
Verizon's video app gets special data privileges - yincrash
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/5/10924268/verizon-go90-net-neutrality
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bediger4000
Doesn't excluding some services from a data cap make a lie out of having data
caps to ease congestion, or to penalize "data hogs"?

For example, couldn't you just run Verizon's video app 24x7, and consume much
more than your allotment, and not pay for the amount over your cap? Is Verizon
prepared for this to happen? In how many cases?

So, data caps, and "bandwidth amounts" are just a way to wring money out of
people, without some kind of consumer revolt, right?

Or is it that Verizon's bytes are smaller or more slippery than Netflix'
bytes?

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zarify
Not sure how this can be levelled at the congestion argument. Presumably
Verizon's video service is running from their data centres over their internal
pipes, rather than external networks where bandwidth is considerably more
expensive and probably more limited.

Anti-competitive, sure, but I think that's about it.

I've always felt conflicted about this here in Australia where different ISPs
have been setting up peering agreements to achieve similar situations for
years. It works out better for the customers who get the unmetered service but
at the expense of competition.

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bediger4000
I live in Denver, Colorado. It looks like Hulu has servers located in
Highlands Ranch, Colorado, right on the Centurylink network. Actually, they're
Akamai servers, but still. Hulu has servers right next to a VPS in Los Angeles
I have access to. Google appears to do the same, without Akamai. Your anti-
congestion argument fails. It appears that large content providers co-locate
servers on lots of networks.

So apparently Verizon's bytes _are_ slippery or smaller than other people's
bytes. Maybe they use smaller bits or something?

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curt15
It shouldn't even be necessary to bring in net neutrality. This should fail on
anti-competitive grounds alone.

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mschuster91
1GB for $30? Are you joking me? Even we Germans, with 20x the data pricing of
mainstream Europe, don't pay this much.

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smt88
It is much, much, much more expensive to deploy cellular infrastructure in the
US than anywhere in Europe. The US is massive, and cities have much greater
distances between them than in Europe.

The carriers here can't price based on where you live, because people travel
(and could easily fudge their addresses). So what happens is the people who
live in cities end up subsidizing the infrastructure for people who live in
suburban or rural areas.

We do have smaller carriers (T-Mobile and Sprint) that have much less coverage
in non-urban areas, and those carriers are much cheaper. Google actually
combines those two carriers into Project Fi, which costs much less than $30/GB
(I think it's $10).

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okasaki
People per km^2:

Europe: 32 (edit: wrong)

US: 35

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ghaff
Not sure where you get that number for Europe. According to Wikipedia [1] it
has a population density of about 73/km^2. European Russia also brings that
number down a bit because it has a population density comparable to the US.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe)

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okasaki
Oh my mistake, I just googled it and didn't read the page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_European_countries)

Seems they included all of Russia too.

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ghaff
I think the figures for Russia specifically are for the whole country. But I
read the population density for Europe as a whole including only European
Russia. (Including all of Russia in the total would skew the result enormously
as Asian Russia is bigger than all of Europe and only has a population density
of about 3/km^2--and probably has pretty spotty cell phone reception:-).)

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roflchoppa
I wonder if they are just playing the waiting game, where for the average joe
would get upset that they are missing out on this "free" video. They would
then retort to saying that net neutrality is the issue at hand, and that it
should be removed to allow for free lanes and paid lanes aka the issue we had
at hand in the first place.

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Patronus_Charm
These ISPs still simply have far too much power. The consumer is the only one
that suffers from their unapologetic greed.

