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Comment by dmead | Hacker News Reader

there's a graph somewhere showing the bitrate for netflix before and after they paid out extortion fees to comcast.

Fast.com was originally a tool to measure if your line was throttling Netflix traffic.[0]

[0] https://qz.com/688033/netflix-launched-this-handy-speed-test...

Extortion fees? Netflix wanted Comcast to provide them with free bandwidth. While some ISPs may appreciate that arrangement as it offloads the traffic from their transit links, Comcast is under no obligation to do so.

You could argue then that Comcast wasn't upgrading their saturated transit links, which they weren't with Level 3, but to assume that every single ISP should provide free pipes to companies is absurd.

If Netflix pays for the bandwidth, what do Comcast's customers pay for?

Customer service!

I don't normally upvote jokes unless they're funny but also make a legitimate point. This was a good one :-D

"I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

Comcast were purposefully keeping those links under capacity so they could double dip - get money from both their customers and Netflix.

So no business should ever have to pay for bandwidth because customers of said business are already paying? Or should I get free internet because businesses are already paying ISPs for their network access?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extortion

Businesses have to pay for bandwidth to get data to the customer's ISP, but they generally don't pay the customer's ISP for the same bandwidth the customer has already paid for.

Netflix did not have to pay Comcast either. One of their ISPs Level 3 already had peering arrangements with Comcast to deliver the content. Instead of paying their own ISP, Netflix wanted to get free bandwidth from Comcast. There's a difference.

Consider it from a customer's point of view.

Comcast threatened to throttle customers' bandwidth, refusing to deliver the speeds they had promised. The data was available to Comcast, customers had paid for the service of delivering that data, but Comcast wouldn't provide the full service they had sold unless Netflix paid them more.

The deeper issue is that Comcast is lying to their customers, promising them more bandwidth than they are able to deliver, so when Comcast's customers wanted to use all the bandwidth they bought to watch Netflix, Comcast couldn't afford to honor their promises.

But Comcast has a monopoly in the markets they serve, while Netflix exists in a competitive market, so Comcast got away with it.

No ISP can guarantee speeds outside of their network. Once it leaves their network it's considered best effort. Comcast has about 30 million subscribers. If they were to guarantee bandwidth out of their network, and if every subscriber had a laughably slow 10Mbps connection, Comcast would need 300Tbps of connectivity to every single company and network. For this reason, every ISP in the world "throttles" in one way or another.

True but not relevant to this case. Netflix was willing to provide the high speed connectivity; the throttling was just intimidation.

That sounds reasonable? If I'm an end-user, what I'm paying my ISP for is to get me data from Netflix (or youtube or wikipedia or ...); that is the whole point of having an ISP. If that means they need to run extra links to Netflix, then tough; that's what I'm paying them for.

You're paying them for access to the ISPs network. For an internet connection, this also comes with access to other networks through your ISPs peering and transit connections.

If you know of any ISP that would give me 100+ Gbps connectivity for my business, please let me know as I'd love to eliminate my bandwidth costs.

> You're paying them for access to the ISPs network.

I thought we moved past that model after AOL

Customer <> ISP <> ISP <> Customer

Why does one end of this example have to pay both ISPs in your view?

They don't, and I never suggested they did. Netflix had their own ISPs. Netflix wanted the Customer's ISP to give them free bandwidth so they could offload the traffic from their other ISPs.

The bandwidth paid for by their customers you mean?

Do you work for comcast or some other isp? it seems like you're biased in favor of the pipe companies here mate...

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