Re: Inevitable death, was Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
At 09:30 AM 7/15/2014, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
If that is the case, how would peering with Netflix help you any?
It would not, and that is the point. Netflix' "peering" scheme (again, I take issue with the use of the term) doesn't help ISPs with high backhaul costs. Measures to reduce the amount of bandwidth that Netflix wastes, via uncached unicast streaming, would. But (and this is the point of the message which started this thread) they are sitting pretty as a monopoly and do not feel a need to work with ISPs to solve this problem. It's frustrating and is causing us to look for workarounds -- including going as far as to found a competing streaming service that is more ISP-friendly.
I took a look at your plans at http://www.lariat.net/rates.html. You use the Netflix brand in your advertising (in the flyer)
We don't "use" their brand, but do mention them as an example of a company that provides streaming media. (We also mention YouTube, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.) It's natural for them to be on that list because they have such a large market share that they qualify as a monopoly. They are attempting to leverage their market power against ISPs instead of working with us, which is a shame. Again, a customer of a small rural ISP ought to be every bit as valuable to them as a Comcast customer. We should receive at least the amount per customer that Comcast receives, especially because our costs are higher.
but none of your plans are actually fast enough to provide Netflix service (up to 6 Mbps per stream for Super HD).
Netflix itself claims that you need only half a megabit to stream. (Whether that claim is accurate is another matter, but that is what they themselves say.)
Selling 1 Mbps is just not going to do it going forward, not even in rural areas.
Unfortunately, due to the cost of backhaul (which the FCC is doing nothing about; it has refused to deal with the problem of anticompetitive price gouging on Special Access lines), that's what we can offer. The FCC has also failed to release enough spectrum (Shannon's Law) to allow us to provide much more to the average user; we have to budget access point bandwidth carefully. We do what we can and price as best we can. Most of our customers, given a choice of possible levels of service, choose 1 Mbps and in fact are satisfied with that because the quality is high. Remember, due to Van Jacobson's algorithm, a 10 Mbps TCP session that drops packets slows down (by a factor of 2 for each dropped packet!) to a net throughput of less than 1 Mbps very quickly. So, we concentrate on quality and our customers have a very good experience. Usually better than with cable modem connections with much higher claimed speeds. We're used to doing a lot with a little and watching every penny. But Netflix doesn't have the same attitude. It wastes bandwidth. Rural ISPs and their customers cannot afford to cover the cost of that waste.
I can say how we solve the backhaul problem. We only lease dark fiber and then put our own 10 Gbps equipment on it. We can upgrade that any day to 40G, 100G or whatever we need, without any additional rent for the fiber.
Nice if you can do that. We have not been able to obtain affordable dark fiber in our area.
Given your expertise seems to be wireless links, you could also backhaul using Ubiquiti Airfiber: http://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber5/
That Ubiquiti radio reaches at most one mile reliably due to rain fade. Most of our links go much farther. Wireless is our specialty and we do know our options; we use carefully selected and engineered microwave and millimeter wave links throughout our network. Being a WISP is not easy; it employs every skill I've acquired throughout my entire life and is constantly challenging me to improve and learn more. --Brett Glass
Given your expertise seems to be wireless links, you could also backhaul using Ubiquiti Airfiber: http://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber5/
That Ubiquiti radio reaches at most one mile reliably due to rain fade. Most of our links go much farther. Wireless is our specialty and we do know our options; we use carefully selected and engineered microwave and millimeter wave links throughout our network.
Read again. You answered thinking about AirFiber 24, while he mentioned AirFiber 5, which goes much longer. Rubens
Brett, You should investigate TVWS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spaces_(radio) it works extremely well in your kind of scenario and at a minimum will solve your over the air data rate challenges. The release of TVWS has provided WISPs in rural areas with almost 1 GHz of unlicensed space and it goes much further than the other unlicensed bands like ISM and UNII. Technically the same amount of frequency was released for everyone, but in urban/suburban markets much more is already taken by licensed over the air TV broadcasters and wireless microphones, both as licensed users have absolute rights to the frequencies they're using. If you want to know vendors that supply the gear, since most of the BWA guys haven't grabbed it yet, let me know and I'll send what I have off list. Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms -------------------------------- On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 1:28 PM, Brett Glass <nanog@brettglass.com> wrote:
At 09:30 AM 7/15/2014, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
If that is the case, how would peering with Netflix help you any?
It would not, and that is the point. Netflix' "peering" scheme (again, I take issue with the use of the term) doesn't help ISPs with high backhaul costs. Measures to reduce the amount of bandwidth that Netflix wastes, via uncached unicast streaming, would. But (and this is the point of the message which started this thread) they are sitting pretty as a monopoly and do not feel a need to work with ISPs to solve this problem. It's frustrating and is causing us to look for workarounds -- including going as far as to found a competing streaming service that is more ISP-friendly.
I took a look at your plans at http://www.lariat.net/rates.html. You use the Netflix brand in your advertising (in the flyer)
We don't "use" their brand, but do mention them as an example of a company that provides streaming media. (We also mention YouTube, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.) It's natural for them to be on that list because they have such a large market share that they qualify as a monopoly. They are attempting to leverage their market power against ISPs instead of working with us, which is a shame. Again, a customer of a small rural ISP ought to be every bit as valuable to them as a Comcast customer. We should receive at least the amount per customer that Comcast receives, especially because our costs are higher.
but none of your plans are actually fast enough to provide Netflix service (up to 6 Mbps per stream for Super HD).
Netflix itself claims that you need only half a megabit to stream. (Whether that claim is accurate is another matter, but that is what they themselves say.)
Selling 1 Mbps is just not going to do it going forward, not even in rural areas.
Unfortunately, due to the cost of backhaul (which the FCC is doing nothing about; it has refused to deal with the problem of anticompetitive price gouging on Special Access lines), that's what we can offer. The FCC has also failed to release enough spectrum (Shannon's Law) to allow us to provide much more to the average user; we have to budget access point bandwidth carefully. We do what we can and price as best we can. Most of our customers, given a choice of possible levels of service, choose 1 Mbps and in fact are satisfied with that because the quality is high. Remember, due to Van Jacobson's algorithm, a 10 Mbps TCP session that drops packets slows down (by a factor of 2 for each dropped packet!) to a net throughput of less than 1 Mbps very quickly. So, we concentrate on quality and our customers have a very good experience. Usually better than with cable modem connections with much higher claimed speeds.
We're used to doing a lot with a little and watching every penny. But Netflix doesn't have the same attitude. It wastes bandwidth. Rural ISPs and their customers cannot afford to cover the cost of that waste.
I can say how we solve the backhaul problem. We only lease dark fiber and then put our own 10 Gbps equipment on it. We can upgrade that any day to 40G, 100G or whatever we need, without any additional rent for the fiber.
Nice if you can do that. We have not been able to obtain affordable dark fiber in our area.
Given your expertise seems to be wireless links, you could also backhaul using Ubiquiti Airfiber: http://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber5/
That Ubiquiti radio reaches at most one mile reliably due to rain fade. Most of our links go much farther. Wireless is our specialty and we do know our options; we use carefully selected and engineered microwave and millimeter wave links throughout our network.
Being a WISP is not easy; it employs every skill I've acquired throughout my entire life and is constantly challenging me to improve and learn more.
--Brett Glass
Brett, you are missing my point. I am no expert on wireless links and the equipment I pointed at might be garbage. But you have a backhaul problem that you need to solve. If not that equipment, then something else. You are balking up the wrong tree with Netflix. People want high bandwidth video and an ISP need to be able to provide that. Caching could not solve your problem, not even close. Netflix might function at .5 Mbps but that would be their poor quality setting. People do not want that. They want the Super HD version of the video. The 6 Mbps version. And this is just now, later on they are going to want the 4k version of the video. Netflix is not a monopoly. They are just one player out of many. You can not expect someone else to solve your backhaul problem. Neither Netflix, YouTube nor Hulu are charities. They do not really care if your customers leave you to a competitor, to get the wanted bandwidth. And neither should they. You hate the fact that the world is moving to high bandwidth video. We on the other hand love it. We sell FTTH and it is a selling point for our technology over, say, wireless internet. We want Netflix to move on to even higher bandwidth streams. I can not see how you can stay in the game if you do not adapt. From everything said here it appears your main problem is that backhaul, so find a solution. The solution will not come from bashing the video services and it will not come from starting up your own service. Even if you by some miracle made a good service, people would STILL want Netflix, HBO, Hulu, YouTube and many others. Nobody can expect to get a monopoly, not even you. Caching, were it possible, is not that effective. Say it could save 50% of the traffic (unlikely) you would still be paying effectively $10 per Mbps and you would still go broke. You simply can not be paying that much for traffic in a marked, where everyone else is paying $0.5/Mbps. Regards, Baldur
participants (4)
-
Baldur Norddahl -
Brett Glass -
Rubens Kuhl -
Scott Helms