it’s more like two trucking companies agree to haul each other’s stuff. one side charges his customer to send the parcel, the other company charges his customer to receive the parcel. the two trucking companies agree to not charge each other. cogent delivers parcels half way and hand off to AT&T who hand it to the customer with due speed they are both doing the same amount of work. AT&T gets a parcel and sends it to cogent to deliver to one of it’s customers. cogent does so but takes his time about it. his truck is spring loaded so it moves faster one way than the other.
after a while AT&T sees that cogent’s customer netflix is sending a lot of parcels and since he doesn’t like cogent who he feels isn’t pulling his weight AT&T slows down only netflix’ traffic and says he will increase it only if netflix pays up.
instead of taking the issue to the party it’s upset with (cogent) they instead attack cogent’s customer and just for extra fun extort money out them as well.
Even though Netflix and its customers are entirely in the right here, Netflix bought this BS upon itself thanks to its stupidity in giving to Comcast bullying. They opened the bulkhead door … woosh, here comes the ocean.
Well, the bus analogy may be a bad one. In many places commercial businesses can “pay” to have their stop added to the route. Most college towns, for example, have quite a lot of funding from the college to get the buses to stop at convenient locations for students.
The business gives the bus company/city money to pay for buses and and the new bus stops. The city then promises to run the bus stop for X amount of time.
So, the situation you described for hypothetical buses is actually pretty accurately how it works. All the more surprising because most bus companies are non-profit.
While I’m no fan of AT&T, I suspect that there’s more to it than a case of “big mean corporation picking on the scrappy underdog.”
Netflix generates a lot of traffic. I mean A LOT. And it’s not your typical, burst-y internet traffic that most applications generate. It’s heavy and sustained. As a result, it strains many peering agreements. The bigger the ISP, the bigger the shit sandwich that they need to take a bite of.
Cogent are notorious cunts when it comes to peering and transit arrangements. It wouldn’t surprise me if Netflix hides behind them while innocently shrugging their shoulders in the background. AT&T is probably hoping that by calling out Netflix directly, they’ll lean on Cogent be less cunt-y.
And, yes, while the “I pay for 20megawhatsits, I damned well better get to use every last one of them!” argument is appealing, it just isn’t realistic. ISPs necessarily oversell their bandwidth. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have enjoyed the rapid and tremendous increase in last-mile bandwidth that we have in the last 10 years. To actually build a network that could handle, say, 10,000 subscribers in a given area all downloading at their max throughput would be utter madness. It would cost a bloody fortune and would sit 90% idle 95% of the time.
You could just as easily say that AT&T’s customers (who are requesting that Netflix send the data that AT&T is complaining about) are hiding behind AT&T and shrugging their shoulders innocently.
Yes, ISPs oversell their bandwidth and make much more money that way. The thing is, if you oversell your bandwidth and your customers start to legitimately use the bandwidth you’ve sold to them, that is not the customer’s fault, and it is your responsibility to either fulfill the promises you made to your customers or to negotiate changes to those promises.
Netflix generates no traffic to AT&T. None. AT&T customers request data from Netflix, and any data coming from Netflix bound for AT&T’s network is at the request of an AT&T customer. If anyone can be said to be generating the traffic, it’s AT&T’s own customers.If AT&T is having problems with the amount of data traffic it’s customers want to request, then it needs to hash that out with it’s customers by either throttling ones that request excessive amounts of traffic or by raising their rates to allow it to pay for a high enough capacity network to handle the traffic.
And why isn’t it realistic to expect that I will get what was advertised if I’m paying for it? Suppose a store advertised a high-end washer/dryer set that normally costs $2400 for $1200 (50% off), people went in and bought and paid for it, and then the store delivered a cheap low-end set normally costing $600 (but kept the full $1200 that customers paid). If customers said “I paid $1200 for the set you advertised, I damned well better get it!” and the store tried to argue “That argument’s appealing, but it just isn’t realistic.”, how do you think a judge would view it? Most likely he not only wouldn’t accept the store’s argument, he’d order the store to either deliver exactly what was advertised and paid for or refund the customer’s money and then he’d order the store to pay the customer damages on top of that for the store’s false advertising and breach of contract. If you advertise something and accept money for it, you’d better be prepared to deliver what you advertised. If you can’t deliver what you’re advertising, you need to not advertise it. The fact that advertising and then not delivering is more lucrative does not make it allowable.
[quote=“tknarr”]
Netflix generates no traffic to AT&T. None. AT&T customers request data from Netflix…[/quote]
*shrug* Semantics.
Tons of bits are coming from Netflx’s network and ending up on AT&T’s. Big ISPs just care about layer 2 (read: volume).
And they are raising rates and they are revising terms of service; most ISPs are. And, ultimately, AT&T customers are able to watch Netflix with nary a blip. This is a beef between carriers. I don’t see the customers having much to do with it.
Because broadband internet connections aren’t washers or dryers. If said washer & dryer’s instruction manual listed a recommended duty cycle of 20%, but you chose to run them 24-hours a day, full of bricks and blue jeans, then complained when the they broke down, the store would tell you to get fucked. If you look at the fine print in your agreement with your ISP, you will assuredly find that they don’t actually guarantee shit.
I don’t think we allow washer & dryer companies to advertise “Cleans clothes and lasts for 5 years!” with a footnote of “clothes not guaranteed to be clean. machine not guaranteed to last for 5 years”, sell you an empty cardboard box, and laugh all the way to the bank.
Which is exactly why people are pointing out that Netflix (who is also a customer in this situation) doesn’t have much to do with it.
If AT&T listed a duty cycle that their customers need to operate under, and stated that in their advertisements, that would be a valid analogy.
Instead, they’re advertising and selling washers and dryers that can operate at full load 24/7 and then complaining that the customers who bought them won’t stay under a 20% duty cycle.
Interesting analogies aside, as a customer this means one simple thing. I’m paying AT&T for high speed internet access. If AT&T is no longer going to deliver internet access but instead wants to deliver me an online service (a la Compuserve, Prodigy, MSN) whereby they decide what I can get and how fast, they need to re-negotiate their contract with me so I can have a chance to go with an ISP rather than an online service.
I’m going to guess that you’re aware of the way that US-based broadband customers have actually seen relatively anemic growth in last-mile bandwidth compared to the rest of the world, yes?
While I wound’t really charactarize myself as a “free market” guy, in general I think the government should give industries the benefit of a doubt and let them try to work things out, and in lots of ways free markets work. It’s after an industry demonstrates that they can’t self-regulate that the government needs to step in. In general regulation shouldn’t be the first line of action.
And we have that situation here.
The ATTs of the world – like the finance industry – has SO demonstrated their inability to self-regulate that I don’t even see how the most committed free-market types can hold onto their ideology (and I’m probably more of a free-market type than most around here).
[Also: ATT established itself as market dominant a long time ago via a government-sanctioned monopoly. Yea, the agreed to give it up when they wanted to expand their business into information technologies, but the history – and the advantage conferred – remains today.]
Personally, I would characterize it as “less-dramatic than south-east asia”. Yes, I’m aware of data rates in other parts of the world. Telcos in many other countries weren’t as hindered by aging infrastructure and monopolistic right-of-way contracts.
Regardless, having 100Mb in your home doesn’t do you much good when your ISP can’t actually transit that much data across their network to anywhere useful. Anything over, oh, I dunno, 20-30Mb and you’ll see rapidly-diminishing returns on end-to-end throughput. The only common application that can really saturate a connection faster than that is bittorrent.
Comcast was trying for a while. I’m not sure if they dropped it due to customer complaints or if it was just impractical. Bittorrent is a tricky little beast.
Agreed. I’d also add that some services have become essential infrastructure. Yes, I know we’re all talking about this in the context of Netflix and entertainment, but a very important part of our economy and infrastructure is now dependent upon high speed delivery of internet content.
To keep adding analogies, this is no longer a privilege. It’s more akin to the interstate highway system. The providers should be free to ask everyone to pay their fare share in order to maintain the service and to keep upgrading it, all while making a decent profit. But when you start making deals to benefit or harm certain “shippers”, it’s like creating a paid HOV lane.
[EDIT: …or a paid HOV lane where shippers can exclude competitors by paying more]
