That wouldn't be charging the manufacture of the car though... his analogy holds. That'd be something like tiered data plans/caps (which is also something people are fighting against). Australia has a huge problem with caps, they get away with it because they have basically one ISP. It doesn't do anything good for the consumer.
Victims of Net Neutrality
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Skanda
I'm Amod too!
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http://www.dailydot.com/politics/int...et-neutrality/
Yesterday generated over 700k emails and 300k phone calls to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality, adding the 1 million they've already gotten this gives it the record for most comments the FCC has ever had on a topic before (Passing the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction which had 1.4 million total). It also managed to accidentally crash the FCC's webpage because of the traffic generated.
Yesterday generated over 700k emails and 300k phone calls to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality, adding the 1 million they've already gotten this gives it the record for most comments the FCC has ever had on a topic before (Passing the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction which had 1.4 million total). It also managed to accidentally crash the FCC's webpage because of the traffic generated.
Arative
Vyemm Raider
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I'd like to say hopefully this gets rid of limited data plans, but somehow I think it won't
http://stopthecap.com/2014/09/11/wi-...e-conquers-4g/
Looks like ATT and Verizon's plan to overcharge people with data overages is backfiring as people are jumping to wifi whenever they can.
http://stopthecap.com/2014/09/11/wi-...e-conquers-4g/
Looks like ATT and Verizon's plan to overcharge people with data overages is backfiring as people are jumping to wifi whenever they can.
Palum
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Uh, yea, I googled it and all I see is 'Netflix payed more money and got faster speeds'. Well, no shit.
Look at this choice quote:
Everyone must be traffic shaping now?
Without a technical understanding, this is all bullshit ghost hunting. Unequivocally, any company can spend money to gain increase in service speeds. What if Comcast ran out and dumped 5 billion in fiber lines to the giant Netflix Acme Server buildings? There, money for speed!
Net neutrality is a very important theory, but the technical implementation of it is far more nuanced. Is an MPLS line not ignoring net neutrality? You are circumventing routing tables to speed up packets from one specific source to another for a price. You are giving your packets priority over a specific network segment not available to others. Aren't fixed routes on a public LAN/MAN (say at a university) circumventing 'neutrality' as well? Shouldn't all packets be subject to the woes of whatever cached routing tables are available at any given time? What about the fact that if you buy an SLA connection the ISP might have QoS set up to give you your packets priority over say, Gram Gram who uses her 5 Mbit home connection used for knitting research that goes into the same edge router?
The arguments I've seen regarding neutrality boil down to whining that everyone should have identical speeds and infrastructure regardless of pricing and/or a diatribe about why net neutrality is the cornerstone of the internet and getting rid of it will break everything. Well, that's fairly ignorant because net neutrality is already gone. Maybe you have to go up a rung on the TCP/IP or OSI models to find where it is no longer applicable, though.
What really needs to happen is ISPs need to be classified as utilities to begin creating and enforcing the aspects of neutrality that make sense for the modern internet. Neither the 'viva net neutrality, do nothing!' approach or the 'let cable companies rape us!' approach hit either of those issues on the head.
Net neutrality ateverylevel no longer makes sense in a completely digital world. Should packets to get a streaming video to 120 fps instead of 60 fps be equally as important to a 911 call? What about your credit card transaction versus some asshole's DDoS spam? This needs to be agreed upon by a consortium and then enforced. Unfortunately a lot of internet 'luminaries' are decrying the end of net neutrality while at the same time benefiting from it selectively. Keep in mind, if net neutrality conceptually made the most sense in all situations, QoS wouldn't even exist as an idea - everyone and everything would just have to get fucked together like overbooking a CRJ by 820 passengers.
I can make a high level analogy by comparing two transportation networks.
Trains are forever fucked because the government forced a bunch of passenger lines together to 'be equal' but the business end (freight) kept all the infrastructure. There's thousands of tiny companies that own tiny parts of rail that you have to get permission to use individually. Even the government Amtrak can't open certain rail service in areas because they can't come to a use agreement and they can't get enough contiguous land to build new rails.
Compare this to air travel with federal airways and controlled airspace. Yes, some traffic does have priority (AF One or medevac choppers, for example). But there are international standards in place and while it certainly isn't perfect, aircraft get around just fine. There are plenty of tiny companies that start small and can grow based upon their own offerings (Southwest or Air Wisconsin, for instance) using 'public' infrastructure.
Rails are an example of how to fuck this up. Airways are an example of an imperfect ideal but a pragmatic and generally fair solution that ultimately works out much better.
Palum
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This is just completely ignorant of infrastructure, which I don't blame you because basically everyone is ignorant of their infrastructure because they don't exactly publish this shit.
But to say they shaped traffic on that scale as opposed to 'we dun laid pipe and set a fixed route and now the pipe is full!' is illogical. Occam's Razor, do you think the idiots who can't schedule a proper install window to plug in a coax cable would be able to install and manage equipment capable of traffic shaping one of the largest streaming companies over random routes passing through their owned networks?
It seems you have a good understanding of the technical side of things, I'd encourage you to learn a bit about the political, financial, and legal side. Like, do you know how many towns have been blocked from installing fiber and forming their own, faster and cheaper, ISPs? How much of the infrastructure was paid for by tax dollars? Why is it exactly our infrastructure is so far behind the rest of the worlds, yes I'm counting population density, even though many of the technologies for faster internet are developed in the US? These all relate in a pretty ugly way.
The net neutrality movement actually does want ISPs to classified as utilities, incidentally. So it'd be a really good thing if you read about it a bit.
Oh, almost forgot, Cogent CEO testified before congress that Comcast intentionally stopped upgrading their hardware to accommodate the traffic. So traffic shaping? No. Intentionally interfering with the traffic over a two year period? Yes. And it literally stopped overnight. Maybe you can explain how a widespread traffic congestion that seemed to only effect Netflix stopped overnight. No time to add new hardware, no time to lay new pipes, Netflix cut a check and a couple of hours later the issue is just gone.
The net neutrality movement actually does want ISPs to classified as utilities, incidentally. So it'd be a really good thing if you read about it a bit.
Oh, almost forgot, Cogent CEO testified before congress that Comcast intentionally stopped upgrading their hardware to accommodate the traffic. So traffic shaping? No. Intentionally interfering with the traffic over a two year period? Yes. And it literally stopped overnight. Maybe you can explain how a widespread traffic congestion that seemed to only effect Netflix stopped overnight. No time to add new hardware, no time to lay new pipes, Netflix cut a check and a couple of hours later the issue is just gone.
chaos
Buzzfeed Editor
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Palum, I agree that there is a lot of hyperbole and people trying to sound informed about things they don't understand, but you're kind of all over the place. QoS has nothing to do with charging edge providers for "enhanced service". Also, the agreement between Comcast and Netflix was specifically not a peering agreement, that was already done by L3 (who is Netflix's provider). Netflix was at first trying to get their caching engine inside of each provider's network. In this instance, they actually paid Comcast off to "increase speed", but I haven't kept up with this particular instance so idk. But you know as well as I do that yes, traffic shaping is entirely possible, even likely. The people doing the shitty over the phone tech support are not the guys implementing the routing rules, and they probably realistically only have a handful of devices to configure.
iannis
Musty Nester
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All I really know is that Netflix caches differently than it did a 6 weeks ago. I don't see it when I watch on the TV, but when I watch on the desktop I can see the cache bar, and they're caching chunks now instead of the entire thing.
Which, honestly, seems like it probably should have been how they did it to begin with. I can't be the only person in the world who hits pause, goes to make a sandwich, and gets involved in something else. I'll come back to the netflix window and the entire episode/movie would have been cached. Well, cool, I guess, but not necessary.
I did it the other night and Netflix had only cached about 15% ahead. Seems like an easy way to reduce overhead that no one would ever notice you were doing.
Which, honestly, seems like it probably should have been how they did it to begin with. I can't be the only person in the world who hits pause, goes to make a sandwich, and gets involved in something else. I'll come back to the netflix window and the entire episode/movie would have been cached. Well, cool, I guess, but not necessary.
I did it the other night and Netflix had only cached about 15% ahead. Seems like an easy way to reduce overhead that no one would ever notice you were doing.
While this example is 'ok', it doesn't take into consideration what other big companies in the already airline market do to AVOID competitors springing up; Take the example of airports, AA and DFW lobbied for years to have DAL (Love Field in Dallas) to pretty much close, causing a tremendous amount of headache to nascent Southwest. All airlines lobby hard to make entry for smaller airlines a PITA, look at Virgin America that got pummeled by officials lobbied by United, Delta, AA to restrict their operations (arguing that Richard Branson is a Brit and can't hold a majority stake on VA, those laws are antiquated).
Right now, ISPs are doing this, see how much Comcast, TWC and Verizon lobby to have Municipal networks like the ones in Chattanooga axed, or prevent their expansion; in your example, Yes federal space is regulated and "free" anyone with planes and a flight plan can take off; it's getting the service setup a issue, getting gates at airport, not being fucked over by politicians from Chicago (United), Atlanta (Delta) or Dallas (AA) coming for you. Many municipal projects have died in the planning stages because Comcast & Co come bankrolling politicians to scream "FREE MARKET! COMPETITION! THIS IS PRIVATE ENTERPRISE!!!" to kill em.
Palum
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Uh, yea. You pay for X Mbps pipe from point A to point B. All of a sudden you have X+Y because of increase in customers. Streaming media does not handle a network bottleneck at all. Again, the issue with the whole accusation is that it ignores the fact that this is how the internet currently is set up. When I have to put in an MPLS for ease of interconnecting offices across the country, the provider has to go to all the ISPs in the way and basically set up an agreement to shuttle the traffic and provide the bandwidth/hardware for the label switching. If I go over my 20Mbps connection, my VOIP devices start shitting themselves because RTP simply can't handle packet loss. Streaming customers have to set up similar agreements because their services can't handle network interruption either, even if they aren't using label switching for a faux VPN. So, maybe they purchase huge pipes between major geographical areas to move content. Now as far as Chaos saying they were trying to pay all the backbone ISPs to install caching services, I haven't really seen anything on that either. Either way, Netflix has to pay for a certain size pipe between their clusters and the local endpoint.
Now, if you can find me an article that says Netflix had an agreement for say 2 Gbps over certain lines of Comcast and they were at 500 Mbps because Comcast was arbitrarily refusing to route packets, then yea... that's a big deal. That's basically hostage taking for an ISP. However if you can't, the more likely issue is that Netflix outgrew its agreements and didn't like the prices they had to pay to up their service.
But either way, that has nothing to do with net neutrality unless Comcast is literally rerouting or blocking packets from Netflix servers. No one has shown me anything, only 'service interruptions' which are symptomatic of outgrowing your service. For the record, I have absolutely no issue with believing Comcast et all are actually acting like mafia ISPs, but no one has actually been able to provide this type of failure to abide by an agreement.
It's pretty easy to actually traceroute packets and test different types of traffic to prove this stuff is going on. It's fairly common on complicated corporate networks where you have many locations, several ISPs and many different types of protocols and security/QoS controlling devices along the way.
Jovec
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There are two different issues here. Net neutrality is about whether ISPs should be able to prioritize or restrict traffic based on type or destination. I firmly believe they shouldn't and should be required to treat all traffic equally. Even if it makes sense to prioritize VoIP or similar today, I don't want that precedent and I have no trust that it won't be abused in the future.
Many are also attaching cost and pricing issues to net neutrality, but this is a separate issue. My cable ISP can charge me $250/mo for an entry level package that places all their customers on a shared T1 while still treating all data equally.
Many are also attaching cost and pricing issues to net neutrality, but this is a separate issue. My cable ISP can charge me $250/mo for an entry level package that places all their customers on a shared T1 while still treating all data equally.
Palum
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Oh, the airports are not the good part of that analogy, yes. Yes, the ISPs need to be regulated as utilities. Again though, obfuscating 'sanctioned' monopolies with a net neutrality argument isn't really helping.
Palum
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They already do, though, it's just at the infrastructure level. Technically, killing packets coming from an attack (DDoS or ARP cache poisoning or whatever) is in violation of net neutrality too... The counter-argument is that we should build robust infrastructure and standards capable of handling those types of attacks instead of discriminating on packet source or content. We haven't though, we've just relied on policy enforcement.
Jovec
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Indeed, but I think most of us can make the distinction between protecting network health against malicious intent and protecting network health against heavy usage. In today's reality it's unreasonable to assume that simply because an ISP isn't traffic shaping that our data isn't being analyzed for destination and content beyond what is required to deliver packets. It still doesn't mean we should allow it.
Palum, again, Cogent's CEO testifiedbefore Congressthat Comcast was, yep,basically holding Netflix hostage. I mentioned that. Feel free to Google it. He even used the analogy of being a mafia! It is kind of amusing you are on the same page as the people who know what is going on without having any idea what is going on. And I don't mean that in a bad way. You have a clear understanding of the technical side of things, which makes sense since I assume it is your industry. You simply don't understand the political or legal side, in terms of what the ISPs are doing.
Palum
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Yea, but that business agreement hasnothing whatsoeverto do with net neutrality. It was a service based issue with Comcast wanting more money to install more equipment. Net neutrality is at the interface level, not the infrastructure level.
Trust me, I do get the political or legal side, I just think this entire battle is basically a red herring tossed out by the cable companies and everyone is taking the bait. Even if net neutrality wins, it's easily circumvented and always will be.
Palum
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Well, realistically this is why SSL exists to protect the payload. Every device has to be able to at least determine packet header information for source, destination, TTL, etc. There are certain metadata indicators to suggest other activities (like P2P connections) but I don't see how you can regulate people to stop doing analysis in general. That said, it is pretty easy to determine who isn't playing fair if you set up the correct tests. I've caught Comcast packet shaping before and I ripped them a new one to get them to stop before they finally got enough PR backlash to 'stop' and went the way of the data caps instead to basically hinder large scale P2P.
Skanda
I'm Amod too!
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Here is Level 3's explanation of the congestion on Verizon's network
They lay the blame directly in Verizon's lap. I would not be suprised in the slightest to find the other ISPs pulling similar tricks.So let?s look at what that means in one of those locations. The one Verizon picked in its diagram: Los Angeles. All of the Verizon FiOS customers in Southern California likely get some of their content through this interconnection location. It is in a single building. And boils down to a router Level 3 owns, a router Verizon owns and four 10Gbps Ethernet ports on each router. A small cable runs between each of those ports to connect them together. This diagram is far simpler than the Verizon diagram and shows exactly where the congestion exists.
Verizon has confirmed that everything between that router in their network and their subscribers is uncongested ? in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used. Above, I confirmed exactly the same thing for the Level 3 network. So in fact, we could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something we?ve been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion. Why is that? Maybe they can?t afford a new port card because they?ve run out ? even though these cards are very cheap, just 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.
But, here?s the other interesting thing also shown in the Verizon diagram.This congestion only takes place between Verizon and network providers chosen by Netflix. The providers that Netflix does not use do not experience the same problem.Why is that?
Palum
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Yea, that is pretty damning but the problem is it has nothing to do with net neutrality. Enforcing net neutrality won't fix it either, because the article stipulates that there is no traffic shaping going on, but rather the border routers set up between specific ISPs are bottle-necked on purpose - this is still OK from a net neutrality standpoint, there is no inspection of packet source/dest/content going on in this situation. Think about it- Netflix doesn't just want 'adequate' or 'normal' service. They want to pay more to get business grade SLA service to their customers. Do you know what happens to the average consumer when two ports on edge router # 38 die? Well, you get fucked in the ass. Routing tables take awhile to update, traffic gets backed up and eventually packets will find a new route but your connection just got shit all over for a period of time. Businesses avoid this by paying special fees to have dedicated lines, QoS or other perks to maintain connections at a minimum quality barring any DR type scenario. This is still 'net neutral' but it is pay-to-play special treatment.
People should have clued in on this when 'mysteriously' several ISPs around the country just doubled their speeds with absolutely no construction instantly and most of the public simply said 'THANK YOU SIR MAY I HAVE SOME MORE??' instead of getting upset. What Netflix et allsaythey want is net neutrality but what theymeanthey want is they want ALL ISPs to provide functionally identical lines/hardware in capacity and bandwidth to all connected networks and continue to enforce net neutrality.
But this will backfire because the ISPs arestillprivately controlled companies. They will not simple say 'OH, you want to pay for a 50Gbps upgrade? OK we'll do the rest of our infrastructure pro-bono despite new legislation requiring us to upgrade all networks!'. If Netflix needs the bandwidth, they will get shouldered with the responsibility to upgrade the ISPsentireinfrastructure - or they will have to wait until the ISP has to do it themselves to stay competitive. Which is going to be a long ass time in a monopolized market...
Skanda
I'm Amod too!
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I'd say it's a bit borderline, that line I bolded and underlined indicates that they are discriminating against Netflix traffic specifically which is very much against Net Neutrality. It's just the physical equivalent of packet shaping by refusing to open more ports. It's also creating a fast lane for Netflix that other video services may not have access too or be able to compete with. Somewhat amusingly it's not even a fast lane Netflix really seemingly wanted or needed, the ISP strong armed them into it.