On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 9:09 AM, <nanog@brettglass.com> wrote:
At 11:39 PM 7/12/2014, Steven Tardy wrote:
How would "4U of rent" and 500W($50) electricity *not* save money?
Because, on top of that, we'd have huge bandwidth expenses.
I know I'm just a dumb troll, but don't you have the same bandwidth demands already from your users pulling down netflix content today? If your users don't use netflix, then this is a moot point, and we can end the discussion now. If your users *do* use netflix currently, then you already have this bandwidth demand on your network, and finding ways to reduce or offload it would be an improvement.
And Netflix would refuse to cover any of that out of the billions in fees it's collecting from subscribers. We can't raise our prices (that would not only cost us customers but be unfair to many of them; it would be forcing the non-Netflix users to subsidize Netflix). We simply need Netflix to pay at least some of its freight.
Why not follow a model that other networks use (if you've ever bought transit in Asia, you've no doubt come across this -- you get a price of $x/mbps for transit; but if you're exchanging traffic with China ASes, that traffic is billed at $x*6/mbps.) Simply inform your users that due to the heavy demands netflix places on your infrastructure, you'll need to add a streaming surcharge onto their monthly bill to cover the costs, and then let the market solve your problem. Either users really do want netflix badly enough to pay the surchage and cover your costs, or they opt to find a different provider (in which case their heavy bandwidth usage is no longer impacting your network, so problem solved), or they decide they really didn't need netflix that badly (in which case the heavy bandwidth usage also goes away, and your problem is solved).
If your ISP isn't tall enough for Netflix, Akamai has a lower barrier of entry. Have you let Akamai give you a local cache? why or why not?
Akamai refused to do so when we approached them. The Akamai rep was rather rude and dismissive about it; we were too small to be worthy of their attention.
It's important to note that the growth of rural ISPs is limited by population. Even if we did not have rapacious cable and telephone monopolies to compete with, our size is naturally limited by the number of possible customers. Each of those customers is every bit as valuable as an urban customer, but Netflix won't even give us the SAME amount per customer it gives Comcast, much less more (it costs more to serve each one). And Netflix is particularly out of line because it is insisting that we pay huge bandwidth bills for an exclusive connection just to it. It is also wasting our existing bandwidth by refusing to allow caching.
See, this is why I think it was a bad move for any content player to bow to $cableco's demands; it's a slippery slope. Once you negotiate with one extortionist, the next blackmailer asks for even more money. The only answer is to never negotiate with...er, sorry, tuned into the wrong psychic channel there for a moment.
If Netflix continues on its current course, ALL ISPs -- not just rural ones, will eventually be forced to rebel. And it will not be pretty.
And the rebellion will take what form, exactly? Cutting off netflix and other alternative content sources, leaving people with the predetermined slop fed to them over the airwaves and by their franchise-agreement-granted-monopoly cable company? Seems like exactly what the cable companies want. It's good they've managed to recruit an army of foot soldiers to lead the vanguard of the attack without even having to pay them--they can sit back and keep their hands relatively unbloodied as the battle unfolds.
Our best hope, unless Netflix changes its ways, is for a competitor to come along which has more ISP-friendly practices. Such a competitor could easily destroy Netflix via better relations with ISPs... and better performance and lower costs due to caching at the ISP.
That won't happen, because allowing content to be freely cached at the edge without control is tantamount to giving the content away without restriction; and no level of premium content is going to come with a license like that. Like it or not, no content creator is going to give up all rights to their content like that; it's not a (currently) viable business model. You might just as well ask why George Lucas continues to charge money for showings of his movies (oh, right--better make that Bob Iger now, sorry. ^_^;) Content creation is a business, and needs to make money to stay in business. Until that end of the equation changes, allowing content to be freely cached, replicated, and distributed just isn't going to happen, and to expect otherwise is hopelessly unrealistic.
--Brett Glass
Matt