I'm trying, but this isn't the/. I remember. We've been overrun with AOLers, so of course my comment (with all those pesky little facts that get in the way of the anti-ISP ranting) gets modded-down.
Stupid? I'm the only one here who seems to know what peering agreements are, and how they've worked for the past several decades.
There's no question Verizon has plenty of bandwidth. The problem here is Level-3 breaking their peering agreement, and not wanting to renegotiate, so Verizon has ever right to disconnect Level-3 and Netflix from their customers. Instead, they let the peering point get congested, until a new agreement is worked out.
It's how peering has always worked. You're the one arguing we need to erase the history of the internet, and turn it into a receiver-pays model, where every site you visit gets a few cents from Verizon.
In the old days, when peering became imbalanced, ISPs would shut-off peering with each other, bifurcating the internet for weeks until one side agreed to pay another. These days, they just let the peering points get congested, and don't upgrade it.
I'm sure if Level-3 would agree to pay Verizon for the peering imbalance, Verizon would upgrade the peering points, but that would cost Level-3 more in the long-term. Level-3 pointing the finger at Verizon, and shaming them in the court of public opinion, is cheaper than fixing their peering imbalance.
Peering agreements have never depended on who requested what data. They're much simpler up/down traffic ratios.
Everybody seems to have enough hate of Verizon, and love of Netflix, that they just want to punish the former, in favor of the later, no matter the circumstances.
Verizon just changed all their FIOS plans to be symmetric up/down, so they're at least less guilty than other ISPs.
In addition, Verizon isn't just customers. They host sites, too. More Redbox streaming going over Level-3 would help to level things out.
Or Level-3 could offer cut-rates to online backup service providers, who recieve a lot of traffic from customers, and only a fraction as many requests. Or Netfliix could change their player to upload junk data to some random server all-the-time, which would help tremendously.
The point remains, no-fee peering has always required roughly equivalent up/down traffic, so the horrible imbalance Netflix causes, is going to cause peering disuptes, legitimately, without any evil conspiracy from Verizon and others. And that's not even getting started on Level-3's poorly concieved CDN, taking money from ISPs while futher imbalancing their peering arrangements.
That is a load of horeshit technobabble meant to obfuscate and mislead.
No, his explanation is spot-on. If "technobabble" means you didn't understand it, that's besides the point.
There is no reason that any link between it and another network should remain saturated if both sides are acting in good faith to serve their respective customers
Level-3 is acting in bad-faith in a couple different ways. Offering to give Verizon a small amount of money does not obviate the large ways in which they are acting badly, which will make them even more money.
it is Verizon's customers who are requesting and already paying for the content in the first place.
Customers pay both Verizon and Netflix. Both sides are supposed to pay their own costs of transit and bandwidth. Saying that Verizon should acquies to badly-behaving peers is a small step away from saying that Verizon should provide free internet services for every service their customers request.
Verizon is choosing to not upgrade its connections to shake down Netflix
Verizon is choosing not to upgrade it's peering points with Level-3 because they are no longer evenly sharing traffic up/down as all free peering arrangements have ALWAYS required, yet Level-3 doesn't want to pay for the imbalance, and Netflix doesn't want to shift some of their Verizon traffic to a different transit provider than Level-3.
Netflix offered to provide co-located CDNs, and all Verizon had to provide was electricity and space (both of which are negligible compared to the cost for Verizon to pay for bandwidth.) Verizon elected not to take the option that would save them money
If Netflix got a free CDN setup without paying ISPs anything, Verizon would quickly see all the other CDNs refusing to pay them, too.
On that same note, I know where you can get a FREE 40-hour/week job... You won't have to pay a penny for this FREE job.
Failing to have peerage agreements in place to honor your downstream sales commitments is a form of throttling - Or, I would daresay, a form of outright fraud.
You're one small step away from saying that Verizon should be giving free internet service to every service that has content their customers want to send/receive.
That's never been how internet service has worked, and forcing Verizon to acquies to misbehaving peers will result in a huge increase in your internet service prices, as everything suddenly becomes client-pays, instead of both sides mutually paying their half.
This doesn't change the fact that the customer paid for 75Mbps and got... a lot less.
1) That's not a news story. It's been happening for a long time. 2) ISPs always warn you that they aren't responsible for the speeds of 3rd party servers, and can't guarantee they'll be fast, too. 3) He paid both Verizon and Netflix. You can make the case for either one of them being at-fault.
Except that if you do that, there is functionally no difference between sending the traffic to a multicast destination and a unicast destination.
Nonsense. With a subscriber base as large as Netflix's, there will always be several people requesting the same video stream, within a minute or so of each other.
Well, Sub2 gets the show 10 minutes later, assuming he's joining the same multicast group as Sub1. Sub2 is not happy, he wanted to watch the entire show.
Actually, when Sub2 joins, his system can start buffering the show 10-minutes in, and while doing so, send a request to resend the first 10 minutes of the video. Netflix servers save bandwidth, and both users watch the video they wanted, when they wanted.
Netflix supplies a tower-pc sized box with all of netflix on it to ISPs for free
That's like saying your boss is willing to give you a full-time job for FREE. In other words, failing to pay you... But it's FREEEEE! Don't you feel special, getting something for FREE?
It's Netflix who's trying to get something very valuable for free, out of the deal. Other content delivery network providers, like Akamai, pay good money for the privilege of having their servers hosted by ISPs on their fat pipes near to customers.
However, this is all entirely Verizon's fault. They are the entity in this arrangement that has actively encouraged assymetric use of the net by offering assymeteric service.
Verizon just became the first consumer ISP to switch to symmetric connections, with all their FIOS services.
Level3 does not pay Verizon anything. Verizon does not pay Level3 anything.
Yes, but there's 2 things going on that you're neglecting to mention.
1) When Level3 started delivering Netflix streams, suddenly their peering traffic was extremely unbalanced... That's when one side has to start paying the other. Verizon wants Level3 to pay, but they won't, so Verizon refuses to upgrade the interconnect. In the bad old days, these peering disputes ended with a disconnect, and big portions of the internet broke off and many sites went offline. These days it's just lots of congestion.
2) Level3 seriously pissed-off ISPs, when they entered the distributed content delivery business. ISPs get paid good money by Akamai and others to host their caching servers. Level3 thought they could get in on this racket by hosting servers just outside their ISP peering points, cutting the ISPs out of the profits. This pissed off ISPs, and more than that, massively screwed-up their peering ratios.
So, on both sides, Level3 is the one who screwed-up their peering agreement with Verizon and others, without considering the consequences.
Netflix has the ability to fix it, though... If their software would tell all the clients to upload random junk to some random Netflix servers (preferably UDP, so the server doesn't even have to really exist), even when idle and not watching videos, they could move Level3's ratios back to even up/down distribution, and really punish the local ISPs who claim they want even up/down peering, at the same time.
some of them won't help you if you don't spend an hour in church or whatever.
Yeah, an hour in church every week sounds so much worse than 40 hours/week in an office, facing some truly crazy belief systems...
I'd be happy to attend Buddhist, Scientologist, or Hindu services, if I needed that much help getting through the day... Just so long as nobody asks me if I believe in their dogma.
They also make a boatload of money (often > $100,000/yr).
I'd love to see a source for that... That seems very high.
In talking to hundreds of homeless people, I have only met one homeless person who was there by choice.
Hmm, depends on what degree of "by choice". I know several who choose to live in a tent, because shelters won't accept their pets, and a few who have a problem with small spaces, crowds, etc.
Directing them to a shelter doesn't mean they have to live there. Instead, it's a central location where they will have resources to find out about government programs and other local charities.
Giving out money to panhandlers is a BAD THING, whether you empathize with them or not. You're enabling drug and alcohol habits for those who already have their needs taken care-of. Centuries of ad-hoc charitable donations never improved the lot of the destitute, while modest social safety net programs have made huge strides in a very short time, to nearly eradicate the problem.
Boost is $35. Sprint is $85 or whatever with a "free" $150 phone. People have the choice, and they choose to pay an extra $50 / month for 36 months = $1,800 for that phone.
Actually, with proper Sprint service, I believe you get unlimited and uncapped data, instead of throttled at 2.5GBytes/month, and more than that, you can roam onto Verizon's network when Sprint towers aren't in-range.
It's been reported a number of times that Sprint earns more money, per customer, on cheaper prepaid plans like Boost, than they do from contract customers on proper Sprint.
Also, Boost is actually $40 with any smartphone, and even that's only after 18 months of service and on-time payments, so in your first 2-year period, it averages out to $47.50/month, PLUS the cost of the cell phone, which could increase that monthly average by 10-50%.
If you act like most customers, and switch phones and possibly providers every two years, chasing the latest slightly-better deal, you won't come out ahead on a prepaid plan. It's only if you want a cheap phone, and/or are willing to keep it for more than 2 years when it's long obsolete, and/or are willing to stay with your provider long-term, that prepaid really works out for you. I'm happy with it, but I'm not a gadget junkie like many people, so YMMV.
Most people aren't set up to lay down a few hundred dollars for a phone at time of purchase. Getting a phone for free and paying for a couple years makes more sense.
T-Mobile allows financing your cell phone purchase over 2-years, with no interest.
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It always has before.
And Verizon is a backbone provider in their own right, not just a local ISP.
Verizon and Level-3.
Good, then complain to Netflix. They can fix it.
I'm trying, but this isn't the /. I remember. We've been overrun with AOLers, so of course my comment (with all those pesky little facts that get in the way of the anti-ISP ranting) gets modded-down.
I only hope SoylentNews turns out better...
Stupid? I'm the only one here who seems to know what peering agreements are, and how they've worked for the past several decades.
There's no question Verizon has plenty of bandwidth. The problem here is Level-3 breaking their peering agreement, and not wanting to renegotiate, so Verizon has ever right to disconnect Level-3 and Netflix from their customers. Instead, they let the peering point get congested, until a new agreement is worked out.
It's how peering has always worked. You're the one arguing we need to erase the history of the internet, and turn it into a receiver-pays model, where every site you visit gets a few cents from Verizon.
In the old days, when peering became imbalanced, ISPs would shut-off peering with each other, bifurcating the internet for weeks until one side agreed to pay another. These days, they just let the peering points get congested, and don't upgrade it.
I'm sure if Level-3 would agree to pay Verizon for the peering imbalance, Verizon would upgrade the peering points, but that would cost Level-3 more in the long-term. Level-3 pointing the finger at Verizon, and shaming them in the court of public opinion, is cheaper than fixing their peering imbalance.
So it's your assertion that Verizon should pay to run lines to the Netflix data center, and give them all the free bandwidth they can use?
Peering agreements have never depended on who requested what data. They're much simpler up/down traffic ratios.
Everybody seems to have enough hate of Verizon, and love of Netflix, that they just want to punish the former, in favor of the later, no matter the circumstances.
Verizon just changed all their FIOS plans to be symmetric up/down, so they're at least less guilty than other ISPs.
In addition, Verizon isn't just customers. They host sites, too. More Redbox streaming going over Level-3 would help to level things out.
Or Level-3 could offer cut-rates to online backup service providers, who recieve a lot of traffic from customers, and only a fraction as many requests. Or Netfliix could change their player to upload junk data to some random server all-the-time, which would help tremendously.
The point remains, no-fee peering has always required roughly equivalent up/down traffic, so the horrible imbalance Netflix causes, is going to cause peering disuptes, legitimately, without any evil conspiracy from Verizon and others. And that's not even getting started on Level-3's poorly concieved CDN, taking money from ISPs while futher imbalancing their peering arrangements.
More peering links won't rectify the imbalance. Your claims of knowing anything about the subject fall quite flat.
No, his explanation is spot-on. If "technobabble" means you didn't understand it, that's besides the point.
Level-3 is acting in bad-faith in a couple different ways. Offering to give Verizon a small amount of money does not obviate the large ways in which they are acting badly, which will make them even more money.
Customers pay both Verizon and Netflix. Both sides are supposed to pay their own costs of transit and bandwidth. Saying that Verizon should acquies to badly-behaving peers is a small step away from saying that Verizon should provide free internet services for every service their customers request.
Verizon is choosing not to upgrade it's peering points with Level-3 because they are no longer evenly sharing traffic up/down as all free peering arrangements have ALWAYS required, yet Level-3 doesn't want to pay for the imbalance, and Netflix doesn't want to shift some of their Verizon traffic to a different transit provider than Level-3.
If Netflix got a free CDN setup without paying ISPs anything, Verizon would quickly see all the other CDNs refusing to pay them, too.
On that same note, I know where you can get a FREE 40-hour/week job... You won't have to pay a penny for this FREE job.
You're one small step away from saying that Verizon should be giving free internet service to every service that has content their customers want to send/receive.
That's never been how internet service has worked, and forcing Verizon to acquies to misbehaving peers will result in a huge increase in your internet service prices, as everything suddenly becomes client-pays, instead of both sides mutually paying their half.
1) That's not a news story. It's been happening for a long time.
2) ISPs always warn you that they aren't responsible for the speeds of 3rd party servers, and can't guarantee they'll be fast, too.
3) He paid both Verizon and Netflix. You can make the case for either one of them being at-fault.
Nonsense. With a subscriber base as large as Netflix's, there will always be several people requesting the same video stream, within a minute or so of each other.
Actually, when Sub2 joins, his system can start buffering the show 10-minutes in, and while doing so, send a request to resend the first 10 minutes of the video. Netflix servers save bandwidth, and both users watch the video they wanted, when they wanted.
That's like saying your boss is willing to give you a full-time job for FREE. In other words, failing to pay you... But it's FREEEEE! Don't you feel special, getting something for FREE?
It's Netflix who's trying to get something very valuable for free, out of the deal. Other content delivery network providers, like Akamai, pay good money for the privilege of having their servers hosted by ISPs on their fat pipes near to customers.
Verizon just became the first consumer ISP to switch to symmetric connections, with all their FIOS services.
Backups. Encrypt and upload your entire harddrive to Dropbox. Then upload anything that has changed, every single day...
Eventually, you'll need to download everything, but you'll generally be uploading many, many times more than you download.
Yes, but there's 2 things going on that you're neglecting to mention.
1) When Level3 started delivering Netflix streams, suddenly their peering traffic was extremely unbalanced... That's when one side has to start paying the other. Verizon wants Level3 to pay, but they won't, so Verizon refuses to upgrade the interconnect. In the bad old days, these peering disputes ended with a disconnect, and big portions of the internet broke off and many sites went offline. These days it's just lots of congestion.
2) Level3 seriously pissed-off ISPs, when they entered the distributed content delivery business. ISPs get paid good money by Akamai and others to host their caching servers. Level3 thought they could get in on this racket by hosting servers just outside their ISP peering points, cutting the ISPs out of the profits. This pissed off ISPs, and more than that, massively screwed-up their peering ratios.
So, on both sides, Level3 is the one who screwed-up their peering agreement with Verizon and others, without considering the consequences.
Netflix has the ability to fix it, though... If their software would tell all the clients to upload random junk to some random Netflix servers (preferably UDP, so the server doesn't even have to really exist), even when idle and not watching videos, they could move Level3's ratios back to even up/down distribution, and really punish the local ISPs who claim they want even up/down peering, at the same time.
Yeah, an hour in church every week sounds so much worse than 40 hours/week in an office, facing some truly crazy belief systems...
I'd be happy to attend Buddhist, Scientologist, or Hindu services, if I needed that much help getting through the day... Just so long as nobody asks me if I believe in their dogma.
I'd love to see a source for that... That seems very high.
Hmm, depends on what degree of "by choice". I know several who choose to live in a tent, because shelters won't accept their pets, and a few who have a problem with small spaces, crowds, etc.
Is there another Christopher Titus out there you think I might be referring to? Fairly unique name, no?
Directing them to a shelter doesn't mean they have to live there. Instead, it's a central location where they will have resources to find out about government programs and other local charities.
Giving out money to panhandlers is a BAD THING, whether you empathize with them or not. You're enabling drug and alcohol habits for those who already have their needs taken care-of. Centuries of ad-hoc charitable donations never improved the lot of the destitute, while modest social safety net programs have made huge strides in a very short time, to nearly eradicate the problem.
"And if we can't have peace, then we'll destroy the people who screwed up the peace..." --Christopher Titus
Actually, with proper Sprint service, I believe you get unlimited and uncapped data, instead of throttled at 2.5GBytes/month, and more than that, you can roam onto Verizon's network when Sprint towers aren't in-range.
It's been reported a number of times that Sprint earns more money, per customer, on cheaper prepaid plans like Boost, than they do from contract customers on proper Sprint.
Also, Boost is actually $40 with any smartphone, and even that's only after 18 months of service and on-time payments, so in your first 2-year period, it averages out to $47.50/month, PLUS the cost of the cell phone, which could increase that monthly average by 10-50%.
If you act like most customers, and switch phones and possibly providers every two years, chasing the latest slightly-better deal, you won't come out ahead on a prepaid plan. It's only if you want a cheap phone, and/or are willing to keep it for more than 2 years when it's long obsolete, and/or are willing to stay with your provider long-term, that prepaid really works out for you. I'm happy with it, but I'm not a gadget junkie like many people, so YMMV.
T-Mobile allows financing your cell phone purchase over 2-years, with no interest.
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/p...
Most pre-paid providers have extremely cheap Android smartphones, some as little as $30.