Level3 is without peer, now what to do? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2014/05/06/14890/ <comment><USER4> There is an interesting unbalance because Comcast has so much leverage by owning the last mile, they can push around Tier 1 providers. I'd like to fix that, mostly by creating a public policy around municipally owned _Layer 1_ infrastructure between customers in their cities and a city exchange building. Conceptually it would be no different than the city owning the sewers and outsourcing the water treatment plant to a contractor (or two). Creating a new "ISP" would involve installing equipment in the City Exchange(s), providing compatible customer premises equipment to subscribers, and then patching their 'port' at the City Exchange to the ISP's gear.

Its going to be a long conversation :-)

<comment><USER5> This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 billion; which isn't _completely_ insane as far as national infrastructure projects go.

The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternatives. Or to put it another way: if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose?

Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that. Fiber optics are awesome now; but what happens in 10 years when we need a new type of quantum fiber made from carbon nanotubes to go faster? Will the cities be able to make the investments? I have my doubts given the overall poor state of municipal infrastructure around the country for things like water and sewage.

The system we have now is far from perfect, but we're going to need to figure out how to make something work within the confines of what we have today: a privately owned and operated physical infrastructure controlled by a small number of companies. How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?

<comment><USER4> Good points, allow me to share with you a bit of my strategy.

There is a case to be made that much of the tearing up of the streets is a function of people laying down multiple communication infrastructures along side each other. We looked though the permits for the last 12 months and compared that activity to a on-going repaving and road maintenance work. There are several interesting variables at play in that, cost to maintain (tax based), property tax (revenue), new permits (revenue). If you consider switching the physical layer to an infrastructure basis you eliminate multiple fiber/copper paths under the street, multiple fiber/copper vaults in sidewalks and on street corners, and replace them with a common set of conduits. That helps a number of costs, site surveys for digs, delays for city work, and multiple trenching/paving jobs with different standards of integrity. My city, Sunnyvale, is dealing with ways to make maintaining the city more efficient. This sort of change helps that in ways that are not immediately obvious to folks because they happen with dozens of different actors across dozens of different departments.

My goal is to get the city thinking differently about communications (more like roads and sewers than 'optional thing some folks have') so that we can move past the current hodgepodge into a more efficient and maintainable system. If I can get my city to change, then other cities can see the change and see how it helps or hurts and decide independently to change. As a particularly tech savvy city we have a strong alignment with citizens who want better communications, and we've seen from places like Kansas with Google fiber that such communications upgrades increase property values, which increases property tax revenues. My hope is we can get everyone (communication providers, city, citizens) all aligned on this idea. If so it will get done.

<comment><USER5> This is all well and good if you're talking about relatively wealthy cities like Sunnyvale with a good tax base, but many cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are literally crumbling. They operate much more in a "try to keep the lights on" capacity because they just don't have the money to do anything else. The roads are constantly torn up from traffic and just never get fixed, water and sewer don't always function properly and the schools are an utter disaster.

Basically, many cities have much more pressing problems than telecom infrastructure. Not to mention that federally, the FCC holds jurisdiction and thus final say over what cities can and can't do. What may look like standardization to you in Sunnyvale starts to look like a hodgepodge of municipal implementations at a federal level, and the FCC may stop you from standardizing at the local level until they've developed standards at the federal level. It's bureaucracy at its finest; but it does serve a purpose.

<comment><USER4> A couple of points, first I talked with a lawyer who works with/for the FCC and established that if the city isn't involved in lighting up the pipes they don't care what they do. The regulations would apply to ISPs _using_ those pipes but it would not apply to the folks maintaining them. He used the example that companies like the old AboveNet which ran dark fiber from place to place and kept it maintained were not liable to FCC regulation.

The second thing that is interesting is that having a city maintained connectivity infrastructure actually has some positive social justice aspects as it starts to chip away at the digital divide. Once existing contracts have expired and the city is in a position to change things (current single provider contracts don't allow for this) a charitable organization could be an "ISP" without the cost of maintaining the physical plant to/from the subscribers. This greatly expands the available market and gives at risk populations more accessibility. Currently kids study at the city library (which has publicly accessible Internet) rather than at home.

Keep them coming folks, these are exactly the sorts of things we're trying to surface and look at.

<comment><USER5> How do we know that wired broadband is even the answer? Wouldn't wireless connectivity be more attractive if the goal is social justice? Many lower- income homes don't own a PC, and at this point they probably never will. How attractive is a home PC to you if all you've ever known are smartphones?

Wired broadband, to me, is more of an entertainment consumption platform. Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth information consumption quite well these days, and at a significantly lower cost and better market dynamics. Wouldn't a city be better served by pushing Wi-Fi or 4G? Especially given the mass adoption of smartphones by all segments of the economy.

<comment><USER6> The laws of physics prohibit wireless from serving current needs in an urban density. It's not a solution for the future.

<comment><USER7> The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem) limits the information that can be transmitted through a given channel. If you want to send more wired data, you add more channels by adding more wires. Wireless doesn't have that luxury.

<comment><USER8> Strictly speaking this is true, however you can add more base stations with lower transmit power so the shared media is shared by lower number of clients. This is what is already done in urban areas with smaller base stations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Nobody paid anybody for the service because it was assumed to be > symmetrical: as many bits were going in one direction as in the other so any > transaction fees would be a wash.

The justification for peering is not equal traffic, it's equal value - <USER2> customer wants to communicate with your customer. Regardless of the direction of traffic, the traffic is equally valuable to both of us because the traffic is the primary thing our customers are paying us for.

Unless, of course, I can get you to pay me for it anyway because of some unrelated advantage such as the fact that your customers can leave you more easily than mine can leave me. Comcast and others are attempting to leverage exactly that - in many regions they have no viable competition whereas Netflix and L3 are much more replaceable in their respective markets. This is a prime example of abuse of a monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would be very interesting to see what happened if the big CDN providers just depeered Comcast for 24 hours. Would certainly cost Comcast a fair amount in customer support calls, bad publicity, and properly bring the debate to the general public.

<comment><USER11> It would also give the CDNs a fair amount in customer support calls, bad publicity, and make their paying customers angry about lost business.

<comment><USER12> Support calls from whom? CDNs effectively sit behind the Comcast site.

<comment><USER13> From the CDN customers. They'll be annoyed if they find out the service they paid money for isn't doing what it's supposed to do.

Since they've paid the CDN, they don't care what Comcast has done or is doing - they paid the CDN, it's the problem of CDN.

<comment><USER12> Those customers aren't getting depeered, only Comcast.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure of a more eloquent way to say this. Comcast's customers are the CDN's customer's customers.

<comment><USER15> To play devil's advocate, those CDN customers would also be unable to access content if their power went out. But nobody would think to say the CDN isn't doing their job if Texas had a blackout, because "I'm paying you to deliver my content to Texas, dammit!"

It's a bit of a stretch, but I think that's the analogy they're going for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If a customer is paying for an internet connection, they are paying for access the full internet, to the best of their ISP's abilities. This is the net neutrality law we need: ISPs should be compelled to upgrade their backbone links as they become congested, to satisfy their customer's demand. Congestion can be easily monitored and often these peerings are "free". (Yes there is a non-zero cost to increase switch and router capacity and to have someone plug the cables in, but it's not like Level3 is charging for the bits exchanged.) But the point is, since most ISPs are de-facto monopolies in this country, we need rules telling them they have to upgrade their capacity to meet their customers demand, if they are promising broadband speeds.

<comment><USER17> We probably need pricing more directly based on bandwidth consumed, maybe with peak hour pricing, as opposed to just based on "speed" with high bandwidth caps.

<comment><USER18> Like the water or electric company, users should pay according to usage. As you say, this isn't on total bits pushed through, because the marginal costs of sending bits at 3am is nil.

So the "usage" is based on the continued need to build out more equipment. Usage at peak hours, as you say.

I'm concerned that the ISPs will simply charge "big users" and pocket the extra fees, with "big users" moving from 1-in-a-thousand to 1-in-a-dozen as more people want to use more bandwidth. I trust my ISPs as far as I can throw them. (And I believe this distrust is at the heart of a lot of people's calls for net neutrality; simply put, they don't trust their ISP to play fair. And I don't fault them for that.)

But I don't mind something that targets the single biggest users and makes them pay extra. The water and electric systems would fail without that, and those are much simpler to model and plan for.

Thinking out loud, we need something that both

1) keeps pressure on the ISPs to keep on growing their pipes, and

2) puts pressure on the biggest users, which, again, needs to be a very small subset of people putting the biggest strain on the system. I can't come up with an exact number, but 20% of people being considered "big users" is too much.

<comment><USER19> I'm willing to pay for usage, sure. And I'll pay for the physical plant to my house too. BUT (and this is a big but) I'm only willing to do so at reasonable prices.

You want me to pay for the physical plant? OK I can deal. The phone company can provide me with a pair of wires from my house to their POP for about $15. I might pay $20 since coax is different than UTP, but that's about it.

You want me to pay per bit? Great! Bill me at wholesale network rates. You don't want to do that? Sorry, fuck off. I'm already paying for the last-mile transport with the physical plant charges.

[https://josephscott.org/archives/2009/01/how-much-does- one-t...](https://josephscott.org/archives/2009/01/how-much-does-one-terabyte- of-bandwidth-cost/)

Here I can buy RETAIL 2TB of bandwidth for $120 WITH A SERVER INCLUDED. I imagine that the wholesale is slightly (or much, much) cheaper than that. But let's just go with it. At that kind of pricing I can get 1TB for $60, 500GB for $30 and 250GB (the caps Comcast is talking about) for $15. If I need another 50GB (their incremental unit of charge for "overage") I should be able to get that for $3, not the $10 that they're charging.

[http://customer.comcast.com/help-and- support/internet/data-u...](http://customer.comcast.com/help-and- support/internet/data-usage-plans-expansion-exceed-allowance)

Now I think that a lot of the cost of that server is the actual machine, the building, the air conditioning, etc. So maybe you should cut all those numbers in half again meaning that 50GB should cost me about $1.50 and 1TB costs more like $30. This is of course assuming you're not involved in a PEERING AGREEMENT which as Comcast you are.

What about Comcast's costs for termination equipment I hear you say. Okay let's talk about that. I bought my own cable modem so they're not paying for that. They have to have another one on their side, sure. Assuming that it's the same price as mine (it's almost certainly cheaper) that's $100 or less. Considering that DOCSIS standards are usually a few years apart $100 / 4 years = $2 per month. That's not too bad.

And what about the back-haul from their POP to the peering point? There's a cost associated with that right? Yup, that's what I'm paying for when I buy Internet access from an ISP since they're not paying for the peering agreement.

Adding all this up: $20 (for the plant) + $15 (for the wholesale bandwidth 500GB ) + $2 (for the termination equipment ) = $37 per month with each additional 50GB costing an extra $3

This seems reasonable to me and I would happily pay it, so long as the wholesale price continues track the market. But with Comcast right now I'm paying more like $65 rather than $37.

For reference 500GB/mo (if it's 100% evenly distributed) is about 5Mbps. If you figure it's a bit bursty, say 50% on and 50% off that's 10Mbps. If it's 75/25 then it's 20Mbps. 88/12 brings it up to 40Mbps. So these are reasonable numbers to expect given the service I've signed up for is advertised the way it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This cable-menu style image from the comments is scary: [http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1567010/original.jpg](http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1567010/original.jpg)

<comment><USER21> Fearmongering- the internet is not going to be that easy to kill.

<comment><USER20> If they stop supplying it to us without discrimination it will. The internet is made up of plastic and metal boxes that are under other people's control - not magic.

<comment><USER22> Things that cannot be simply cut off:

        - populist revolutions

Things that can:

        - <USER3>

        - the internet

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This wouldn't happen if those ISPs didn't have local monopolies. Networks should be opened by selling traffic wholesale to other companies so that they can compete for subscribers on those networks. The network owners would have more than enough money for upgrades and if they don't, downlevel ISPs will sue them.

<comment><USER24> I'm not making a claim about the veracity of the counter argument to this, but it is easy to state. If network providers had to sell traffic wholesale to other companies, they would have less incentive to upgrade them as those networks then become pure commodities. Right now the local monopolies can use their networks to sell high margin services (cable) bundled with low margin services (internet traffic). If they had to compete with other companies, namely bargain ISP offerings, the cost of ownership of the network would be non-profitable.

I've heard some argue that this is precisely why DSL has lagged so far behind cable in upgrades.

<comment><USER25> > they would have less incentive to upgrade them as those networks then become > pure commodities

Pit DSL against cable, as has happened in the UK. The POTS network is owned by one company (BT) and the cable network by others. Retail customers generally have a choice of connecting to the Internet by either. BT (POTS network owner) are required to sell traffic wholesale to competitor ISPs (who then buy their own transit). This seems to work very well here, and DSL upgrades continue.

<comment><USER26> British DSL is far worse than cable in my experience. Virgin's cable & fiber offering is massively faster and has a wider footprint than DSL products I've seen.

<comment><USER25> > British DSL is far worse than cable in my experience.

Define "worse". What ISP were you using?

From a peering point of view as described in the article, there are a large number of ISPs buying transit and then selling Internet connections through BT-provided last mile DSL lines. I never suffer from peering congestion, since my (DSL) ISP pride themselves on not having any.

For the link from my local exchange to my ISP, there are multiple options, too, and my ISP monitors congestion on my line closely. I currently have no congestion there, either, and if I did, there are multiple providers available (thanks to LLU): [http://revk.www.me.uk/2014/02/bt-21cn-not-fit-for- purpose.ht...](http://revk.www.me.uk/2014/02/bt-21cn-not-fit-for-purpose.html)

The only issue with DSL in the UK is the (mostly analogue) quality of the DSL line itself, and the way that BT (the company with the monopoly on POTS lines) manages them. And perhaps the pace of upgrades (eg. to fibre to a street cabinet and copper from there, instead of copper all the way from the exchange), but upgrade rollouts are happening (and fibre to the cabinet is already available to me).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Somebody has to pay the money to upgrade the equipment and bandwidth available at these exchange points. The very reasonable argument in this article is that the ISPs should pay that cost, which seems reasonable given that their customers are demanding it. It sounds like the ISPs are playing a game of chicken, trying to see if their peers like Level3 will throw money in to pay for the ISP to upgrade its equipment and bandwidth. That's certainly something the ISPs can try to do; on the other hand, what are their customers going to do, _not_ use Netflix and YouTube? If a pile of customers of one ISP start reporting that they're all having a poor experience with high-bandwidth video, and there are a pile of well-publicized press releases blaming the ISP, customers will start complaining to the ISP, and they'll have to upgrade their infrastructure eventually. (And in areas where they have competition, there's an incentive to upgrade before the competitors, to avoid losing customers; while there isn't such competition in every locale, there are enough locales with more than one ISP choice to make those customers painful to lose.)

But what does any of that have to do with mandated peering requirements at the NSFnet exchanges? Who would enforce that, and why, when any two major networks can set up peering at any number of meet-me rooms? Requiring that an ISP peer as much traffic as is available or not peer any at all seems ridiculous; some ISPs will suck more than others, but that's the problem of them and their customers, not a problem for the entire Internet.

Meanwhile, I'm surprised there aren't more startups and VCs looking to bet that "new ISP that doesn't suck" is a viable business model. People are chomping at the bit for Google Fiber, which seems unlikely to grow to a national level without developing competitors. This is a space with very few competitors, and there hasn't been serious competition in that space since DSL stopped being a viable option.

<comment><USER28> The ISPs aren't dropping the packets, Level3 is. From the article linked to in the blog: "A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers." "We"in the quote is Level3. They're dropping the packets.

Why do the ISPs have to pay for Level3's dropping of packets? Shouldn't the ISPs replace Level3 if they keep dropping packets?

Also, dropped packets isn't the end of the world. In TCP at least, the packets just get resent.

The language that gets used in all of these talks ("deliberately harming", "American business", "It's insulting") just makes me want to tune out entirely. I don't have time for chicken littles.

<comment><USER29> Dropping packets makes load problems worse, because failing users start to send even more traffic.

<comment><USER30> This is not true. TCP will retransmit, yes, but TCP congestion control will also reduce the transmit rate in response to lost packets. Overall, proper TCP implementations will back off to approximately their fair share of a contended bottleneck. The application layer sees reduced throughput, not message loss. New TCP connections start with very conservative transmit rates, so an application which is overly aggressive in abandoning slow connections and retrying will not add substantially to congestion.

UDP doesn't necessarily have these properties, but anyone who implements a high-bandwidth UDP protocol which isn't TCP congestion control friendly deserves public shaming.

<comment><USER31> Except between buffer bloat[1] and users spamming the reload button, TCP's congestion control is not going to solve the problem.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> You would think, okay, if Comcast is terrible at maintaining sufficient peering for it's customers needs -- and if the OP proposal to throw Comcast out of peering exchange points happened, that would certainly lead to increased terribleness for it's customers -- then eventually it's customers would choose a different ISP. The market would solve it.

The problem is that in many many markets, Comcast (or another ISP) are pretty much the only choice. Customers don't have another option, no matter how much Comcast underfunds it's peering infrastructure or gets thrown out of peering exchange points.

So what is the consequence to Comcat for underfunding? What is the consequence to Comcast for even such a disastrous outcome as getting kicked out of the peering exchange point? Not a lot.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but 'regulate them as a common carrier' is certainly part of it, since they are a monopoly, and the common carrier regulatory regime was invented for exactly such a monopoly.

<comment><USER33> > Comcast (or another ISP) are pretty much the only choice. Customers don't > have another option

If an entire town is angry, their city councilors will very quickly utilize eminent domain on the fiber in the ground and sell it to a competitor.

<comment><USER34> But not before the ISP lobbies the state legislature to decree that cities can't annex fiber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've previously interned at one of the mentioned Cable Companies, and I see both sides.

The solution is to make it 'capitalistic'. Change all of our internet contracts from Unlimited (up to 'x' GB/month), to a simple $/gb cost.

It would be in the ISPs best interest to provide their customers the fastest internet connection as possible. E.g, if a customer can stream a 4k video vs SD then the ISP would make more money per unit time.

Think of it this way, if comcast charges $0.25/GB, and a netflix SD show is say 1GB and HD is 4GB, then comcast grosses $1 for HD and $.25 for SD for the same customer streaming request.

Over time its likely the price per GB would decrease, just like it has for cellular.

On a more evil side, this would also stop chord cutters. Pirating content is no longer 'free', and Netflix would cost significantly more than $10/month ($10/month + 'x'GB * $/GB).

As for what rates to expect, if comcast charges in ATL $30-55 for 300GB, that'd be about $.10/GB to $.20/GB. As for speed tiers in a $/gb system, your guess is as good as mine.

<comment><USER36> Interesting suggestion.

I've often thought about this. What I hear (I'm not very knowledgeable in this field) is that somewhere up the chain, someone has to pay for bandwidth (per GB) (can anyone confirm this?). But consumers prefer to know how much they will pay each month, and so they get that -- a flat rate service.

So now we have a situation where a company's expenses are measured in GB of data transferred, and their customers pay proportional to their maximum transfer rate. This means the incentives of this company and its customers are not aligned.

It's a bit like if you rent a car and the price you pay is proportional to the top speed of the car, but the expenses of the car hire company is proportional to how many miles you drive.

Where I live, we're currently in the process of wiring up the apartment complex to FTTP (fiber to the buildings and copper from the basement up to the apartments). I'm in charge of the process, and I've thought about asking whether I can get an unlimited connection speed, but pay per GB. I haven't asked yet, but I think I might prefer this over a flat rate price per month. When I use the connection I pay, and it's blazingly fast, and when I don't use it it's free. Contrasted with being slow when I use it, and also paying when I don't use it.

<comment><USER37> _somewhere up the chain, someone has to pay for bandwidth (per GB) (can anyone confirm this?)_

No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around $5,000/month regardless of usage.

 _So now we have a situation where a company 's expenses are measured in GB of data transferred, and their customers pay proportional to their maximum transfer rate. This means the incentives of this company and its customers are not aligned._

More like the ISP's expenses are proportional to aggregate peak demand, but yeah, it's not aligned.

<comment><USER36> > No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around > $5,000/month regardless of usage.

When I went around asking for a price for a shared connection to out apartment complex, I was asked how many tenants we had. And the reason -- I was told -- that they asked for this, was that the more tenants the more traffic consumed.

So it seems to me that _somewhere_ , someone is paying for traffic. Or else I don't understand.

<comment><USER38> End user ISPs often charge by traffic. But buying transit from larger ISP for colocation or to operate your own ISP for example, is typically done based on some combination of port speed, committed information rate (CIR) and _peak usage_ within a defined interval (burst).

For example, at work we pay abour $6 per Mbps 95th percentile use averaged per 5 minutes, with a 10Mbps CIR and 100Mbps port speed at one of our data centres. This means we always pay for at least 10Mbps. Our ISP then measures our traffic and averages it over 5 minute intervals. They then throw away the top 5% of samples (so we can have short traffic spikes up to our port speed without paying extra), and we pay for the higher of 10Mbps and the next sample.

Any bandwidth above the CIR is entirely dependent on whether or not our ISP has spare capacity. The higher your requested port speed, the less likely you are of being able to burst much more than your CIR - any halfway decent provider will have 90Mbps excess capacity much of the time, so paying for 10Mbps CIR and bursting to 100Mbps is not unlikely, but paying for 1Gbps and being able to burst to 10Gbps gets far more dicy.

At some higher speeds some providers will only offer links where CIR == port speed - effectively a "unlimited" connection. If you know your bandwidth exceeds the CIR a lot of the time, you will typically want to pay for a higher CIR for the reason that you otherwise risk getting throttled even if your port speed is higher and your connection in theory is burstable.

Effectively the sum of the CIR of their customers + some margin is what the ISP will turn around and contract with their transit providers and peering partners for. If other customers don't use their CIR, and your CIR is lower than your port speed, your ISP is likely to let you burst (at a cost) that moment, but traffic within the CIR (should) always have priority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> While I agree with the general thrust of the article, there is one fallacious argument here.

Cringely argues that cable breaks even and money is made on the net, but that's an artificial distinction. What if cable disappeared? Would they still make money if they had to pay for the upkeep of the network with only Internet fees? The desperation and risk of this game of chicken convinces me that the answer might be "not much." The loss of cable might very well be apocalyptic for these companies, at least from a shareholder value and quarterly growth point of view.

What's happening is very clear to me: the ISPs are trying to either harm the Internet to defend cable or collect tolls on streaming to attempt to replace cable revenue. That's because cable is dying a slow death. This is all about saving cable.

The fundamental problem is that cable ISPs have an economic conflict of interest. They are horse equipment vendors that got into the gas station business, but now the car is driving out the horse and their bread and butter is at stake.

<comment><USER40> The problem with your later analogy is that there was minimal gating to opening a gas station if the local tack vendor started trying to extort the local populace to maintain a dying business model.

That is why, usually, capitalism works in these situations - if the status quo is exploiting its customers, you can create a competitor because there is profit between the extortion and the break even.

With ISPs, or any general infrastructure, it is a hugely inefficient usage of resources to duplicate the work - good analogies would be how dumb it would be to have multiple sewer systems, with only one attached to the house at a time, or multiple voltages of electric lines where only your choice electric company is hooked up.

Fundamentally, it is that all and _any_ future goods that require transport to the home over infrastructure need to be public services, and the maintainers be common carriers. Because creating the pipes (the water, the subway, the electric, the networking) are all prohibitively expensive to try to compete in, require deep intervention of states (which rarely doesn't result in market dilution) and are naturally a common good because unused bandwidth - in roads, in power line voltage, in pipe flow - are wasted potential, and duplicating the effort and having all the lost potential as a result can be, and _is_ devastating to economies.

<comment><USER39> You're referring to the concept of a natural monopoly, which is problematic for anarchist and libertarian versions of capitalism. There are certain markets that inherently favor monopoly for physical constraint reasons. Utilities are the classic example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The proposed solution is at the bottom of the article (which is why everyone seems to have ignored it):

> The solution to this problem is simple: peering at the original NSFnet > exchange points should be forever free and if one participant starts to > consistently clip data and doesn't do anything about it, they should be > thrown out of the exchange point.

I do have a couple questions though - who is in charge of the original NSFnet exchange points, and do they have this authority?

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't know why everyone is up in arm over this. Here is reverse thinking and a perfect oppoturnity for everyone.

The current situation is that Comcast doesn't have the equipment/resources to handle extra internet traffic at its peers. Most people want Comcast to buy more stuff to handle it, why don't we think the opposite way- get Comcast to decrease its amount of traffic?

If we can get Comcast to consume less traffic, they wouldn't have to complain to other peers about load asymmetry.

The best way to decrease traffic? Make Comcast has less customers.

Why does Comcast has so many customers, even though their resources cannot handle it? Because they have a government mandated monopoly in the last mile, so they are forced to have more customers than what they can handle.

We can come to a conclusion that last-mile monopoly -> network congestion -> forcing L3 to pay for peer.

If Comcast has to compete with other ISPs for last miles, the traffic load would shift from 1 single entity (Comcast) to 10+ smaller ISPs. In such case the traffic load problem would not exist.

Another solution is to breakup Comcast.

See? This is a perfect opportunity. Comcast can has its multi-tier network, but at the price of the last mile monoploy. After all, if they want to have the right to choose peers, we customers should also have the right to choose ISPs.

</comment><comment><USER43> The UK experience is, broadly speaking, that any ISP who is sufficiently tall to have the appropriate interconnects can offer a service to a customer via the incumbent's last-mile infrastructure. (This is for telephone-based ADSL broadband - the UK's only cable operator is not bound by this.) But, furthermore, competitor ISPs are enabled to install their own equipment and backhaul directly into local exchanges, known as LLU - local loop unbundling. LLU allows competitor companies to provide just your broadband, or your voice telephone service, or both.

There is one further step, whereby the prices of the incumbent monopoly are regulated in areas where no competition exists. Ironically this works in the opposite way to how you'd think, as it forces the incumbent NOT to offer their lowest prices in that market - the intention being to make monopoly areas prime targets for competition and to ensure that potential competitors aren't scared out of the area by predatory pricing.

It's an odd system with good and bad on both sides, but it seems a lot better than being stuck with a single source of Internet access.

</comment><comment><USER44> People keep claiming that there should be a "free market" for bandwidth...but then they say that the ISPs should have to absorb the costs of peering (which can be significant -- the hardware isn't free) without passing the costs on to _anyone_. The backbone providers complain when the cost is passed to them; the consumers scream bloody murder when the costs are passed to them in the form of a bill.

Obviously, there's no free market in the status quo: we (consumers) basically expect to pay a low, ever-declining price for bandwidth, while someone else eats the costs of a growing network infrastructure. There's an economic disconnect, and legislating that it shouldn't exist seems worse than futile.

I say: pass the costs on to the consumer, and break down the monopolies on last-mile cable service. If the cable companies had to compete for subscribers, they could still pass on the costs of improving their infrastructure, but they'd have to compete with everyone else to do it.

In other words, the problem here isn't "net neutrality" \-- it's that we've got a monopoly at the last mile that we need to destroy.

<comment><USER45> >basically expect to pay a low, ever-declining price for bandwidth, while someone else eats the costs of a growing network infrastructure

Are we though? Our bills have only been increasing. The amount of money they put into infrastructure has decreased[1].

The Telecoms did have to put a lot of initial investment into infrastructure, but that was largely from laying the wires. Most of them are already starting to see positive returns on those investments [2]. They already have the infrastructure to support traffic to consumers in the last mile. The peering infrastructure being upgraded shouldn't cost them even 1/10th as much.

So why should they get to pass their peering infrastructure costs on to the content providers? They should pass it on to the consumer if they must, after all it's us trying to get the content. But really they are going to be making such a large profit off us over the coming decades it's ridiculous for them to cry poor.

Net neutrality is fairly meaningless when it comes to the last mile. I doubt hardly anyone is saturating their last mile worth of bandwidth. I regularly have three streams going in my household and it doesn't saturate my bandwidth. That part isn't what needs upgrading.

[1][http://www.vox.com/2014/5/12/5711082/big-cable-says- broadban...](http://www.vox.com/2014/5/12/5711082/big-cable-says-broadband- investment-is-flourishing-but-their-own-data)

[2][http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/15/does-cable-really- have-a-9...](http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/15/does-cable-really- have-a-97-profit-margin/)

<comment><USER36> > Are we though? Our bills have only been increasing.

I would venture the guess that the price you pay per megabit has decreased. The problem is that the number of megabits you demand has increased faster than the price per megabit has decreased.

<comment><USER45> >I would venture the guess that the price you pay per megabit has decreased.

For me personally or on average? I'm a heavy usage user, but most my neighbors pay the same as me for using a lot less. My grandparents have basically the same service as me and all they use it for is email, some web games, and the occasional VOIP call and video.

Considering that nowadays almost everyone has high-speed unlimited plans for the same price I might question whether the net per megabit price for ISPs has really gone up. At the very least I'd gamble to say that it hasn't been anywhere close to exponential or unsustainable for them to keep up with.

<comment><USER36> I can't speak for you, of course, but 10 years ago my parents paid more for a 256kbit/256kbit DSL connection than I pay now for a 35mbit/5mbit connection now.

My (parents') connection back in 2003 (256/256 Kbit/s for 395 DKK per month): [http://web.archive.org/web/20040604100538/http://www.cyberci...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040604100538/http://www.cybercity.dk/privat/produkter/adsl/priser_og_produkter/)

My connection now (35/5 Mbit for 279 DKK per month): [http://www.fullrate.dk/privat/bredbaand/priser](http://www.fullrate.dk/privat/bredbaand/priser)

That's 7.97 DKK per downstream megabit in 2014 versus 1580 DKK per downstream megabit in 2004.

I very much doubt it has become 200 times cheaper per megabit/s in Denmark and actually more expensive in the US (or wherever you live).

<comment><USER45> That's all bandwidth, not total data usage. I'm talking about price per actual megabit transmitted by the ISPs. It's not like you actually do 35/5 mbps every second of the day for the entire month.

I'm in an east coast city in the US. I remember having had maybe 5/1 mbps 10 years ago. I wasn't paying the bills but I'm pretty sure it was like $50 per month from the TV commercials. Now I've got 25/10 for closer to $70 per month. Bandwidth wise it's risen a bit, but not really that much. Course I'm pulling down a lot more megabits per month in streaming content (though I was big into Napster/Torrents back then).

But my point was that most people have upgraded to broadband from dial-up even if they don't really use it that much. Only the ISPs would really have the data, but I'd be surprised if the cost per megabit transmitted for them has gone up dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Godaddy, Rackspace, Google, Amazon, etc. have skin in this game. With multiple redundant network connections they could, for a day or a week, defend neutrality by shaping their traffic to the lowest common denominator or routing their traffic to avoid the peer's punitive bottlenecks. Today its Level 3 and Netflix, but tomorrow it could easily be them.

</comment><comment><USER47> "and make their profit on the Internet because it costs so little to provide once the basic cable plant is built."

That's some big hand waving, because laying the cable costs a fortune, and takes many years to recoup the cost which is why there is so few are competing for this "super profitable" business.

<comment><USER18> It's not even a one-time cost.

Without knowing the specific numbers, I'm pretty comfortable saying that the costs to an ISP to get the bits all the way until they reach the peering point is much less than the costs to an ISP to continually upgrade their network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> If the peering ports are congested that means that either the ISP needs to add more ports, or they are oversubscribing their capacity. Just make it illegal to sell more capacity than you have and the problem is solved.

<comment><USER36> > Just make it illegal to sell more capacity than you have and the problem is > solved.

No. The result would be that you would pay 100 times more for your Internet connection. Or, alternatively, that you cannot get a guaranteed bandwidth, but you pay per GB.

This article: [http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations- inte...](http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-internet- middleman/) states that Level3 has 13,600 Gbps of capacity with its peers.

Your solution would mean that Level3's peers can only sell 13.6 million 1 Mbps connections without overselling their bandwidth. Even if Level3's peers have several other Internet wholesale agreements -- let's say they actually have 5 times that capacity (most likely an overstatement) -- _all_ Level3's peers would only be able to sell 68 million 1 Mbps connections. That would be some expensive 1 Mbps connections!

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I like the article overall but I don't understand the author's proposed solution. The issue as it stands is apparently a lack of peering, in that big ISPs are using transit to reach large content providers rather than directly peering to those networks. So how would "kicking them out" for a maxed out connection work? If I buy transit from Level3 and my connection maxes out, I'm no longer allowed to be a customer of Level3?

<comment><USER50> I think he is saying that companies like Level3 should kill all peering with Comcast if they refuse to upgrade to more peering. At least temporally to get their attention and that of their customers that is.

<comment><USER51> Not all peering, just peering at certain key sites (12 specific sites).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The extreme download vs upload traffic asymmetry between Comcast and L3/Netflix has been mentioned several times as a straw man argument for why Comcast is justified in charging Netflix directly.

Maybe Netflix could find some creative uses for all that idle viewer upload capacity to reduce the deficit ;)

\- Have every Netflix client cache and serve chunks of the most popular streams P2P-style. You could have a DHT algorithm for discovering chunks or have Netflix's own servers orchestrate peer discovery in a clever way, for example by only connecting Comcast customers to peers physically outside of Comcast's own network. This would reduce Netflix's downstream traffic and increase viewer uploads.

\- Introduce the Netflix-Feline-Image-KeepAlive-Protocol, whereby every Netflix client on detecting a Comcast network uploads a 5MB PNG of a cat to Netflix's servers over and over again while you're watching a video. Strictly for connection quality control purposes of course.

</comment><comment><USER53> The problem is not to peer or not to peer. The problem is WHERE to peer.

I work for a european ISP and the problem we have is the location of the peering. Big content providers will happilly peer with you in, say, Palo Alto or Miami; but they will refuse to add a peering connection in Europe. Why? because today the problem is about WHO pays the Intercontinental route (which limited and is expensive bandwidth).

Level3 is known in the industry as a pioneer for bit-mile-peering agreements. This means you have to sample the origin and destination of the IP packets and make some calculations to know how many miles the packet has traveled and pay / get paid if someone dumps long haul traffic to a peer. Getting to this is complicated with current tecnhology and many companies are refusing to peer with Level3 because they don't know what will happen with their business with bit-mile-peering agreements.

</comment><comment><USER54> Along these lines, can someone ask whether net neutrality ever existed at all? Akamai and F5 have been helping big corporations like Disney circumvent internet bottlenecks for over a decade now. Those who have had the money have managed to purchase faster delivery schemes for over a decade. Could it be, then, that telecommunications companies are consolidating so that they can extort money not from the small guys, but from the big guys? Are Hulu, Netflix and others willingly submitting to the extortion because they see no other way out? To be sure, the telecommunications industry is in desperate need of regulation because providing good service at a reasonable price for a reasonable profit is not good enough for them.

</comment><comment><USER55> Since everyone is pitching their own solutions, how about I post mine. Let's take the example of Netflix and Comcast. Instead of no deal with Comcast, and thus giving Comcast Netflix users really slow or no service, Netflix should make the deal for now, and tell subscribers that if you use Comcast the Netflix rental is higher. By passing off the higher costs to the users, Comcast customers are given the incentive to switch ISPs.

Everyone shows loss aversion, and so will be determined to find out why being on Comcast gets them penalised. They will learn about its dick moves, and complain to Comcast to make them remove these fees so they can access Netflix, which they have already paid for access to.

<comment><USER51> Netflix would lose, they have competitors and Comcast (and potentially, in the future, ComcastTWC) has too many customers. Increasing the costs to all of them would result in the loss of too many customers before the dust settled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Regulate ISPs as utilities.

<comment><USER57> Common carriers are the words of art for these sorts of utilities. And Comcast and company are in steadily increasing danger of this as they piss off more and more voters (at a certain point, all the money in the world is of no interest to a politician who perceives himself in danger of having to spend more time with his family after the next election; gun owners have demonstrated this many times).

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> > It's about money and American business, because this is a peculiarly > American problem.

Hardly. We've experienced the whole interconnect brinkmanship locally too (South Africa). Its actually quite the opposite - the interconnect things are a lot nastier in other countries because it tends to be paid for (powerful co vs underdog) whilst the bigger US setups seem to run mostly open peering.

</comment><comment><USER59> I can't help but wonder if the RICO Act applies to this sort of extortion. My first thought was FCPA, but none of the ISPs involved can likely be construed as "foreign officials." The behavior can be described as demanding kickbacks, however.

</comment><comment><USER60> Just for scale, backbone links these days are not 10 gigabits/sec, more in the order of 40-100 gigabits/sec.

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange is the largest and most important exchange in Europe, and it's peak traffic each day reaches 3 terabits/sec.

</comment><comment><USER61> Maybe I'm naïve beyond any recognition, but shouldn't the ISP's or whoever is peering charge based on the bandwidth amounts? It sounds like they have a flat-rate contract with each other and now they're charging more?

<comment><USER62> From the article, it seems like the "flat-rate contract" the ISPs have for peering with L3 is $0.

The issue that L3 is raising, is that the equipment/appliances that the ISP has installed in these peering arrangements are insufficient to keep up with the amount of traffic which the ISP's customers are requesting, and L3 is attempting to provide.

If the ISPs were to upgrade their peering equipment to handle their customer's requests, there would be no issue.

<comment><USER61> So by Netflix making a deal with Comcast, did L3 effectively get cut out of the picture?

Also, isn't increasing equipment/bandwidth part of the business? It seems so ridiculously absurd that Comcast is balking to increasing its bandwidth...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Level3 should drop the same percentage of outbound packets from Comcast, that Comcast drops on the inbound. If every tier 1 did, Comcast's internet service wouldn't look all that good any more, would it?

</comment><comment><USER64> It will be interesting to see how gaming download services such as Xbox Live, PSN, Steam, etc would be affected as there as the file size of video games gets larger due to advances in the video game industry.

</comment><comment><USER65> The problem would disappear if ISPs used metered pricing. Why do we have unlimited commercial broadband?

</comment><comment><USER66> Lack of competition all around - just break up the big boys and everything will be fine...

</comment><comment><USER67> why there are no last mile providers like comcast and ATT?

<comment><USER68> Local governments grant monopolies to Comcast or AT&T.

<comment><USER51> And some state governments force it on the local governments (see NC and TWC versus Wilson, NC).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> So on the one side is the fat-cat ISP who doesn't want to make expensive capital investments ih their transport.

And on the other side is the fat-cat vc funded video content providers, who don't want to pay for the their mp4-based saturation of all the pipes.

This is a negotiation. There are two active media campaigns that are trying to gin up our anger against The Other Guy (tm) as part of their negotiations. I just can't get invested in this nonsense.

<comment><USER70> I find it a bit offensive that this can be accurately viewed as a negotiation.

This is like demanding the supermarket buy your grocery delivery business a larger van when the toilet paper manufacturer starts selling larger packs.

It's arrogant, and violates the proper division of responsibilities. It only might work because of local monopolies. Netflix is already paying for traffic to Level3. ISPs need to upgrade their infrastructure and increase prices if it's too expensive.

<comment><USER28> L3 isn't the only content provider, and the 5 UNNAMED ISPs (Comcast isn't necessarily the culprit here) can still provide content to their customers. Netflix is free to hire one of the many CDNs which _do_ play ball with these ISPs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> 1\. Peering is based on equal traffic both ways. At the moment we tend to download gigabytes with a few bytes of request. As video-communications really takes off (yes chicken and egg - see below) this will get lost in the noise

2\. rise of ad-hoc local networks This might come out of mobiles, this might be me dreaming, and it might come with sensible home router designs, but ultimately most of the traffic I care about probably originates within 2 miles of my house - my kids school, traffic news, friends etc

A local network based on video comms - that will never happen. just like mobile phones.

3\. electricity and investment In the end this is down to government investment. Let's not kid ourselves, gas, water, electricity, railroads, once they passed some threshold of nice to have into competitive disadvantage not to have, governments step in with either the cash or the big sticks.

Fibre to the home, massive investment in software engineering as a form of literacy, these are the keys to the infrastructure of the 21C and it's a must have for the big economies, and it's a force multiplier for the small.

<comment><USER72> The problem is your point #3 has never been true, though. In each case, in American history (though I don't know about water), the utility was privatized for _years_, became local monopolies, and used that monopolistic advantage to become one of the most major Washington lobbying industries of the time, often to the massive detriment to specific sections of the economy. In each case it was only _after_ an alternative industry rose in lobbying prominence in washington (often, the next one on your list) that the previous utility lost their position as #1 lobbying firm in Washington, that their competitors were able to then force anti-trust lawsuits, and or get fair government regulation.

The railroads were monopolized until the late 1800s, the original American idea of a fat cat comes from railroad owners who made profits at the expense of midwestern farmers. That was eventually regulated when oil became a major lobbying industry, whereupon oil and gas subsidies became the new norm and we regulated the railroads. Electricity is a general complex area, but outside of domestic coal-based electricity production, my understanding is that the majority(?) of American electricity comes from nuclear power, which in turn is a regulated monopoly. That industry is so locked that Northern America imports much of its electricity from nuclear plants in Canada, and Texas is actually on Mexico's electricity grid.

I was somewhat hopeful that as Wallstreet rose to replace other industries as one of the top lobbying firms in America that they would end up pushing for net neutrality so as to commoditize their network costs, but instead they simply pushed for B2B fiber to be regulated completely differently (and more sanely) than consumer networks.

I don't want to wait for something better than the internet to come around, before we get net neutrality back.

<comment><USER71> interesting. Is there a constant contraction in the time between monopoly and regulation (ie decades for rail, years for electricity?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> _Except it's actually right (not wrong) because those bits are only coming because customers of the ISPs — you and me, the folks who have already paid for every one of those bits — are the ones who want them._

What is the source of the notion that, because you paid for your consumer broadband, all bits are paid for and the charge for carrying them cannot be split with the other side of the connection? Why is it so bizarre that both sides of the connection have to pay for it? Because you're used to your phone working differently?

As an analogy, you know how you used to pay for a subscription to a magazine and there were ads inside which advertisers (the other side of the connection via the magazine in this case) also paid for? The magazine split its fee in two: you paid part of it, and the advertisers paid the other part. It's the same here.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with charging both sides. You may prefer a different fee structure but a better argument than "I already paid for it!" is necessary.

<comment><USER74> No, it's not, because the other side also paid for it to their ISP, CDN, or the build-out and operation of their own CDN.

What Comcast and friends are asking for is a _third_ payment, just because. And don't be mistaken, if they win this battle they will start looking for the fourth payment, which is from their customers for faster service to "premium" sites like Netflix, HBO, iTunes, etc.

<comment><USER73> _because the other side also paid for it to their ISP, CDN, or the build-out and operation of their own CDN._

That's like saying that you should be able to park for free because you paid for your car, all the taxes on it, and the fee for issuing a driving license. Paying your ISP doesn't necessarily grant you unlimited access to every other network on the Internet.

There is no God-ordained fee structure here. It can be split between you, Comcast, Netflix, your landlord (many will pay for laying fibre and then for servicing it), local government... Some may be better than others but there's definitely no moral highground.

<comment><USER75> I'm sorry, your comparison doesn't work for me. I don't see how those even remotely compare.

What I was actually sold from my ISP and I'm currently paying for was indeed unlimited access to everything on the Internet. It's called an Internet connection and that's how I interpret what I'm paying for.

If the bill can be split between me, my ISP, and Netflix then I want my bill lowered if my ISP is going to charge Netflix to deliver bits I requested. But I won't be holding my breath over that negotiation happening.

<comment><USER73> _What I was actually sold from my ISP and I 'm currently paying for was indeed unlimited access to everything on the Internet._

There is no such service. Not only does it not exist, it cannot exist. No ISP can provide that. Any independent network on the Internet can start dropping your packets tomorrow for any reason. Including a lazy admin filtering out your entire country. Or due to a copyright agreement. Happens all the time.

If they really promised "unlimited access to everything on the Internet", then you were misled but I doubt their lawyer would allow for it.

 _If the bill can be split between me, my ISP, and Netflix then I want my bill lowered if my ISP is going to charge Netflix to deliver bits I requested_

Why? It may not be increased. Or it may be increased less than it otherwise would. Or it may be jacked to whatever amount they can get out of you.

That's the whole point. There is no pre-ordained price for carrying bits. There is no pre-ordained split between carriers and end points. There is no pre-ordained service level. It's all just a matter of agreement between parties. So now they're negotiating.

I don't understand however why some believe they have moral highground because "they already paid." Everyone already paid something.

<comment><USER76> > There is no such service. Not only does it not exist, it cannot exist. No > ISP can provide that. Any independent network on the Internet can start > dropping your packets tomorrow for any reason. Including a lazy admin > filtering out your entire country. Or due to a copyright agreement. Happens > all the time.

The point of net neutrality is that, while ISPs should not be held liable for what other entities in the network do, they shouldn't engage in those practices themselves. In logical terms, that's a perfectly reasonable goal.

<comment><USER73> That's a nice goal but it doesn't answer the crucial question: who pays for the expansion to accommodate traffic generated by Netflix?

Netflix? Comcast's subscribers? All of them or only the ones using Netflix? Level3? Comcast's investors? Tax payers? Some combination of the above? And if so, in what proportion?

This is completely impervious to "I already paid and I demand..." argument because everyone listed there already paid and wants something. Preferably cheaper or paid by someone else.

<comment><USER77> >who pays for the expansion to accommodate traffic generated by Netflix?

They are _already being paid_ \- that is the problem. They are trying to double dip.

A visual aid (not the real arrangement, but good enough for discussion:

        Netflix <-> Level3 <-> Comcast <-> Me

Netflix pays money to Level3 for an internet connection.

I pay money to Comcast for an internet connection.

Leve3 and Comcast have an agreement to connect to each other for the purpose of serving their respective customers.

The concept of "an internet connection", this thing that we're both paying for, implies the interconnects working together to deliver, in good faith, what their respective customers have paid for - i.e. access to arbitrary services at best effort speeds.

The players have already been paid everything they deserve at this point. If they feel they are not being paid enough, they should raise their prices.

Comcast, they decide they want to double dip and charge Netflix for something _I am already paying for_. They are no longer playing in good faith, and I argue not delivering what I pay them to do. Why? Comcast's argument carries the sneaky assertion that they deserve money from Netflix since Netflix consumes such a huge portion of their capacity.

Except that doesn't wash - it is _their customers_ requesting those resources and consuming capacity.

They could throttle their customers instead of Netflix, and this would even be defensible, but it would get them pilloried in the marketplace. But that assumes it's a capacity issue in the first place..

But in the end, it isn't. That is a damn lie perpetrated by the ISPs. It is a politics problem. Note how, when Netflix agreed to the demand for protection money, their capacity problem with Comcast went away literally overnight? Comcast either has an army of the best and fastest network engineers in the entire world (and I invite you to speak to a Comcast user if you think _that 's_ true), or already have the gear and configurations in place and just won't switch it on.

There is no cost for expansion here. It's money grubbing, pure and simple. ISPs have always been expected to steadily grow their capacity and speeds over time, and just now Comcast decides they have an issue with it? It's BS. It's a business decision - some suit decided they could charge twice for the same thing and do no extra work.

<comment><USER73> They're not being paid already because the explosion of streaming video traffic is a relatively new and ongoing process. They expect to be paid more for moving more bits.

Now, you might expect the capacity of the network to simply increase as a matter of technological progress. But it's not that crazy of a notion to charge more for doing more. They could make their own customers pay but they're trying to shift it to Netflix, and indirectly to Netflix users. There's nothing fundamentally unfair about it.

The answer that they shouldn't charge anyone more amounts to financing the expansion by their investors (in the form of lower returns). It's not a political problem, it's an economic one. All of those companies are after money, whether in additional fees or lower costs.

<comment><USER77> The fair and forthright thing to do, if that's really the case, is to charge me more. I am their customer, Netflix is not. Comcast's job is to deliver what content I ask for.

Except, they won't do that, because an ISP who will play in good faith will come along and eat their lunch, and their plans are already absurdly expensive.

It's not as if Netflix is blasting unsolicited traffic into Comcast's network that they should somehow compensate them for the inconvenience. "Oh, So sorry! That neighborhood scamp Netflix, blasting their packets all over the place".

The fact that it's Netflix is utterly irrelevant in truth. In the end, _Comcast 's customers are the ones requesting the data_. It's just the simple fact that it's all coming from one source starts the wheels turning, where if it was more spread out, they couldn't come after any one person in particular to seek rent.

>Now, you might expect the capacity of the network to simply increase as a matter of technological progress.

As it has been for the past couple of decades? Yes, that is _exactly_ what I expect.

I'm not saying they shouldn't charge more. I'm saying they shouldn't piss on the internet's leg and tell them it's raining. Don't come to us with that 'But but but capacity!' argument when their behavior with Netflix clearly indicates the opposite, and less so when you're a monopolist with the second worst customer satisfaction score in the entire country, and even more less so when it's _their damn problem in the first place!_

On top of that, streaming video is a time-sensitive medium and others are not. The sane thing to do (again, assuming this is really a capacity issue, which I absolutely believe is 100% grade A horse manure) would be to throttle down the other, non-time-sensitive packets like torrent, http, mail traffic. Basic QoS.

If you believe this company's stated reasons for anything, you are being played for a fool. They can not be trusted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lenovo Unveils Thinkpad P52: 8th Gen Core, 128GB RAM - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/12970/lenovo-unveils-thinkpad-p52 <comment><AUTHOR> Detailed specs seem to hard to find, but this should come with either the 6 core i9 or Xeon CPU. Max mem is either 128GB non-ECC or 64GB ecc. GPU is "Up to NVIDIA Quadro P3200" Should be available this month.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you lost your job anytime? - <AUTHOR>

The company I worked suddenly closed down. I am sure I can find a job outside but  I don't want to  join a random company. I can of course clear interviews, but  I think I cannot make choices now. Have you been through this kind of situation ? <comment><USER2> If you're healthy, and really in a pinch, you can make money donating plasma and hopefully soon, bone marrow for more money.

Don't be afraid to go after social services you paid for in the past with your taxes too. You paid into the system, now it is time to collect out on unemployment, food stamps, whatever and everything you can find. Don't be too proud or something stupid like that. Every little bit helps. $100 in food stamps is $100 more you have.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes try to find freelance work immediately, contact recruiters and see if they have any small gigs that are available. The point being make some breathing room so that you have time to evaluate your next move. Hit up people that you know and see if there company has any small projects that have been on the back burner for a while. See if you can persuade them to fund it and let you run with it. Remember all you have to do right now is cover living expenses to give you time to breath. A lot of people will get caught up with not making less than the last job, which should be a goal, but when committing to small term efforts the first and foremost concern is to cover the rent, to give you breathing room, from there you can make bigger decisions. Once your rent is covered raise you rate to the next small project that comes along. Do this until you find a job you are interested in, or have built a freelancing network that will support you until you do. Be careful though, you can get caught in the freelancer trap, where you start earning too much to go back to a day job, this can make you pass on what would have been good opportunities. It's a strong market for us right now and we are blessed for that, so don't panic and work the numbers, a contact is a potential project so ask every contact you make.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sure, happens to everybody.

Losing your job unexpectedly does funny things to your emotions - it can create feelings of panic, and lead to rash decisions in your rush to get back to a steady income.

Assuming you've got marketable skills and you're not broke, you'll be just fine - but it takes a few days for your emotional, non-rational side to realize this. So don't make any rash decisions until you've calmed down.

Go for walks, do something you find fun, try to put looking for a job out of your mind until the initial shock wears off and you're thinking clearly again. Then and only then should you resume your normal job search.

 _That's_ how you keep yourself from foolishly joining 'a random company' - you give yourself time to cope with the shock you've just had.

<comment><USER5> Right on. I would add that after the new job is landed prepare for it to happen again by keeping your professional network fresh and up-to-date. Most importantly be ready to look for the signs before the shit hits the fan. There are always pre-indicators when things aren't going well in an organization. It is always much better to jump ship before the thing sinks if you can do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're a coder or tech just wait until January, companies start deciding who to hire and advertising work then. Until then just chill out, go to the movies, do stuff that isn't computers and decompress. The panic will pass shortly.

If you were close with your coworkers, invite them on linkedin and maybe ask if they all want to go get beer.

<comment><USER7> Is this true about January? As someone that is actively looking for work, this is kind of a big deal to me

<comment><USER8> same here im looking to move to the bay area come next year.

<comment><USER9> absolutely! The holidays are always slow for hiring. A lot of company budgets start in Jan.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple to release OS X 10.9 with new power-user features, more from iOS - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2013/04/29/apple-to-update-os-x-with-new-power-user-features-more-from-ios-later-this-year/ <comment><USER2> Rumors. All rumors.

Why is this here? I'm one of the biggest OS X 'fanbois' in the world, and I read the rumor mill sites every day, and I enjoy them for what they are: speculation.

But this isn't news; news is typically factual. And the Apple Rumor business is abysmal; 9to5mac, and specifically Mark Gurman, have one of the best track records in the game[1]; even then, it's a horrendous track record.

If this stuff shows up, then yay. I'll be thrilled. Especially proper multi- monitor support for full-screen apps. And I'm not saying that Mark Gurman is wrong (after all, he has "sources"). It's entirely possible that everything in this article will show up in 10.9

But it doesn't change the fact that it's still chaff, not wheat.

[1]: [http://www.quora.com/Who-has-been-the-most-accurate-in- predi...](http://www.quora.com/Who-has-been-the-most-accurate-in-predicting- next-moves-by-Apple) (sorry for the Quora link, the cited site is no longer up)

<comment><USER3> It just looks like Apple integrated TotalFinder, but considering that is closed source, I imagine it will not be an integration with TotalFinder, but there own brew.

I only hope 10.9 doesn't break TotalFinder.

<comment><USER2> Screenshot in the source article is a screenshot of the existing TotalFinder.

We don't know if Apple has done anything at all to Finder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I saw power user features I wondered if it might be something that might convince people that OS X isn't going further down the locked down iOS route and certainly multiple monitors and more advanced use of finder are towards the power user end of things.

On the other hand it would be fair to say that they're relatively a small investment on Apple's part and it would be possible to read too much into them.

Looking at changes like this my take is that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I don't think Apple are going to lock down OS X the way iOS is locked down but nor do I think that power users are as critical a part of their target audience as they once were.

The end result - small changes for power users, enough to give them faith that they're not being completely ignored, and more significant investments for the new breed of typical Mac user.

</comment><comment><USER5> >> " _The new operating system includes major enhancements to the Finder application such as tags and tabbed browsing modes._ "

This would certainly be a welcome improvement.

However, not sure this ranks as a " _power user_ " feature so much as a " _fixing a really broken_ " feature. The finder in OSX ranks up there with the single-button mouse as among the most nonsensical stubborn non-features Apple has clung to over the years.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I didn't see anything I'm interested in as a "power-user".

OSX lately has decided to hide a ton of features out of the box that require changing values in Terminal before being useful. A quick list I know of: \- Hiding full paths in Finder \- Launchpad can't actually delete things. \- Library is hidden

Other weird default settings: \- Scroll with trackpad is inverted

It also doesn't have Ubuntu's nice window snapping or Windows' snap to sides feature, which is a big time saver.

Finally, I don't feel like "port iOS features to OSX" has been a win for Apple. It just seems to confuse people by adding more crap to the OS.

<comment> X-Istence Library being hidden by default makes a lot of sense. It contains user specific application configuration, it's the same as on Windows having AppData which is hidden in the users "home" directory.

There is almost no reason for a user to ever be in the Library folder, let alone why it should be visible by default.

\---

As for scroll being inverted, they did this so that it matches what you do on iOS. You move up to scroll down the page since you are physically dragging the page, and you move down to scroll up.

I recently used a friends computer where the scroll was still inverted and he said it felt much more natural. To each their own, it is a non-hidden setting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't say I agree with the many people that think the Finder is broken. For my purposes the Finder works fine, doesn't get much in my way. Might be because I've used Apple computers for around 20 years now. I can imagine people migrating from other platforms have more issues with the Finder, since it works quite differently from Windows, Linux OS-es.

Actually, I don't think I interact much with the finder directly nowadays. I start apps using Apple-Spacebar and switch between apps using Apple-Tab. Finder is pretty much only used for some file management purposes (moving files to other folders, copy files etc...) and for those purposes it seems to work fine for me.

I do really wish Apple will fix full-screen display for multiple screens. I can imagine a lot of Apple developers would like to see this changed as well. Perhaps Steve Jobs blocked this change in a previous Mac OS X release due to personal issues with it? I can't imagine any Apple developer implementing full-screen support as it stands currently, only if it was forced by management, cause it makes no sense at all with regards to multiple screens.

</comment><comment><USER8> There isn't anything in there that would get me back on board (I jumped ship about two years ago). I would consider proper multi monitor support for fullscreen "apps" a bugfix and not a feature.

Where is the proper window manager (or at least some hooks for 3rd party window managers) and the modern file system (at least give us snapshots and copy-on-write)?

<comment><USER9> OS X works extremely well on a laptop, which has been Apple's primary Mac focus for a while now. Flicking between virtual desktops/fullscreen apps on a multi-touch trackpad is a wonderful way to use a 13" screen.

If you replace the awful Finder with something usable, I'd argue that it's the best OS (desktop environment) for that particular form factor. For a proper workstation...well, they haven't even bothered to update the hardware for years. No surprise that the software has been neglected as well.

<comment><USER10> That's a good point, although a huge part of that is how good the trackpad is and how deeply it's integrated into the OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These look like good moves. While Microsoft and Ubuntu are shunning their desktop users, Apple is making me look the smarter for choosing a company who still stands believes in a desktop OS :)

FYI, I was a decade long Windows user who switched to Mac then to Ubuntu then back to Mac after Unity.

<comment><USER12> As a happy Ubuntu Raring user, I can't honestly agree with the complains against Ubuntu.

It's the best desktop experience I've ever had.

<comment><USER11> I tried Ubuntu 12.10 again briefly and was disappointed that intel HD4000 wasn't fully supported in 3D. Graphics is dog slow in Ubuntu on the same hardware.

It looks like shopping spies still on by default in 13.04. I doubt I'll ever use Ubuntu again on that principle alone. Even Apple doesn't force that on you in Spotlight. Still cannot move taskbar. Still cannot resize taskbar without 3D support.

<comment><USER13> Hear hear! I just installed 13.04 on a relatively modern computer yesterday (C2Q, 8GB RAM, an "old" 9800GT) and had what I consider the typical linux experience. Any one of these might halt or scare off a newbie:

* It wouldn't let me choose the encrypted/LVM option when formatting the drive before installing. Unencrypted worked though. I didn't bother to really investigate why, maybe the HD is at fault?

* Defaults to the nouveau drivers for obvious reasons and I swapped it to the NVidia binary (for specific reasons). Screen dumped to console on its own while it reset X. Functionally fine, but scary looking compared to anything you'd see in Windows or OSX.

* Changing the GPU driver now makes the system boot up in a not-native resolution until LightDM loads. Visually unappealing.

* The computer has a Broadcom Wifi card installed that I'd like to use. Oh boy! (read that as... fuck broadcom). Obviously not handled by Ubuntu out of the box so I drag out an ethernet cable. Trying to install their binary driver requires command line magic which temporarily breaks dpkg/apt when a installing kernal module stalls out. I fixed that and then installed an open source version which grabbed the binary for me, which worked, but I wouldn't ever expect a layman to figure it out. Requires a reboot to finally function.

* Numerous "application encountered an error" popups in the 10 or so hours I was working with it. Nothing that halted the OS, but several apps had to restart. It dings my confidence in the quality a bit. And the computer's RAM checked out fine a couple months ago and all temps were normal, I'm going to lean towards either my suspected aforementioned drive issue or actual errors with the apps. Didn't investigate, but they could happen to anyone.

* Annoying Amazon and Ubuntu One monetization techniques defaulted into the Unity. It's not a functional issue, but raises concerns about the future of the free software ethos at Canonical and treads awfully close to the adware and spyware that plagues Windows users that the OSS community has been railing against for years.

Compare that to OSX where I could just turn it on and have none of these problems, it's not quite rainbows and unicorn farts. I like linux for many reasons and Ubuntu has made great strides towards making Linux available to the masses, but it's still relatively easy to want to do normal things and encounter rough edges that require technical prowess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really, FTFF is in the works? I'll believe it when I see it. (I don't know why Apple hasn't just bought Path Finder.)

<comment><USER15> Since I had to look it up: FTFF = Fix The &$%#ing Finder[1], a blanket term for OS X Finder woes!

[1]: <http://www.applematters.com/article/ftff/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Makes sense. Good focus. As the masses flock to pocket OSes, OS X becomes more streamlined for the audience that remains; the creators.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm more concerned about what large feline they will name 10.9 after. Do they even have any left?

OS X 10.9 - House Cat FTW

<comment><USER18> There hasn't been one called "cougar," which is a scary-cat name people think of, I think. Of course, "cougar" is another name for the puma, but then, so is "mountain lion," so that may not be a barrier.

Cougars(/pumas/mountain lions) are also interesting because they're not big cats, taxonomically speaking, so potentially the entire felidae family is in play, and it's pretty big. "Lynx" is a possibility... maybe also "wildcat" or "bobcat"? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae>

<comment><USER19> Wildcat was already used as the codename for the iPad, though I suppose it's possible they could repurpose it.

<comment><USER17> I'd vote for Wildcat

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lets hope that it doesn't require us to re-install all of our *nix tools like every other release did in the past.

<comment><USER2> I've never had to reinstall my *nix tools when using OS X.

Where are you installing them? OS X respects all of the guarantees in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard so if you aren't installing custom-built binaries in /usr/local then the problem isn't OS X.

<comment><USER20> With every update I seem to have to reinstall just about any command line tool that I've previously installed because either they've moved some executables, or deprecated something , or the old binaries simply do not work with the newer version of the os. MySQL is probably the biggest annoyance with regard to upgrading. I don't believe that this is just a thing that I go through because the answers to my problems are a Google search away and I've taken an 07 MBP from Leopard to Mountain Lion.

<comment><USER2> I've never had that problem, but I've only been on OS X since Snow Leopard, and it seems that things have remained pretty consistent.

I also try to do as much installation from Homebrew (<http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/>) as possible, so that I can let the package manager worry about stuff like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The first thing I noticed is that this would be the first OSX release to be named after something other than a great cat. Instead, they seem to be going for alcoholic beverages now.

Why do I find this darkly hilarious?

<comment><USER22> It says 10.9 is 'internally codenamed' so I assume Cabernet not the the final release name. Fingers crossed for OSX Ocelot.

<comment><USER23> I think 'Lynx' would be neat, as it is the last major version before OS X 11 (or whatever they will call it), linking it to the next generation. It also reminds us of the lowly text web browser and the fact that the web is only 20 years old.

<comment><USER24> You don't think they'll do OS X 10.10?

<comment><USER23> Em, no. Of all the possibilities, I'd say that is one of the least likely.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#Sequence- ba...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#Sequence- based_identifiers)

<comment><USER24> Are you sure you read that correctly? I quote:

> In this system, the third digit (instead of the second digit) denotes a > minor release, and a fourth digit (instead of the third digit) denotes bug- > fix/revision releases. Because the first digit is always 10, and because the > subsequent digits are not decimals, but incremental values, it is likely > that a hypothetical 11th major version of OSX, should it exist, would be > labeled "10.10" rather than "11.0".

They did 10.4.10 and 10.4.11 so I'd say its within the realm of possibility.

<comment><USER23> All very good points. I think it would look silly, but sure, it's possible. However, I think Apple would only choose it if the version after 10.9 didn't look all too different from 10.9. If they did some kind of UI overhaul, it would be a good time to jump to a new major version – maybe even 'OS XI' or 'OS 11'.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node.js v4 Release Timeline - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/2522 <comment><USER2> Most excited about v8 4.5. Native support for arrow functions and stuff like Array.from really makes the dev experience feel so much smoother.

<comment><USER3> I may be out of the loop here, but wasn't the big benefit of JavaScript everywhere that it's the _same_ JavaScript everywhere?

Does it matter if server-side is JavaScript Next Gen and browsers lag by a few years of features?

Too many more iterations of this and you'll be back to two programming languages again and web developers heads will explode from having to learn _two_ things instead of _one_ things.

<comment><USER2> Chrome (logically) already supports features of the new JS spec that 'only now' get put into node. With automatic updates for browser being the trend currently I also think that it is now easier to keep the server and browser support for JS in sync.

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily. I don't think the v8 team really consider the Node project so breaking changes in v8 take some time to get merged into Node/io.js. This is the reason that arrow functions are only shipping now when v8 marked them complete a while back. AFAIK Node is somewhere around 3+ months behind Chrome.

<comment><USER5> This is not really accurate. Arrow functions shipped in Chrome on Tuesday (Sep 1) with Chrome 45 (V8 4.5).

<comment><USER4> Gotcha. I guess marking them "shipped" just puts them into canary? That was done a while back.

[https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2700](https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2700)

<comment><USER6> V8 has had arrow functions for a long time, but until recently they were not fully spec compliant. That is also why iojs put them behind a flag (separate from the flag that enabled stable harmony features).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On nodejs.org, it says "Current Version: v0.12.7". Can someone explain why this discussion is about "v4"? I'm missing something…

<comment><USER8> node.js got forked into io.js. io.js made a lot of improvements and changes, while trying to reconcile the fork and the reasons why it occurred. those have been reconciled.

io.js had many contributors and changes, starting at 1.0, they are now on 3.0. 4.0 is the full reconciliation with node.js, as part of the linux foundation.

<comment><USER9> It's also useful to note that io.js moved fasted in version numbering because they switched to a more semver versioning pattern, whereas Node had been using something a lot more awkward and rather more confusing. It looks like a benefit to the 4.0 jump is that Node will be using semver moving forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're hoping to use native V8 Promises, beware using them with other promise libraries / custom thenables because of [https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=4162](https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=4162) (more detail and test case in [https://github.com/zloirock/core- js/issues/78](https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/78) )

</comment><comment><USER10> One issue to go: [https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/2516](https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/2516)

A .bat file is holding up the whole thing!

<comment><USER11> rvagg, in a comment on cited issue:

 _FYI this isn 't holding up release ("A .bat file is holding up the whole thing!"—hackernews), it should be completed by recent commits to core, I'm leaving this open as a reminder to confirm that it's working as expected in the 4.0 RC builds._

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been waiting for this since io.js was announced.

</comment><comment><USER13> So excited this is finally happening. I enjoy every bit of node I get to write, really excited for the updated features. Babel has taken a lot of the edge off, but I dont want to pull babel in for every script.

<comment><USER14> I'm curious, what is your development background, and what do you enjoy most about Node.js?

I come from a Java background, but have been working exclusively with Node.js for the last eight months. Everything I write, I can't help thinking things like "this problem has already been solved in Java many times over", and "this would be safer in a statically typed language", and "this would be faster to write in anything else" (though this is more a reflection on my choice of libs).

<comment><USER15> With TypeScript [1] you can get the best of both worlds: statically checked code with tool-assisted refactoring plus the ability to drop down to JS when the type system doesn't support what you want to do. (Of course, you'll now need to be careful about it and try to isolate the dynamic code from the rest of the system and present a static facade to it)

[1]: [http://www.typescriptlang.org/](http://www.typescriptlang.org/)

<comment><USER14> I've thought that if you're going to go the route of compiling to JS, you might as well go to a higher level of abstraction and use something like PureScript, Haxe, or any of the 100 other languages that compile to JS. Of course, interop then becomes a problem.

<comment><USER15> Thats precisely why I suggest TypeScript or Facebook's flow, as interop is a non-issue. They're both just ES6 + optional types.

The trouble with PureScript is that its different enough to have a different cost model (in terms of performance) thanks to the pervasive closure allocations resulting from currying as well as the typeclass dictionaries. Though I'm sure that once the compiler matures and those costs are eliminated, it would be the best choice.

There is also TypeScript's tooling - while the language is less safe, the language service tools are a lot more advanced than PureScript's (I can't say if the same applies for Haxe though)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So it seems this is v4 because io.js got to v3 in it's short lifetime.

Is Chrome somehow setting the pace for version numbers? We don't have major.minor.path. Semver is pointless.

A version is an integer, and every change is a new version?

How long until we see Uint32 overflows on a version number?

<comment><USER17> io.js does follow semver, that's why it's at 3.x, because certain changes required the major version bump.

Node v4 will be the first Node to follow semver.

I get that you don't like Chrome style versioning, but that's not what's going on with Node.</comment></comment>


Red Hat at ISO C++ Standards Meeting 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://developerblog.redhat.com/2014/05/28/red-hat-iso-c-standards-meeting-february-2014/

<comment><USER2> Some of these new sources of undefined behavior are quite concerning.

Converting an enum to a value outside it's range is _extremely_ common, as enums are frequently used as bitmasks and the like.

The bit about optional will likely break a fair amount of code which performs functions similar to optional as well.

<comment><USER3> It's not quite that bad. Instead, it's the number of bits used by the enumerators. This makes bitwise operations safe on enumerators because or'ing and the like will not result in using more bits than any enumerator.</comment></comment>