South Korean ISP Somehow Thinks Netflix Owes It Money Because Squid Game Is Popular

from the troll-tolls dept

We've noted for a while how the world's telecom executives have a fairly entrenched entitlement mindset. As in, they often tend to jealously eye streaming and online ad revenues and assume they're inherently owed a cut of those revenues just because at some point they traveled on their networks. You saw this hubris at play during AT&T's claims that "big tech" gets a "free ride" on their networks, which insisted that companies like Google should pay them significant, additional troll tolls "just because" (which triggered the entire net neutrality fight in the States).

AT&T pretty solidly established this entitlement mindset domestically, and I've watched it slowly exported overseas. Like this week in South Korea, where South Korean broadband provider SK Broadband sued Netflix simply because its new TV show, Squid Game, is popular. Basically, the lawsuit argues, because the show is so popular and is driving a surge in bandwidth consumption among South Koreans watching it, Netflix is somehow obligated to pay the ISP more money:

"South Korean Internet service provider SK Broadband has sued Netflix to pay for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work because of a surge of viewers to the U.S. firm's content, an SK spokesperson said on Friday.

The move comes after a Seoul court said Netflix should "reasonably" give something in return to the internet service provider for network usage, and multiple South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic.

Except that's not how any of this works. ISPs design their networks for maximum potential peak load. It's completely irrelevant how popular some content traveling over your network is. Your job as a telecom operator is to design networks that easily flex to handle a surge in capacity, regardless of traffic type. If you're failing to do that, it's because you're not designing your network and investing in capacity properly. It's not suddenly the content company's job to pay you more money to fix a problem you created.

Notice how SK Broadband also trots out the "Netflix doesn't pay for bandwidth" trope, which is a deeply entrenched talking point in telecom lobbyist circles and also... simply isn't true. Consumers pay ISPs for bandwidth. Streaming companies like Netflix pay ISPs for bandwidth. The idea that Netflix is somehow getting a "free ride" on telecom networks is just not based on any factual or technical reality. That hasn't mattered to the South Korean courts, which have been leaning toward the telecom point of view in rulings the last few years:

"the Seoul Central District Court ruled against Netflix in June, saying that SK is seen as providing "a service provided at a cost" and it is "reasonable" for Netflix to be "obligated to provide something in return for the service".

SK estimated the network usage fee Netflix needed to pay was about 27.2 billion won ($22.9 million) in 2020 alone, the court document said.

Netflix has appealed against the ruling, court records showed, with fresh proceedings to start in late December.

The South Korean courts, shockingly, are wrong. South Korean telecoms have convinced some in the South Korean legal system that content companies should pony up additional cash if something is popular "just because," even if that makes no technical sense from a network design standpoint. It's the kind of bizarre legal outlook AT&T dreams of here in the U.S., and the "big tech is getting a free ride" concept is the foundation of the argument, despite not actually being true.

In addition to paying for bandwidth, companies like Netflix and Google also spend massive fortunes on their own transit networks, underseas cables, and in some cases (Google Fiber) their own residential ISPs. In Netflix's case, the company also operates a Content Delivery Network which helps greatly improve streaming efficiency and overall load, the hardware for which is provided to ISPs around the world, for free. Netflix has also been pretty flexible when it comes to designing adjustable tiers of service to help users on bandwidth caps (which, to be clear, are also bullshit cash grabs) avoid additional bandwidth fees.

So when you see a telecom (or one of their captured regulators, consultants, think tankers, or policy wonks) arguing that somebody is getting a free ride and should be throwing more money at them, what they're really saying is "we're too cheap to adequately invest in our networks and want you (Netflix, whoever) to give us money for no reason." That the South Korean courts have bought into this argument (largely because the content companies in question are U.S. based), is unfortunate.

Again, this whole bumbling, bad faith argument was a cornerstone of the origins of net neutrality, a battle that was (in part) about preventing regional telecom giants from exploiting their gatekeeper power to demand obnoxious, arbitrary troll tolls. Pushed by AT&T, some U.S. regulators (most notably and recently the FCC's Brendan Carr) are still pushing some variation of this dumb argument today. And the folks pushing it are generally hopeful you're too dumb to realize that it makes absolutely no technical sense.

Filed Under: bandwidth, free ride, internet, net neutrality, network traffic, south korea, squid game, streaming
Companies: netflix, sk broadband

Another Report Shows US Consumers Don't Get The Broadband Speeds They Pay For

from the false-advertising dept

Yet another report has shown that US consumers aren't getting the broadband speeds they're paying for.

Researchers from broadband deal portal AllConnect dug through FCC data on broadband speeds and found that about 45 million Americans aren't getting the speeds that broadband providers are advertising. Fiber and cable broadband providers appeared to have the toughest time providing the speeds they advertise, with those subscribers getting around 55% of the speeds they were promised. Satellite and DSL providers generally offer crappy speeds, but at least, the report found, those speeds were delivered more consistently.

The firm noted that consumers just aren't getting accurate data on what speed is available, or how much speed they'll get. Something that's kind of important during a pandemic in which broadband is key to education, employment, health care, human connection, and opportunity:

"Having dependable internet is crucial right now, and with so many options available, it is important to have information like this to help consumers make the right choice for their needs. Being able to compare various aspects of internet service like reliability and speed helps make those decisions a little easier,” Layton adds."

Granted this has been a problem for the better part of this decade. And it's another problem (much like patchy availability and high prices) federal regulators haven't done enough to seriously address. Speed data ISPs provide to the FCC is notoriously unreliable, and the FCC historically doesn't do enough to verify availability and speed claims. It only takes a few minutes perusing our $350 broadband availability map, which all but hallucinates competition and throughput, to realize there's a chasm between what the US government and industry claims exists, and what actually exists.

Every year, the FCC is mandated by Congress to release a report detailing the status of the U.S. broadband industry. If broadband isn't being deployed on a "timely basis," the agency is supposed to, you know, do something about that. But every year, sometimes regardless of party, the agency, swaddled in dodgy data, pretends this isn't a problem. Why? Because we've fused extremely politically powerful telecom monopolies to our government surveillance apparatus, and holding these companies accountable is bad for political careers.

Of course ISPs aren't just engaged in false advertising when it comes to speeds. They also routinely use a bevy of misleading fees and surcharges to covertly jack up their advertised rates post sale -- to the point where your advertised cable or broadband bill can be as much as 45% higher than advertised. And again, aside from the very occasional suggestion by regulators that ISPs could maybe do better or be more transparent, nobody much does anything about it. After all, who wants to risk losing Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Charter campaign contributions by doing the right thing?

Filed Under: bandwidth, broadband, promises, speeds, study, truth in advertising

Major ISP Cox Begins Throttling Entire Neighborhoods for 'Excessive Usage'

from the not-the-future-we-were-promised dept

Major ISP Cox Communications has begun throttling the connections of entire neighborhoods for what the ISP deems "excessive usage." More specifically, the ISP has begun severely throttling the upstream connections of internet users who consume too much bandwidth for the ISP's liking, even if those users have paid the company extra for faster, unrestricted service.

Despite ISPs making it repeatedly clear that their networks are handling COVID-19 related strain very well, complaints about the new restrictions have been popping up at Reddit over the last month. While Cox confirmed to Ars Technica that it had started throttling the upstream speeds of entire neighborhoods, it wasn't willing to clarify how many neighborhoods are impacted and just how much data is deemed "excessive" by the cable giant:

"Cox responded by lowering the upload speeds on the gigabit-download plan from 35Mbps to 10Mbps for the customer's whole neighborhood. Cox confirmed to Ars that it has imposed neighborhood-wide slowdowns in multiple neighborhoods in cases like this one but didn't say how many excessive users are enough to trigger a speed decrease."

Some users who are impacted say they already pay Cox $150 a month for a 1 Gbps down, 35 Mbps up (now 10 Mbps) connection -- and an additional $50 per month to avoid going over Cox's 1 terabyte monthly bandwidth cap (which triggers a $10 per additional 50 GB surcharge once surpassed). And they're still facing slowdowns:

"Mike, a Cox customer from Gainesville, Florida, pays $150 a month, including $100 for 1Gbps download speeds and 35Mbps upload speeds, and another $50 for "unlimited data" so that he can go over Cox's 1TB data cap. Mike told Ars via email that most of his 8TB+ monthly use consists of scheduled device backups and "data sharing via various (encrypted) information-sharing protocols," such as peer-to-peer networks, between 1am and 8am."

Please keep in mind that as ISPs pushed for the net neutrality repeal (which demolished much of the FCC's authority over telecom), they claimed repeatedly that this would result in a massive surge in investment (that never happened, and at some ISPs, like AT&T, investment dropped). The idea that "regulatory freedom" would result in near-Utopian outcomes has been the mantra for several years, yet suddenly users who already pay an arm and a leg for bandwidth find themselves inexplicably throttled anyway? Without any transparency into "how much is too much?"

Telecom lawyer Harold Feld asked all the right questions on Twitter, noting that this certainly wasn't the deregulated Utopia US broadband consumers were promised:

Again, we heard more times than we could count that the net neutrality repeal and FCC lobotomy requested by telecom lobbyists would result in waves of investment and near magical outcomes. Yet here, instead of investing in the necessary upgrades to handle the added load, Cox is throttling the connections of entire neighborhoods that already pay an arm and a leg for bandwidth (Americans consistently pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world). Worse, they're doing so in a way that's entirely not transparent, and likely would have violated the transparency requirements in the FCC's net neutrality rules, had we not demolished them at lobbyist behest and in stark contrast to the will of the public.

Granted this is happening because, as we warned all along, mindlessly deregulating US telecom doesn't magically result in spurred investment and Utopia. In large part because when you eliminate regulatory oversight of a broken, monopolized market (without embracing reform or competitive policies), telecom giants always just double down on bad behavior. For ISPs that means higher prices, stifled investment, worse customer service, and more of the kind of non-transparent behaviors US consumers have complained about for decades.

Filed Under: bandwidth, excessive usage, fcc, net neutrality, regulations, throttling
Companies: cox

Netflix, Disney Throttle Video Streams In Europe To Handle COVID-19 Internet Strain

from the throttle-me dept

Netflix, Disney, YouTube, and Instagram have all announced they're temporarily throttling their video streams in Europe to help mitigate the bandwidth strain created by COVID-19, as millions hunker down to slow the spread of the pandemic. In a blog post, Netflix stated the company was throttling back the streaming quality of its titles by around 25% for 30 days after European regulators asked the company to do so to handle the pandemic-driven bandwidth surge:

"We immediately developed, tested and deployed a way to reduce Netflix’s traffic on these networks by 25% - starting with Italy and Spain, which were experiencing the biggest impact. Within 48 hours, we’d hit that goal and we’re now deploying this across the rest of Europe and the UK."

Netflix had already integrated settings that let users on slower or capped broadband plans manage their bit rate and stream quality. According to the company, the impact on visual quality should be minor (for everybody but videophiles, anyway):

"In normal circumstances, we have many (sometimes dozens) of different streams for a single title within each resolution. In Europe, for the next 30 days, within each category we’ve simply removed the highest bandwidth streams. If you are particularly tuned into video quality you may notice a very slight decrease in quality within each resolution. But you will still get the video quality you paid for."

So far, Netflix has yet to indicate that similar measures will be coming to the United States, though it's certainly possible as more and more locations engage in everything from voluntary self-quarantines to mandatory shelter in place requirements. Disney's Disney+ service, which launches across Europe on Tuesday, will similarly incorporate a bitrate throttling scheme for the foreseeable future. The company's launch of Disney+ in France has been delayed until April 7 at the request of the French government.

Many telecom executives and experts I've spoken to about the strain COVID-19 will place on U.S. networks have remained largely optimistic the U.S. internet will be able to handle the load, though many are quick to point out that it's hard to make predictions given the unprecedented nature of the pandemic--and the US' historic inability to craft accurate broadband speed and availability maps:

"Blair Levin was a former FCC chief of staff and co-author of the agency’s 2010 “National Broadband Plan."...

“I don't think anyone knows,” Levin said. “First, the FCC has done such a poor job of collecting data that we don't know where we are on many points. Second, we really don't know how much bigger the bandwidth demands will be. So this situation will be a stress test and show us where we are strong and where we are weak."

Most of those weaknesses shouldn't be particularly surprising for Techdirt readers. The central transit core of the US internet shouldn't have problems; it's the spotty, expensive, and slow "last mile" where a lot of headaches will pop up. US telcos, who've neglected their infrastructure for years, have refused to upgrade (or in some instances even repair) the nation's aging DSL lines. As entire families attempt to use sluggish era-2003 speeds to teleconference and stream video, games, and music, problems will inevitably arise (especially on the upstream side). VPNs could also be another congestion point.

But the biggest problem remains affordability and availability. For years, arguments that broadband should be seen as an essential utility were brushed aside, and now the "digital divide" could easily become a matter of life and death. Some 44 million Americans can't get any kind of broadband whatsoever, and thanks to limited U.S. competition (especially at faster speeds), many more can't afford a decent connection. This patchy, expensive, barely competitive nature of US telecom networks is something the industry's biggest players have lobbied to perpetuate for years, and now the check is likely coming due for many.

Filed Under: bandwidth, covid-19, europe, networks, streaming, throttling, video streams
Companies: disney, instagram, netflix, youtube

US Bandwidth Consumption Surges As Usage Caps Pose A Looming Threat

from the full-on-squeeze dept

We've noted for years how broadband providers have increasingly imposed arbitrary, confusing, and punitive usage caps and overage fees to cash in on the lack of competition in US broadband. Not only have industry executives admitted these limits aren't technically necessary, they've increasingly been abused to hamstring competitors. AT&T, for example, doesn't impose the limits on its broadband customers who use its streaming video service (DirecTV Now), but will impose the added charges if you use a competitor like Netflix.

For many years ISPs have slowly but surely imposed such limits hoping that consumers wouldn't notice (think of the frog in the pot of boiling water metaphor). But as streaming services have increasingly embraced high-bandwidth 4K streaming, consumer usage has started to push back hard against some limits. For example, Charter Spectrum last week noted that the average Charter subscriber (one that doesn't subscribe to traditional TV) consumes just over 400 gigabytes of data per month:

"Monthly data usage by our residential Internet customers is rising rapidly and monthly median data usage is over 200GB per customer. When you look at average monthly usage for customers that don't subscribe to our traditional video product, usage climbs to over 400GB per month."

It should be noted that Charter is one of the only major broadband providers that doesn't impose usage caps and overage fees. Why? It was banned from doing so for six years as a condition of its 2016 merger with Time Warner (read: in four years it probably will). Many DSL providers (AT&T, Centurylink) impose caps as low as 150 GB per month, with overage fees as high as $10 per each additional 50 gigabytes consumed. Elsewhere, I've seen caps as low as 50 GB per month.

Initially, ISPs tried to claim these limits were necessary to manage congestion. After that claim was repeatedly debunked, you'll find most don't even try to justify the move. But again, the fact that these caps are completely technically unnecessary just kind of falls by the wayside as the practice has expanded.

A home full of heavy gamers and streamers can already eat through these limits in pretty short order. A recent study by OpenVault found that Internet customers are using an average of 268.7GB per month. Those numbers are about to change dramatically with the launch of game streaming services like Google Stadia, which eliminate your local game console and shift all computing power to the cloud. Such services will need at least 25 Mbps to stream games at 60 FPS, and are certain to drive users toward costly restrictions and overages.

Of course this was all by design. Usage caps aren't just glorified price hikes, they're increasingly used by incumbent ISPs to harm competitors. In a functioning market, these behaviors would be restricted by either healthy competition (users would just switch to an uncapped ISP) or regulators (who'd clearly note such limits are misleading, unnecessary, and often anti-competitive). But since most broadband consumers have few if any real broadband options and regulatory capture is so totally hot right now, its a problem that remains stuck in neutral for the foreseeable future.

Filed Under: bandwidth, broadband, data caps, usage caps

Stories Claiming DNC Hack Was 'Inside Job' Rely Heavily On A Stupid Conversion Error No 'Forensic Expert' Would Make

from the don't-trust-anonymous-sources-unless-you-agree-with-them dept

While we wait for the Mueller investigation to clearly illustrate if and how Russia meddled in the last election, there's no shortage of opinions regarding how deep this particular rabbit hole goes. While it's pretty obvious that Putin used social media and media propaganda to pour some napalm on our existing bonfires of dysfunction, just how much of an impact these efforts had on the election won't be clear until a full postmortem is done. Similarly, while Russian hackers certainly had fun probing our voting systems and may have hacked both political parties, clearly proving state involvement is something else entirely.

Quite fairly, many folks have pushed for caution in terms of waiting for hard evidence to emerge, highlighting the danger in trusting leaks from an intelligence sector with a dismal track record of integrity and honesty. There's also the obvious concern of ramping up tension escalation between two nuclear powers. But last week, many of those same individuals were quick to highlight several new stories that claimed to "completely debunk" Russia's involvement in hacking the DNC ahead of last year's election. The problem? These reports were about as flimsy -- if not flimsier -- than the Russian hacking theories they supposedly supplanted.

In fact, these reports took things one step further by claiming that the hack of the DNC was something committed solely by someone within the DNC itself. This particularly overlong, meandering piece by The Nation, for example, claimed to cite numerous anonymous intelligence sources who have supposedly grown increasingly skeptical over the "Russian hacking narrative." Quite correctly, the report starts out by noting that while there's oodles and oodles of smoke regarding Putin's involvement in the election hacks, the fire (hard evidence) has been hard to come by so far:

"Lost in a year that often appeared to veer into our peculiarly American kind of hysteria is the absence of any credible evidence of what happened last year and who was responsible for it. It is tiresome to note, but none has been made available. Instead, we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year—this standing as their authoritative judgment.

But it's then that's where things get a little weird. The report repeatedly proclaims that a laundry list of anonymous "forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed" have been hard at work "producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year." But one of the key conclusions by these experts -- and a key cornerstone for of all of these stories -- makes absolutely no sense.

The reports lean heavily on anonymous cybersecurity experts calling themselves "Forensicator" and "Adam Carter," who purportedly took a closer look at the metadata attached to the stolen files. Said metadata, we're breathlessly informed, indisputably proves that the data had to have been transferred from inside of the DNC network and not over the internet, since the internet isn't supposedly capable of such transfer speeds:

"Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds."

That reads like a semi-cogent paragraph, but it's largely nonsense. 22.7 megabytes per second (MB/s) sounds impossibly fast if you don't know any better. But if you do the simple conversion from megabytes per second to megabits per second necessary to determine the actual speed of the connection used, you get a fairly reasonable 180 megabits per second (Mbps). While the report proclaims that "no internet service provider" can provide such speeds, ISPs around the world routinely offer speeds far, far faster -- from 500 Mbps to even 1 Gbps.

And despite the report oddly pooh pooh'ing Romanian broadband's "delivery overheads," many Romanian cities actually have faster internet connectivity than either Russia or in the States (check out Akamai's global broadband rankings). Bernie Sanders learned this last year when he unintentionally pissed off many Romanians when trying to highlight the dismal state of U.S. connectivity. Even then, the hacker in question could have used any number of tricks to hide his or her location and real identity from a high-bandwidth vantage point, so the claim that the hacker couldn't achieve 180 Mbps through a VPN is simply nonsense.

Obviously this raises some questions about what kind of cyber-sleuths we're talking about when they can't do basic conversions or look at some fairly obvious broadband speed availability charts. And it also raises some questions about why reporters thought flimsy anonymous experts were the perfect remedy to the other flimsy anonymous leaks they hoped to debunk. While The Nation couldn't even be bothered to do the simple calculation to determine the speed of the connection used by the hacker was relatively ordinary, in a story titled "Why Some U.S. Ex-Spies Don't Buy the Russia Story," Bloomberg actually did the conversion to get the 180 Mbps speed, and still somehow told readers that such speeds were impossible:

"The VIPS theory relies on forensic findings by independent researchers who go by the pseudonyms "Forensicator" and "Adam Carter." The former found that 1,976 MB of Guccifer's files were copied from a DNC server on July 5 in just 87 seconds, implying a transfer rate of 22.6 megabytes per second -- or, converted to a measure most people use, about 180 megabits per second, a speed not commonly available from U.S. internet providers. Downloading such files this quickly over the internet, especially over a VPN (most hackers would use one), would have been all but impossible because the network infrastructure through which the traffic would have to pass would further slow the traffic."

Yes, all but impossible! Provided you ignore that DOCSIS 3.1 cable upgrades and fiber connections deliver speeds consistently faster than that all around the world every day -- including Romania. False claims and sloppy math aside, after the Bloomberg column ran, several actual, identifiable intelligence experts also came forward doubting the legitimacy of the supposed intelligence sources for these stories altogether:

Surrounded by raised eyebrows, The Nation is now apparently reviewing its story for accuracy after numerous people highlighted that a major cornerstone of the report was little more than fluff and nonsense. Bloomberg has so far failed to follow suit.

So again, there's certainly every reason to not escalate hostility between the United States and Russia with many details still obfuscated and investigations incomplete. And there's also every reason to view reports leaning heavily on anonymous intelligence insiders skeptically after generations of distortions and falsehoods from those same agencies. That said, if you want to debunk the anonymous claims of a growing number of intelligence insiders who claim Russia played pinball with our electoral process, perhaps running into the arms of even more unreliable, anonymous intelligence sources -- without checking your math -- isn't your best path toward the truth.

Filed Under: bandwidth, dnc, election, hack, math, russia

FCC Commissioner Thinks Ultra-Fast Broadband Just a 'Novelty'

from the 640K-is-more-memory-than-anyone-will-ever-need dept

One of the hallmarks of Tom Wheeler's FCC was a renewed focus on competition at higher broadband speeds. It's one of the reasons the last FCC bumped the standard definition of broadband from a measly 4 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up, to 25 Mbps down, and 3 Mbps up. That higher benchmark allowed the FCC to point out that roughly two-thirds of American homes lack access to more than one ISP at 25 Mbps or better, highlighting a growing cable monopoly over broadband as DSL providers like AT&T and Verizon shift their attention toward giant media acquisitions and away from residential broadband.

Needless to say, large broadband providers (and the politicians paid to love them) quickly threw a hissy fit, insisting that nobody really needs that much bandwidth. This idea that you don't really need faster speeds falls in line with the industry's (and again, many politicians') ongoing refusal to acknowledge that the broadband market isn't all that competitive. After all, if you admit there's a problem, then you've admitted that somebody may just have to fix it.

FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly is squarely on the side of industry on this subject, having voted down the FCC's higher 25 Mbps benchmark. Even though 25 Mbps is a far from radical benchmark, and 3 Mbps upstream remains a bit of a joke, O'Rielly's dissent (pdf), made his disdain for faster speeds (and the technologies that will use them) abundantly clear:

"To justify setting the new benchmark at 25/3, as opposed to the current 4/1 or even 10/1 as several commenters suggested, the Report notes that 4K TV requires 25 Mbps. But 4K TV is still relatively new and is not expected to be widely adopted for years to come. While the statute directs us to look at “advanced” telecommunications capability, this stretches the concept to an untenable extreme. Some people, for example, believe, probably incorrectly, that we are on the path to interplanetary teleportation. Should we include the estimated bandwidth for that as well? "

Chortle! Guffaw! Of course 4K is here now, the streaming of which is already being hamstrung by ISP usage caps, even on ultra-fast connections. Now on the agency's majority, O'Rielly last week again proclaimed that the sector really needs to stop focusing on this whole ultra-fast broadband thing, since faster speeds are really just a novelty:

"The outcry for things like ultrahigh-speed service in certain areas means longer waits for those who have no access or still rely on dialup service, as providers rush to serve the denser and more profitable areas that seek upgrades to this level,” O’Rielly said. “Today, ultrafast residential service is a novelty and good for marketing, but the tiny percentage of people using it cannot drive our policy decisions."

Of course, that's not really true. Ultra-fast broadband and even consistent coverage aren't somehow mutually exclusive; we can focus on getting broadband to rural markets (first at slower speeds), and still enjoy gigabit speeds provided by the likes of Google Fiber. There's not a longer wait for broadband in Cleveland, for example, just because Google Fiber wants to bring broadband to San Antonio. As we've noted, the real reason there are stalled rural broadband deployments is a growing cable monopoly in areas that telcos are effectively giving up on. That FCC data now shows this is not somehow the fault of faster gigabit broadband itself.

The idea that gigabit is a "novelty" or unnecessary bumbles around the newswires occasionally, but originates with industry executives who don't want their own, slower speeds highlighted. But that doesn't mean ultra-fast service isn't important. Data has indicated that prices overall tend to drop in markets with ultra-fast service, which is likely a reflection of the increased competition that brought those speeds in the first place. AT&T's gigabit broadband service, for example, has been anywhere up to $50 less per month in markets where it faces competition from Google Fiber.

But even if there's a touch of marketing hype involved in the gigabit race, ISPs benefit from the fascination with faster speeds as well; numerous providers have noted that just advertising these ultra-fast connections causes consumers (most of whom have absolutely no idea what their current speed even is) to call in and upgrade to faster tiers, even if they're not the fastest options available. As Google Fiber made evident, ultra-fast broadband has captured the imagination of a public tired of overpaying for slower speeds. That excitement, and the surrounding competition, is not a bad thing.

If there's something that does get overlooked in the hype surrounding faster speeds, it's the fact that the United States still pays more for broadband service than a laundry list of developing nations, something the industry -- and O'Rielly -- also don't want highlighted in FCC policy discussions moving forward.

Filed Under: bandwidth, broadband, competition, fcc, mike o'rielly, speed, tom wheeler

Verizon Picks The Worst Possible Person To Try To Bullshit Into Unnecessary Upgrade

from the smooth-move-exlax dept

"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."

Filed Under: bandwidth, dan rayburn, upgrades
Companies: netflix, verizon