
Verizon made an enemy tonight - sudonim
http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Verizon-Fios-Netflix-Vyprvpn.html
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jpgvm
Verizon, TWC, Comcast. All of these providers are local monopolies.

This is the root of the problem.

Here in Australia I can choose any number of retail ISPs that will service my
Fibre to the Home connection. If I was not living in the building I am now I
would be able to choose any number of ADSL ISPs. This creates competition and
fixes the problem.

Funnily enough this access is legislated here in Australia. Yes. Legislated.

There can be no ISP monopolies in Australia.

Better yet we have embarked on building a Fibre to the Home national network
called the National Broadband Network which functions under the same scheme,
ensuring we won't have any bullshit monopolies for the foreseeable future.

Americans should campaign for the same solution, enforce last-mile wholesale
and legislate separation of ISP retail from ISP wholesale business units.

Everyone wins.

~~~
jedrek
I firmly believe markets should be regulated _for_ competition. I'm sure there
are examples of companies merging and creating an improved experience for
their customers, but I can't think of any. On the other hand, I can list half
a dozen companies I've done business with, where a merger has reduced the
quality of service and while increasing its price.

Tons of markets that have been "deregulated" have become more competitive -
national airlines in Europe, Ma Bell in the US - but they are almost all about
breaking up a government sponsored/created monopoly. The US market telecom
market has done an amazing job re-merging, to the point that a few more
mergers and it'll be Ma Bell all over again.

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kentonv
I think this issue may be more subtle than we want it to be.

I'm no fan of monopolistic ISPs, but it _is_ true that when you have a peering
point with unbalanced traffic flows, the side sending more traffic is supposed
to pay the side receiving more traffic. You pay per byte sent, just like how
the sender of a letter pays postage. This has always been the case, and as
long as Verizon charges Level 3 the same amount per-packet as they do any
other sender, there's no violation of net neutrality.

So Level 3/Netflix is making the argument that all Verizon has to do is
install some additional network cables and everything would be fixed. Well
that's a convenient argument, given that Level 3 sends way more traffic than
it receives on that link, and currently (it seems) isn't paying for that
difference. I hate to say it, but I think Verizon may actually be in the right
here, at least insofar as that Level 3 should in fact be paying for that
peering arrangement. Level 3's blog post seem deceptive on this point.

That said, Verizon has a video service that competes with Netflix. Verizon's
video service presumably doesn't have to pay transit fees to reach Verizon
customers. So what's to stop Verizon from charging unreasonable fees in order
to stamp out competition? Presumably, this is the real problem: Verizon and
Level 3 cannot agree on a price, because Verizon has no reason to offer a
reasonable price.

So Level 3 and Netflix are waging a public campaign to shame Verizon,
presumably as a bargaining chip to get the price lower. But neither side is
really being truthful with us.

I'm just happy that in my area I can get sonic.net, an ISP whose only business
interest is delivering packets.

~~~
nishonia
> ...it is true that when you have a peering point with unbalanced traffic
> flows, the side sending more traffic is supposed to pay the side receiving
> more traffic.

Up until very recently the only time you paid for peering was when you were
actually buying transit. Level 3 is definitely on the right side of this
argument, not only logically - but also from the perspective of precedence.
Anybody interested in learning how the internet actually works should read
"The Internet Peering Playbook".

~~~
kentonv
Hmm, I guess I don't understand why sending packets to an end user over an ISP
is not "transit", but I'll go ahead and admit I know very little about this
subject and am probably wrong.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Transit - I send you data and you deliver it to another ISP or backbone
provider.

Not transit - I send you data and you deliver it to someone in your own
network.

~~~
kentonv
Yeah, the thing is, I don't consider myself to be part of my ISP's network. I
consider my ISP to be "transit"ing packets from the internet to my network. :)
But I guess that's not the accepted definition.

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awalton
"Verizon, you're my enemy, I'm going to continue paying you every month while
I work around your stupidity with my VPN..."

That's just how fucked up this situation is.

~~~
mobiplayer
This is clearly a "dame pan y dime tonto" situation (“Dame pan y dime tonto”
literally translates to “give me bread and call me fool”. The idiomatic
meaning is “I don’t care what people say as long as I get what I want”.)

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Maxious
They have trained their agents on how to respond to complaints about speed...
[https://twitter.com/CyrisXD/status/489950468483731458/photo/...](https://twitter.com/CyrisXD/status/489950468483731458/photo/1)

~~~
_m_
The funny thing is even though the rep claims that speedtest.net is fake, the
Verizon speedtest service at
[http://my.verizon.com/services/speedtest/](http://my.verizon.com/services/speedtest/)
is powered by Ookla, the company behind speedtest.net

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djchen
I do the same thing as the OP, I use an OpenWRT router with OpenVPN back to a
VPS I have and it improves streaming video quality and speed for Netflix and
more. Highly recommend it.

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kaeawc
Wonder what location he tunneled from / to to get around Verizon's bottleneck.

~~~
sudonim
Hi! OP here. I'm in NYC. I tunneled to Washington D.C. and that seemed to do
it. I figured I'd try a location as close as possible first.

~~~
kaeawc
Tried the same thing on TWC from NYC with no difference in speed. Will
experiment with other setups.

Also would like to note we pay for (and can get) 50 Mbps down. Netflix comes
in at ~560 kbps and just stays there.

~~~
sudonim
Cool. You may want to test different VPN services in case that's it. I've been
using vyprvpn and I'm quite happy with it, but there are probably a few others
that would work well.

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tweakz
If I were him, I would change ISPs.

~~~
brianbreslin
Many Americans don't have that option. The physical wires either in your house
or connecting your house to the street trunks are often owned by the telco
themselves. That's right the copper wires in your house you own, might be
property of Verizon or comcast. They get exclusivity to these wires.

