Verizon Picks The Worst Possible Person To Try To Bullshit Into Unnecessary Upgrade
from the smooth-move-exlax dept
It's no secret that ISP support reps will consistently tell you whatever you'd like to hear when trying to sell you on more expensive packages, even if the claims are miles from reality. Sometimes that's just a support rep going rogue to meet numbers and try to make a sale, and sometimes it's part of a consistent, scripted effort to mislead the consumer. Frost and Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn says he ran into the latter recently when he called to renegotiate his FiOS triple play bundle rate with the telco, and was informed, repeatedly, that he needed to upgrade his speed from 50 Mbps to 75 Mbps if he wanted Netflix to stream properly.That wasn't the brightest move on Verizon's part, since Rayburn covers the streaming video sector for a living. Rayburn was quick to highlight that Ookla data shows that the average bitrate delivered to a Verizon customer last month was around 3.5 Mbps. Even in a household full of streaming video fanatics, there's really not much that 75 Mbps will provide that 50 Mbps won't. And while Rayburn warns that uninformed users can easily fall into Verizon's trap, it should only take the average consumer about five minutes of Google use to avoid this pitfall.
Netflix's website informs users the company's standard definition streaming service eats about 1 GB of data per hour per stream of standard def video, and Netflix recommends roughly 3 Mbps for standard def content. High definition video meanwhile consumes around 3 GB per hour, per stream, with Netflix recommending 5 Mbps for HD video. Even if you're part of the tiny number of people with a 4K set looking to stream Ultra HD, you'll only need a connection of around 25 Mbps, according to Netflix. Of course this requires the average consumer to know what a gigabyte is, which is no safe bet.
Rayburn proceeds to document that this wasn't just a one-off situation, but that Verizon lied about his need for 75 Mbps to obtain "smoother" Netflix streaming numerous times:
"While some might want to chalk this us to an isolated incident, or an over zealous sales rep, that’s not the case at all. I called in three times and spoke to three different reps, plus one online and got the same pitch. Clearly this sales tactic is being driven by those higher up in the company and isn’t something a sales rep made up on their own. And two years ago, Verizon tried to pitch me the exact same story, promising better quality Netflix streaming if I upgraded my Internet package."The biggest irony here, unmentioned by Rayburn, is that he's consistently been one of only a few analysts on Verizon's side during the company's recent interconnection scuffle with Netflix, blaming Netflix, not giant ISPs, for most of the congestion issues that magically started popping up over the last year or so as ISPs like Verizon started pushing Netflix for direct interconnection fees. In other words, Verizon not only tried to bullshit someone who spends their life discussing streaming issues, but it managed to annoy one of the company's few allies on the net neutrality and interconnection front. That's quite a double play.
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Filed Under: bandwidth, dan rayburn, upgrades
Companies: netflix, verizon
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Our consumer protection agency (PROCON) started a service where you can opt-in to have your line blocked for telemarketing and the companies that do not respect it are fined. My phones have been pleasantly silent since then.
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He is then asked if 50mbps is enough and he admits that 50mbps is indeed enough. So when did the lies happen? Also if there is other parts of the chat log why would you post this part. If this is the most incriminating part of the log you could post,and I assume it is because why would you not post the most incriminating part,then Verizon didnt do anything wrong and this article is blown way out of proportion.
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--Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
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I wonder how Star Trek fans feel about that?
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Star Trek: Deep Space Blog
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Once you have enough bandwidth that Netflix isn't reducing quality to conserve it, adding more won't improve your the streaming. The jump form 50 to 75mps won't do what the sales rep said: it won't make things "smoother". That's the lie.
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Dan Rayburn: they told me if i go from 50 mbps to 75 mpbs i will get better netflix streaming. is that true?
Robert: Yes it you have more bandwidth you will have smoother video viewing.
COMMENT: Looks like Robert is lying right there, or he's simply not answering Dan's question, but is attempting to look as if he's answering the question. Going from 50 mpbs to 75 mpbs won't improve Dan's netflix streaming since 50 mbps is well above the netflix requirements. So there's one lie.
Dan Rayburn: but isnt 50 mbps already enough?
Robert: yes it is enough. 75 will just be smoother
COMMENT: Dan attempts to confirm that Robert actually understands the original question by pointing out his current speed of 50 mbps and Robert responds with an outright lie. 50 mbps is already at least 10 times faster than netflix's requirement and Robert has the gall to claim that going to 75mbps will make the streaming smoother. So for the two responses I see from Robert... BOTH of them are lies.
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You see, increasing the bandwidth does absolutely nothing in that case so the rep is lying when he/she says it's gonna make things smoother.
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[I remember Youtube at one time used to buffer videos from beginning to end the moment you opened them and you used to be able to jump from one portion of the video to any other without losing previously buffered sections. It seems like they removed that feature for most videos now. Not sure if Youtube, Flash player, or HTML5 (depending on the video) is to blame or if it's something in the settings (though I tried messing with those but couldn't fix it). Perhaps it's just a way to allow Youtube or Flash to better track what parts of a video customers tend to watch but it sure is a waste of bandwidth to delete previously buffered video just because someone jumped from one portion of a video to another. That means every time they want to move around those video sections need to be re-downloaded.]
That's the thing about qualitative marketing terms. "Smoother" is a qualitative property (though it can be quantified more finely if you begin to account for various other factors, conditions, and demands) and can also depend on various conditions.
Doesn't Mike always argue that people will find uses for faster Internet connections and that's why ISPs always need to upgrade.
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Mike argues that if ISPs provide faster connections with higher caps people will make applications and services that take advantage of that connection, and that imposing data caps or speed limits because no one is using that ability right now (or justifying caps by saying few users risk approaching their caps) prevents the innovations that would make use of that connection. Not that the random user will always need or use that higher level of service. Neither the TD article or Dan are arguing that you might not need or want 75mbps, just that going from 50mbps per second to 75mbps wouldn't result in the across the board improvement in streaming quality that is being sold by the Verizon reps.
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It's only true if Verizon is violating Net Neutrality behind the scenes and maliciously stuttering the 50mbps connection to make Netflix have issues.
So, my question to you, Mr Verizon Shill (for that is what you painfully obviously are!) is...are Verizon stuttering their 50mbps customers to try to illegally squeeze more money out of them?
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Overblown
More bandwidth is better, all else being equal.
Whether streaming will be "smoother" or not depends on what else is running on the connection - in some cases (admittedly not many), 75 Mbps will indeed be smoother than 50 Mbps.
But if the customer already has 50 Mbps and streaming video isn't smooth, it's reasonably possible they're one of the few who actually need more.
Yes, it's an exaggeration. But I just bought a new car last week - compared to the whoppers car dealers tell, VZ is not bad.
[BTW, knowing how much a "gigabyte" is won't help much here - data rates are measured in bits/second, not bytes/second.]
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Re: Overblown
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Jiffylube pads their bills?
I take Jiffylube mechanics are also prepared to deal with the 1950s style consequences of his questionable behavior, that is a back alley beatdown by the disgruntled customer and five of his streetgang friends, armed with Louisville Sluggers.
Maybe they use aluminum bats these days.
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Re: Jiffylube pads their bills?
Your local mechanic will probably do a better job, and is MUCH less likely to use sleazy sales tactics to get you to buy stuff that you don't need.
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In this case I suspect that the last mile infrastructure is piss poor as is with most major ISPs. The user is paying for up to 50 Mbps, when in reality they are receiving less than 10 because their last mile hardware is overloaded. To be honest I wish Title 2 classification could impose requirements on last mile infrastructure to have capacity for at least 80% of total promised bandwidth to consumers connected to it so that this kind of thing wouldn't happen, but I won't hold my breath.
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Also, Dan noted that he wasn't having problems with streaming quality. And he recently had streamed 10 simultaneous streams of GoT and got clear streaming on all of them, capping out at 29 mbps. So no, last mile improvements wouldn't have affected this call.
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Let's be honest though, increasing his connection speed wouldn't have improved much of anything here assuming he was getting 50 Mbps and un-throttled traffic from Netflix.
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I love your claim at the end. "Well car dealers tell bigger lies so we can just ignore the ones Verison tells". If that was a legal test it throws out an entire body of tort law around lying as a sales tactic.
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Re: Overblown
As Rayburn notes, he already had smooth performance, so he wasn't over-saturating the line. I get your point, but it doesn't apply here. I agree it's not the worst of Verizon's nonsensical claims ever seen on this green earth, the amusing part is they were trying to bullshit the very last person who'd fall for it.
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Re: Overblown
If you increase your bandwidth from 50 to 75Mb it will not help this problem. It would only make the game download go a little faster.
In order to prevent this from happening you have to take other measures on the network, such as throttling the Steam client to use less bandwidth than the full amount you have available. Or configuring Quality of Service to prioritize specific packets.
So increasing your internet bandwidth will not, in of itself, in any case ever, make your netflix streaming "smoother". Unless your max bandwidth to start was something very low like 1Mb.
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In my experience this is not true. A faster internet connection tends to result in a smoother experience for everyone all other things equal.
In some circumstances the game server limits its upload bandwidth. If the server's max upload bandwidth is 50 Mb/sec then a faster Internet connection would not result in more bandwidth being allocated to the downloader and that excess bandwidth can be used for streaming. But even if the upload server can handle higher speeds I still find that faster download bandwidth speeds result in a smoother experience for everyone all other things constant. It all depends on how your network equipment allocates the bandwidth but if you have more bandwidth the network has more bandwidth to allocate to each user.
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If it's other video or audio streams (with finite maximum bitrates), then you're mistaken.
All I'm saying is that there are cases (admittedly, few) where more bandwidth - even if you already have 50 Mbps - will indeed make Netflix stream better.
So I don't think it's unreasonable for VZ to train their low-level support people to suggest more bandwidth when customers say Netflix isn't streaming smoothly.
Yes, it can be (and probably is often) abused in a sleazy way.
But compared to the way VZ and others scheme and sleaze, this is so minor as to be almost acceptable. "Overblown."
[BTW, I've been doing network engineering since 1978.]
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I just don't think it rises to the level of reproach it's getting.
We may not like it, but _most_ businesses do this kind of upselling.
I personally think it's unethical, and we don't do it in my company.
But it's not exceptional.
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I guess I fail to see how unethical business practices fail to be newsworthy when evidence of the lack of ethics is exposed. But I guess in this day and age the only thing that we are allowed to talk and complain about are things that haven't been done. I mean, who would ever complain about unfair and unethical treatment thats been going on for years? (I mean aside from a ton of countries that are throwing out their dictators and the scraps we get out of china)
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Routers that allow hogging.
If I wanted to, I could reserve specific ports for high-priority data, so that any gaming would take priority over streaming or downloading. But that's a lot of work.
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Re: Overblown
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gigabit?
I keep seeing articles blasting the ISPs for not rolling out gigabit service yet here we have VZ trying to sell faster service and they shouldn't?
Mixed messages...
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And nothing in this article suggests you only need 6mbps per second for the average user. Where do you get that value from? The article is a user with 50 mbps (nearly 9 times the value you use) saying 75 mbps wouldn't improve his usage or the average users right now. where does 6 mbps come in?
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Gigabit will allow several streams, or for one person to download big data fast.
In fact, with gigabit, it may be easier to just pre-load movies rather than stream them, since that requires a burst of bandwidth rather than prolonged use, and allows for better compression.
A well-compressed 1080p movie would be ~4-6GB. About enough time to make popcorn.
So yeah gigabit is awesome not because it lets you stream better, but because it gives you alternatives to streaming at all.
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Re: Gigabit will allow several streams, or for one person to download big data fast.
A 20 gigabyte game (typical for AAA games these days) would come in in less than an hour.
A 100 gigabyte game (over what even the biggest games currently take) would take about two hours, rather than days.
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If Verizon supplied electricity...
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A bigger sin
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Re: A bigger sin
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Scam artists
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It's beyond puffery; it's consumer fraud.
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*When rider falls off a cliff.
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A junker car could theoretically reach 'up to' well over a hundred miles an hour... if you dropped it from a plane, yet advertising that speed as though it had any reasonable expectation of reaching it in everyday use would be ridiculously deceptive.
ISP's should be forced to tailor their advertising based upon the average, or median speeds that customers in a given area experience, no more of that 'Speeds up to...' crap, when the reality isn't even close to the numbers they're providing.
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Re: Re: Re: It's beyond puffery; it's consumer fraud.
Absolutely. I'm not sure how the FCC and FTC officially divide their jurisdiction over ISPs with respect to unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices, but the FTC could certainly end the near-universal misrepresentation of Internet speeds within a matter of months by adopting a rule mandating something along the lines of your suggestion.
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Analysts and customers
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Re: German NET NEUTRALITY KILLS video
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Just ask Günter Oettinger about it.
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He then said the 25/25 plan was no avaiable in my area and I would have to upgrade anyway. But I got a free phone line. Even though I ordered online. I told him to fuck off and hung up.
I later called under my wifes name, and ordered the 25/25. Guess what, it was avaiable.
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