Verizon's video app gets special data privileges | Hacker News Reader

Verizon's video app gets special data privileges

theverge.com

55 pointsyincrash14 comments

Doesn't excluding some services from a data cap make a lie out of having data caps to ease congestion, or to penalize "data hogs"?

For example, couldn't you just run Verizon's video app 24x7, and consume much more than your allotment, and not pay for the amount over your cap? Is Verizon prepared for this to happen? In how many cases?

So, data caps, and "bandwidth amounts" are just a way to wring money out of people, without some kind of consumer revolt, right?

Or is it that Verizon's bytes are smaller or more slippery than Netflix' bytes?

Yes, I believe it was Comcat who publicly admitted that data caps are just a way of wringing more money out of you.

Not sure how this can be levelled at the congestion argument. Presumably Verizon's video service is running from their data centres over their internal pipes, rather than external networks where bandwidth is considerably more expensive and probably more limited.

Anti-competitive, sure, but I think that's about it.

I've always felt conflicted about this here in Australia where different ISPs have been setting up peering agreements to achieve similar situations for years. It works out better for the customers who get the unmetered service but at the expense of competition.

I live in Denver, Colorado. It looks like Hulu has servers located in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, right on the Centurylink network. Actually, they're Akamai servers, but still. Hulu has servers right next to a VPS in Los Angeles I have access to. Google appears to do the same, without Akamai. Your anti-congestion argument fails. It appears that large content providers co-locate servers on lots of networks.

So apparently Verizon's bytes are slippery or smaller than other people's bytes. Maybe they use smaller bits or something?

It shouldn't even be necessary to bring in net neutrality. This should fail on anti-competitive grounds alone.

1GB for $30? Are you joking me? Even we Germans, with 20x the data pricing of mainstream Europe, don't pay this much.

It is much, much, much more expensive to deploy cellular infrastructure in the US than anywhere in Europe. The US is massive, and cities have much greater distances between them than in Europe.

The carriers here can't price based on where you live, because people travel (and could easily fudge their addresses). So what happens is the people who live in cities end up subsidizing the infrastructure for people who live in suburban or rural areas.

We do have smaller carriers (T-Mobile and Sprint) that have much less coverage in non-urban areas, and those carriers are much cheaper. Google actually combines those two carriers into Project Fi, which costs much less than $30/GB (I think it's $10).

People per km^2:

Europe: 32 (edit: wrong)

US: 35

Not sure where you get that number for Europe. According to Wikipedia [1] it has a population density of about 73/km^2. European Russia also brings that number down a bit because it has a population density comparable to the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe

Oh my mistake, I just googled it and didn't read the page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europea...

Seems they included all of Russia too.

I think the figures for Russia specifically are for the whole country. But I read the population density for Europe as a whole including only European Russia. (Including all of Russia in the total would skew the result enormously as Asian Russia is bigger than all of Europe and only has a population density of about 3/km^2--and probably has pretty spotty cell phone reception:-).)

How does this explain the stories of exellent cell coverage in the middle of nowhere in Africa?

I wonder if they are just playing the waiting game, where for the average joe would get upset that they are missing out on this "free" video. They would then retort to saying that net neutrality is the issue at hand, and that it should be removed to allow for free lanes and paid lanes aka the issue we had at hand in the first place.

These ISPs still simply have far too much power. The consumer is the only one that suffers from their unapologetic greed.

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