Level 3 Shaken Down By Comcast Over Video Streaming 548
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the gloves are really coming off; Level 3 Communications had to pony up an undisclosed amount of cash to keep Netflix streaming to Comcast customers. Perhaps now the FCC might actually do something to ensure that the internet remains open. Level 3's Chief Legal Officer, Thomas Stortz, said: 'Level 3 believes Comcast's current position violates the spirit and letter of the FCC's proposed Internet Policy principles and other regulations and statutes, as well as Comcast's previous public statements about favoring an open Internet. While the network neutrality debate in Washington has focused on what actions a broadband access provider might take to filter, prioritize or manage content requested by its subscribers, Comcast's decision goes well beyond this. With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast's subscribers at all, unless Comcast's unilaterally-determined toll is paid — even though Comcast's subscribers requested the content. With this action, Comcast demonstrates the risk of a 'closed' Internet, where a retail broadband Internet access provider decides whether and how their subscribers interact with content.'"
Don't be so smug there snippy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Alternate viewpoint (Score:3, Interesting)
Customers want to access Netflix, and (presumably) won't use an ISP that won't carry Netflix.
Two problems:
1) Comcast is a monopoly cable internet provider in its area. There is no possibility of competition so they can pretty much do what they want. They have 6.897 million reasons for the government not to regulate their monopoly.
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000461 [opensecrets.org]
2) Comcast probably provides movies and videos on demand for $$$. The strategy is to use their monopoly internet service to boost profits in their MOD/VOD service. Frankly, as a guy whom purchases his VOIP and his inet svc from two different companies, I'm surprised I haven't been shaken down yet.
The UK (Score:2, Interesting)
Comcast customer here... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wrong approach L3 (Score:2, Interesting)
That seems like a reasonable opinion but all Republicans and most Americans have a quasi-religious perhaps even fanatical belief that a free market naturally corrects these problems. Alas, like all religious beliefs this is a matter of Faith and not subject to change based on facts.
A Simple Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
I find this whole argument ridiculous. Isn't the simple, effective solution to simply charge customers based on the amount of data they consume?
I mean, if I want to use Netflix, shouldn't I pay for the bandwidth required to use the service? Why should that cost be shared by my neighbor, who only uses the internet to check his email and the news?
Charge consumers per byte of data they send/receive. Yes, it sucks if you are a bandwidth hog, but its really the only fair solution.
I mean, there's a reason other utilities, such as electricity, water, or waste disposal don't give unlimited plans. It's just not a reasonable way of doing things. You should pay for what you are in fact consuming, rather than subsidizing the consumption of your neighbor who has a hundred torrents going all night, every night.
I agree, it sucks but it's really the only fair solution. It might stifle growth of some services which consume lots of data, but it would also have major benefits, for examples companies would be motivated to reduce the amount of bandwidth their services provide.
Re:Class action suit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazing how people continue to vote for politicians who are so corrupt, but that is what they do.
Amazing how people continue to think an alternative to corrupt politicians exist. Some democratic systems, the US one in particular, make minority votes practically useless.
Re:This is excellent (Score:1, Interesting)
A toll booth operator is charging $9.99 per month for unlimited access across the state highway system. No tolls paid at the booth, ever, for a month, regardless of how much you drive. Sweet deal! So, everyone who drives through the state pays $9.99, and everything is great. However, those pesky guys in the *next* state have decided that instead of paying $0.50 per toll to travel through their current state highway network, it's cheaper for them to come to your state and use that unlimited access you have. So, now, you have two states worth of traffic on your highway system, and your booths can't handle it. You're a greedy git and don't want to blow profits on more toll booths, so you instead charge the other state for taking their traffic.
This is what has happened here. Level 3 are now the Netflix carriers, which used to be Akamai. Akamai have the same deal with Comcast that was offered to Level 3 to carry their disproportionately large amounts of data (out of state traffic), because data is very much one way over the Level 3 network (nobody from their state was travelling to the neighbouring state to use their highway system.)
This is not about the content of the network, this is about capacity and symmetry. Barely anything is incoming from Comcast to Level 3: Everything comes from Level 3 into Comcast. Therefore, just as Akamai did, Level 3 need to pay for the data used over Comcast pipes.
I've had issues with Time Warner myself (Score:2, Interesting)
I will tell you the truth; I hate both Time Warner and AT&T with a passion. Just last month I started having DNS resolution issues. Websites that I had previously been able to access would suddenly pop up with a 404 page (conveniently hosted by...Time Warner!). I called the local office and they said they knew nothing, even checked to see if there were any outages, and nothing came up on their screen. Finally got through to one of their internet support and he informed me that they switched over to new DNS relay servers in our area. One switch over to my router, and I plugged in Google's public DNS servers where I had previously allowed the Time Warner DNS to relay...and all the sudden, my pages started to resolve just fine. In fact, the resolution was even faster than it had ever been before.
My wife noticed the difference immediately. She's an avid WoW player, and she said her latency went down considerably...how could DNS affect latency, I thought, unless the DNS was routing all the traffic through some sort of filter? Did I just stumble on some sort of nefarious scheme on the part of TW? I experienced the same issues with Netflix movies over the TW network as well. While under TW DNS, my netflix movies would have to recache at least once every 30-40 minutes. Now, under the Google DNS, it never has to cache. I wonder...
Here's what's going on (Score:5, Interesting)
Full disclosure: I worked in a Comcast department that helped to determine what future internet bandwidth requirement were going to be. They fired me for reasons I don't feel like getting into, I'll try to give an unbiased account of what I think their thinking is.
Honestly, Comcast is extremely frugal. This can be both good and bad. In 2008, Wall Street types were encouraging them to take on a lot more debt before the debt bubble popped.
They do a lot of things in order to free up bandwidth and to satisfy bandwidth demand. It's not like they are sitting on their butts and collecting money. But what they are not going to do is put fiber optics straight to your home, which would be the clearest way to expand the amount of bandwidth. That is extremely expensive and only Verizon is doing that. No other telco is doing that.
When they are converting analog channels to digital, they are doing that to free up bandwidth. They are trying to roll out Switch Digital Video in order to free up bandwidth (80 or so channels which barely anyone watches in a given service group will be swapped in and out when needed). They split off customers into different service groups to mitigate this as well. They are constantly monitoring this and a lot of hard work goes into this.
What I think is going on is not that they are worried about cable revenues going down (and I think they know that it is inevitable) but they are freaking out about an increase in web video eating up all their bandwidth. I can't be certain about this. But you have to also understand a corporation has several different parts. One part might not care about something while another part may view Netflix as an existential threat.
So while I would love to bash Comcast because I feel they screwed me over, I can't sit here and tell you that they aren't doing anything.
However, Verizon does have a superior product in my opinion which works better for reasons I could get into. But that basically comes down to the fact they don't have much legacy equipment on their system and they went with fiber-to-the-home instead of fiber-to-the-neighborhood.
Inevitable. Now we deal with the truth.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Internet is assymetrical. I click a few times, and in comes gigs of movie. Even when I wax on about something important here, or send a Christmas email of a few kilobytes, I read many more. One post on facebook yields me megabytes of web page.
This is an old complaint. Multiple providers used to complain about peering arrangements in the late 90s, and then they got together and dealt with it. Sprint and Cogent get into hissy fits regularly, mostly because Cogent undercuts Sprint access pricing, and Sprint tries to hurt Cogen by raising their peering fees. It all goes away.
Now the cable companies are whining that other content providers are taking advantage of their networks by pouring data into their gateways without compensating these poor media delivery networks for the effort.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if the cable co ISPs, in particular, had a content delivery business that they could sell to non-subscribers, but they don't. So they want to encourage their subscribers to 'stay at home' and use the content they DO have, which is pretty much on-demand TV and pay-per-view movies. So far, subscribers aren't as interested as expected, and seem to prefer Netflix. Pricing has a lot to do with this, but massive numbers of new releases are the big driver.
So do the cable cos have a beef here? Should they be compensated by other Internet media providers for the highly assymetrical traffic they are receiving?
No. They already are being compensated by subscribers.
I pay Cox about $50/mo for Internet service, and I rarely watch or stream anything. My limited gaming is no great burden, the issue there being latency. My occasional downloads of ISOs for a Linux distro are so rare they can't be causing Cox any real trouble. I don't Hulu, don't Netflix, don't even YouTube. But I may have to. My video bill with Cox is closing in on $100/mo, and it's not worth it. In high season, I pay about $3 per show that I WANT to watch on TV. That's about 30 shows, assuming it is October and all my favs are on. Now that several have ended for the season, it actually costs me almost $5 per show tha I WANT to watch. The rest is idle channel-surfing, entirely optional viewing, and I could not do any of it and not feel cheated. Seems like a lot. If I could stream current episodes of some programming, I could kill my cable. Actually, I could kill my cable since only one show can't be had over the air, and I can deal with that. I can use ATSC and be done with cable. I live so close to the DSL box I can get slammin' speed and Qwest seems ready to call me back. I even have a wireless DS option that's good for 5MB down, and the hardware isn't too expensive. I may yet have to exercise my freedom and go elsewhere. I can buy a ChannelMaster DVR at Fry's for $300 if I'm too lazy to whip up a media server/PDVR out of stuff I'm not using any more.
But this is really about the ISP, this case being a cable co, trying to get paid twice. I pay for access to content. They want the providers to pay separately. Imagine the Post Office making you buy a stamp to send an envelope, and then having to buy another stamp to pick up your incoming mail. Nice.
Of course, in the end, we pay.
Cable and Internet companys care (Score:2, Interesting)
I work for a small cable isp. We care. We really do. We just don't have the resources to continue to support company's that compete against us. That isn't the only factor though. The other is bandwidth. Not the little sippy straw bandwidth that most people have. Netflix is crushing our usage. If we have to pay for programming Netflix is going to have to pay for pushing their programming to us. I would like to block them here. Other company's such as espn (espn360.com) block our customers from streaming their video unless we pay by the subscriber. I haven't heard of any backlash for them doing this. But block netflix then suddenly we are the evil cable company. If we had the pull comcast had we would have done that around here a long time ago.
Re:Here's what's going on (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait, I'm missing something here....
How does this part work? I thought that digital cable-boxes were basically just a streaming device, with the channel numbers being a code to tell the cable company what stream to show instead of an actual frequency marker. If that's true, then the number of channels should make no difference at all to overall bandwidth, since you're still only streaming content for the one channel (or two if it's a DVR or they're using PiP, whatever) that's been requested. 100 people watching 100 channels should be roughly (assuming similar stream quality) the same as 100 people watching the same channel in terms of bandwidth.
I can't say I've ever actually looked into this, it's just the way I assumed it works so if I'm wrong I'd actually really like a correction....
Re:Here's what's going on (Score:3, Interesting)
Excellent question.
Switch Digital Video (SDV) is a cable industry standard which you can find documents detailing how it works. Its all on the back end.
I believe this is how it will work:
-analysis goes into which channels get swapped in and out
-for a given service group, if someone wants to go to channel X they just change the channel
-on the back end some complicated stuff happens where they determine someone wants that channel and they dynamically allocate bandwidth for that channel and swap out some other channel no one is watching
Re:This is not about Net Neutrality (Score:1, Interesting)
Notice that the dispute is not between Comcast and Netflix -- it's between Comcast and Level3, which doesn't create content, only owns pipes. Level3 and Comcast have a "peer" agreement; they generate a similar amount of traffic, so they accept each others' traffic for free. That's a typical arrangement. However, this was before Netflix changed CDN from Akamai to Level3. Akamai sends much more traffic to Comcast than it receives, so it pays Comcast for receiving the traffic. That's also a typical arrangement. Now that Neflix will be going over Level3 instead, Comcast is just trying to negotiate the same deal w/ Level3 as with Comcast:
What is more, back in 2005 the shoe was on the other foot [infoworld.com]. Level3 and Cogent had a settlement-free peering agreement, but Level3 was complaining that too much traffic was coming from Cogent so they should get payed to carry it. After several months of failed negotiations, Level3 unilaterally de-peered Cogent.
Re:I Disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, it's perfectly valid to say that Comcast customers are requesting 5 times more content from Level 3 customers than they are sending Level 3 customers. So seems to hardly be a Level 3 issue.
Re:Here's what's going on (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea being that there is a small set of popular stations that there is always someone in the neighborhood tuning in 24/7 to
Then there is the set of unpopular stations and normally only 5 of the maybe 100 are tuned into by someone in the neighborhood.. so the provider would like to use only 5 of those analog channels to stream to those 5 instances of abnormal viewing, regardless of which of the 100 stations they may be viewing, rather than tie up 100 analog channels.
In this scenario.. only 25 analog channels would be required to handle 120 stations of digital programming, leaving the rest of the analog channels for regular analog cable as well as broadband internet.
Re:I Disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
Level 3 is sending 5 times more traffic to Comcast that Comcast is sending back. The peering agreement has failed and Comcast is asking for compensation because of the traffic disparity. Level 3 would ask for the same thing if some business just wanted to dump 5 times the amount of traffic on their network.
http://blog.comcast.com/2010/11/comcast-comments-on-level-3.html [comcast.com]
Re:I Disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
Comcast is a last mile provider, not tier 1. This means no one wants to look at crap on their network and all their customers want to get to level 3's network. In that case often the peering agreements should and do reflect that.
Re:Class action suit? (Score:4, Interesting)
It would actually be interesting if you could cast your one vote for (+1) or against (-1) any candidate. That would allow a candidate who a small number of people preferred but nobody really disliked to prevail rather than just the "other" candidate - if you want to "throw the bum out," you vote against them rather than for their opponent. Far simpler a change than many suggestions.