Verizon already slowing down Netflix...Follow

False alarm then; it happens. Wanna bet on how soon it will not be a false alarm though?

You make me sad.

So be it.

Come on patsy.

It makes you a Republican. So, yes.

In Canada our Internet is good. So I am watching Season 2 of House of Cards on Netflix today.

This has nothing to do with what you guys are talking about, other than Netflix and Internet use.

Sigh...



Um... No. Fiber is quite expensive, both the physical cable and the connections.



Except for the physical cost of the cable itself. And the cost to run the cable. And, more significantly, you have to plug the damn cable into something. There aren't an infinite number of "somethings" to just plug cables into. You get that you can't just splice fiber optic cables together into one big cable and magically have a trunkline or something. Every single fiber optic cable has to plug into a connector. And every single connector has to have sufficient smarts to transfer the pulses of light traveling down that cable into new pulses of light traveling down the bundle of cables that are on the back end of that switch.

That's not only not "free", it's freaking expensive as hell.



Yes, numbskull. Which is why they really aren't just running a length of cable directly from your house into a backbone (no matter how far away it is). They're running it like a quarter mile to their local switch, along with all the other users in that quarter mile radius. That switch then runs a single higher capacity line to another layer of switch, which in turn runs to another switch, which maybe then finally has a big fat pipe that runs into a true backbone.

You don't understand a damn thing about network architecture. I do. No one, and I mean no one, just runs wire directly from each individuals house to the top tier of their network. If for no other reason than you'd end up with a bundle of fiber cable 100 feet wide by the time you got there.



Yeah. That's not how it works. Again. Think about how many users there are in a given physical area. Then think about how many individual fiber cables they'd need to run every single one of them directly to the nearest segment of backbone trunkline. Then realize how monumentally stupid your idea is.

It doesn't matter if it's fiber or copper. The basic assumptions and cost effects are the same. I'm frankly not sure why you'd think that fiber is some magical thing that somehow changes all the rules. It's not. At the end of the day, it's a cable down which data can be sent and received. There's no magic.

Fiber to the end user is largely a marketing scheme. It's mostly being incorporated by providers who are behind on infrastructure and need to upgrade. So, if you're going to spend the money digging up the street, you may as well run the latest and greatest wire, right? And they can charge 2-3 times as much to the customer for giving them "fiber to the house". And certainly, this process also involves upgrading their switch clouds along the way (so there is generally going to be an actual increase in overall performance). But at the end of the day, the same cost restrictions still apply. They don't magically go away because you're laying a different type of wire.

Edited, Feb 14th 2014 3:18pm by gbaji

Yes, numbskull. Which is why they really aren't just running a length of cable directly from your house into a backbone (no matter how far away it is). They're running it like a quarter mile to their local switch

Nope. They don't. They run it into a backbone. Not a secret, go look at the Verizon technical documents. Why? Because it's not 1985, and the internet "backbone" isn't a fixed location where multimillion dollar frame relay rooms can't be moved

You can stop guessing now, seriously. We're done discussing it. I'm still interested in what you actually do for a living. Your complete lack of any useful technical context is pretty telling. I assume it's something where you follow instructions from a manual and pray every day you don't get replaced by perl script, but it's sort of fascinating.


You don't understand a damn thing about network architecture. I do. No one, and I mean no one, just runs wire directly from each individuals house to the top tier of their network. If for no other reason than you'd end up with a bundle of fiber cable 100 feet wide by the time you got there

Hahhaha. Ahh, no. Wow, you are so obviously not a networking person, it's almost painful. I'm sure it was an awesome class you took for a week for MCSE or whatever, but, buddy, let me tell you, you're ******* lost. I really enjoy the part where you think Verizon's "top tier of their network" is like a ******* building in Maryland where all of the backbone switches live in a big room. It's great that you have this bizarre mental block where everything is always marketing and you're the only one who sees it. I assume because you're a massive sucker and have been taken so many times that you just figure that's how the world works, but no, "fiber to the n" makes a massive difference. That's why Google rolls out fiber and offers almost free broadband and 1gb for $70 a month. Because, unlike, copper, there's no overhead for adding bandwidth to fiber. Because there's a one time cost of $100m to pass every house in a metro area with fiber...which you then run back to a backbone switch....and.....plug it the **** it. That's why Vtel in Vermont can roll out fiber to 20,000 homes in ******* VERMONT and charge $40 a month for 1gb service. Because WITH FIBER bandwidth costs almost nothing.....why? Because you run it back to a backbone switch and PLUG IT THE **** IN. As to the "100 foot wide cable," ********* fiber is passively split, usually about 32 per splitter, usually once. Including cladding, the diameter of fiber is about 125 µm, so about 32,000 end users to an inch of diameter.

Why are you so stupid? Is there any answer?

So they're going to craft new rules to do the same thing the old rules did. Only the old rules were illegal, but the new ones won't be.

Or something...

Not unless you're using a radically different definition of "internet backbone" than everyone in the industry. Seriously Smash. You're just plain wrong. I could explain exactly how and why, but if all you're going to do is insist you're right while providing no reason why anyone should believe you, there kinda isn't much point. It's like arguing with a 6 year old who insists that Dinosaurs really do live and no amount of telling him otherwise will dissuade him.

So... Have fun in your delusional world where there are magical wires that go directly from your house to an internet backbone. In the real world where there's a whole series of layers between the two, the adults will make sure things keep working, so don't you worry your head about it.





Yup. 6 year old mentality. You honestly have no freaking clue how fiber works, do you? There is more overhead for fiber bandwidth. Not less. Single gbics are often more expensive than whole switches of copper connections. What makes fiber attractive compared to fiber is the higher number of total bandwidth you can send down a single cable. But this only actually saves you money if you route multiple customers through a single cable. Get it? If you actually ran a separate dedicated fiber connection directly from each house to your backbone it would cost a ridiculous amount of money and waste 99.9% of the actual functionality of the medium you're using (not to mention the whole "bundle of cable 100 feet in diameter issue).

What you're saying is just so laughably bizarre to anyone actually in the industry that it's hard to even take you seriously. Yet, despite my initial assumption that you were just joking around, you seem to actually believe what you're saying. What's next? Pixie dust powered phones?



You are grossly oversimplifying the "run back to a backbone" and "plug it in" parts of that though. I really think you honestly don't understand that those are the expensive parts of any network.



Sigh... Only if they are sharing cable. Which is the point I've been making all along.

Have you ever actually looked at a single fiber optic cable. You know, like the one running from your house? Seriously. Go look at it. Now imagine if that one wire was run all the way to a single backbone point, along with every other individual cable from each individual home. Remember, your argument is that there is no switch clouds or sharing of cables at any point in between (so each individual home gets the full bandwidth capacity of their own individual cable all the way to the backbone). I'm saying that's not remotely how networks are set up. It's not remotely close.

This is more or less what I was referring to when I said that at the back end, there are some agreements and cost sharing that goes on that most end users aren't even aware of, but which is more or less necessary for "the internet" to work at all. The key to realize is that while one company may serve as a service provider (ISP) and a content provider, and a intermediate/trunck carrier (also known as backbone providers), those are actually three different businesses.

It's wrong to say that ISPs lagged upgrading their connections. Because if that was true, they'd be "slow" to everywhere, not just AWS. It's the backbone providers which did and only for their physical connections to AWS. And for good reason IMO.



Again, it's not about ISPs at all. Verizon the ISP, purchases the license to run cable directly to homes and businesses in an area. Verizon the backbone/trunck/whatever provider owns and operates larger bundles of wires that connect ISPs to them and them to other backbone segment owners. It's the agreements between those backbone owners that ensures that everyone pays a fair price for the traffic that their customers are generating on the network as a whole.

Another way to look at it is that the real problem is that AWS is not paying for sufficient bandwidth connections for their customers, one of which happens to be Netflix. This trickles through the whole system and causes the folks with physical wires connecting to their centers to not have any reason to increase bandwidth to them, unless they pay a higher prices. Why would they? It would be like having a neighbor who you allow to share your wifi for a small fee deciding to host a massive and popular web site, but refusing to pay more for his connection and then also complaining that you don't upgrade your wifi to provide faster performance.

Worse, all of the customers of that neighbors website jump up and down and complain how their access to their favorite website is being "throttled" by the evil guy who owns the actual network that's being used, but isn't being paid for it. If you want something, you have to pay for it. The problem is that too many people have gotten used to the idea that everything on the internet is "free". It's not. Usually it's just that someone else is paying the lion's share of the cost. But when something like Netflix begins generating massive amounts of traffic, their ISP will have to pay more for that, and thus have to charge them more for it, and they'll have to charge their customers more as well. That's kinda just the way things work.

Edited, Feb 19th 2014 5:43pm by gbaji

Then you are ignorant as hell. Not sure how else to say this. Someone has to pay for the increased bandwidth used by AWS. Who do you supposed should do so? Either VZ pays for it (well, each and every ISP that has users who might connect to AWS), in which case all of their customers then have to foot the bill, or AWS pays for it, in which case their customers have to (which means Netflix pays, which means Netflix consumers pay). Get it?

Pick one. I'm assuming that if you are a customer of VZ, you don't want VZ to pay for it, because you might not be a customer of AWS. It's unfair for all the VZ customers who *don't* use Netflix to have to pay for the extra bandwidth that product uses, right? Yet that's what you seem to think should happen. Doesn't it make more sense that AWS is responsible for its own bandwidth use and charge its customers for it? I think it does.



I'll take oligopoly over authoritarian government regulation any day. The oligopoly has a profit motive to pursue. So ultimately, they need paying customers. Which means that they have to produce a product that people are actually willing to choose to spend dollars on instead of anything else they might spend those dollars on. The government, as we've witnessed recently with Obamacare, can just pass a law mandating what products must be sold. And if enough people don't choose to buy the product? It can just pass a law requiring them to buy it, no matter how crappy it is.


So yeah. Easy choice.

Monopoly would need another update.

The luxury tax to be more than $75, to start.