
“Not” Neutrality? - doctorshady
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/not-neutrality/
======
opendais
I like how the first comment on the blog is:

"Face it: You are simply trying to defend your CDN business as it is being
bypassed by direct connections between content providers and last mile ISPs."

Its clearly a telecom employee that wrote that or someone who is ignorant. If
they weren't, they'd realize
[https://www.netflix.com/openconnect](https://www.netflix.com/openconnect) was
Netflix offering to do that for free.

Netflix is paying to get the data from their datacenters to the LEC
regardless.

~~~
josh2600
Is this the logical conclusion? Everyone puts a CDN box inside the local ISP?

Doesn't this cease to scale at some point?

~~~
nmjohn
Does it need to?

At the moment netflix is 50% of internet bandwidth.

If that could be delivered from a CDN within the ISP, that takes a majority of
traffic off the congested pipes and leaves enough room for all the current
demand with quite a bit of overhead.

~~~
ryandvm
Ugh. I think it's very Brave New Worldish that half of our global
telecommunications grid is saturated by people watching TV.

~~~
opendais
We are in the Brave New World, my friend. That is just the open internet. Now
add all those lovely people who watch cable, satellite. ;)

[http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-
movies/americans...](http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-
movies/americans-spend-34-hours-week-watching-tv-nielsen-numbers-
article-1.1162285)

People spend more time watching TV as they do working on average. [34 + 3 =
37]

[http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm](http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm)

34.5 hour work week average

~~~
mercurial
More accurately, we live in an eerie mix of Brave New World and 1984 :(

~~~
opendais
True. ;)

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rlpb
Could Netflix start offering discounts to customers of more reasonable ISPs?

~~~
Jgrubb
That'd be great, but I only have one choice where I live.

~~~
rayiner
Do you not have cable, DSL, satellite, and LTE?

~~~
fragmede
Cable is generally the primary option of high-speed internet ( > 10 Mbit).

DSL (when not of the ATT U-verse variety) barely gets over 10-Mbit in
practice, with speeds closer to 3-Mbit being fairly common.

Satellite can't really be considered high-speed due to latency.

LTE coverage is still poor, and I've yet to see hardware suitable for a home
connection for it. (Tethering via a cellphone doesn't count.)

So, no. There's really generally one, _maybe_ two choices for home high-speed
internet so it's not like customers can vote with their dollars and move to a
Netflix-friendly ISP.

~~~
ultramancool
It still surprises me that US government hasn't gone the same way as Canada
and the UK and opened the lines up to competition. By forcing ISPs to offer up
their "last mile" lines to competitors at reasonable prices, I've seen prices
and plans get a lot better where I live over the last few years.

~~~
T-hawk
Regulatory capture. Interests concerned with protecting ISPs' monopolistic
profits have more government influence than interests concerned with the good
of the consumer.

~~~
rayiner
It's not like they don't have regulatory agencies in the UK or Canada. It's a
pretty weak, handwaving argument to just assert that their agencies are less
prone to capture.

------
guelo
What about class action consumer lawsuit for false advertisement? You are not
selling me 1Gbps if you are deliberately congested at the LEC.

~~~
wmf
Or maybe the FTC could step in.
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140608/07411627511/forge...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140608/07411627511/forget-
fcc-should-we-be-looking-to-ftc-to-save-open-internet.shtml)

~~~
click170
I think there's a valid argument for them to step in here.

This is an issue of customers not being able to use what they purchased, eg
The Internet.

The water was arguably muddy when they were advertising "Speeds up to X", but
now when their own infrastructure is incapable of providing what they're
selling and they are fully aware of this, they no longer have a leg (or
argument) to stand on.

~~~
blasteye
I dont see how they can get in trouble for not providing their advertised
speeds so long as the speed degradation only occurs outside of their direct
network.

~~~
click170
Are you choosing to ignore the fact that Level3 has offered to pay for the
equipment and labor to upgrade their peering point and the ISP has refused, or
are you choosing to imagine that the peering point is outside of that ISP's
"direct network"?

Either way you cut it, the ISP is in the wrong. The peering point is 100%
within their control, and Level3 has gone above and beyond to try to ease
congestion, the ISP has outright refused.

How on earth can you side with the ISP on this - do you work for one?

------
earlz
I wish they would've named the ISPs, but I'm sure they'd probably get in
trouble for that heh

~~~
wmf
LEC 2 is probably AT&T. (With congestion like that, I guess I won't bother to
sign up for "GigaPower".) Verizon is LEC 1 or 3 and I'm not sure who the other
LEC is.

~~~
comex
EDIT: Disregard this I'm dumb

Comcast? Comcast and Verizon were the big two Netflix signed deals with.

~~~
function_seven
It's probably CenturyLink, which is the 3rd largest LEC behind AT&T and
Verizon. (Comcast isn't classified as a Local Exchange Carrier, it a cable
operator.)

~~~
pktgen
It definitely is CenturyLink. Their Level 3 interconnects have been saturated
for awhile, longer than March.

------
jcavin
When is a high tech Silicon Valley company going to pop up providing high
internet speeds through wifi or data signal?

Would be a booming startup for sure. Very surprised google has not taken this
one on. I hate being forced to have only once choice for internet (cox). You
know that there is not much of incentive for them to do a good job when they
have no competition!!!!

~~~
jlawer
4G speeds is pretty much the state of the art in production ready systems.
While there is a lot of speed available on LTE, once it is shared across a
reasonable number of people the performance drops. This is why bandwidth caps
are so tight on mobile networks, they can't have all their subscribers pulling
200gb of data a month, else everyone is going to get DSL 1 speeds.

This problem is a fundamental issue of RF Spectrum, and these problems tend to
be addressed by blue sky research that occurs at a university.

Google is trying to address this in the most cost effective manner possible...
google fibre. Wireless is unlikely to be any cheaper then simply rolling fibre
/ copper to every home.

~~~
runeks
I think it may have a lot to do with regulation.

I've been looking around, to see whether I could find information on the total
bandwidth of the DVB-T(2) spectrum for some country, but I couldn't.

I want to know because I'm wondering if, perhaps, the technical abilities are
there, but we can't use them because only a select, small set of frequencies
are allowed for data transfer.

I'm still not sure whether that's the case though.

~~~
foobarqux
It has nothing to do with regulation, it has to do with physics. Wireless is
not nearly as good a communication channel as fiber or cable. Intuitively this
is because of interference with other signals, reflections and obstructions,
all of which are continuously changing.

~~~
wtallis
It's also due to the fact that there's only a few GHz of spectrum in which
cheap equipment can broadcast a powerful enough signal to go any useful
distance. WiFi operating in 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz are tricky but not impossible to
use for anything longer-range than a single building. Much higher frequency,
and you have to use pretty powerful transmitters and well-aimed highly
directional antennas. Current tech allows for a few bits/s/Hz, so there's only
a few gbit/s of bandwidth to be allocated between all long-range communication
uses. If you want to offer gigabit speeds to households over wireless, you
have to deploy a mesh network that's so dense it would be cheaper to just lay
fiber.

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adam-f
FYI: I'm running a 1920x1200 screen rotated, so with my browser (FF32) as full
screen I'm just at the point that the annoying #dd_ajax_float element is
shown, but it covers the left edge of the first paragraph.

~~~
mfisher87
1920x1200 landscape, same issue.

~~~
na85
Here also. It's awful UX/UI.

