FCC votes in favour of net neutrality

It will be interesting to see if the small number of people who have learned to massively abuse the FCCs complaint system to control TV content attempt the same thing for the internet.

The argument that "we get more traffic from netflix then we receive and that is unfair" is entirely spurious and without merit. The only reason Netflix is sending the data is because a Comcast customer asked them to and the poor smuck stuck using Comcast as his ISP has already paid Comcast to provide this service. Comcast needs to shut the fuck up and get fined to death if they ever try this illegal throttling and website blocking ever again especially since they were refusing to provide the one and only service they had been hired by the consumer to do.

I don't know what the peering agreement was between Comcast and the backbone that carried Netflix's traffic. If it happened now, I think Comcast would have to utilize the courts instead of disrupting service. That's one good thing the publicity and net-neutrality brought.

50% of peak traffic cannot be ignored. Designs specific to this traffic have to be implemented to maintain efficiency. By nature these designs are biased: the so-called fast lane, placing dedicated servers in ISP's data centers, or facilitating private connections to nearby data centers (the Google model).

Other ISPs also opened up their data centers to house Netflix's servers. Netflix is paying many of them for their services, instead of paying the backbone. Net-neutrality may make this arrangement illegal (after a long expensive court battle that will only benefit lawyers) which means Netflix could have to go back to CDNs and backbones. Not only will their streams suffer, but so will all the others using the backbone.

This isn't about Comcast. It's about Netflix and 50% of peak traffic. It can't be ignored no matter how neutral you are.

I became aware just this week, that Comcast changed their internet service December 2015 in most major markets to a data-usage plan. Customers are limited to 300GB/month after which they are charged $10 per 50GB over this amount. They will alert customers via email whether they are nearing the 300GB threshold, and will allow a grace period of 4 months where they will not charge for overage when 300GB is exceeded.

Keep in mind that 300GB/month is about 150 hours of HD TV streaming or 5 hours per day. If you subscribe to any 4K streams, I can see blowing past the 300GB boundary pretty fast.
here's more at comcast's site

And an opinion piece from Money blasting Comcast for charging customers more for greater usage.

Our household hasn't exceeded (or come close) or we would have gotten the email/browser warnings. I have turned on the traffic meter function of my router to monitor data use. This is where I came up with the 2GB/hour for streaming HD.

How do you net neutrality proponents feel about this? Charging customers for usage is a direct result of this, since they cannot pass this cost on to media content providers.

I'm fine with it. There is probably an argument to be made that some extent of internet access should be commonly available without cost, but that isn't the IP companies' problem, but politics. As long as things are as they are now, paying for bandwidth is fine with me.

If it was a competitive market I wpuld agree but in the vast majoroty of the country cable companies have a legal monopoly over certain areas and no one can legally set up a competing similar service. The phone company and satellite companies found legal ways around these agreements but the vast majority of the country still has just one high speed provider.

Personally, I say take away their legal monopolies and open everything up to competition. Cities shpuld be legally requirong builders to put in empty tubes into the grpund when they build and that way a competitor can just take advantage of existong infrastructure and lay their fiber to it. Personally, I would never pay an ISP who caps my data but I livw in one of the few places in the country with a competitive ISP market (even if it is just four competitors).

http://www.extremetech.com/internet...n-15-states-acknowledges-caps-arent-necessary

If Comcast wants to go to a pure metering system then I am fine with that but that is not what the company is doing. If I use 10 gigs instead of 300 will I get charged 1/30th the price each month? I doubt it.

Comcast isn't capping data. Who is?

They don't really reduce the cost when you use little, just charge more when you use a lot. They have to cover costs for the infrastructure to deliver whatever bandwidth the market demands. And throttle it by charging heavy users more.

Deregulated natural-gas exists in the Atlanta market. You pay Atlanta Gas and Light a carrier fee and buy your gas from dozens of companies. Internet could be the same I suppose. DSL is kind of. But it really can't compete with cable.

That's how they do it Europe. With that system, they pay much less per month than we do, and have far faster speeds than we do.

I'm not sure what the product is other than a carrier fee. Seems like it would make it more expensive...

Can you link to a discussion of the European model? Does this apply to more than twisted copper in Europe. They still have national phone companies there.

This is an older article, but my understanding is that prices have only dropped, while speeds have gone up, in the years since it was written.

mmmm as of 2011 it was twisted copper. We have that here already with multiple DSL providers coming over the local phone company's lines. It's not that fast.

I don't know if BT has been forced to allow other providers (fiber, coax) to use their poles and conduit.

Possibly regulating the cable companies here would work. But I don't think our country would do that, and it would be up to the states or counties (cities?).

Part of the problem is the less dense population here. Europe benefits from their population density, both for "broadband" transport and bits/bytes. I don't think their model can be applied here.

If you read the article, the UK's speeds are faster than ours.

According to the aritlce

It was written 5 years ago, given that speeds have only increased in the UK since then, it seems safe to say that they've figured out something.

It can be done.

I'm guessing you missed this part of the article as well.

There have been more recent studies on the subject, all done by reputable research organizations which agree with the conclusions of this article. Here's an article from last year which shows just how far we've fallen in terms of internet speeds since the previous article was written.

I read both your articles. The first from 5 years ago was anecdotal, not evidence based. The second in your post above shows wildly varying rankings between reports, but mostly it shows there isn't that much difference between the US and the UK for wired connections, or between the US and most 1st world countries. If cell phone data transfer rates are your concern then we're talking about two different things.

Yes there is a huge difference between the fastest countries' ISPs and ours (think South Korea and Sweden), but I'll bet the infrastructures and government handling of access is markedly different. I think you'll have to acknowledge a different geography, government, business and social structure between here and there.

The article from five years ago makes a point of compairing the UK and the US. Today we're at parity (0.4Mbps advantage to the UK for average connections). Germany and France are slower than either of us. This is going from the Akamai report.

If you want anecdotes, my service has gone from sustained 8Mbps a few years ago (15Mbps "boost") to a sustained 30Mbps download rate today. This is with Comcast with no change in rate (about $60/month for just internet less than 300GB data/month). I could pay more for faster 1Gb service, but why bother?

But none of this is germane to the topic of net neutrality.

My point resurrecting the thread is that Comcast customers are now in a pay for use business model as opposed to a flat rate. This is a direct result of net neutrality. People are complaining about it.

Allow competition and the data caps will disappear the same way wireless companies no longer charge per minute of talk time. Though the FCC allowed too much consolidation in the wireless industry and that is why unlimited data plans disappeared.

The barrier preventing new ISPs entering a market is local community government and private utility companies.

I don't see any easy way around this. Privately owned utilities would need to be forced to allow other companies access to their poles and trenches without charging excessive fees. Laws would have to be enacted at the state and federal level to prevent communities from granting exclusive right of way to single companies.

Sucks to live in the US. We need more regulation.

More.

Some quotes from the Wired article in your link. Your conclusion is perplexing after reading your source.

What's clear is that local communities gave exclusivity contracts (regulation) to cable companies for some kind of kickback. That kind of soft corruption should be regulated against. Without more regulation at the federal level, what is there to prevent communities from acting this way?

^The problem is viewing benign/beneficial regulation as the natural result of your impulse to fix the problems caused by "bad" regulation by adopting more regulations (this time of the "good" variety). Where does your optimism come from? Why do you think the fix will this time somehow spare us from the bad shit that resulted from the last rounds of regulations? There are already plenty of laws that provide actionable cause against corrupt practices. If the fuckers are so corrupt, how the fuck do you trust the same kind of politician fuckers that fucked us so much in the past?

I'll agree that the feds might be smart to 'preempt the field' and set national standards since this is one of those rare cases as with air traffic control and radio spectrum allocation where it's among those limited powers reasonably (i.e. constitutionally) appropriate to be handled on a federal level.

But fuck off with that 'our country sucks we need more regulations' paradox nonsense.

Yeah, that's why they kept quoting that Harvard study.

Unless, of course, you're talking about price, in which case folks in the UK pay way less than we do.

Nope. Didn't even mention it.

All addressed in previous comments and articles I've linked to. Suffice it to say that in places where the population densities are comparable, the US still comes out way behind.

And you're paying 3 to 4 times what they are in Europe.

Nope. Don't want anecdotes at all. That's why I picked an article (out of many) which linked to a study done by Harvard.

Right, but you brought it up.

Nope. You're a Comcast fanboy for some reason. I don't know why, don't particularly care, but I've seen enough of the shit you've posted here to know that you're more than happy to suck Comcast's cock.

But the thing is, our internet service doesn't suck unless you live in the boonies. We're on par if not a bit better than the rest of the developed world. And it's all driven by commerce. I just find it amusing when people here point to better service in more socialistic countries and whine because we don't have it as good, and then turn around and make stupid comments about all regulation being bad.

mmmm I'd love to have google fiber (or any for that matter). But there isn't any where I live. Such as it is Comcast's service is acceptable. They're not the cable-guys they were back in the 80s.

I think if you do an honest price comparison you'll find that our service isn't that much more. Certainly not "3 to 4 times" as much for equivalent service. As this is your statement I'll leave it to you. But I think we could still use a social upgrade to enable us to be on par with Euros. Our roads, schools, healthcare, quality of life is less than theirs.