You will be changing your tune when your mother is sick and can't get the care she needs because the system is overwhelmed because we (communities, not just network operators) didn't do what was necessary because of some idealistic hard line people drew in the sand.

The medical system is going to be run over by lack of trained professionals / beds / equipment long before it is unable to provide care because of transient internet congestion. 

I know you're under a lot of stress Mike, and I wish you all the best getting through these current events.

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 11:09 AM Mike Bolitho <mikebolitho@gmail.com> wrote:
"It is something that matters, because it has the potential to set a dangerous precedent."

Can we stop with this talk... around everything? We're literally living through an unprecedented event right now. My 86 year old grandmother said she's never seen anything like this in the US. My friends 94 year old grandmother in Italy said she hasn't seen this since WWII. Nobody is going to say "Well we did this during a global pandemic so we can now do it because we feel like it". People will laugh them out of the room. I live in Phoenix, the mayor shut down bars and restaurants (carryout only) in order to help stop us from becoming Italy. One of our city councilmen was saying the same thing: "This is martial law and sets bad precedent! We must open everything up!" Of course, they then held a closed to the public meeting because city council can't be exposed. The point is, the mayor isn't going to do the same thing in six months on a whim because traffic on the freeway is bad. Thankfully calmer heads prevailed and the rest of the council told him to pound sand, at least for now.

Something that keeps happening on this mailing list over the last few weeks is this tendency to try to take the "Moral high ground". And from way up there people are looking at the whole topic from an idealistic point of view like we live in some Network Operators Utopia with perfect conditions where money doesn't exist and we can do whatever we want because there is no upper management. We should be having a practical conversation that sits within the confines of reality. We don't have perfect networks built. We don't have unlimited resources. We are facing a global pandemic. Money is tight. In principle, I agree with what you guys are saying. But in reality, we're going to have to bend our convictions in order to protect populations from COVID-19. You will be changing your tune when your mother is sick and can't get the care she needs because the system is overwhelmed because we (communities, not just network operators) didn't do what was necessary because of some idealistic hard line people drew in the sand.

- Mike Bolitho


On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 7:44 AM Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> wrote:
It is something that matters, because it has the potential to set a dangerous precedent. 

If you say "$Service should reduce their bit rates because this is an emergency!" , I guarantee that exact same argument will be made well after this crisis has passed with a different definition of "emergency", and adding on "well it's an emergency to me!".

Some of the pipes Netflix goes through is also used by other services that aren't as adaptable.

And how is that Netflix's responsibility? They have already taken action to ramp down bitrates when they detect congestion. Why should other applications be able to say piss off, I don't want to? Didn't we just have a 10 year net neutrality argument that we're not supposed to want to treat the bits differently?

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 10:17 AM Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:
It's one of those most important things that matters.

The end user likely won't notice the difference between 4k and 720p. They also aren't likely to notice the transition from one to the other.

The person on the VPN, VoIP call, video conference, video game, etc. will very much notice the congested link, even if it's only a few seconds.


Yes, Netflix video is very efficient, if not the most efficient. They're also one of if not the largest slingers of bits on the Internet. Small changes in usage of such a huge player totally eclipse most other usages on the Internet.


Netflix recommends 25 megs for Ultra HD, while only 5 megs for HD. That's a 5x difference in something people likely won't notice and would make a big difference on the additional VPN, VoIP, video conferencing, etc.

From: "Blake Hudson" <blake@ispn.net>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Friday, March 20, 2020 9:01:18 AM
Subject: Re: COVID-19 vs. our Networks

Yes, but does that matter? If there's extra capacity on the link, Netflix runs at full rate. If there is not extra capacity Netflix rates down to prevent congestion. While streaming video (including Netflix) uses a lot of bandwidth, I don't see Netflix causing congestion. It gets a bad wrap, and I think that's unfair because Netflix is actually really efficient and really conscientious compared to others.

On 3/20/2020 8:52 AM, Mike Hammett wrote:
Some of the pipes Netflix goes through is also used by other services that aren't as adaptable.

From: "Blake Hudson" <blake@ispn.net>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Friday, March 20, 2020 8:32:45 AM
Subject: Re: COVID-19 vs. our Networks


On 3/19/2020 12:22 PM, Mark Tinka wrote:
>
> On 19/Mar/20 18:07, Matt Hoppes wrote:
>> Agreed... 720 or 1080 Netflix will work just as fine as 4K for the
>> next month or two.
> Well, the article claims "Drop stream quality from HD". That means 4K,
> 1080p and 720p.
>
> If you have an OCA on your network, how does this encourage consumers to
> use the "extra bandwidth" for anything else?
>
> Are we assuming we know how consumers want to spend their time now?
>
> Mark.

Across several eyeball networks I'm not seeing any noticeable increase
in peak (95%) demand between now and January. Since Netflix
automatically scales down data rates in the event of congestion, the
only thing I foresee forcing Netflix to reduce data rates [ahead of any
congestion] would accomplish is causing excess link capacity to go
unused (wasted). This sounds like a policy decision made without a
technical argument... e.g. not a data driven decision, but a decision
made out of fear or panic.