That's actually easy to answer - QoS markings. They're not just for traffic prioritization. It's pretty easy to use them for access control and accounting as well. Pubic WiFi traffic is marked one way, subscriber traffic another. Setting your own QoS markings won't get around that either - the modem will just strip them and set the proper ones.
The flip side of that is that you have access to the wireless mesh as well if you want it. You're not only providing it, you can consume it as well.
And Comcast is not charging you for power. You have to provide power to the cable modem in order to use it, and you're paying that fee whether you provide your own, or you take theirs.
I do agree, however. Leasing a modem is stupid. A Motorola SB 6121 costs about 80 bucks at your local big box store and is fully compatible with the Comcast network (do not believe the sales people or the install techs when they try and make you doubt whether or not the modem will work with the Comcast network - it will. Comcast supports every cable modem vendor you can find in Best Buy and it's like). It'll pay for itself in under a year. Now, if you're using one of the Wireless gateways, then the cable modem is also acting as a router, so you'll need to buy one of those as well if you don't already have them, which takes you a little longer to reach your break even point. However, most folks only change service providers when they move, and most folks don't move frequently, so chances are you'll hit the break even point before then.
If someone has been paying a cable modem rental fee for like 5+ years, then that person is terrible at math.
Ehh, Comcast's business practices tend to suck, but their technical people do a good job. I think they were the first large-scale residential provider in the US with DNSSEC and IPv6 for example.
In any case, they are already doing separate channels for separate services (I believe that's how they implement voice service for example), so this will just be turning up another channel.
Nope. Comcast Digital Voice is straight IP, straight VoIP. It's not another service channel, the modem just has a priority queue for VOIP traffic.
There are separate RF channels for different products in the sense of video and VOD, but that's because they travel over different infrastructure at the hubsite/headend (it's not combined until it heads down to the customer facing nodes).
The one exception to that is the new X1 boxes. The channel guide is delivered through the CMTS rather than through a small freq OOB channel like it's been traditionally done (this is why if you reboot an X1 box, you don't have to wait for hours for the channel guide to repopulate). But even this isn't coming in via your internet cable modem - the X1 boxes simply have another cable modem inside of them that ranges up just for that information.
This is accurate. How fast your speeds can go depend on three things -
1. How many channels are turned up on the CMTS side. Each DOCSIS 3.0 downstream supports ~42mbit/s and each upstream supports ~30mbit/s
2. How many channels your modem can bond. For example, if your cable modem can bond 8 downstreams, and 4 upstreams (which is pretty common with modern cable modems), you can have a theoretical maximum of 383 Mbit down and 122 Mbit up. Your modem will bond to as many channels as it can (ie, however many the CMTS offers, or the maximum amount it can bond to if the CMTS offers more than that)
3. The modems bootfile. This is where the rate limiting comes in. If you're bonding 8 down and 4 up, but you only purchased 30 down and 4 up as part of your plan, this is where they enforce that - the bootfile will have the QoS settings that the modem enforces.
There's a 4th factor that those who purchase top tier internet quickly find out - their router (assuming they haven't leased a cable modem that's also acting as a gateway). The shitty little Linksys you bought ten years ago is *not* going to be able to handle 100mbs of downstream, since the packets are all forwarded in software, and they didn't exactly put powerful procs in those things.
Of course a network vendor is going to point out that some packets needs preferential treatment over others. It's something they've worked to engineer into their product lines because their customers demand the capability to do so. For an ISP, 911 VoIP packets are a much higher priority than World of Warcraft packets.
Too many folks are caught up in the idea that prioritization is bad. There's a difference between between the philosophy of Network Neutrality and the operational reality of packet prioritization.
Saying Cisco opposes Net Neutrality just because they're pointing out some simple truths on how network operate today is like saying Glock supports terrorism just because they make guns.
Of course, if the title weren't sensational, no one would probably read it.
It saddens me that Slashdot seems to have decided that they need to resort to the same tactics as the National Enquirer
Why? Because there was no benefit for Comcast to do so.
This isn't like Comcast refusing aid to vets, the homeless, or kicking kittens, or anything like that.
The colocation appliance *only* helps Netflix. For Comcast, it increases OpEx for no benefit. That tends to make shareholders mad.
So what responsibility does Comcast, a for-profit entity, have to help another for-profit entity (and a direct competitor to Comcast's own streaming service) contain their operational costs. Would it be nice? Sure. But Comcast isn't in business to be nice. It's in business to make money.
The idea that Netflix is some sainted company that deserves to be treated better than any others mystifies me.
I actually know quite a bit about routing. Enough to know that you don't call an interconnect a 'route'. A route is a destination prefix with a valid next-hop. But go right on ahead and think you know all about internet routing just because you read a blog entry or two.
And yes, you do let interconnects get congested if there's no business case for upgrading them.
I'm not saying I disagree with your opinion. As an operations wonk, it pains me to see capacity issues and my natural inclination is to fix it.
However, that shit costs money, and not lunch money either. This is when the business side interfered with the tech. Unless there's a good business case for it, those links aren't getting upgraded until there is.
In this case, there was no business case to do so. If Netflix was complaining about the quality of service because of the saturation on the Cogent interconnect, all they had to do was alter their routing policy to send the traffic for Comcast's prefixes out their Level 3 links instead. It's a trivial and often performed piece of BGP traffic engineering. Netflix decided not to do so (because Level 3 is a crapload more expensive than Cogent) and make a public stink about it.
Even after the public stink failed, Netflix *still* decided not to send the traffic out Level 3, opting to purchase direct links into the Comcast network (and, shortly thereafter, into AT&T's network as well. Strangely enough, people don't seem to have an issue with AT&T telling Netflix to go fuck themselves, just Comcast). That decision should tell you a couple things - Bandwidth ain't cheap. It's cheaper than it was 10 years ago, on a per mbit/gbit cost, but the amount of traffic crossing has scaled up even while prices have been scaling down. And it should tell you just how expensive Level3 is to actually use.
You're basically saying that, just because the Cogent link was saturated, Comcast should have instantly gone ahead and upgraded their links with Cogent, nevermind that the guys doing the complaining had links to another Comcast transit provider, who's links *weren't* saturated.
When bandwidth costs are the clear majority of your OpEx, you think twice about doling out CapEx and additional OpEx if there is another option. You would make a horrible network operator.
In a sane world, the up side would be that they got to keep their customers, who would leave and go to someone else if Netflix didn't work properly. In our world, they often have a monopoly on high-speed internet access within a market, and so their customers will simply have to suckit.
Ok, and how many customers do you think are cancelling their internet service with Comcast just because of Netflix? I'll give you a hint - before Netflix agreed to pay for their peering links, the effect of Netflix performance had a negligible effect on customer churn. By and large, Comcast was keeping it's customers without having to colocate Netfix apps onto it's network. IE, no upside at all for Comcast. By saying no and letting Netflix come to the conclusion that it was better business to just pay for the links, Comcast's upside is more revenue. Netflix sure are being crybabies about it though.
And they and all other internet service providers should be prohibited from engaging in that kind of behavior. Content should be separate from transport. It is long past time to force ISPs to behave as common carriers. We forced the telcos, we can force the ISPs.
Why? You're making assertions, but not backing it up.
You realize this is how the internet has worked since the NSF stopped off, yes? All transit providers double dip. You do understand that Comcast is not a tier 1 provider, and to my knowledge, has no settlement free peering agreements. That means Comcast pays every single one of it's transit providers for the traffic that comes in. Which means that, prior to Netflix establishing it's own links, Comcast was paying Cogent to receive Netflix traffic. And Netflix wanted Comcast to upgrade it's links with Cogent so that Netflix could send it more traffic. Netflix wanted Comcast to pay more money to deliver Netflix's products to Comcast's customers.
So somehow it's ok for Netflix to do that, but when Comcast turns it around and makes Netflix pay instead, it's a bad thing?
You can hate on Comcast all you want, but don't even try to pass this off as Comcast not being fair or being mean. This is just business, and Comcast had more leverage than Netflix. Welcome to the world.
Then Netflix would lose all revenue from Comcast customers.
I strongly suspect the loss of revenue is larger than the fee Comcast wants to charge to link them directly to the network.
Comcast is basically acting like Wal-Mart does for alot of it's vendors. They're so big that they can dictate terms, and the vendors have no choice but to comply because losing access to that market has dire effects on their bottom line.
Comcast is not charging Netflix to deliver packets on it's network that come in from a transit provider. Comcast was not sitting there and saying 'Hey Netflix, we're going to drop or degrade your inbound traffic at our border if you don't pay us'.
Netflix wanted direct connections into the Comcast network to help them save on transit costs. And they wanted them for free, arguing that Comcast was already making money off the customers they'd be delivering the traffic to.
Comcast said we'll give you direct links into our network, but it won't be free. If you want direct access, you pay for direct access
Comcast then gets this awesome idea, instead of paying for bandwidth, they should get paid for it! So not Comcast is making even more money, but making money isn't a bad thing in itself. So, what's wrong about Comcast wanting to make more money? Because Comcast is having their customers foot the bill for the infrastructure, then Comcast outright refuses to allow the customers to use the infrastructure to its fullest, then Comcast turns around and resells that same infrastructure for more profit to another company, while making no additional investments into the infrastructure.
You have woefully misunderstood the nature of your subscriber agreement.
You are not paying for a piece of the infrastructure to use to its fullest when you pay your fee. Since we're talking about Netflix, we're talking about the internet side. What Comcast gives you in exchange for your money is internet service with a specified downstream/upstream _UP TO_ the stated speeds, and it's all best effort (for residential access, anyway. Business Class has different parameters).
That's it. You don't get to claim a piece of the infrastructure and use it however you please. You send packets, Comcast does it's best to deliver them. You request packets, Comcast does it's best to deliver them. How you think it is, or how you think it should be is irrelevant. The only thing that *is* relevant is what was agreed to when service was established. If you think the legalese matches your opinions, you're in for a very sad revelation.
There are no man in the middle machines. The taps they use for monitoring are passive, not active. If the tap goes down, it has no effect on the data transferring across the wire that's being tapped.
Most providers will simply capitulate to a request and turn down the links and/or bgp sessions instead of actually having their gear powered off. Cutting power to a datacenter, or even a floor of a datacenter, can have a major impact in the ability to recover. If the government is going to shut me down anyway, I'd rather kill the peering sessions myself rather than risk additional loss of revenue due to equipment becoming unrecoverable.
DirectTV has their rental service, in which you pay 3 to 5 bucks for a movie, and that streams from the sat feed. It is, essentially, pay per view, though the terms of the rental may let you watch it more than once over a day or so, and it also gives you the ability to watch relatively recent movies in your home for alot less than theatre.
Traditional Video on Demand is stuff like your weekly television shows, or older movies which are long out of the theatre and not currently being hyped for DVD sales. That kind of Video on Demand, as delivered by DirectTV, does stream over your internet connection, as the sat feed doesn't have nearly enough bandwidth to handle that level of VOD. I work as a network engineer for one DirecTV's competitors, and the bandwidth that VOD consumes is one of our biggest hogs, easily outpacing linear video.
Goodbye, Medicare. Goodbye, Social Security. Goodbye, foodstamps and welfare and section 8. Hello, social upheaval. Hello, desperation-induced crime wave. Hello, Great Depression.
That's your idea of "annoying"? I'd say "catastrophic" is a far more apt description.
Wow, the amount of pessimism here is amazing. Do you really believe that the entire health of US economy and society is dependent on our entitlement programs?
I don't think we've quite reach the point where the majority of Americans are proles on the dole, I don't think losing those entitlement programs would be a bad thing. Would it cause some problems? Of course it would, and the politicians would take a heavy beating in the media (which, don't kid yourself, is the *real* reason this was never going to default), but ultimately, it would be to the benefit of the country.
Gold is an excellent safe haven in the sense that if you have 1kg of gold about $40,000K and civilization collapsed tomorrow you would still have 1kg of gold. If you had that in hard currency all you would have is 40,000 pieces of paper. Though 40,000 pieces of paper would be very valueable as toilet paper. Hmmmmm maybe gold isn't as good of a safe haven as I thought. I need to stock up on US currency.
This is why I don't get folks that want to hoard gold as a hedge against economic fallout. If civilization collapses, gold becomes worthless. In a collapsed economy, gold has no practical value. If civilization collapses, I want things that will actually be useful. Food. Water. Shelter. Guns. Clothing. These are the currency of a collapsed economy, not pretty baubles or shiny bricks.
Or maybe because what I buy is my business and my business alone? Without anonymity, it makes it trivial for people to track my purchases. If people can track my purchases, they can target me for their sales campaigns in order to try and manipulate me into giving them more money, Since I'm not terribly fond of being manipulated, nor am I terribly fond of junk mail or spam, I prefer my transactions to be as anonymous as possible.
But yeah, I guess you're right, it's all about the hookers and blow, Couldn't possibly be any other reason I don't want folks up in my business.
Which doesn't really apply to the nuclear industry in the southeast, seeing as how the NRC has the oversight, and not state agencies. Federal law actually places severe constraints on any states ability to regulate nuclear plants, which results in the ball being pretty much entirely in the NRC's court.
Someone very close to me happens to be employed as a civil engineer at a southeastern nuclear plant. The NRC is constantly in their business. Right now, my acquaintance has spent the last two weeks in hectic meetings over a "potential" hazard that someone at the NRC thought might could happen (the chances are astronomically small) because they saw a video from a vendor trying to sell a solution to the problem and directed the plant to make sure that particular issue could never, ever happen.
The consequence is that the culture at the plant is one where safety is the paramount concern, because they don't want the NRC to make their lives any harder than it already is. As a consumer and someone who's outside of the industry, I can actually appreciate that. I suspect that the higher rate of incidents out west has alot more to do with bad NRC oversight than with southeastern state agencies keeping things on the down low.
However, we don't have one anymore; we have the poor, and the super rich. The line separating those two is getting thinner every year.
Uhm, I think you may be just a little too broad in your definition. I fit neither category. I am not super rich. I make a good living, and the work I do makes me better paid than the majority of americans, but I'm not even regular old rich, let alone super rich. I own my car, and I have some nice toys to play with. I can pay all of my bills on time. However, I also have a mortgage, and in order to meet my financial obligations, I do have to continue to work. I'm not poor, I receive absolutely no government assistance (nor do I want any). I'm pretty much the definition of middle class, and most of the people I know and associate with are the same.
I think your views might be just a tad bit skewed.
I wish someone would make a cop show a la Breaking Bad. A good cop, doing the best that he can. Bends the rules occasionally to get the job done but things slowly, inevitably get out of hand as the bending becomes breaking and the breaking becomes outright flaunting.
The NSA will still get the data one way or another as long as they are not stopped. To stop the NSA we indeed do not need a technical solution for a social problem.
It seems that everybody is relative OK with what the NSA does. Otherwise there would have been a lot of REAL protests.
Overly pessimistic. If the source point and the destination point do not transit US controlled routers, then the NSA can't sniff the traffic. The only way for them to get it would be for someone in the transit path to sniff the data and forward it on to them. Which isn't entirely impossible, but it'd dependent on country of origin and country of destination before I'd automatically assume that to be the truth. Believe it or not, some foreign intelligence agencies don't play nice with the US based ones!
Short of a new network protocol you might have issues getting the IP blocks for international routing. The only way I can see it happening is during the migration to IPv6 and only if either the world unanimously votes to start their own equivalent of IANA allows current non-US blocks to remain allocated without paying a second time (perhaps simply paying their next renewal fee to the Internationalized replacement to 'port over')
No. You don't understand how it works.
The IANA delegated the IP blocks (and it's done with that, it doesn't have anymore left) to the Regional Internet Registrars, of which there are 5. Brazil gets it's global IP's from LACNIC, which is not the IANA, is independant from the IANA, and is not US-based. US based companies get their IP's from the US based LACNIC equivalent, ARIN. The only real question would have been possibly DNS, since all the root servers used to be located in the US, but that hasn't been true for a long time.
There is absolutely nothing that would prevent Brazil from doing this technology wise. The only question is one of infrastructure.
You are incorrect. I am a network engineer for Comcast, so I have direct knowledge of this.
Comcast previously did have a cap of 250 GB transfer a month. Last year, the caps were suspended and have yet to be reinstated, if they ever will. If you're a customer, your usage per month will still show on your account page when you login, but the references to caps have been removed.
Now, I'm not going to say caps will never come back. That decision is far, far above my pay grade.
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That's actually easy to answer - QoS markings. They're not just for traffic prioritization. It's pretty easy to use them for access control and accounting as well. Pubic WiFi traffic is marked one way, subscriber traffic another. Setting your own QoS markings won't get around that either - the modem will just strip them and set the proper ones.
The flip side of that is that you have access to the wireless mesh as well if you want it. You're not only providing it, you can consume it as well.
And Comcast is not charging you for power. You have to provide power to the cable modem in order to use it, and you're paying that fee whether you provide your own, or you take theirs.
I do agree, however. Leasing a modem is stupid. A Motorola SB 6121 costs about 80 bucks at your local big box store and is fully compatible with the Comcast network (do not believe the sales people or the install techs when they try and make you doubt whether or not the modem will work with the Comcast network - it will. Comcast supports every cable modem vendor you can find in Best Buy and it's like). It'll pay for itself in under a year. Now, if you're using one of the Wireless gateways, then the cable modem is also acting as a router, so you'll need to buy one of those as well if you don't already have them, which takes you a little longer to reach your break even point. However, most folks only change service providers when they move, and most folks don't move frequently, so chances are you'll hit the break even point before then.
If someone has been paying a cable modem rental fee for like 5+ years, then that person is terrible at math.
Ehh, Comcast's business practices tend to suck, but their technical people do a good job. I think they were the first large-scale residential provider in the US with DNSSEC and IPv6 for example.
In any case, they are already doing separate channels for separate services (I believe that's how they implement voice service for example), so this will just be turning up another channel.
Nope. Comcast Digital Voice is straight IP, straight VoIP. It's not another service channel, the modem just has a priority queue for VOIP traffic.
There are separate RF channels for different products in the sense of video and VOD, but that's because they travel over different infrastructure at the hubsite/headend (it's not combined until it heads down to the customer facing nodes).
The one exception to that is the new X1 boxes. The channel guide is delivered through the CMTS rather than through a small freq OOB channel like it's been traditionally done (this is why if you reboot an X1 box, you don't have to wait for hours for the channel guide to repopulate). But even this isn't coming in via your internet cable modem - the X1 boxes simply have another cable modem inside of them that ranges up just for that information.
This is accurate. How fast your speeds can go depend on three things -
1. How many channels are turned up on the CMTS side. Each DOCSIS 3.0 downstream supports ~42mbit/s and each upstream supports ~30mbit/s
2. How many channels your modem can bond. For example, if your cable modem can bond 8 downstreams, and 4 upstreams (which is pretty common with modern cable modems), you can have a theoretical maximum of 383 Mbit down and 122 Mbit up. Your modem will bond to as many channels as it can (ie, however many the CMTS offers, or the maximum amount it can bond to if the CMTS offers more than that)
3. The modems bootfile. This is where the rate limiting comes in. If you're bonding 8 down and 4 up, but you only purchased 30 down and 4 up as part of your plan, this is where they enforce that - the bootfile will have the QoS settings that the modem enforces.
There's a 4th factor that those who purchase top tier internet quickly find out - their router (assuming they haven't leased a cable modem that's also acting as a gateway). The shitty little Linksys you bought ten years ago is *not* going to be able to handle 100mbs of downstream, since the packets are all forwarded in software, and they didn't exactly put powerful procs in those things.
Of course a network vendor is going to point out that some packets needs preferential treatment over others. It's something they've worked to engineer into their product lines because their customers demand the capability to do so. For an ISP, 911 VoIP packets are a much higher priority than World of Warcraft packets.
Too many folks are caught up in the idea that prioritization is bad. There's a difference between between the philosophy of Network Neutrality and the operational reality of packet prioritization.
Saying Cisco opposes Net Neutrality just because they're pointing out some simple truths on how network operate today is like saying Glock supports terrorism just because they make guns.
Of course, if the title weren't sensational, no one would probably read it.
It saddens me that Slashdot seems to have decided that they need to resort to the same tactics as the National Enquirer
Yes, they did.
Why? Because there was no benefit for Comcast to do so.
This isn't like Comcast refusing aid to vets, the homeless, or kicking kittens, or anything like that.
The colocation appliance *only* helps Netflix. For Comcast, it increases OpEx for no benefit. That tends to make shareholders mad.
So what responsibility does Comcast, a for-profit entity, have to help another for-profit entity (and a direct competitor to Comcast's own streaming service) contain their operational costs. Would it be nice? Sure. But Comcast isn't in business to be nice. It's in business to make money.
The idea that Netflix is some sainted company that deserves to be treated better than any others mystifies me.
I actually know quite a bit about routing. Enough to know that you don't call an interconnect a 'route'. A route is a destination prefix with a valid next-hop. But go right on ahead and think you know all about internet routing just because you read a blog entry or two.
And yes, you do let interconnects get congested if there's no business case for upgrading them.
I'm not saying I disagree with your opinion. As an operations wonk, it pains me to see capacity issues and my natural inclination is to fix it.
However, that shit costs money, and not lunch money either. This is when the business side interfered with the tech. Unless there's a good business case for it, those links aren't getting upgraded until there is.
In this case, there was no business case to do so. If Netflix was complaining about the quality of service because of the saturation on the Cogent interconnect, all they had to do was alter their routing policy to send the traffic for Comcast's prefixes out their Level 3 links instead. It's a trivial and often performed piece of BGP traffic engineering. Netflix decided not to do so (because Level 3 is a crapload more expensive than Cogent) and make a public stink about it.
Even after the public stink failed, Netflix *still* decided not to send the traffic out Level 3, opting to purchase direct links into the Comcast network (and, shortly thereafter, into AT&T's network as well. Strangely enough, people don't seem to have an issue with AT&T telling Netflix to go fuck themselves, just Comcast). That decision should tell you a couple things - Bandwidth ain't cheap. It's cheaper than it was 10 years ago, on a per mbit/gbit cost, but the amount of traffic crossing has scaled up even while prices have been scaling down. And it should tell you just how expensive Level3 is to actually use.
You're basically saying that, just because the Cogent link was saturated, Comcast should have instantly gone ahead and upgraded their links with Cogent, nevermind that the guys doing the complaining had links to another Comcast transit provider, who's links *weren't* saturated.
When bandwidth costs are the clear majority of your OpEx, you think twice about doling out CapEx and additional OpEx if there is another option. You would make a horrible network operator.
In a sane world, the up side would be that they got to keep their customers, who would leave and go to someone else if Netflix didn't work properly. In our world, they often have a monopoly on high-speed internet access within a market, and so their customers will simply have to suckit.
Ok, and how many customers do you think are cancelling their internet service with Comcast just because of Netflix? I'll give you a hint - before Netflix agreed to pay for their peering links, the effect of Netflix performance had a negligible effect on customer churn. By and large, Comcast was keeping it's customers without having to colocate Netfix apps onto it's network. IE, no upside at all for Comcast. By saying no and letting Netflix come to the conclusion that it was better business to just pay for the links, Comcast's upside is more revenue. Netflix sure are being crybabies about it though.
And they and all other internet service providers should be prohibited from engaging in that kind of behavior. Content should be separate from transport. It is long past time to force ISPs to behave as common carriers. We forced the telcos, we can force the ISPs.
Why? You're making assertions, but not backing it up.
You realize this is how the internet has worked since the NSF stopped off, yes? All transit providers double dip. You do understand that Comcast is not a tier 1 provider, and to my knowledge, has no settlement free peering agreements. That means Comcast pays every single one of it's transit providers for the traffic that comes in. Which means that, prior to Netflix establishing it's own links, Comcast was paying Cogent to receive Netflix traffic. And Netflix wanted Comcast to upgrade it's links with Cogent so that Netflix could send it more traffic. Netflix wanted Comcast to pay more money to deliver Netflix's products to Comcast's customers.
So somehow it's ok for Netflix to do that, but when Comcast turns it around and makes Netflix pay instead, it's a bad thing?
You can hate on Comcast all you want, but don't even try to pass this off as Comcast not being fair or being mean. This is just business, and Comcast had more leverage than Netflix. Welcome to the world.
Then Netflix would lose all revenue from Comcast customers.
I strongly suspect the loss of revenue is larger than the fee Comcast wants to charge to link them directly to the network.
Comcast is basically acting like Wal-Mart does for alot of it's vendors. They're so big that they can dictate terms, and the vendors have no choice but to comply because losing access to that market has dire effects on their bottom line.
You misunderstand the problem entirely.
Comcast is not charging Netflix to deliver packets on it's network that come in from a transit provider. Comcast was not sitting there and saying 'Hey Netflix, we're going to drop or degrade your inbound traffic at our border if you don't pay us'.
Netflix wanted direct connections into the Comcast network to help them save on transit costs. And they wanted them for free, arguing that Comcast was already making money off the customers they'd be delivering the traffic to.
Comcast said we'll give you direct links into our network, but it won't be free. If you want direct access, you pay for direct access
Situations are a bit different.
Comcast then gets this awesome idea, instead of paying for bandwidth, they should get paid for it! So not Comcast is making even more money, but making money isn't a bad thing in itself. So, what's wrong about Comcast wanting to make more money? Because Comcast is having their customers foot the bill for the infrastructure, then Comcast outright refuses to allow the customers to use the infrastructure to its fullest, then Comcast turns around and resells that same infrastructure for more profit to another company, while making no additional investments into the infrastructure.
You have woefully misunderstood the nature of your subscriber agreement.
You are not paying for a piece of the infrastructure to use to its fullest when you pay your fee. Since we're talking about Netflix, we're talking about the internet side. What Comcast gives you in exchange for your money is internet service with a specified downstream/upstream _UP TO_ the stated speeds, and it's all best effort (for residential access, anyway. Business Class has different parameters).
That's it. You don't get to claim a piece of the infrastructure and use it however you please. You send packets, Comcast does it's best to deliver them. You request packets, Comcast does it's best to deliver them. How you think it is, or how you think it should be is irrelevant. The only thing that *is* relevant is what was agreed to when service was established. If you think the legalese matches your opinions, you're in for a very sad revelation.
You're kidding right? Books are freaking heavy.
There are no man in the middle machines. The taps they use for monitoring are passive, not active. If the tap goes down, it has no effect on the data transferring across the wire that's being tapped.
Most providers will simply capitulate to a request and turn down the links and/or bgp sessions instead of actually having their gear powered off. Cutting power to a datacenter, or even a floor of a datacenter, can have a major impact in the ability to recover. If the government is going to shut me down anyway, I'd rather kill the peering sessions myself rather than risk additional loss of revenue due to equipment becoming unrecoverable.
Ah Waldenbooks, how I miss thee. many hours of a misspent youth in malls with Waldens...
Different service.
DirectTV has their rental service, in which you pay 3 to 5 bucks for a movie, and that streams from the sat feed. It is, essentially, pay per view, though the terms of the rental may let you watch it more than once over a day or so, and it also gives you the ability to watch relatively recent movies in your home for alot less than theatre.
Traditional Video on Demand is stuff like your weekly television shows, or older movies which are long out of the theatre and not currently being hyped for DVD sales. That kind of Video on Demand, as delivered by DirectTV, does stream over your internet connection, as the sat feed doesn't have nearly enough bandwidth to handle that level of VOD. I work as a network engineer for one DirecTV's competitors, and the bandwidth that VOD consumes is one of our biggest hogs, easily outpacing linear video.
Goodbye, Medicare. Goodbye, Social Security. Goodbye, foodstamps and welfare and section 8. Hello, social upheaval. Hello, desperation-induced crime wave. Hello, Great Depression.
That's your idea of "annoying"? I'd say "catastrophic" is a far more apt description.
Wow, the amount of pessimism here is amazing. Do you really believe that the entire health of US economy and society is dependent on our entitlement programs?
I don't think we've quite reach the point where the majority of Americans are proles on the dole, I don't think losing those entitlement programs would be a bad thing. Would it cause some problems? Of course it would, and the politicians would take a heavy beating in the media (which, don't kid yourself, is the *real* reason this was never going to default), but ultimately, it would be to the benefit of the country.
Gold is an excellent safe haven in the sense that if you have 1kg of gold about $40,000K and civilization collapsed tomorrow you would still have 1kg of gold. If you had that in hard currency all you would have is 40,000 pieces of paper. Though 40,000 pieces of paper would be very valueable as toilet paper. Hmmmmm maybe gold isn't as good of a safe haven as I thought. I need to stock up on US currency.
This is why I don't get folks that want to hoard gold as a hedge against economic fallout. If civilization collapses, gold becomes worthless. In a collapsed economy, gold has no practical value. If civilization collapses, I want things that will actually be useful. Food. Water. Shelter. Guns. Clothing. These are the currency of a collapsed economy, not pretty baubles or shiny bricks.
Or maybe because what I buy is my business and my business alone? Without anonymity, it makes it trivial for people to track my purchases. If people can track my purchases, they can target me for their sales campaigns in order to try and manipulate me into giving them more money, Since I'm not terribly fond of being manipulated, nor am I terribly fond of junk mail or spam, I prefer my transactions to be as anonymous as possible.
But yeah, I guess you're right, it's all about the hookers and blow, Couldn't possibly be any other reason I don't want folks up in my business.
Which doesn't really apply to the nuclear industry in the southeast, seeing as how the NRC has the oversight, and not state agencies. Federal law actually places severe constraints on any states ability to regulate nuclear plants, which results in the ball being pretty much entirely in the NRC's court.
Someone very close to me happens to be employed as a civil engineer at a southeastern nuclear plant. The NRC is constantly in their business. Right now, my acquaintance has spent the last two weeks in hectic meetings over a "potential" hazard that someone at the NRC thought might could happen (the chances are astronomically small) because they saw a video from a vendor trying to sell a solution to the problem and directed the plant to make sure that particular issue could never, ever happen.
The consequence is that the culture at the plant is one where safety is the paramount concern, because they don't want the NRC to make their lives any harder than it already is. As a consumer and someone who's outside of the industry, I can actually appreciate that. I suspect that the higher rate of incidents out west has alot more to do with bad NRC oversight than with southeastern state agencies keeping things on the down low.
However, we don't have one anymore; we have the poor, and the super rich. The line separating those two is getting thinner every year.
Uhm, I think you may be just a little too broad in your definition. I fit neither category. I am not super rich. I make a good living, and the work I do makes me better paid than the majority of americans, but I'm not even regular old rich, let alone super rich. I own my car, and I have some nice toys to play with. I can pay all of my bills on time. However, I also have a mortgage, and in order to meet my financial obligations, I do have to continue to work. I'm not poor, I receive absolutely no government assistance (nor do I want any). I'm pretty much the definition of middle class, and most of the people I know and associate with are the same.
I think your views might be just a tad bit skewed.
I wish someone would make a cop show a la Breaking Bad. A good cop, doing the best that he can. Bends the rules occasionally to get the job done but things slowly, inevitably get out of hand as the bending becomes breaking and the breaking becomes outright flaunting.
They did. It was called The Shield.
Short of a new network protocol you might have issues getting the IP blocks for international routing. The only way I can see it happening is during the migration to IPv6 and only if either the world unanimously votes to start their own equivalent of IANA allows current non-US blocks to remain allocated without paying a second time (perhaps simply paying their next renewal fee to the Internationalized replacement to 'port over')
No. You don't understand how it works.
The IANA delegated the IP blocks (and it's done with that, it doesn't have anymore left) to the Regional Internet Registrars, of which there are 5. Brazil gets it's global IP's from LACNIC, which is not the IANA, is independant from the IANA, and is not US-based. US based companies get their IP's from the US based LACNIC equivalent, ARIN. The only real question would have been possibly DNS, since all the root servers used to be located in the US, but that hasn't been true for a long time.
There is absolutely nothing that would prevent Brazil from doing this technology wise. The only question is one of infrastructure.
You are incorrect. I am a network engineer for Comcast, so I have direct knowledge of this.
Comcast previously did have a cap of 250 GB transfer a month. Last year, the caps were suspended and have yet to be reinstated, if they ever will. If you're a customer, your usage per month will still show on your account page when you login, but the references to caps have been removed.
Now, I'm not going to say caps will never come back. That decision is far, far above my pay grade.