Netflix CEO Accuses Comcast of Not Practicing Net Neutrality 272
braindrainbahrain writes "Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has a Facebook page in which he posts a short gripe about Comcast. It seems watching video through the Xfinity app on an Xbox does not counting towards your cap on your Comcast data plan. All other services, Netflix included, do. To quote Hastings: 'For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all. The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment. In what way is this neutral?'"
The difference, of course, is that you need a Comcast cable TV subscription in order to have the Xfinity app not count toward your monthly data usage allowance. Then again, you can't exactly sign up for a similar plan through Netflix or Hulu.
So when my roommate comes and says (Score:2)
(we have comcast too)
Re:So when my roommate comes and says (Score:5, Insightful)
You can point to this and tell him or anyone else this is why Net Neutrality is good and not the antithesis of fair competition in an open market.
Sharing cable (Score:3)
So if comcast asks why I'm paying for one subscription but sharing my cable connection with the neighbors I can tell them, "don't worry, it's not going over your network"?
Re:So when my roommate comes and says (Score:5, Interesting)
I have netflix and comcast as well. I went nearly a month unable to use netflix on my ps3, then I switched to use the google DNS ( 8.8.8.8 ) and it suddenly worked flawlessly again.
Comcast has had other flaky reliability issues with their DNS service, but that specific problem of netflix never being able to connect is highly suspect.
Comcast is an icon of the "new" Corporate America (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Comcast is an icon of the "new" Corporate Ameri (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been said here before, these people are for the free market until they're not. When the free market turns against them they don't "innovate," they instantly go whining to their favorite congress person with a moneybag in their hand.
It's the same for everyone that claims to be "free market." There isn't one truly free market person in Congress on in Corporate America. Whenever you hear that it should cause your B.S. detector to go off.
Re:Comcast is an icon of the "new" Corporate Ameri (Score:5, Informative)
"When the free market turns against them"
Actually, that's never happened. There's never been a free global communications market.
Infrastructure, and those running it, are regulated and taxed/subsidized at different levels at different times, markets, and media.
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Re:Comcast is an icon of the "new" Corporate Ameri (Score:5, Insightful)
Well keep in mind, when people talk about "the free market", they're not always talking about the same thing. It all depends on whose perspective your looking from, and who you think should be "free" in the market. Is a "free market" the market where *customers* are free, in that they are permitted to choose freely between different vendors of different products, based on the quality of those products? Or is a "free market" a market where the *vendors* are free, in that they are permitted to manipulate the market in any way that they're able, including fraud and monopolization?
When Comcast says they want a "free market", they're talking about the second one, where vendors are free.
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In Soviet Russia, it's just the opposite.
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"There isn't a single market in the world that has zero barrier of entry, perfect competition, perfectly rational consumers, and so on"
Nor is there a single dictionary or encyclopedia in the world that defines "free market" in those absolute terms.
I think of a "free market" as a marketplace where the rules are uniform, and exist to enforce honesty and efficiency rather than favoritism and dominion.
"There's no such thing as a free market."
There's no such thing as a free country either. Doesn't mean we have
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Psychic (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe Comcast created some kind of psychic link for Xfinity so it doesn't have to go over the tubes connected to your house? Thus why it doesn't count towards your bandwidth!
My theory is that it's probably such a huge bandwidth hog that they don't want anyone to realize that it would kill their cap in 10 minutes.
Unfair competitive advantage (Score:5, Interesting)
It violates antitrust laws. Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming video services should just sue Comcast and get it over with it.
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I have Verizon DSL, and if there's a cap, I haven't found it yet. I only have a 4M/768k ADSL, but based on my router data, I've been doing anywhere from 300 to 800 GB per month for the last year.
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You would have to sue one county (or city) at a time, in order to challenge the validity of the exclusive contract they gave to Comcast in your juris diction.
I have Verizon. So far they've not applied any caps.
This is just a stupid complaint ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:This is just a stupid complaint ... (Score:4, Informative)
Great! So if i rig my bittorrent client to only connect to peers within Comcast's network, none of that transfer will count against my cap, right? No? Oh right, such concepts will only be applied when it's to Comcast's benefit.
Re:This is just a stupid complaint ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Reminds me of Comcasts DNS Hijacking (Score:5, Interesting)
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Time Warner has been doing this here forever. It's a pain in the ass because it takes much longer than a simple "not found" message to load and offers no useful results.
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Where in particular are they doing this, cause I don't experience that and I have been a customer of theirs for over 10 years now.
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Rochester, NY, for at least 2 years. Actually, I think it's more like 10, but I'm certain of 2.
I've been running my own DNS server that just goes straight to root because, aside from the sheer audacity of it and privacy implications, their DNS fuckery hosed my spam RBL.
Re:Reminds me of Comcasts DNS Hijacking (Score:5, Informative)
Comcast does NOT do this anymore... (Score:3)
When they transitioned to DNSSEC validating resolvers for all customers, they dropped the "Domain Helper" [comcast.com] service as they viewed it as fundamentally incompatible with DNSSEC validation.
If you are still seeing such behaviors, check which DNS resolver you are actually using, its likely to be OpenDNS or another third party service.
Unicast vs. Multicast (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Unicast vs. Multicast (Score:4, Insightful)
Multicast is for broadcasts where everybody is receiving the same content simultaneously. It doesn't work for what's being discussed here; on-demand playback of individual episodes and movies. That's unicast. Why would Comcast stream the 15th minute of the 4th episode of season 2 of Community to everybody simultaneously, including the guy watching the 6th episode?
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I highly doubt they are using multicast for this. This isn't IPTV being used to deliver live TV which does work very well with multicast. This is providing on-demand access to a library of content that you can start at any time and control the playback. This doesn't allow the use of multicast.
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Re:Unicast vs. Multicast (Score:5, Informative)
Multicast only works as a bandwidth savings device when you're streaming the same content at the same time to multiple devices. I'm not familiar with the Comcast Xfinity service, but to be able to glean any reasonable measure of savings you'd have to watch Xfinity like you do regular TV - shows scheduled at a certain time, not streamed on demand.
Re:Unicast vs. Multicast (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it was a kludge. And got kludgier when you wanted to add things like long pauses (longer than X minutes) without recording the entire stream. But it did reduce the total bandwidth needed to deliver popular on-demand content.
so it begins.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I made a comment some months about how this will happen, as the reason why isp's are rolling out bandwidth limits and creating artificial scarcity. most(all) of the isp's doing this have such services of their own and this is an easy way to create incentive to use those services and not competing services. for the consumer it sucks bigtime of course - and the big isp's doing this have no incentive to upgrade their services to higher bandwidths since it works as a method to drive users towards their own services, which even if they don't make money(for the isp) surely count against somebodys bonus matrix plans(which are bullshit of course too).
this is the reason why they don't want net neutrality, why they don't want uncapped connections. they just want to promote their walled garden bullshit services. content providers don't mind as it let's them "monetize" the shows in the old fashion - meaning lots of regional licensing and their staff sitting at bullshit lunches getting hammered while selling something the consumer should be able to buy/view globally directly.
they should at least be forced to advertise the fact and be forced to advertise their internet connections as comcast-network connections.
Re:so it begins.. (Score:4, Insightful)
they should at least be forced to advertise the fact and be forced to advertise their internet connections as comcast-network connections.
I've been advocating a much larger change for some time: forbid any company from being both an infrastructure provider and a service provider.
It seems vitally important to me that Comcast, for example, should not be permitted to string the coaxial cable to your house *as well as* providing internet services, VoIP, and Television over that cable. It inherently creates perverse incentives for them to provide both the infrastructure and the services carried over that infrastructure. Even if they weren't providing their own streaming service, their business interests as a TV provider are undermined by companies like Netflix, so they have an incentive to provide poor Internet service that makes Netflix untenable. Further, the fact that Comcast is also a content owner (via NBC/Universal), they have a perverse incentive to undermine any dealings with Netflix that would put their content on Netflix's streaming service.
There's no real way to prevent these kinds of perverse incentives unless you break Comcast up, the cable infrastructure company on one side, and the media services company on the other. Once they're broken up, regulate the infrastructure company as public infrastructure, and require that they aren't allowed to make special deals with individual companies. That should go a long way towards ensuring net neutrality.
not NET neutrality (Score:2, Interesting)
The NET in Net Neutrality implies Internet. When comcast is delivering you a Netflix/Hulu/Vudu etc. stream, they're pulling it from the open Internet to deliver it to you. When you're using their app, the can deliver the same content completely over their own network. You're not using the Internet, you're using Comcast's WAN, so no Internet bandwidth is being used, so it shouldn't be charged. If I'm streaming a movie from my PC to my TV, it doesn't go against my cap either, because it's using my isolated ne
Re:not NET neutrality (Score:5, Informative)
Not really true. Comcasts WAN is part of the internet. Remember internet is a network of networks.
Re:not NET neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly right. The Internet is by definition a network of private/public networks. The reason the Internet took off is because all those network operators realized that the benefits they gained from openly interoperating was much greater than the benefits they could leverage from offering a walled garden (AOL anyone).
Now that some private networks are big enough, and have gotten an idea of what people might want to do with a network, they're starting to wall off and charging rent. Comcast might be able to squeeze out some temporary profits, but it will most definitely be temporary. The Internet would collapse into a series of AOLs, innovation will die off, and it'll all be quiet until the concept of an open Internet is revived.
This is a classic case of killing the goose with golden eggs.
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I'd say the Internet is a Specific network of networks. If Comcast is receiving the shows from the studios via satellite telemetry, encoding them, then distributing them to your app via their own IP based network, no Internet connection is required. You're paying separately, via your cable subscription, for this network access. I have Comcast as my ISP, but I don't have cable. I have access to the Internet, but I don't have access to this.
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"their WAN is part of the internet and fully connected to it"
No, it's not. If you've got Comcast as an ISP, check your computer's ip address and subnet mask. I'm sure you'll find that you're not routable from the Internet.
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You mean because you have a *router* between you? Or a cable modem that is routable, or a router that is routable?
jesus man, do you know what a network is?
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I'm sure you'll find that you're not routable from the Internet.
I... what... I mean... that's... what?
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Internet is from IP which stands for Internet(work) Protocol
If you are crossing form one network(say Ethernet) to another(say DSL/Cable Internet/802.1 wireless/token ring/etc) you are on an internet
If that internet is connected to the Internet Backbone then you are on The Internet.
Unless Comcast's network is unconnected to the rest of the 'net, their network is part of The Internet.
For the consumer, The Internet is anything on the other side of their connection(be that a cable modem, DSL modem, ISP provided
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I disagree that the Internet is anything on the other side of their connection. I'd say the Internet is anything on the other side of their Gateway, but anything on the same side of that gateway is local network.
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BT is Internet, it's just not WWW.
Ok, I'll bite... (Score:3)
Ok, I'll bite - I don't get one thing... I pay Comcast an obscene amount of money every month for Cable TV and Internet... why should they give a flying crap if I stream a show or not then? After all, I'm already paying for their Xfinity streamy stuff even if I don't take advantage of it.
I never even come close to my cap every month, but I'm still bothered by how a cap == "unlimited" and I don't understand why Comcast would care since they got the money anyway.
Oh, right - Capitolism now requires that every cporprate entity take the greediest possible short term position on any issue.
Grumble...
"does not counting" does not compute (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems watching video through the Xfinity app on an Xbox does not counting towards your cap on your Comcast data plan.
"All your cap are belong to us"?
Everybody click on all the ads so that Slashdot can afford a proofreader.
Conspicuously absent from this comparison (Score:2)
What is missing from this rant is the source of the video. Content closer to your customer is easier, typically, to deliver and therefore cheaper. And then we have peering agreements and a load of other stuff on top of it.
Maybe comcast and content providers should work on a way of providing a mirror on comcast's network for their customers, thus avoiding the cap issues.
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Net neutrality is not as trivial as made out (Score:5, Interesting)
Way back when I had ADSL in australia as my internet traffic within the ISPs network didn't count to my quota. The ISP had a bunch of ftp mirrors, a bunch of game servers, and the subscribers ran a bunch of not legitimate at all P2P servers/clients that restricted to within the ISP IPs.
It had nothing to do with the ISP trying to leverage itself into having an edge over content providing competitors. That external traffic was a big part of their costs and so encouraging their users to use their mirrors and so on was good for them.
When I was at uni, AARNet traffic was cheaper than other national traffic which was cheaper than international traffic - in terms of what the university charged the department for their usage. I can't find any docs now of course, but a different university still has a slightly simpler but similar setup: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/its/quotas/internet/definition.html [adelaide.edu.au]
Again that wasn't the university trying to get content providers to pay them or trying to give an edge to themselves. It was just a reflection of the costs.
Now the US has far lower costs to start with and maybe they are low enough that it really doesn't matter and comcast are just trying to benefit their other business arms. But without knowing some of the vague details I don't think you can just ignore the non-jerk potential reasons.
Why not redefine "CAP"? (Score:2)
If comcast just said that "CAP" was the amount of bandwidth that was used by a customer which left Comcast's network. Such that all traffic that stayed within Comcast's network did not count toward the customer's bandwidth limit.
Nobody said they had to measure it at the modem? Also, I don't believe how much traffic you use is part of this neutrality debate, I though it was around the speed at which it was used. So the same 1GB netflix movie is streamed at the same speed to the consumer as a 1GB xfinity mov
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Why not eliminate the cap altogether? It's absolutely garbage that a land line should be capped. Neither of the services I have available (Cablevision and FIOS) have caps.
I think caps would go away real quick if this practice of exclusive broadband franchises were to come to an end.
I'm all for net neutrality, but... (Score:2)
Just think of them metering your bandwidth as it leave the Comcast network instead of when it leaves your house. As a network operator, I don't really see this as being evil. ISPs have to pay for bandwidth that leaves their network, while content inside their network is free. Naturally ISPs want their subscribers to pay for content they access outside the ISP's network since the ISP
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Uneven competition (Score:2)
All these posts about the cost to Comcast (Netflix is outside Comcast's network while Comcast's content is within the network) are missing the point.
If Comcast allowed Netflix to host their servers within Comcast's infrastructure for a reasonable fee, then Netflix would have an option of how to host the content. Pay a little more, and Comcast customers do not have to deal with the cap. But Comcast does not allow that. And that is the real issue.
Netflix would love this, because not only would they have a bet
A different world view is ... (Score:2)
Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their (Score:5, Interesting)
Not entirely true. The bulk of the costs are the last mile (which remains the same whether it's Comcast or Netflix doing the streaming). Internet transit costs almost nothing these days, especially at the commit levels that a large carrier like Comcast has...
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No kidding. I'm non-existent compared to Comcast and I pay next to nothing for bandwidth these days. My best deal is at a $1/meg for transit on a 100meg commit for a back up connection and my highest is $15/meg for one of my main lines. Saying that bandwidth is expensive is laughable in this day and age.
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When you're buying wholesale bandwidth it's per second and not on total transfer. You can max out the commit 24/7 and pay the same amount as never using it. The only reason dedicated server / VPS companies charge you on transfer is to make extra money. You'll also notice that some will give you a crazy amount of transfer. That's because it normally doesn't cost them anything more if you transfer 1 meg over their line or 1 gig.
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My best deal is at a $1/meg for transit
Netflix has several million simultaneous streaming users, and I'd say it is likely Comcast at least has one million simultaneous Netflix streams. 1 million x 1 mbps = 10 Tbbps.
Do you have a 10 Tbps router? Do you know how much that costs? Maintenance?
And of course it isn't one big 10 Tbps router, but actually thousands of routers distributed across thousands of head-ends, along with all the monthly local-loop charges for each of those head-ends. And some of these
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ahh, but your not accounting for the cost of all the systems and equipment needed to monitor and track your quota usage! :)
Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems the relevant point is that your cable TV wouldn't normally be part of your data plan, even though it's all delivered digitally now anyways.
But I'd say they're obviously working this angle to ease us into accepting their view of how isp's networks should work... Netflix pays Comcast extra, behind the scenes, for the luxury of being able to deliver video to their customers.
That way your Netflix will cost you twice what it does or you'll be more likely to use comcast's video services... a win-win for them, and all-around bad for Netflix and the customers.
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Which in theory shouldn't be a problem. To get to use the Xfinity service you need a tv cable subscription so you have to pay extra to Comcast. Presumably to pay the cost of the extra bandwidth consumption. In a way, Comcast --the tv cable company-- has to pay Comcast --the ISP-- to deliver its content. The question then is, does Comcast --the tv cable company-- pay less for badwidth than would Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo, etc?
Net Neutrality is at its heart, a problem of anti-trust, of monopoly abuse, of a corp
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To get to use the Xfinity service you need a tv cable subscription so you have to pay extra to Comcast. Presumably to pay the cost of the extra bandwidth consumption.
So let's eliminate the presumption then, and just have them do the accounting: Don't exempt Xfinity from the bandwidth cap. And if that means Comcast will give you a discount on TV service to compensate for the extra money you're paying for internet service, great. But it also makes them feel the pain they're causing to third parties with their ridiculously low caps, when customers start cancelling their TV service because it uses up too much overpriced data.
Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side. You could be arguing that it travels less far, because the data already resides on Comcast's network (Hulu being sponsored/owned/controlled in part by Comcast), but that has nothing to do with bandwidth, and all to do with.... wait for it... Net Neutrality. In one case, the same packets (assuming the very same file exists on both Netflix and on Hulu), are traveling through the Comcast network, with an endpoint in a Comcast controlled network. In the other case, it is traveling through the Comcast network with an endpoint outside of the Comcast controlled network.
This is EXACTLY what Net Neutrality is about it.
And this is EXACTLY what everybody has been screaming bloody murder about since the ISPs got in bed with content, and since ISPs became big enough to be monopoly/duopoly providers. This exact beehavior was predicted by a number of people, and it will end in
* Internet access that works exactly like cable channel access
* a death sentence for any site that isn't paying off the ISPs to be on a special access program
Welcome to the future Internet. It's called TV.
Exactly! (Score:2)
That's why I've been saying for years. Network providers should be just that provide internet access. If they expand into media like you see so often these days there needs to be some regulation.
Seems there's a potentially HUGE market for wireless/wifi internet providers that can offer unlimited data transfers to customers. They wouldn't have their hands tied like some of the loca IPS's here where they have to lease the lines from the major providers which get money from everyone regardless if they are from
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Except that wireless ISPs suffer massively from frequency shortages. The only way for an ISP to do more than email and light browsing is fiber backbones and wired access. There's a reason Sonic.net got out of the wireless business.
Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side.
Nope. I've seen the magical compression on Comcast's side and it doesn't come as dust. It usually arrives in big, slow-moving blocks.
Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, the majority of bandwidth cost to the home is the last mile. The long haul is cheap. In this respect, the difference in cost between streaming from the nearest comcast datacenter vs. the nearest netflix datacenter should be close to the same.
Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their (Score:5, Insightful)
Data from Comcast to customer is half the bandwidth compared to data from Netflix to Comcast to customer.
Comcast is both a provider of internet services and a provider of content. What it is doing is bundling its services together to gain an unfair market advantage. It's the same kind of monopolistic practice that Microsoft got sued by, er... every country it does business within. The legal precident here is obvious, as is the conclusion. Whether you call it net neutrality or not, Comcast is doing something unethical and probably illegal as well.
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So buy your pro-corporate definition, the old Sugar Trust would not be unethical.
Perhaps the oil and steel trusts weren't unethical either...
Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming that to be true (it isn't) then half is still not zero. If you're going to calculate cost as "sum of all fractions of pipe consumed end-to-end", that would be fair and neutral -- if it was done for everyone by the same metric, even it ended up biasing one source over another. (Neutral simply means that everyone has the same rule applied equally - ie: it is equitable - it does NOT mean all providers are equal. Just as in science or in news, equitability and equal standards are FAR more important than equal share.)
Comcast isn't being equal OR equitable. It's making sources you buy from it essentially zero network cost and all other sources much more expensive. It's leveraging the (rather obvious) monopoly it has over its network to create a second, independent monopoly in the completely different field of content delivery. That's not ok. That's actually blatantly illegal. It also knows that in an election year where markets are jittery and unemployment is high, nobody is going to do a damn thing about it.
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This statement makes no sense. The "high bandwidth service" in question in Netflix, Comcast has no say in where this service is located. Unless you mean the high bandwidth service is Xfinity, in which case it is already located within the Comcast network. The fact is, Comcast, and all other ISPs, are being forced to pay significantly more in peering costs due to the massive amount of bandwidth being used by Netflix. Services like Xfinity never leave the Comcast network, so they have no impact on peering
Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their (Score:4, Informative)
At a certain point the peerage costs would be equal or greater to just going to the big content providers (Netflix, Youtube, etc) had having them host a cached version on the internal Comcast network that Comcast subscribers would hit first before trying to go out over a peered link (which should then not count against the cap since it's internal).
Since they're not doing that but directly trying to drive customers to the Comcast Xfinity and away from being paying customers of their competition (both in services and in content). They've kind of crossed a line methinks.
Re:Why post on facebook? (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't have the $1 mil to make them pay attention to us, that's why.
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His name is MickeyTheIdiot.
Re:Why post on facebook? (Score:5, Insightful)
The FCC has remarkably little enforcement capability. Likely, the goal was to name & shame in the most publicly visible way possible, so Netflix could gain some traction on this issue quickly, instead of having to wait around for months for the FCC to do anything useful.
Re:Why post on facebook? (Score:4, Insightful)
And not lodge a complaint with the FCC or his local congresscritter (maybe over an expensive dinner)?
One man, even with a loud voice, isn't going to make much of a difference. By posting it on Facebook he's hoping to stir the pot and get others up in arms about the unfair nature of this special treatment.
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One man, even with a loud voice, isn't going to make much of a difference.
Unless that one man happens the CEO of a publicly-owned corporation with a $5.6B market capitalization, who is speaking on behalf of that corporation's (very wealthy) investors... investors who also happen to give giant campaign contributions.
Re:Why post on facebook? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one element of a much larger campaign. Who better to hit up (than your installed base) than the mobs at FB?
One man with a command of social media can indeed make a difference. The problem is that Netflix shot itself in the foot before, whizzing off their customer base, and they have part of that image to overcome.
My hopes? Somebody listens and makes Comcast become the neutral transport that they're supposed to be. Comcast will fight this tooth and nail; they will NOT roll over easily as they have the same "we own the wires" mentality that the rest of the once public utilities have.
Re:Why post on facebook? (Score:4, Informative)
Except it's not one man, it's a large corporation with a lot of employees, customers, and general name recognition. This is exactly the reason they formed a PAC...
http://slashdot.org/submission/2014593/netflix-forms-a-pac [slashdot.org]
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I believe the idea behind it has nothing to do with the delivery mechanisms beyond the fact that both go over the Internet connection. However, Xfinity traffic is given priority at the expense of potentially competing services. If you have 2GB/month cap and Xfinity doesn't count towards it, then Xfinity practically has a monopoly for the rest of the month once that 2GB is used up.
Comcast's defense is that the app turns the Xbox, etc into another cable box (since it's only available with their cable plan), s
Re:Comcast's memo in reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
"why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms"
Actually having used Comcasts service, it streams the Hulu feeds through their own Xfinity web app. So essentially the Xfinity web app is a wrapper for Hulu for paid cable customers. In fact if its a show that appears on both, the Hulu feed is likely to be faster as its not going through 2 different gateways to get to you. I have tested this myself with numerous network shows. I only realized this after a redirect was screwed up and it showed the stream was coming from Hulu, NOT Xfinity.
"Apples to oranges."
Nope the last mile is the last mile no matter what. 0s and 1s don't change just because you use a different service. Maybe get a better understanding of streaming media and understand that the ONLY reason they are doing this has nothing to do with the costs associated, but everything to do with making people THINK there are different costs associated when in reality there are not.
Its lying to the government/customers enough to completely obliterate the fact that they are in reality a utility and should be regulated and beaten into submission as such. Hell Comcasts whole plan to produce "original content is all a elaborate scheme to convince people they are more than what they are, a utility. But making a company not screw customers and not scheme and violate basic civil and federal laws "would be communist."
Our forfathers are rolling in their graves at just how much the rich control this country now.
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Nope the last mile is the last mile no matter what. 0s and 1s don't change just because you use a different service. Maybe get a better understanding of streaming media and understand that the ONLY reason they are doing this has nothing to do with the costs associated, but everything to do with making people THINK there are different costs associated when in reality there are not.
People seem to like the idea that "bandwidth is next to free" and the cost is only in the last mile, and for all intents and purposes it has gotten very cheap compared to years gone by but if it were free (or somewhere approaching free) then explain to me how CDNs are a multi-billion dollar a year business, please. Surely it can't be that network operators at the national level are interested in optimizing traffic (in the name of reducing costs) by moving the content closer to the consumer, can it? But bu
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People seem to like the idea that "bandwidth is next to free" and the cost is only in the last mile, and for all intents and purposes it has gotten very cheap compared to years gone by but if it were free (or somewhere approaching free) then explain to me how CDNs are a multi-billion dollar a year business, please. Surely it can't be that network operators at the national level are interested in optimizing traffic (in the name of reducing costs) by moving the content closer to the consumer, can it? But but but bandwidth is free! If Akamai were going to earn $1 billion a year from moving data around surely they are doing it by hand-delivering DVDs to consumers thus reducing the last-mile cost! Oh, wait, that's a different company.
First: Akamai: they make lots of money to improve the user experience and lower the resource load on servers, nothing more, nothing less. Having worked at companies that have used Akamai and served 10s of thousands of concurrent users, I can definitely tell you what happens when, say, Akamai goes down at an inconvenient time - load spikes at your datacenter can go up 1000-fold or more, as your servers struggle to serve all those images marketing thought so nifty to include everywhere, resulting in lots of
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why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms
What, one greases their bytes so they slide over the network easier?
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why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms
What, one greases their bytes so they slide over the network easier?
You think Comcast (who owns NBC by the way, the chief content provider for Hulu) has no idea where Hulu comes from, they just let it on to their network and say "hey we won't count it in this special case"... Netflix, on the other hand, truly does come from wherever Netflix wants it to and Comcast accounts for the bandwidth as such.
Is Comcast giving special accommodation to local/friendly services and not Netflix a neutrality no-no? Of course it is. Is content from Hulu and Netflix the same "thing" on Co
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Youtube videos are just crap - gotta load them hit play and THEN hit pause and let the rest download and then hit play again AFTER they download completely because otherwise, it just starts and stops.
I don't know WTF it is. Is Netlfix buffering that much better or is Youtube shitty?
Youtube is just shitty sometimes.
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Comcast might be tough, but Netflix is more popular, it will not be in Comcasts favor if this issue is being played out in the court of public opinion.
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Except this has nothing to do with the network engineering, it's simply about whether or not the particular streaming video service counts towards a user's cap.
If Comcast chooses to cap, then neutrality would mean that their own XFinity content counts toward that cap, regardless of the actual load placed on the network.
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If Comcast doesn't want to expand their capacity at the peering point, they could invite Netflix to colo a cache of their own on the Comcast side of the peering.
If the cost of upstream bandwidth or peering capacity was really much of an issue, they would have done so by now just for the money savings.
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This person indeed.... (Score:2)
This person sounds like they are just complaining to complain, or worse, work for netflix or hulu.
Did you read the headline? The guy complaining is the guy that runs Netflix:
Netflix CEO Accuses Comcast of Not Practicing Net Neutrality