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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.
Just connect to a VPN first and then use Netflix. You'll be able to clearly see how much Verizon is throttling. I've been using this as a workaround for a while now. I'm not sure why more people don't think of pointing this out when Verizon's tech support people claim there is no throttling.
Actually, they did. Verizon has just yet to deliver. Apparently they don't expect to deliver until the end of the year in any case.
Which this article seems to implies it takes Verizon a year to send a technician to 7 cities to connect up a few cables between routers. (And / or maybe install a couple of cards). Maybe Verizon should stop having their techs travel by horseback, they might get it done faster.
Verizon's response was "Ok, but these cards tend to wear out pretty quickly so we'll need you to pay that amount each month. 5,000 streams may sound like a lot, but they don't last very long. A person watches a few movies a week, maybe a couple of youtube videos per day, that's like 20 streams in one week, and that's only one customer. Before you know it, you've used up all 5,000 of those streams and the card needs to be replaced."
"Oh yeah, and if it's coming from Netflix then we're using twice as many streams. We use one stream from Netflix to us, then another stream from us to our customers. Maybe you should really pay us that amount every week."
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?
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)
+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.
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.