Obama speaks out in favor of Net Neutrality; Ted Cruz likens it to "Obamacare"

I think you meant to say something else here?

I'm sorry you keep getting inundated with questions, but here's another:

Do ISPs advertise broadband tiers they can't provide, the way airlines oversell flights or universities accept more students than they have openings? Like if someone subscribes to 10mb/s, but if ALL the 10mb subscribers started watching Hulu at 7pm, the network couldn't handle it?

Because really, to watch SD streaming video or even 720p doesn't take more than 4mb/s, I think. So most broadband subscribers have enough "advertised" bandwidth to watch TV after work. I suspect the problem is that if most customers started streaming 720p at the same time, the provider wouldn't be able to really provide their advertised speed. And for this, it seems you blame Netflix, which I find kind of weird.

Maybe a solution is to have lower guaranteed speeds at peak times? Or maybe reward customers who use most of their bandwidth off peak. Another solution would be to move from a streaming model to a downloading-during-off-peak model, then watching whenever you want without eating bandwidth.

 

This isn't as easy to measure as you think it is. If the model you're describing is to charge customers for total data downloaded/uploaded in a month (maybe you aren't), you aren't really efficiently controlling the problem of bandwidth, which is traffic at peak hours. (I think ISPs would be fine charging customers extra in whatever ways the customer will accept, though.)

The customer who wants to stream HD video for a couple hours from 6pm to 8pm is a much harder customer to serve than the one who is torrenting 40mb/s from 1am to 6am.

The problem is peak hours vs off-peak hours. Highway analogies are way overdone on this topic, but I'll use one anyway: Promising a customer he can take I-45N from downtown to the Woodlands in a guaranteed amount of time is WAY harder to do at 5pm than 2am.

When the "pipes" are not being used so much at the middle of the night, a small number of customers using a lot of bandwidth each doesn't cost the ISP much, if at all. The infrastructure and switches are in place; so long as you don't have to push more data per second than your pipes can allow, the marginal cost for usage below peak is close to zero. The problem of cost is spending money to increase the total bandwidth available during peak hours.

 

Yes I likely was interrupted and didn't follow through on my thought.

Absolutely. EVERY ISP over subscribes their bandwidth. Its impossible to guarantee a dedicated link to everyone. Just as you have Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 providers, there is often 3 levels of service.

Standard Shared: This is the vast majority of customers. If its a residential plan, its a standard shared, low priority. In the last year when Comcast doubled their speeds, all they did was give the customer more access. It was just a show. The majority of people never come close to using more than 30Mbps. If they are not using it, why not double it? Great PR, right? However it does water down their revenue subscriber rate, as people tend to bump down to a lower plan to save money.

Shared Priority: These can be business plans. They may pay a little more, or sometimes a lot more. These accounts have priority traffic over the standard shared.

Dedicated: Not only are you guaranteed, but you have bandwidth that is dedicated to you. This are outrageously expensive. For example, we paid $600.00 for a 50mbps fiber link, when a standard business plan would go for a 1/6 of that. Usually these are bought through Tier 2 providers. T1's, T3's, OCxx are all considered dedicated. Entities who purchase these need very low latency with very low jitter. Think 1080p broadcasters who can not afford spikes in their broadcasts.

We generally over subscribe ours to the point of our backhauls reaching 85-90% peak load. Cable and DSL subscribers do not do anything unless the customers start to complain. Even then they ignore them. Most of ours are under 100%, but we have locations that are oversubscribed at 225%-300% (2:1, 3:1) and rarely does the peak load go above 75%. From what Ive heard, the average Cable/DSL is 50:1 - 100:1. (I suspect this number is inaccurate, closer to a 1/3 of what it was 5 years ago, thanks to massive backhaul upgrades).
http://www.quora.com/How-much-oversubscription-is-acceptable-given-todays-standards-for-an-ISP-for-1-dedicated-IP-access-and-2-broadband-access

Oh Netflix - Do you know why I hate Netflix? They have this nifty tool that evaluates your bandwidth connection, and from there, it compresses it to provide a seamless stream. Badass, right? Except if you have a 36" 1080p TV, Netflix will use the max amount of bandwidth and push the highest quality picture. All of that higher resolution is wasted on a crappy TV. While you cant exactly fault Netflix, much of the resolution (which equates to chewing up valuable bandwidth) is wasted across the board.

So when Over the Top subscriptions are allowed (your TV services streamed online instead of coming from satellite or cable services), there will be a big boom in online streaming. When Sportsjock bob, who only uses his internet for email and facebook, decides to cut the proverbial cable cord and subscribes to ESPN over the internet, he will now be using a steady 10Mbps the entire time he leaves his TV running in the background.

 

Excellent info, SG! Many thanks.

 

Isn't oversubscribing just lying, selling a level of product you can't deliver.

At least in the airlines industry there are compensationd for getting bumped. If an ISP fails, the consumer really doesn't even know who caused the issue or why and is never compensated.

If you sell me "up to" 50 Mpbs you be able to deliver me 50 Mbps all day every day. Otherwise you should have to qualify it with the truth/

 

Well, what we have here is a major public perception/marketing problem when it comes to expectations of service vs. what is promised. And if the ISPs are oversubscribing 100:1 and then recoiling in horror when their subscribers actually want to use the bandwidth they were sold, they have no one to blame but themselves.

The fact that Netflix makes it harder for ISPs to oversubscribe does not garner much sympathy from me. At all. Running a business means managing risk and managing customers' expectations.

If/when people start cutting the cord en masse, the 50:1 oversubscription chickens will come home to roost.

 

This is true and an excellent point. However, I think there are ways around it. Look at the cell phone model justtx mentioned earlier - they used to do free nights & weekends and things like that exactly for this reason. An ISP could offer 10Mbps at $x and then offer "free triple speeds during off-peak hours!" or whatever.

But my overall point is that the pricing should be based on the bottlenecks. Instead of charging companies for sending data that the ISP promised their users that they could send, the ISP should just more properly price their intent to their customers to account for these things. Whether that takes the form of guaranteed bandwidth, average bandwidth, peak bandwidth, total data usage, etc - or a combo of them all - is fine by me. But I just think charging customers based on their usage makes more sense than arbitrarily charging different companies different amounts because their services are more or less popular. ISPs want to do this simply because charging their customers properly is not popular with the customers - but that doesn't make it good policy.

 

Comcast sells 50mbps here in Houston and you will rarely hit that precise number. Speedtest can be fooled by their download booster

 

They are already charging you for peak BW (e.g. up to 50Mbps). There is no guaranteed BW unless you have a dedicated line (big busn). Technically, they could guarantee BW with shared line, but than each person would be guarantee yesteryear dial-up speed.

It comes down to.. they have to expand their BW capability.

On Netflix - it's not just them. All streamer uses similar technology to adjust bitrate to available BW. Just how the game is with video streaming and perfectly make sense to do so. 4k is coming down the pipe as well. Good thing newer codec (else there is no way to stream 4k) will be much more efficient. But still, the BW got to go up.

 

Ehh Should we get started on bank reserves? The concept is very similar.

It is stated in agreements. Nobody reads the fine print and actually takes the time to understand it.

Could you imagine trying to guaranteeing a connection? I would much rather my 50Mbps shared connection than only my guaranteed 1mbps connection.

 

Read the whole thing.

Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet would do more harm than good

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...a795d0-6b82-11e4-a31c-77759fc1eacc_story.html

By Michael Mandel November 14 at 6:52 PM

Michael Mandel is chief economic strategist for the Progressive Policy Institute.

President Obama’s call this week to regulate the Internet as a public utility is like pushing to replace the engine of a car that runs perfectly well. The U.S. data sector — including wired and wireless broadband — is the envy of the world, administering a powerful boost to consumer welfare, generating high-paying jobs and encouraging tens of billions of dollars in corporate investment. Indeed, the prices of data-related goods and services have dropped by almost 20 percent since 2007.

Putting the Federal Communications Commission in charge of regulating broadband rates and micromanaging Web services, as the president proposes, would slow innovation and raise costs. It would be bad news for the economy. It would also be a serious misstep for the Democratic Party, marking a retreat from market-based, pro-competition policies pioneered by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

The issue here is how best to ensure an open Internet, in which big and small companies alike have unfettered access to customers. After the courts threw out the old open Internet rules in January, virtually all concerned parties agreed the United States needed strong regulations to prevent blocking or discrimination online, to require real transparency for network-management policies by Internet service providers and to ban paid prioritization that could divide the Internet into fast-lane “haves” and slow-lane “have-nots.”

The debate is over the best policy road to take in enacting these rules. One path — using Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — would allow the FCC to enact strong rules and penalize Internet service providers who impede anyone’s access to the bounty of the Web, while preserving the freedom to innovate and deploy new technologies.

The other road — which relies on Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 — would resuscitate decades-old public-utility regulations and enable the FCC (and a new layer of state agencies) to regulate prices and micromanage Internet services. This is the road back in time that the president endorsed.

Each year, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) prepares an “Investment Heroes” report identifying the companies that are investing the most in the United States. In 2013, the telecom and cable industry led the list with $46 billion in investment. Compare that with Europe, where Title II-style regulations have suffocated broadband innovation and investment. Indeed, even the president admitted in his announcement that “network investment remained strong” under the current rules.

This is not an industry that needs a new approach — and especially not a policy prescription borrowed from the failed monopoly-style regulations of the past. A PPI analysis of government statistics shows that the data sector has been the main force driving gains in consumer welfare since 2007. Consumption of data-related goods and services per person has risen by 48 percent since the recession started seven years ago. By comparison, the real per capita consumption of all other goods and services is up by only 0.9 percent over the same stretch. The number of computer and mathematical workers has risen by 35 percent since October 2007. These are high-paying jobs.

If Title II were the only way to enact strong open Internet rules and protect consumers, I would be the first to support it. However, the more reliable Section 706 approach, suggested as a possible source of regulatory power by the court that struck down the last set of open Internet rules, provides ample authority to pass effective, market-based rules that give us the best of both worlds — strong consumer protections within a pro-market framework. Indeed, many experts believe Section 706 provides a stronger foundation to restrict anti-competitive “paid prioritization” deals because Title II expressly allows for whatever counts as “reasonable” discrimination among utility services and customers.

Meanwhile, Title II goes far beyond simple open Internet protections and could impose thousands of obsolete or harmful rules and regulations on the entire Internet ecosystem (not just broadband companies, but potentially application and content firms as well). The president suggests these destructive rules could simply be waved away using the FCC’s power to “forbear” from applying its own rules. But that’s fool’s gold. Forbearance proceedings are lengthy and complex with uncertain outcomes, and they would provide yet another forum for special interests to litigate their pet issues. The unpredictability and chaos of extended forbearance cases could do as much damage to investment and the Internet economy as Title II itself.

Title II could turn out to be a tremendous drag politically for the Democratic Party as well. Putting the government in charge of Internet service will just make the Democrats the scapegoat when anything goes wrong. That’s not a good way to avoid a repeat of the 2014 election.

For economic, policy and political reasons, Title II is the wrong road for the FCC — and the wrong road for our country. The FCC would be wise to exercise its independent policymaking authority and ignore the president’s backward-looking misstep.

 

For starters our internet is not the envy of the world...

We have higher rates and lower speed than pretty much anywhere and we want to concede more of a stake to these major companies? I dont doubt it would benefit these companies, but how do you think the increased service, potentially, would be reflected on the consumer?

 

Are you just posting articles in here and then running off without reading any of the discussion? I took the time to address the series of falliacies in the last WaPo article you posted and now you just post another one with the same talking points with no response.

Ah, the "Progressive Policy Institute", authors of the same load of bull you posted last time.

HOLY FRIKKING WHOPPERS BATMAN. To open up with this whopper earns a pants on fire rating. It has been very well established for years now that America falls behind most of the developed world in bandwidth/price. To actually open with a statement like this 1) blows away one's credibility as an authority on the issue 2) shows that the author is aiming for a low-information audience that doesn't know any better anyway.

Bull. Verizon v. FCC clearly delineated that the FCC doesn't really have the authority to 'enforce' anything on the last mile providers. It is exactly because of that case that NN proponents are pushing Title II, because that's what will give the FCC the ability to enforce.

HOLY CRAP THIS AGAIN?? Truly, I rarely use all caps, but such a bald-face deception is boggling. Practically the entire continent of Europe is ahead of the States in speed and price to broadband customers, because of their Title-II type regulations (more specifically unbundling or common carrier rules).

Comcast is the most hated company in the USA for good reason. They lobby/legislate themselves into monopolies and quasi-monopolies country wide, and provide service so crappy at prices so high they dare their customers to leave, but they can't, because of monopolies/duopolies. Anyone who is a fan of the favorable outcomes of capitalism, i.e. competition, believes that terrestrial broadband in the USA desperately needs a new approach.

The only sensible thing here. The real fear is that Title II gives too much power to the FCC.

To repeat what I've said before, and I'm far from the only one to say it: I'd drop fighting for net neutrality altogether if we had real competition in a true market for broadband services. Unfortunately getting there means regulations even bigger than NN. But personally I prefer a market-based solution to the problem. Too bad the republicans don't.

 

wat

 

Hahaha. No, just no.

 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pR1BHjanLIc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

I won't watch a Cruz video but the strange thing about this issue is, net neutrality actually leaves the net the way it is, not allowing the giant ISP's to start charging for fast lanes. If you are saying, Don't Mess With The Net, you are actually for net neutrality.

 

no, it means don't let the government mess with the net,

you want others to mess with the net, i.e disruption and innovation

 

It's like Comcast/ATT/TimeWarner/Verizon paid Frank Lutz to dream up a misinformation campaign.

There is no competition to deliver high speed internet to your home and there won't be for the foreseeable future. The companies that provide it had tax abatements and exclusive deals in order to insure their return. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and public relations so that they can charge competing content providers for the same service that consumers are already paying for, in order to provide profits that would escalate from massive to obscene.

It's you against a billion dollar industry and your only possible ally is your government and they are buying them as fast as they can.
Good luck citizen.

And Cruz is a w****, selling out people for a growing oligarchy.

Ted Cruz Digs Heels Into Campaign Against Net Neutrality
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ted-cruz-campaign-net-neutrality--2

 

No, NN is like Obamacare in the sense of "I say again, you can keep your doctor if you want" or "Prices will be dropped for everyone, because it will reduce fraud, waste and abuse". Two very important promises that they knew very well they couldn't keep.

Read between the lines people. You b**** and moan that these providers lobby for support measures the fit them best. The government does not have any teeth in this fight currently. What do you think these lobbyist are going to do when the government can actually regulate it??