to squash competition from local municipalities. The cities who got in before the legislation are loving their services. It is absolutely insane what money can do in the political process.
Costs should be driven by the party responsible for the traffic being on the network. In the case of neflix traffic, that's _me_, the end recipient. And I've already ponied up to the cable company to cover their cost to transfer the bits to me. The cable co just wants to double dip.
Even if that were the case, Verizon didn't sell its customers a 50Mbps network connection that only gets 5Mbps to Netflix during peak hours. They marketed and sold their service at the full speed and have been completely happy to take our money despite the problems. The bottom line is that they need to fix their shit. Yes it may cost a lot of money but the last time I checked, Verizon was doing just fine and can definitely afford it.
Nice sentiment, but, unfortunately, a public corporation's responsibility is to its shareholders and their interests - which is simply $$$. (and probably executives and cushy bonuses, etc...)
And a government's responsibility is to take action against a company which is committing wholesale fraud against its customers by selling them Internet Service which promises bandwidth speeds which they are then purposefully not providing in order to shake down their customers and companies trying to provide services to those customers more money.
A government's responsibility is to ensure that companies that are given government licenses and franchise agreements which restrict competition in certain geographic areas are providing the service that the people of that area want and need at a fair price.
A government's responsibility is to ensure that companies which get too big, hold too much market share and are too horizontally or vertically integrated are broken up so that there can be real competition and a real free market.
"it's Verizon's customers who are causing all this bandwidth usage"
Let's pause to re-read that: Verizon's customers. Ah yes, those people who pay Verizon $x each month for y mbp/s of bandwidth. Those foolish people who actually expect Verizon to deliver on what is being paid for.
And then Verizon passive aggressively acts like the problem is not of their own making.
And I'm tired of people who claim that anything but greed is a problem. The graph in the blog linked here clearly shows that there are no internal network problems at Verizon, everything is below 65% peak utilization - and those are only the metro and backbone routers, which are few and far between. Everything else is at ~50% peak utilization. No immediate upgrades are required, except the interconnect to L3, where both L3 and Verizon have spare capacity, and L3 has even offered to pay for the upgrade.
So why does running a VPN fix this? A To a CO there is no difference between Netflix or a VPN connection.
If you read the Verizon page they are proposing a solution... Netflix should connect directly to Verizon and pay them.
This should be an argument between level 3 and verizon we wouldn't be hearing about this at all if that bandwidth was evenly split up between 100+ services.
Bingo. Well, almost; it's a little more nuanced than that. Costs should be driven by the party responsible for the traffic being on *your* network. For Verizon, that's Verizon's customer; for Level3, that's Netflix. And they both already pay their providers. Where Verizon and Level3 peer, it's a matter of recognizing that the imbalance of traffic across that link is caused by Verizon's customers requesting more traffic than they (can) return. Thus, Verizon caused the imbalance and should therefore pay for it. If Verizon primarily sold symmetrical access and allowed their users to run servers, there would likely be a balance, and if there was not, they'd have a leg to stand on here, but they don't sell symmetrical access to the end user and they don't have a leg to stand on in this debate; what they do have is a monopoly on Verizon customers, which they're attempting to abuse right now, which should warrant an anti-trust suit, if anything. No additional regulation needed.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.