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Verizon's Mobile Video Won't Count Against Data Caps -- but Netflix Will (arstechnica.com)
Earthquake Retrofit writes: Ars Technica has a story about how Verizon Wireless is testing the limits of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules; Verizon has announced that it will exempt its own video service from mobile data caps—while counting data from competitors such as YouTube and Netflix against customers' caps.
Let's hope that the FCC shows that its net neutrality enforcement has teeth.
If they get too heavy handed with it, people will bail.
Damn straight. If Comcast pulls this shit, I will dump them for Xfinity.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
That's a joke, right? You're pointing out the lack of competition between ISPs in the US? Yes. You are. Ha ha. Good joke.
I guess that would depend on who funded their network, no? Who gave up the land that they needed to cable? If it was the "People" then it is the "People" who get to dictate the terms. Quid Pro Quo.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
In Australia, Optus has offered unlimited Facebook/Twitter for years. I think even Wikipedia has a zero cost with many African providers.
The US really needs to make a stand. We're behind in so many other areas, we can at least have real network neutrality. It's something the industry won't do itself, and they sell it to customers by saying, "Hey, free Facebook and YouTube..."
You are wrong. Netflix will put servers physically next to Verizon's. The cost is that of a few feet of fiber and some ports. It's probably cheaper because your "general" incoming bandwidth isn't used.
And it's about antitrust. Since the telcos have what us basically a government approved monopoly, they have to agree to certain rules that might seem weird in a free market. Such as net neutrality.
I believe they lost in court, heres the main story but couldn't find conclusion easily.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...
If their customers were paying the ISPs to connect only to the ISP's servers then you might have a point. If you don't use any of the high bandwidth features then you can get a lower capacity tier. If you charge your customers for the data they want brought to them and then charge the other side to bring the data to your customer, that's double charging and hides where the costs lie from the customer.
in the FAQ's it says the app is free but you will use data unless on wifi and the free data is only this weekend
Doesn't this prove by example that there is no last mile scarcity on Verizon's wireless network? The reason for limits on wireless has always been this bottleneck, transit costs over fibre are small, if not free for a tier 1 provider. These costs are easily covered by a cellphone agreement. What is the IP transit cost for a 95% average line that does 2GB a month to Verizon $.05?
With this move, Verizon is demonstrating that caps are unnecessary. With this evidence, one might even argue that caps are an arbitrary and capricious with the sole purpose of extorting money from customers and content providers.
Service providers continue to maintain that caps are about congestion and infrastructure. This move proves that the network has plenty of bandwidth and is plenty robust. So when the FCC comes calling they can't use this as an excuse for why they have caps on their "unlimited" plans. This type of thing is very hard to defend logically, but I'm sure they'll find a way to make up something that sounds reasonable.
And actually caps of any kind can't be justified by network infrastructure since if there's bandwidth to let everyone download up to, say, 300 GB a month, all at the same time and at full speed, there's bandwidth for everyone to download as much as they want at full speed.
To the new slashdot owners, when you finally get around to supporting utf-8, how about lengthening the subject line to at least another dozen characters!
The free market is a nice idea but fails at the entrance fee.
If I have an established system, I can operate at much lower cost than someone who would have to establish the system first. If I already have a factory pumping out a product (which has redeemed its cost already by me being able to set the price due to having a de facto monopoly due to a lack of competitors), I can easily squish any and all competition that may arise by lowering the price to the point where it is not feasible for someone who still has to redeem his investment. By fixing the price at a level where he cannot redeem his costs, I can ensure the continuation of my de facto monopoly. This is crucial in markets where the initial cost of doing business is magnitudes higher than the operational cost. Like, say, ISPs.
There are a few ways to crack open such a monopoly. But that first and foremost needs the will of the law makers to actually do something against it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What now, vote Trump or criminalize criminals. Make up your fuckin' mind!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because of the golden rule. He with the gold makes the rule.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's no such fucking thing as a fucking free fucking market ... a free market is a lie, because companies will always lie, cheat, steal, collude, and otherwise game the system.
There never has been, and never will be, a free fucking market.
You can pretty much replace corporations with anything run by people (including the government).
Difference is, it's easier (not easy, just easier) to get out of the way of a corporation than it is to get out of the way of government.
Example, I hated sprints customer service so I switched to t mobile. I have my city's electrical company but the cost of switching away from that is much higher (have to move, find a new job, etc.)
Holy crap are you a fucking idiot. But you just had to let everyone know that, right?
To the new slashdot owners, when you finally get around to supporting utf-8, how about lengthening the subject line to at least another dozen characters!
A few months ago, we played around with using the Ampersand character in the subject line. It gets expanded out to 5 or 6 characters in the internal buffer, but still is shown as "&" in the line. It was noticed because someone's post had the maximum length for the subject line, but an & in the middle made it too long in the buffer, so the end of the final word was truncated before being printed.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
This sounds like the differing prices between cash and credit that the credit card companies killed-off a bunch of years ago. Now everyone offers a "cash discount" which evidently does not violate that price-equity law.
Verizon will find a way to get around it. For example, all they have to do is change their data policy to charge only for data leaving their network, instead of charging for data traversing their wireless networks.
CAPTCHA: Legalize
Because AT&T is better, right?
Verizon has peering agreements to cover costs the wider Internet. Secondly, the ISPs have always argued that the last mile (in fiber or spectrum) is the bottleneck and why they need data caps. So it's amusing watching you try to flip the argument now that we see that Verizon has no real bandwidth bottleneck for its wireless service if it can zero-rate streaming as long as you pay the piper.
Because they will use their monopoly in the local areas to make it prohibitively expensive for anyone else to compete against them. They've already been caught throttling other providers and not themselves, again trying to push customers to their service by adding additional pains and costs to other services.
They'll make it very expensive to use Netflix, far more than is in any way justifiable, in order to drive you towards their own over priced services.
They don't get the privilege of doing so because the government granted them the monopoly. For fucks sake they didn't even pay to build out their own god damn networks, we got charged and taxed extra on our bills for fucking years for that shit.
Pull your head out of your ass, its not their network its fucking ours. Its our money that paid for it via government taxes and fees. Its our land that their lines lay in and travel over. Verizon/TWC/Comcast and the other major providers should just be dissolved and the networks become public utility. Even the fucking government wouldn't make it worse for us in this case.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Netflix doesn't have physical servers anymore. They're 100% in Amazon AWS, so no, this will not work.
Cox Communication also has a data cap on their broadband service, but their own video on demand service does not count while Netflix and Amazon do.
They have been doing it for years and to the best I can tell, nothing has happened.
The last mile for towers and cell sites are very restricted technically. The bottle neck is NOT the backhaul. it is the number of people that can connect to a sector. It is something like 40 concurrent connections.. and they all have to share the bandwidth for that sector. Wireless just doesn't scale for high bandwidth usage.
So it sounds like everyone should start streaming Verizon video whenever possible. They don't have to watch it, just do unlimited streaming.
When are we going to get bans on data caps? Does the Obama Administration and FCC realize that the very idea of a cap belies the nature of a service which indicates how much data per second they are selling you? Shouldnt my 100 megabits per second be capped at no less than 2,592,000,000,000 bits, a hundred for every second in a 30 day month?
will work for dragon quest localization
They have a control plane in AWS, but the bulk of the bandwidth comes from distinct CDN strategy. Notably they have appliances for ISPs to incorporate, precisely to enable ISPs to deliver better netflix performance.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There is no objective difference between, on the one hand, counting towards a cap (beyond which one must pay a surcharge) only data not received from certain stated parties, and on the other, counting towards a cap only data received from certain stated parties. To claim otherwise it to play a transparently absurd word game. It's like claiming that giving a discount on cash purchases of petrol is different to assessing a surcharge on credit purchases.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
"Does the Obama Administration..."
Yes, they understand that.
President Obama is invested in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund as one of his largest holdings, apart from bonds and T-bills -- Source: http://www.davemanuel.com/pols... -- which in turn is invested in:
Telecoms: AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Comcast Corp. Class A
Oil companies: Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp.
Pharma companies: Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. Inc., Gilead Sciences Inc., Allergan plc, Amgen Inc.,
Banks: Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Visa Inc. Class A
Healthcare problem companies: Philip Morris International Inc., Altria Group Inc., McDonald's Corp., Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo Inc.
Healthcare solution companies: UnitedHealth Group Inc., CVS Health Corp., Medtronic plc
Among others -- Source: https://personal.vanguard.com/...
So perhaps this explains the issues he's interested in, and the things he votes and advocates for and against.
Perhaps this was written by someone too young to remember 3G video services.
Strangely enough, Verizon also doesn't charge me for receiving texts from their own customer support center, or "Fortune of the Day" service, or those chintzy CNNgo mobile .3gpp clips back in 2006, or NFL video, or any of the other benefits of cobranded services that carriers have offered. I fail to see how this is any different.
In fact, this is argueably LESS of an issue than T-Mobile's deal with the video services, simple as a result of it not being co-branded. If "Netflix by T-Mobile" was an actual thing, there'd be absolutely no room to complain at all.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Found it: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
From almost one year ago.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
They have a control plane in AWS, but the bulk of the bandwidth comes from distinct CDN strategy. Notably they have appliances for ISPs to incorporate, precisely to enable ISPs to deliver better netflix performance.
Assuming that the ISPs play ball. Some of the bigger ones have said "no" because Netflix competes against them and they want their customers to pay extra for Netflix.
Oh yes, every company is just EVIL EVIL EVIL.
They're all totally EVIIIIIL. Because money is EVIL.
Companies are just terrible and EVIL.
That's why they call it a "golden parachute" after all. He put in the procedures to make it incredibly expensive just to fire him.
Anything originating from inside their network should not be counted against the data cap or they would be charging you for something you didn't get. That being Internet data.
Now, I would be completely against them not applying the data cap to something that actually comes from Internet like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.
As someone who supports net neutrality, I'm okay with this. If the agreement is "Pay to have access to our network, plus some internet" that's fine. But the second it would be something like "Pay to have access to our network plus Facebook (or whatever else)" that's not fine. That's against net neutrality.
Perhaps they have only a little bit more room, and since their video service is used a little bit, that extra usage will fill in the gap.
Holy crap are you a fucking idiot. But you just had to let everyone know that, right?
And you just had to add a little more nastiness to the web for no benefit whatsoever. I like being an AC here, but I can see why your behavior gives ACs a bad name on /.
<aside>
FWIW, I had to google Xfinity to see the relationship to Comcast. This doesn't mean I'm a "fucking idiot", it just means that I'm fortunate enough to have zero dealings with Comcast. So the GP post was actually useful to me. Just because everyone doesn't share your perspective doesn't make them an idiot.
</aside>
Yes, but that was the whole point in the thread was that Verizon *could* play ball, and the response was 'no, because AWS'. Which is inaccurate because netflix *has* hardware to locate at the edge for willing ISPs, and also inaccurate because even ignoring that, their video comes over non-AWS CDNs (cheaper bandwidth, AWS is not as cheap as traditional CDNs for high bandwidth tasks).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Well, there is always generating your own electricity... though that may depend on your local laws.
isn't a bar in a college town pretty much a market to get free fucks? Or is that not what you were meant by a free fucking market.
I'm guessing you're just being a sarcastic jackass, but non-physical=VM image, meaning they can just pop it into existing VM infrastructure without needing to dedicate space or support to additional physical hardware.
It still takes compute/storage resources, but there's no need to worry about stuff like cabling, hardware replacement, etc etc (beyond what they're presumably already doing for their own VMs in the farm)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
LTE and LTE Advanced actuality have some pretty high max speeds
I really say one should test that literally. How well does a golden parachute really work if you toss said manager out of the 50th floor? Inquisitive minds want to know! And let's be honest here, it sure ain't no loss if a CEO or two die in the process, we have far more than we need anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually we used to have a curious form of economy for the longest time in many parts of Europe where key infrastructure was in the hands of the state while the rest of the economy worked out in a market economy. The net result was that there was a lot more competition for the consumer market because the playing field for the competitors was a lot more level.
In this example it would mean that the cables would be owned by a state controlled monopoly while the ISPs compete on equal footing by renting cable from the state monopoly and providing the ISP service to the customers. Much lower entrance cost into the market meant that a lot of small ISPs competed, allowing the price to drop. Then in their unending wisdom our regulators decided to "liberate" the market because that bad, bad state government made everything so terribly expensive due to all the red tape and bureaucracy that state monopolies entail.
Now, about 15 years after the monopoly fell, we have two major ISPs left, zero competition between the two (who curiously seem to divine whenever the competitor raises the price and matches it immediately), prices are up at the ceiling, bandwidths have been stagnant for a few years now, cables are congested because nobody invests in new infrastructure and the whole shit is going down the drain.
Thanks, free market!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Has FIOS crossed a line?