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Net Neutrality: A Guy in the Trenches
My son had a little discussion with one of his millennial friends on Facebook about Net Neutrality. I took the liberty of writing direct responses to his friends’ points, which I publish here for your review and comment. (Their points are in block quotes.)
Jodie says I can’t just cast aspersions, I should educate you young people. So here goes. But first, my bona fides. I’ve worked in IT for nearly 30 years, longer than you guys have been alive. I currently work directly in the telecom industry and interact with all of the major carriers, and many of the minor ones. I am responsible for bandwidth provision throughout the country, as well as some locations internationally, and I have a deep, expert understanding of how the industry works. My opinion isn’t based on what I read on Facebook. It’s based on experience and understanding.
The reality of this is entirely opposite of how he’s explaining it.
No, it is exactly how he is explaining it. [Ben] Shapiro obviously doesn’t fully understand the issue, most people don’t because they aren’t experts in the field (which I am). But he has the basics exactly right.
Netflix was already basically forced to pay to have their internet traffic kept up to speed (right around the time that ISP/Cable companies suffered (if I remember correctly) one of their biggest drops in cable TV subscriptions. Netflix was once small, and thanks to a no-favoritism internet, was able to thrive and succeed the way it is today.
Nonsense. Netflix is a $9B corporation. The rules that were repealed yesterday went in to effect in June 2015. Netflix was a $5.5B corporation in FY2014 and had experienced 25% YoY growth. The notion that Netflix was “able to thrive” because of “no-favoritism” internet is unsupported by the facts. That said, of course, a $9B corporation wants the government to regulate some of its costs away. How else to keep the little guy from becoming a competitor? Further, in 2015, the year net neutrality rules went in to place, Netflix was consuming close to 40% of the overall bandwidth, and making cold, hard cash doing it. Of course, they should kick in some do-re-mi to fund the infrastructure. Of course, they should.
Now imagine you’re trying to start a web service; be it an online store (Amazon-esque), social network, or even a webpage for your own small business. Net neutrality would’ve given your small website as much of an opportunity to be loaded at high speed than any other website out there. Without Net Neutrality, Comcast now has the power to tell you to pay “$x” monthly (on top of your monthly plan/package, domain rental, etc.) or we’ll throttle your traffic down to bare minimum (just like they did with Netflix).
Also nonsense. First, Comcast already throttles you at the source, based on the class of service you purchase. But even so, you think the bandwidth in use by your aunt’s little jewelry business is even a drop in the bucket? It’s chicken scratch by comparison to the bandwidth in use by the bigs. In actual fact, the opposite of what your friend is saying is true. Comcast isn’t going to charge you because your use is small. They are going to make Netflix pay because they put the most strain on the infrastructure.
Now consider this from a consumer standpoint. Do you enjoy social media? GREAT NEWS! Our new social media package lets you browse all your social media websites at full speed, only $5.00 more per month! How about Netflix? Streaming package, $10 per month! Do you play video games online? You do?! How about the video game package, another $10 per month! Rinse and repeat for any number of categories/prices.
First, this isn’t going to happen, because #Capitalism; but if it did, great! That’s actually great news! Pay for play. Why should gramma who reads e-mail and plays solitaire on her tablet fund “the internet?” You know who should be paying top dollar? Us. We use the crap out of the Internet. So an a la carte option for bandwidth consumption is actually a good thing for consumers.
The internet is one of the most, if not THE MOST pivotal piece of modern technology. It is monumentally important in global infrastructure, and they (3/5 people, who the public never voted for, they were appointed) just voted to give control over traffic to an oligopoly.
There is some truth to this, though I won’t say “the internet” I’ll say “bandwidth.” Bandwidth is to the current century what container shipping was to the last. (n/t @roblong) But guess what? Bandwidth costs money. Real money. And a lot of it. Someone has to pay for the infrastructure, which is constantly under strain, and constantly being upgraded. Constantly.
Now, basic economics lesson: who pays? Someone has to pay. Because a Cisco CMTS costs a boatload of cash (we bought an “end-of-life” CMTS for our lab, used, for $150k, to give you a sense of what one costs). So who pays? The consumer. Always. Always. Always. You are going to pay for it one way or another. And that’s the end of it.
I realize the progs want something for nothing, make the rich pay for it, whatever. That just ain’t the way the world works. Anyone who says different is ignorant of basic economics. Now, as far as the 3-2 vote, keep in mind that the rules put in place were voted for on the same split, by a similar group of unelected bureaucrats. As long as we are trying to save representative democracy while we are arguing for nonsense, let’s remember that.
And let’s remember that Congress spent 10 years trying to pass laws in various forms, but because our system is so broken, and we are so divided, it never happened. Let’s also remember that Tom Wheeler’s FCC, on the same day they voted in the Net Neutrality rules, voted in rules overriding individual states’ ability to regulate within their own states. Another blow to federalism. So if we are going to wring our hands, let’s wring our hands for real. Let’s not pick and choose.
This doesn’t just effect the US either, this effects the world. Anybody, no matter their location, trying to access information/a website hosted in the US will be at the mercy of the ISPs/whether the host paid for priority traffic. That opens an entirely different can of worms.
Strawman argument. For all the reasons above this is a bogus argument. Plus, it happens now, anyway. Try looking at the BBC UK version of their website. You can’t. Because #GovernmentRegulation. And you can get around it, anyway, using VPN technologies. So, nope, ain’t buyin’ it.
While a lot of this is kind of “guessing games” as to what ISPs will actually do now that they have the power to do it. They have already shown exactly what they intend to do when they bullied Netflix into paying big bucks to keep their traffic up to speed. If Netflix has to pay, then so will you, in subscription costs (expect a higher Netflix cost and a higher internet bill). This benefits nobody but the ISPs, and they’ll try and twist it any way they can to come off as the nice guy.
They’ve always had the “ability to do it” and only haven’t for the last couple of years. So this is another strawman argument. Plus, I love how people hate the corporations when it suits them, but they don’t when it doesn’t. “If Netflix has to pay, then so will you!” That is a basic truth of economics, see above. I wish you guys would adopt this sort of attitude when you are calling for taxes and regulations on these companies. But you seem to forget it most of the time.
My final point: this industry is changing, and it is changing fast. Net Neutrality rules are backward looking. And they stifle innovation. We don’t know where the industry is going to end up, but those of us who are in it have a pretty good idea. And it is going to get better and better for the consumers of bandwidth. The very last thing we should be doing is regulating bandwidth providers as if they were a phone company. It’s just backward thinking.
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Just a comment on my last comment:
I find it funny how new technology often provides us with a worse user experience than the technology it replaces, yet we’re so eager for the new thing.
Cell phones seem like a great example. It’s taken decades for the quality of cell phone calls to reach that of POTS, and even now it still doesn’t have the same consistency. Yet many of us (myself included) have cut our landlines in favor of the more expensive, lower audio quality alternative.
Same for home entertainment: for decades, cable provided us with 100 or more channels with no interruptions in streaming, and nobody seemed unhappy. But along came Netflix, and now we stampede toward video with crappier quality.
You have a lot of questions here, and I’ll handle each in a separate reply.
Yes, but the author is saying that’s where we need real net neutrality, and this stuff that the FCC had tried to do was wrong and counterproductive. I don’t think he was saying it tongue in cheek, though I could be mistaken.
I’m usually against solving problems, but I think this and other problems could be mitigated by balkanization of the Internet, allowing states to regulate it within their borders. Actually, it will take federal regulation to prohibit them from doing it, and it may not stand up to court tests, but I understand that such regulation is being pushed by the big ISPs. Republicans seem to be real big on destroying federalism in favor of single, unified markets with uniform regulation these days, so I presume such regulation has a chance. And then, in response to near-monopolies controlling content, we’ll end up with federal government controls all around — a real monopoly. At least that has been the pattern, starting with bank regulation in the late 19th century.
This isn’t completely true. There is a wonderful article describing the hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network topology here. Please take a quick look before reading on. Look particularly at the diagram labelled “A common HFC architecture”. Starting on the right we see all the houses in your neighborhood, interconnected by coax cabling. We know it is coax because it says it is RF (radio frequency). So that cable that is running around the neighborhood is bringing encoded and compressed data that ultimately becomes the “TV” signal, the Internet, and voice services (which are really just Internet, but, you know, that confuses people) to your home. Upstream from that you see a thing called “Optical Node”. This guy essentially converts signals from the RF cabling to the fiber. We go to fiber because it has more bandwidth, and can run, as you see from the diagram, many miles. Whereas coax requires many line amplifiers to keep the signal up to par. Now, that optical node is often your first bottleneck. If you live in a new neighborhood that is all built out by the cable operator, and there are 50 homes, and you are all using Netflix one evening, you probably have a good experience. 3 years later when there are 500 homes, well, then what? If nothing is done at that optical node level (assuming it wasn’t pre-built to handle 500 homes), you will all suffer, right? And this is a bit of a cart and horse game the cable operators have to play. Do they invest up front to build out the neighborhood, hoping to recoup the investment when there are a lot of homes and subscribers? Or do they build for the next 12 months, then come back and build more, and come back later and build more etc?
Now, you are right there is a potential for bottlenecks even further upstream where different providers hand off to each other, and that has caused many problems over the years.
And when you think about it, all of this has to be considered in the context of what is a relatively new situation, which is the explosion of streaming video. Which is your second question…
Answer to 1: No, the primary difference is they sent one movie per channel to all users at once. The absence of FFWD, pause, etc is what birthed the DVR. Internet entertainment is an on-demand service having a number of subscribers choose from among a large selection of movies starting at different times. I’ll put it to you: what is more difficult, feeding one 9:30 showing of Groundhog Day to 10,000 viewers who watch or don’t watch, or have 10,000 viewers start a viewing Groundhog Day, each starting at least a minute apart and pausing when someone ran to the bathroom? One movie, one start or one movie, 10,000 starts. Now add in a library of 5,000 movies and episodes to choose from.
Answer to 2: This and other solutions can help load-share the demand across the network, reducing the instances of the same information traversing the internet. But the problem in these architectures is always in predicting who will ask to see what, starting when? It’s analogous to mass transit vs everyone driving as they wish. If you reduce the individual freedom of destinations and schedules, it gets much more efficient. Know anyone who is keen to give up access to a particular site or is willing to watch it on a 10 minute delay?
So what if you were a big Netflix user and in 3 months watched more on Hulu? Then a month later had a binge of Instagram? What’s that do to the best-laid plans of mice and internet engineers?
Just because it arrives on a coax cable doesn’t mean it is at all the same. You probably forgot about the schedules and the lack of pre-DVR flexibility in the good ol’ cable days, huh?
Well, the big thing here that makes it different is the explosion of high-definition. HD movies require more bandwidth than the old stuff we used to see on TV.
The other thing has to do with how the cable headends compress the signal before it gets to you. The headend is the place where all of the channels come in, and get processed and “multiplexed” down so they can all go out over a cable to your house. Frankly, though I am an IT guy, this stuff is black magic to me. I’ve been in cable headends, we have a couple “test” headends built within our labs and I’ve seen them in operation, and had engineers explain it to me, but I still struggle with it. I’m used to data networks, and these RF networks with signals on different bandwidths running down a two conductor coax cable just escapes my understanding.
What I do know, though, is it is fundamentally different.
Now, where we are headed is what we call “fiber to the home”, where we completely eliminate the RF network and just run a pair of optical cables to your house. We are currently building enclosures for cable operators that house this equipment. I was out on the floor earlier today looking at one, and I wish I could take a photo and post it here. It is super exciting and I think it will eventually render all of this Net Neutrality discuss moot.
So two things, here. They never “hosted” content themselves, unless it was content they created. It was all re-routed, as you say, from upstream providers. That’s the purpose of the head end.
Your second question, about Comcast having it’s own version of Netflix, I’d answer as follows: they’ve done that. It’s crap. Because they are good at provisioning bandwidth, that is, they are good at distributing stuff to you. But the last thing we want them to be are content providers. I think the best case scenario is they simply get out of that business.
Finally, someone else already pointed it out, but Netflix does put in “servers” within cable operators data centers, to bring their (Netflix’s) content closer to the consumer. This is a good idea, and I think it will continue.
Thanks for the replies guys.
I got this notion from one of the articles linked earlier in the thread. It talked about how lots of Netflix congestion was due to a spat between Comcast and the company upstream of Comcast which provided its data. There was talk of restoring unbuffered streaming by using a VPN, with the conclusion that the Comcast>user pipe was not the congested one. Good to know otherwise.
I thought this would probably be the answer, but I didn’t want to make a long comment even longer with unfounded speculation. I suppose my underlying question was: is the improvement in viewer choice/freedom at least commensurate if not better than the loss in video quality in the fixed cable TV vs. internet streaming trade-off? It seems like the answer is yes.
No, no no! A thousand times, no! Using Facebook as an example, let us say that Washington, where I live, have no laws regarding what Facebook can do. We are talking about censorship, here, and Washington, say, just doesn’t care. It’s your site, you can do what you want. Now, let’s say Montana has different laws. They’ve said “If you are gonna run a website that our people look at, you cannot censor out conservative views.” Leaving aside the fact that this censorship thing is just a big gray area of who knows what, what you are talking about, effectively, is Montana becoming the censor. “Sorry, but the great state of Montana doesn’t approve of Facebook’s censorship, so we won’t allow you to get to their site.” China, anyone? So it’s a really really bad idea just in concept.
In practice? How in the world would Montana stop you from getting to Facebook? They now have to regulate the internet providers, and/or the intermediate carriers, to prevent data from flowing between their citizens and Facebook. Technically, you could do this, but at great expense and it would take a long time to implement. Because there are currently no natural demarcations between states. Meaning there is no digital “border crossing” at which you could implement this regulation. And even if there were, guess what we’d all do? Well, some enterprising young person would start up a VPN service in Washington and say “Hey Montanans! You can route your traffic through me, thereby bypassing your states backward rules!” Then what will Montana do? Block that traffic, too?
No, I think this is a very bad idea, both in principle and in practice.
Ask the question differently, because I don’t quite understand the question, please.
I find this interesting.
If we leave out Netflix’ original programming, the company really fulfills the same function as a cable company: it distributes somebody else’s content into households. That would seem to be a perfect fit for the Comcasts of the world.
I’ve also always been perplexed that cable ISPs don’t complain more about Netflix – after all, it’s competing directly with their own cable TV offerings for eyeballs. Typically, businesses don’t like hosting their own competition on their premises – after all, you can’t push a food cart into McDonald’s and start selling your own burgers there.
Maybe internet connections are so lucrative that it’s worth the loss to their cable business, or perhaps enough Netflix subscribers haven’t cancelled their cable subscription yet. Either way, it still seems like companies with the cash of a Comcast would do more to compete with Netflix on the level of content distribution.
Streaming suffers from capacity issues that lead to buffering, interruptions, and a poorer viewing experience. Traditional cable TV did not suffer from those problems and thus provided a much smoother video run.
My question is: are the benefits of internet streaming worth the trade-off of poorer video quality? Obviously the market says yes. I just find the market interesting some times.
It was a one-way conversation, not a back-and-forth one.
No. Netflix doesn’t run cable. They have no fiber on poles, no coax underground, and they do not sell access to the Internet.
Streaming doesn’t have poor video quality, the vast majority of the time. Quite the opposite, in fact. This was a problem at first. It has all but disappeared.
Add to all of this the fact that I can watch “The Crown” when it comes out, when I want. I can watch part of the episode and go to bed, or two episodes in an evening. I recently watched “Lawrence of Arabia” over the course of two weeks, when no one was around because I was the only one who wanted to watch it. And that movie is simply stunning in HD.
Three or four years ago I “bought” “A Christmas Story” on Xbox so we could watch it every christmas whenever we wanted. We just watched it again the other day.
My mom loves the movie “White Christmas”. In the old days, we watched it if it was on and we had the time. Now I can watch it whenever I want, from (almost) wherever I want.
Add to all that the fact that I used to pay $200 for Internet, Cable, and a phone line. I cut all of that out, and now pay about $70 a month for business class cable to my house. The first time I bought a season of The Walking Dead people told me I was crazy. “Why pay for something that’s free?” Are you kidding me? cont’d
cont’d from #106:
Are you kidding me? I paid $45 plus tax for a whole season of a show I want to watch. I paid for that three times with the money I’m saving by cutting cable TV. And there are no commercials. Tell me who’s paying for something and who isn’t?
In all ways, streaming is an improvement over the traditional means of consuming video content, that is CATV. All ways.
What remains, of course, are live sports. This has been the iron lung of the CATV industry. You have to effectively break the law to watch a live football game without a CATV subscription.
That really is all that they have left, and Roger the Dodger is killing it off.
There are always people who hate federalism, i.e. hate friction in doing business across state lines. They are the people who give us socialism, even though they think they hate socialism.
In this case, because there aren’t any border crossings I don’t think the types of regulation you suggest are feasible. I wouldn’t be against such border crossings eventually coming into being, though. But unfortunately, that is a long way off, and perhaps never will come about, so we’re probably going to end up with a socialistic police state on the order of China. China wouldn’t be able to exert the central control it does if the various regions in China had the power to exert their own controls and had to compete with each other for the goodwill and support of their citizens.
One thing that states could do is insist that if Facebook has a presence in their state, e.g. pays property taxes or employees in their state, they have to be transparent about the rules for what type of content is allowed and what is suppressed. Facebook could then, if it doesn’t like that, move its business presence out of those states. That would be fine. It would open up niches for Facebook competitors who have a business model that allows that kind of transparency.
So yes to federalism, a thousand times yes!
You realize, of course, that by its very nature, Facebook requires exactly 0 presence in any state, right?
It requires a presence in some states, though, because it does business with advertisers.
I should point out that the states must have some levers they can pull, because the Comcast, Netflix, et al are trying to get the feds to preclude any such regulation they can do, the Constitution be damned. If there was nothing they could do, then Comcast and Netflix et al wouldn’t bother lobbying for federal regulation to stop it.
It could be in Canada. It could be in Mexico. It can be anywhere. The point is, if states start putting onerous restrictions on what Facebook can and cannot do, those restrictions will just drive it out, and ultimately will have little effect on the business itself. It’s not like a Boeing that has 100s of acres of manufacturing facility that can’t simply be moved. The Facebook product can literally run anywhere.
But we were talking specifically in the realm of censoring a web site like Facebook.
Comcast, for example, has to have physical stuff in Washington in order for people in Washington to buy its products.
It should also be known that the Net Neutrality rules put in place in 2015 actually did some damage to States’ abilities to regulate telecom.
You mentioned that earlier, but when I searched for information on it all I found was talk about the current push to preclude state regulation. Wouldn’t mind having more details.
https://www.cio.com/article/2889633/fcc-votes-to-overturn-state-laws-limiting-municipal-broadband.html
Wait, are you talking about the Trump administration or the deep state? =)
Whoops…looks like you beat me to it! =)