Verizon's Mobile Video Won't Count Against Data Caps -- but Netflix Will (arstechnica.com) 106
Earthquake Retrofit writes: Ars Technica has a story about how Verizon Wireless is testing the limits of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules; Verizon has announced that it will exempt its own video service from mobile data caps—while counting data from competitors such as YouTube and Netflix against customers' caps.
Well, that's pretty much a textbook violation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, that's pretty much a textbook violation. (Score:5, Insightful)
If Verizon is allowed to abuse this as a loophole, others will follow, and sponsored content will reign.
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I don't think that word means what you think it does. Zero rating, by definition, implies discrimination between sources of data. And it doesn't help to say it's ok to do it for Netflix because then your are discriminating against non-Netflix video or non-video applications. The whole point of net neutrality is that a bit is a bit and companies that use public easements (whether telephone poles or public airwaves) are common carriers subject to limitations on pricing.... for the public good.
Just a Few Thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't this prove by example that there is no last mile scarcity on Verizon's wireless network? The reason for limits on wireless has always been this bottleneck, transit costs over fibre are small, if not free for a tier 1 provider. These costs are easily covered by a cellphone agreement. What is the IP transit cost for a 95% average line that does 2GB a month to Verizon $.05?
With this move, Verizon is demonstrating that caps are unnecessary. With this evidence, one might even argue that caps are an arbitrary and capricious with the sole purpose of extorting money from customers and content providers.
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Eh, yes and no. If Go90 can truly clog up Verizon's bandwidth, they'll be making so much money that network expansion costs are little to be concerned about.
The physical issues with congestion are real, and while Verizon can solve them, they want to be paid more (i.e. profit more) if they're going to have to spend more.
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No question. The issue is that - under the current Verizon scheme at issue - only Verizon can pursue this business model. Anti-net-neutrality proponents would argue that Netflix should be able to pay Verizon more money for access, and Verizon could then use that money to upgrade. Net neutrality proponents would argue that Verizon should just directly charge their customers to use more bandwidth, and then use that money to upgrade.
Verizon wants a little of both to give themselves something of a monopoly (1).
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Yeah, I'd not say that it's a monopoly so much as there are alternatives but not many of them are very good. My home is in a *very* rural area. My choices are pretty much limited to those who have a peering agreement or resell VZW or I'm booted off in short order. I use US Cellular and they have their own towers and whatnot. However, they also have a peering agreement with VZW. T-Mobile seems to not have such an agreement and simply does not work in my area. AT&T works but they boot you off if it turns
Re:Just a Few Thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, it's an indication that carriers and ISPs are not being completely honest. They basically keep claiming that they need special protections, they need the ability to throttle and limit service, and that services like Netflix can't perform because it's simply not possible to deliver the bandwidth people are demanding. They imply (I'm not sure they've said it outright) that it's not a problem of their unwillingness to upgrade their network, but that people's expectations are just out of whack-- that people using more than a few gigabytes per month are bad actors, using up all the bandwidth, and that there is not any possible way for them to fulfill the demands on their network.
But now they're saying that everything is fine, so long as they can cut Netflix out of the market and take those profits for themselves. If they're allowed to have a monopoly, then suddenly all the technical problems go away.
Re:Just a Few Thoughts (Score:4, Funny)
Alternative theory: Verizon's home growth mobile video is crap that no one wants, thus the usage is so low that they can afford to give the bandwidth away from free.
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AT&T and Sprint Have LTE too. Perhaps you are a hating Verizon fanboy.
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That was true maybe 3 years ago, however T-Mobile's coverage is rapidly approaching what Verizon has. In fact, in terms POP (point of presence, basically how many people they cover on average,) they're currently where Verizon was about a year ago:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/... [yahoo.com]
They're also quickly catching up. If you're still seeing people in your area that don't get coverage, it's likely they have an older phone whose radio doesn't receive the newer bands T-Mobile has been using. These newer bands are lo
Re:Well, that's pretty much a textbook violation. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it?
They are not preventing Netflix or YouTube, There isn't any sign that they are slowing down their performance. It is just they are counting the data the same as any other internet download.
The only twist is that Verizon isn't charging for bandwidth for its own service.
You could say the cost of Verizon mobile is being paid from the service fee, and you are actually paying more then than the data cap fees.
Re: Well, that's pretty much a textbook violation. (Score:2)
They're not going to do a damn thing. Net neutrality had been little more than lip service. Applications can still be discriminated against and traffic is still favored (create your own speed test and compare against the popular ones to see what I mean).
Re: No transit costs. (Score:5, Informative)
You are wrong. Netflix will put servers physically next to Verizon's. The cost is that of a few feet of fiber and some ports. It's probably cheaper because your "general" incoming bandwidth isn't used.
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Netflix doesn't have physical servers anymore. They're 100% in Amazon AWS, so no, this will not work.
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They have a control plane in AWS, but the bulk of the bandwidth comes from distinct CDN strategy. Notably they have appliances for ISPs to incorporate, precisely to enable ISPs to deliver better netflix performance.
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They have a control plane in AWS, but the bulk of the bandwidth comes from distinct CDN strategy. Notably they have appliances for ISPs to incorporate, precisely to enable ISPs to deliver better netflix performance.
Assuming that the ISPs play ball. Some of the bigger ones have said "no" because Netflix competes against them and they want their customers to pay extra for Netflix.
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Yes, but that was the whole point in the thread was that Verizon *could* play ball, and the response was 'no, because AWS'. Which is inaccurate because netflix *has* hardware to locate at the edge for willing ISPs, and also inaccurate because even ignoring that, their video comes over non-AWS CDNs (cheaper bandwidth, AWS is not as cheap as traditional CDNs for high bandwidth tasks).
Non-physical (Score:1)
I'm guessing you're just being a sarcastic jackass, but non-physical=VM image, meaning they can just pop it into existing VM infrastructure without needing to dedicate space or support to additional physical hardware.
It still takes compute/storage resources, but there's no need to worry about stuff like cabling, hardware replacement, etc etc (beyond what they're presumably already doing for their own VMs in the farm)
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The last mile for towers and cell sites are very restricted technically. The bottle neck is NOT the backhaul. it is the number of people that can connect to a sector. It is something like 40 concurrent connections.. and they all have to share the bandwidth for that sector. Wireless just doesn't scale for high bandwidth usage.
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Even if they are physically adjacent, Netflix is still part of a network that isn't owned by Verizon. How is Verizon supposed to tell if treating those machines the same as it treats its own does not also allow that server to perform attacks on its network?
Re: No transit costs. (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's about antitrust. Since the telcos have what us basically a government approved monopoly, they have to agree to certain rules that might seem weird in a free market. Such as net neutrality.
Re: No transit costs. (Score:4, Insightful)
The free market is a nice idea but fails at the entrance fee.
If I have an established system, I can operate at much lower cost than someone who would have to establish the system first. If I already have a factory pumping out a product (which has redeemed its cost already by me being able to set the price due to having a de facto monopoly due to a lack of competitors), I can easily squish any and all competition that may arise by lowering the price to the point where it is not feasible for someone who still has to redeem his investment. By fixing the price at a level where he cannot redeem his costs, I can ensure the continuation of my de facto monopoly. This is crucial in markets where the initial cost of doing business is magnitudes higher than the operational cost. Like, say, ISPs.
There are a few ways to crack open such a monopoly. But that first and foremost needs the will of the law makers to actually do something against it.
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Actually we used to have a curious form of economy for the longest time in many parts of Europe where key infrastructure was in the hands of the state while the rest of the economy worked out in a market economy. The net result was that there was a lot more competition for the consumer market because the playing field for the competitors was a lot more level.
In this example it would mean that the cables would be owned by a state controlled monopoly while the ISPs compete on equal footing by renting cable fr
Re: No transit costs. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no such fucking thing as a fucking free fucking market ... a free market is a lie, because companies will always lie, cheat, steal, collude, and otherwise game the system.
There never has been, and never will be, a free fucking market.
You can pretty much replace corporations with anything run by people (including the government).
Difference is, it's easier (not easy, just easier) to get out of the way of a corporation than it is to get out of the way of government.
Example, I hated sprints customer service so I switched to t mobile. I have my city's electrical company but the cost of switching away from that is much higher (have to move, find a new job, etc.)
Re: No transit costs. (Score:2)
Well, there is always generating your own electricity... though that may depend on your local laws.
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Oh yes, every company is just EVIL EVIL EVIL.
They're all totally EVIIIIIL. Because money is EVIL.
Companies are just terrible and EVIL.
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isn't a bar in a college town pretty much a market to get free fucks? Or is that not what you were meant by a free fucking market.
Re: No transit costs. (Score:1)
Re:No transit costs. (Score:4, Insightful)
Verizon has peering agreements to cover costs the wider Internet. Secondly, the ISPs have always argued that the last mile (in fiber or spectrum) is the bottleneck and why they need data caps. So it's amusing watching you try to flip the argument now that we see that Verizon has no real bandwidth bottleneck for its wireless service if it can zero-rate streaming as long as you pay the piper.
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Because they will use their monopoly in the local areas to make it prohibitively expensive for anyone else to compete against them. They've already been caught throttling other providers and not themselves, again trying to push customers to their service by adding additional pains and costs to other services.
They'll make it very expensive to use Netflix, far more than is in any way justifiable, in order to drive you towards their own over priced services.
They don't get the privilege of doing so because the
Other countries (Score:2)
In Australia, Optus has offered unlimited Facebook/Twitter for years. I think even Wikipedia has a zero cost with many African providers.
The US really needs to make a stand. We're behind in so many other areas, we can at least have real network neutrality. It's something the industry won't do itself, and they sell it to customers by saying, "Hey, free Facebook and YouTube..."
Re: Other countries (Score:2, Interesting)
I feel sorry for you Americans. In Finland I get 250/100Mbps for 29.90 EUR/m. And if there was a case of carriers favoring their own products over direct competitors like Verizon they'd find themselves in court pretty damn soon. Heck, even if they taunt their competitors using names or other similarly identifiable information they'd go to court.
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Can you get that if your connection is in Croatia?
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In Finland I get 250/100Mbps for 29.90 EUR/m.
What wireless technology is your phone using that it gets 100 Mbps download?
Wifi technology (Score:1)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
LTE and LTE Advanced actuality have some pretty high max speeds
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Because of the golden rule. He with the gold makes the rule.
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That's why they call it a "golden parachute" after all. He put in the procedures to make it incredibly expensive just to fire him.
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I really say one should test that literally. How well does a golden parachute really work if you toss said manager out of the 50th floor? Inquisitive minds want to know! And let's be honest here, it sure ain't no loss if a CEO or two die in the process, we have far more than we need anyway.
FYI: Bell Did this in Canada (Score:1)
I believe they lost in court, heres the main story but couldn't find conclusion easily.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol... [www.cbc.ca]
isn't this only a free weekend? (Score:2)
This proves there's plenty of bandwidth to go arou (Score:2)
Service providers continue to maintain that caps are about congestion and infrastructure. This move proves that the network has plenty of bandwidth and is plenty robust. So when the FCC comes calling they can't use this as an excuse for why they have caps on their "unlimited" plans. This type of thing is very hard to defend logically, but I'm sure they'll find a way to make up something that sounds reasonable.
And actually caps of any kind can't be justified by network infrastructure since if there's band
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To the new slashdot owners, when you finally get around to supporting utf-8, how about lengthening the subject line to at least another dozen characters!
A few months ago, we played around with using the Ampersand character in the subject line. It gets expanded out to 5 or 6 characters in the internal buffer, but still is shown as "&" in the line. It was noticed because someone's post had the maximum length for the subject line, but an & in the middle made it too long in the buffer, so the end of the final word was truncated before being printed.
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Found it: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
From almost one year ago.
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Cash versus Credit (Score:1)
This sounds like the differing prices between cash and credit that the credit card companies killed-off a bunch of years ago. Now everyone offers a "cash discount" which evidently does not violate that price-equity law.
Verizon will find a way to get around it. For example, all they have to do is change their data policy to charge only for data leaving their network, instead of charging for data traversing their wireless networks.
CAPTCHA: Legalize
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Don't people realise that if a business accepts a credit card the card company gets somewhere around 2% this is a cost to the business itself unlike sales tax. So say an item costs $100
that the business would only receive $98 after fees.
Here it would go
charge to customer
item $100
tax 10% $10
total $110
Received by business
paid in Cash $100
paid with cc 2% $98
Now tell me again how it's fair to pay people for their money? It really is a convenience charge shouldn't the customer be payin
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Re: Cash versus Credit (Score:1)
Agreed
There were some places I just didn't patronize because they were cash only, and frankly (especially given some of their neighbourhoods) it wasn't always a good plan to walk around carrying a lot of cash.
There's are benefits to both.
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charge only for data leaving their network, instead of charging for data traversing their wireless networks.
This is exactly how the backbone is organized and settled. When people mention "settlement free" peering agreements, these are normally just when the data going both ways is about balanced. Every once in awhile one of these agreements gets stressed due to a growing imbalance, several times now due specifically to netflix's at-the-time provider (first when they were with Cogent, second when they were with Level 3, and interestingly that first time the dispute was between Cogent and Level 3) discovering that
Cox does the same thing over cable allocation (Score:1)
Cox Communication also has a data cap on their broadband service, but their own video on demand service does not count while Netflix and Amazon do.
They have been doing it for years and to the best I can tell, nothing has happened.
Use the unlimited service til it hurts (Score:1)
So it sounds like everyone should start streaming Verizon video whenever possible. They don't have to watch it, just do unlimited streaming.
100 Megabits Per Second - Just Not Every Second (Score:1)
"Does the Obama Administration..." (Score:2)
"Does the Obama Administration..."
Yes, they understand that.
President Obama is invested in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund as one of his largest holdings, apart from bonds and T-bills -- Source: http://www.davemanuel.com/pols... [davemanuel.com] -- which in turn is invested in:
Telecoms: AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Comcast Corp. Class A
Oil companies: Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp.
Pharma companies: Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. Inc., Gilead Sciences Inc., Allergan plc, Amgen Inc.,
Banks: Wel
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"President Obama is invested in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund"
Lol, so am I, because that's the lowest cost index fund which tracks the average market growth.
It's one of the lowest yield S&P index funds out there. You have to buy into their investment strategy for it to be worthwhile for you.
Word Game (Score:2)
There is no objective difference between, on the one hand, counting towards a cap (beyond which one must pay a surcharge) only data not received from certain stated parties, and on the other, counting towards a cap only data received from certain stated parties. To claim otherwise it to play a transparently absurd word game. It's like claiming that giving a discount on cash purchases of petrol is different to assessing a surcharge on credit purchases.
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It's their service; what's the problem? (Score:2)
Perhaps this was written by someone too young to remember 3G video services.
Strangely enough, Verizon also doesn't charge me for receiving texts from their own customer support center, or "Fortune of the Day" service, or those chintzy CNNgo mobile .3gpp clips back in 2006, or NFL video, or any of the other benefits of cobranded services that carriers have offered. I fail to see how this is any different.
In fact, this is argueably LESS of an issue than T-Mobile's deal with the video services, simple as a res
It's a cap on Internet data, not all data (Score:1)
Anything originating from inside their network should not be counted against the data cap or they would be charging you for something you didn't get. That being Internet data.
Now, I would be completely against them not applying the data cap to something that actually comes from Internet like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.
I'm Okay with this (Score:2)
Sherman Anti Trust Violation? (Score:2)
Re:It's their network, they should be able to (Score:5, Funny)
If they get too heavy handed with it, people will bail.
Damn straight. If Comcast pulls this shit, I will dump them for Xfinity.
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Holy crap are you a fucking idiot. But you just had to let everyone know that, right?
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Holy crap are you a fucking idiot. But you just had to let everyone know that, right?
And you just had to add a little more nastiness to the web for no benefit whatsoever. I like being an AC here, but I can see why your behavior gives ACs a bad name on /.
<aside>
FWIW, I had to google Xfinity to see the relationship to Comcast. This doesn't mean I'm a "fucking idiot", it just means that I'm fortunate enough to have zero dealings with Comcast. So the GP post was actually useful to me. Just because everyone doesn't share your perspective doesn't make them an idiot.
</aside>
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I guess that would depend on who funded their network, no? Who gave up the land that they needed to cable? If it was the "People" then it is the "People" who get to dictate the terms. Quid Pro Quo.
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Because AT&T is better, right?
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What now, vote Trump or criminalize criminals. Make up your fuckin' mind!