
Netflix CEO: In Ten Years, “We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home” - cosgroveb
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/03/netflix-hastings-gigabit/
======
jacobian
"All" is just a wee bit hyperbolic.

I live in a rural county outside of Lawrence, KS. The fastest 'net connection
I can get is Verizon 3G. In a decade, I'll be lucky if WiMax has made its way
out that far, but there's absolutely no reason why a telco would run a
physical pipe out to me. It'd be miles of cable/fiber with me and my chickens
on the other end of it.

People who live in cities and tech hubs forget the fact that there's a _lot_
of open space in this country. Much of the population may very well might have
gigabit in a decade, but there'll always be a portion of the population who
just live too far out in the sticks.

~~~
trotsky
Came here to post a similar story. 26 miles from the white house here, but in
a lower density area. My home internet comes from a T1 that runs about $500/mo
to provide 1.5Mbit. My other options are ISDN (128kbit) or sprint EVDO at
about -100db, providing ~200-500kbit but with many, many dropouts. 5 years ago
there were the same options. 10 years ago it was T1 or ISDN. 15 years ago the
same.

Nobody wants to serve below a certain density with anything.

Comcast was asked by the county to provide a customer pays dig fees estimate.
They wanted 2.2M up front. Verizon actually wants to stop maintaining the
copper plant in the next few years. It's very possible that this would leave
us without enough clean pairs in the neighborhood to use leased lines. They
indicate that we're scheduled for FIOS somewhere around 2020.

~~~
Zev
_Verizon actually wants to stop maintaining the copper plant in the next few
years._

Verizon wants to do this everywhere, not just in low-density area's.

------
Lagged2Death
How odd to see a prediction like this on the same day that AT&T announced new
bandwidth caps for its residential broadband services. Which some industry
watchers speculate is partly intended precisely to impair streaming video
services. Like Netflix.

[http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/03/technology/att_broadband_cap...](http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/03/technology/att_broadband_caps/index.htm)

~~~
zephjc
Even AT&T can't stop inevitability, as much as they will stomp and pout.

~~~
kenjackson
Supersonic jets flying routes all over the US were once considered inevitable.
There was once a time that skyscraper height increases were considered
inevitable. Bigger ones were put up all the time. Audio quality on phones was
once an area where improvements were constant. Now I'm surprised if people
even mention call quality in phone reviews, except to say that it dropped
fewer calls.

My point? What seems inevitable today can often seem like a concern of a
bygone era.

~~~
spc476
The points you make are economic in nature. Supersonic flight is just too
uneconomical to really be worth it at this point in time---regular jet service
is "good enough" (just a side note---some thirty miles west of Miami a two-
mile long runway was built for supersonic flights; it's now used for training.
You can see it here:
[http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=25.861695,-80.871048&...](http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=25.861695,-80.871048&spn=0.28515,0.392075&t=h&z=12))

A friend of mine, an architect, says that it's technically feasible to build a
skyscraper a mile high (not to say it wouldn't be technically challenging;
just that it _is_ possible). But they aren't not because it's not worth the
money to build (hard to rend out the office/hotel/living space where there
aren't windows).

And for phone quality, mobility and convenience of use has trumped quality for
most people, so again, it's economic in nature.

~~~
kenjackson
_The points you make are economic in nature._

Indeed. And so is bandwidth to the home.

~~~
rsheridan6
But there's a killer app for fast bandwidth - high definition, low latency
videos. What Netflix is talking about. When consumers see that, they'll want
it and they'll pay for it in a way that they would not pay for a supersonic
jet flight.

~~~
evgen
The problem is that this need is already served well by cable and satellite
service. If video is the only killer app you have for this bandwidth then it
will never get built.

------
ronnier
Fast internet does very little good when we have 250 Gb/month transfer limits
imposed on us by Comcast (Xfinity) and AT&T. Those companies are preventing
progress with such caps.

------
radicaldreamer
I see a future where the country is increasingly segregated in terms of
bandwidth and connectivity... we're already seeing this in some areas, but
expect it to accelerate.

Large cities will be wired for gigabit connections in the home and LTE
wireless while rural areas will be increasingly left behind with connections
averaging in the single megabits.

As computing power and bandwidth requirements accelerate, these areas of the
country will be affected disproportionately.

~~~
WALoeIII
How is this different than any other "service"?

Its way easier to get everything from Thai food to dry cleaning to auto parts
in a city.

~~~
radicaldreamer
There are certain services which are available everywhere with relatively
equal quality: power, mail, water, voice cellular phone, and wired telephone.

One server that isn't available, despite subsidies given to build it out, is
high speed broadband- both wired and wireless.

------
sdizdar
Maybe if Comcast goes bankrupt and gets replaced with set of small companies.
Otherwise, I doubt it is in business interest for large cable and teleco
companies to increase bandwidth. Profit and increasing bandwidth don't go
together when you have monopoly.

~~~
chopsueyar
Maybe they need to be busted up. I remember my local cable company before
Comcast took over.

Of course, I would be happy with some muni. ftth.

------
thaumaturgy
I live in an area (not far from Sacramento) where half of the residents are
still on dialup because there's nothing else available.

Just a data point.

~~~
hugh3
If nothing else is available, what are the other half on? Nothing?

~~~
thaumaturgy
No. There is (some) DSL and Comcast availability, but no fiber anywhere. To be
more specific:

"I live in an area (not far from Sacramento) where, of the residents that have
internet access, roughly half are still on dialup because they can't get
anything better."

And, of the dialup subscribers, many have problems every year because it's old
infrastructure and the aerial lines have a tendency to fill with water in the
winter.

I only point this out because I suspect that there are a lot of people living
in metropolitan areas that really have no idea what internet access is like in
rural areas.

------
dstein
He's off by an order of magnitude. It took about 10 years for my cable
internet to go from 100KB/s to 1MB/s where it stands now (this is in Canada).
That's a 10 fold increase in 10 years, not 100 which he is predicting. So by
2021 I expect to have 10MB/s, not 100ish. And unless some anti-UBB legislation
gets passed I also expect my bandwidth cap to still be where it is today
(90GB/mo).

~~~
phlux
I disagree - We already have +10Mbps offerings from Comcast etc.

The issues is moores law - we will be at multi terabyte backbone links in ten
years.

The access port in most environments is already 1 gig. (Enterprise environs)

You will have a 1 gig link - but you will be metered to some <1 gig feed -
and, as we do now, pay for bursting.

~~~
dstein
If you're going to use Moore's law you'd look at what your speeds were 10
years ago. On a cable modem in 2001 I was certainly getting more than 100kbps
(~12KB/s), I was probably closer to 1mbps.

~~~
phlux
But thats not how moores law trickles through the tech stack to the
consumer....

We get shifting increase in computing benefits all over the place -- the last
place the consumer sees the benefit is in access speeds.

Carrier backbone links will continually grow, but consumer access speeds will
grow at a much slower rate.

The compute power of all devices will grow incredibly fast by comparison
(moores law).

The reason for this is that you already pay what the market will bear for your
access. The infrastructure costs to the carriers are incredible at the access
layer, so the cost benefit for them is to upgrade much slower.

I predict that the disruption will come from the following potential areas:

* Google, Facebook or Amazon will offer a fiber to the home network soon.

* Advances in Spectrum technology cost/availability will offer the Gig-link

* Municipal networks are seen as the next New Deal and massive technical infrastructure projects are sponsored by the government because they do know how to supply funding for infrastructure and dont understand how to fund startups.

~~~
chopsueyar
* Google, Facebook or Amazon will offer a fiber to the home network soon.

This would be a nightmare working with various municipalities and their right-
of-ways. No two situations would be the same. Anytime a road is repaved, the
fiber has to come out and be replaced. Lots of maintenance, too.

* Advances in Spectrum technology cost/availability will offer the Gig-link

Not possible. Has nothing to do with Moore's law. Imagine a family of 5, each
watching a separate live 1080p stream. Now, how many people in a town can
watch a unique 1080p stream simultaneously?

* Municipal networks are seen as the next New Deal and massive technical infrastructure projects are sponsored by the government because they do know how to supply funding for infrastructure and don't understand how to fund startups.

Yes, this will save the United States. I'm serious. This is the only viable
option.

~~~
phlux
I think that you will be surprised with respect to the fiber to the home
projects in the near future.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Some newer housing developments have fiber-to-the-home, with blazingly fast
internet access in perpetuity, included in the price of the home. I have no
idea how the financials actually work on that. I don't remember what the speed
test was, but I half-wondered if it had malfunctioned somehow because I'd
never seen anything like it in a residential area.

That said, I suspect that very few people are going to get that kind of access
relative to the population as a whole. The U.S. is pretty big, and there are a
_lot_ of people in areas that simply aren't feasible to do expensive build-
outs. (I live in one such area.)

------
jsz0
I seriously doubt it. Perhaps 50-100Mbit/sec which is obtainable using the
cable/telco infrastructure already in place. I don't see any killer apps on
the horizon that will actually require a gigabit of bandwidth into the home.
Even today you can get pretty good HD video over most residential broadband
connections. Even if we double or triple the resolution/bit rate the math
still doesn't work out. Other than people lusting over a bigger number what's
going to justify anyone spending tens of billions of dollars to make this
happen in the next 10 years?

------
27182818284
At the Verizon store today, their "Blazingly Fast" connection was 0.2mbps on
speedtest. We all know technology exists to go much faster than that, but it
is the politics of the companies involved that is slowing everyone down.
Consider the other news story submitted to HN recently about 1Gbps coming to
Chattanooga not Verizon, not Comcast, but the community-owned EPB. Whether it
is here in 10 years will depend not on the tech, but on the companies so it
could come sooner than 2021 if there is a shift with the sources'
understanding.

------
hardtke
Moore's law is an observation, whereas Shannon's law is basic physics.
Shannon's law dictates the maximum bandwidth over a physical communication
link. Telephone wires and over-the-air solutions aren't going to cut it. The
only two was to get Gigabit Ethernet to the home are optical fiber and coaxial
cable. Most communities won't be able to afford fiber installations, so
Netflix and other streaming sources will be 100% at the mercy of Comcast and
Cablevision. The future of home entertainment is the cable companies, not
Netflix.

~~~
kenjackson
Shannon's Law doesn't actually say anything about the medium. That is we can
find more bandwith OTA. I'm sure 30 years ago not many would have guessed you
could do 100Mbps OTA (even knowing Shannon's Law), yet with LTE we can.

With better engineering (multiple frequencies, compensations, etc...) I have
little doubt that we can achieve bandwidths that are still technologically out
of our reach today.

With that said, when it does end, I'll probably be just as optimistic not
knowing we hit the wall.

~~~
chopsueyar
It's not just the speed, it is how many simultaneous connections at the speed
that is important.

Also, 30 years ago, a MicroVAX was running at 5MHz, so anyone optimistic
enough to assume we would break the 10MHz CPU barrier, could also assume we
would break the 300bps communication barrier.

------
danilocampos
Netflix, of course, needs this (or some fraction of it) to be true. Meanwhile,
all the current (lazy, inept, consumer-hostile, mediocre) bandwidth providers
are going to try to fuck them out of the game.

So a big part of me wonders what Netflix is working on behind the scenes to
secure their future from a bandwidth perspective. This is a company that has
always been so proactive – I have a hard time believing they're twiddling
their thumbs and hoping that AT&T, Comcast and other telecom companies will be
menschy guys.

What _could_ they do? I know very little about large scale networking. Is
there some supply-side critical path that a company like Comcast _needs_ that
Netflix could buy for leverage? On the consumer end, is it reasonable to
imagine them reselling bandwidth to end-users under terms that favor their
business, thus spurring competition?

Everyone who controls the consumer side of bandwidth seems to be an asshole of
one flavor or another – perhaps Netflix's needs could align with consumers in
such a way as to change that.

~~~
martincmartin
Could they start running fiber to people's homes?

Whatever happened to Google's "experiment" of running a fat pipe to one
community?

~~~
losvedir
Nice, that'd be convenient! I'd only have to deal with one company to get both
my internet connectivity and my tv/movie content. Wait a minute...

------
harshpotatoes
As has been mentioned, there are many communities who still are only served by
dialup, or slow-ish cable/dsl connections.

I wonder if the telecoms are waiting to roll out fiber optics to the
everybody, and potentially skipping over installing the intermediary fast
dsl/cable connections for the rural communities.

------
barrydahlberg
Sometimes it feels like we don't even have a Gigabit to our _country_ , even
if we were allowed to use Netflix...

(New Zealand)

------
smoody
How many servers will it take to push everyone data to a billion people all
trying to pull data at a gigabit per second?

------
zaidf
I'm confused whether to feel elated, sad or hopeful at the 10 year timeframe.

------
cheez
Canadian ISPs say: You can already download 1 Gigabit. 2 Gigabits are $25.

------
jacques_chester
In Australia we may have it some time in the next 30 years after our multi-
hundred-billion dollar FTTP program is complete (I include modest 400% time
and cost overruns in my prediction).

~~~
joahua
I disagree with your (hyperbolic?) overrun predictions, but won't
international backhaul remain a problem? Then again, a more connected country
might make putting proper CDN points of presence more attractive.

~~~
jacques_chester
You're correct in highlighting backhaul; when talking to other Australians I
point out that it would be useless to have fibre running into every home if
we're still squeezing everything down 3 (soon 4) very expensive pipes.

Out of the 50 odd billion that's been budgeted for the project it might have
been nice to splurge a few billion for an additional 2 or 3 pipes -- say one
to Singapore, one to Guam and another on the trans-Tasman route to California.

The paucity of competition in backhaul makes traffic so expensive in Australia
that I actually host all my sites in the US -- including several of
Australia's most influential blogs. Dollar for dollar I can get the same RAM,
CPU and disk space in Australia, but I will get only about a tenth of the
traffic quota with punitive overages.

~~~
te_chris
I do exactly the same in NZ, except here we have 1 intl. pipe. They're trying
to get another one off the ground, but it's probably far off in the future and
I'm yet to be convinced it will make any meaningful difference. The govt. are
also trying to roll out fibre to the home, but they're fucking it up
fantastically and basically gifting it to Telecom (NZ's monopoly
telecommunications provider). Thank allah for Linode.

~~~
jacques_chester
I'm on Linode too.

So if backhaul was being built, perhaps NZ could be persuaded to chip in for
more trans-Tasman pipes being laid? As I understand it, the one pipe from NZ
to California continues on to Sydney.

~~~
te_chris
Actually, looking at their website, looks like they're basically planning on
duplicating that pipe and running it to SYD as well <http://pacificfibre.net/>
Guess that could be good for you guys too.

------
phlux
This is what I love about Netflix, both their CEO and from Adrian Cockcroft.

They are visionaries who are really thinking in terms of 5 and ten years out.

Their business model WRT IT is fantastic, they KNOW that computing is a
commodity utility that Netflix has no business being in - they are a content
provider.

They are effectively and very successfully both consuming cloud computing
_and_ driving its direction.

If you look at Adrian's presentations on the subject - they clearly have a
solid understanding of their technical needs to support a visionary content
delivery model.

This is why Netflix will succeed and dominate in the future.

They can focus on the way that content is successfully delivered via IP --
they are already YEARS ahead of other players in this perspective, where CATV
broadcasters have lots of legacy debt.

We have already seen the first small battles in the space with respect to net
neutrality/QOS manipulations from carriers such as Comcast.

Further, the added benefit is that companies like Amazon benefit from the
input and partnerships with Netflix allowing both offerings to co-mature
through situations like last weeks outages.

What will be interesting is to see the product offerings from Netflix expand.

Wait till we hear they bought a movie studio. They are doing a show - other
content creation ventures are sure to be close behind as the biggest issues
they have are licensing.

When they own the license to content delivered over their amazingly efficient
delivery infrastructure a new content era exists.

Wait until they offer content hosting and delivery via enterprise accounts.
Imagine when they can host and deliver content for channels with a whitelabel
service -- or they create a video CDN for content.

They should, if they already are not, work to foster and host indie movie/docu
content and in return get a better voice on the licensing models of such
content.

