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Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

This is going under the false assumption that when I bought bandwidth from my ISP they didn't _really_ need to provide me with that bandwidth for realzies. This isn't netflix driving network upgrades this is Verizon customers driving network upgrades. If VZ didn't promise the customers the bandwidth they wouldn't need to upgrade their backhaul to provide it. I mean it would be like Verizon wireless charging apple to connect iPhones to their network because "I phones drive up the amount of data customers consume"

How is that viewpoint even remotely considered valid ?

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... Your wireless network service is best effort. This is why your service provider doesn't have to compensate you for dropped calls or dropped packets or towers with insufficient capacity.

The word "promise" is not an accurate reading of the legal concepts at play in bandwidth purchase. Dedicated bandwidth for consumers is expensive and completely unavailable on cellular networks.

Verizon also doesn't have to let iPhones connect to their network and only does so because they benefit financially from the relationship. Trust me, putting a device onto a major cellular network in the US is highly political, full of peril and financial alchemy.

Source: I do lots of telecom stuff specifically around wireless.

> Your wireless network service is best effort.

Wouldn't intentionally throttling and/or not keeping up your capacity intentionally be a violation of this "best effort" doctrine? Not arguing, honest question.

To the best of my knowledge, Net Neutrality doesn't apply to wireless networks.

Ah, I misread that. Sorry.

However, false advertising laws do apply. If they advertise "up to 40Mb/s", then they can't configure their routers to throttle you to 10Mb/s - they can only drop below 40Mb/s due to real contention for limited bandwidth as a result of high utilization.

Amusingly, I've heard carriers use that justification before for pushing phones other than iPhone. Well, that and Apple demands the largest subsidy of all phones. It's a position Apple can sustain because people walk in to the store and ask for Apple and want nothing else, but the carriers really want competition so they will encourage other phones when they can.

> the carriers really want competition so they will encourage other phones when they can.

I've yet to meet any carrier who wants competition, for anything. Their ideal world would be that they would decide which phone the customer can have, what limited service the customer can buy, and how much it is, and take-it-or-leave it. That's how AT&T worked, and every major carrier today is a spin-off from AT&T and still thinks pretty much the same way.

This is a two way street. Verizon customers are demanding content from Netflix. Peering agreements are based on a mutual benefit, in that both sides will use relatively the same amount of bandwidth. Now the bandwidth usage is lopsided towards Netflix, and Verizon is stating this is no longer a mutually beneficial relationship.

Sorry this perfectly valid and relevant quote is being down voted. Disagreeing with the hive mind on HN has consequences now days unfortunately.

It's not valid, as has been discussed about a dozen times in the thread. Peering arrangements to consumer ISPs are not symmetrical, and never have been.

That's what peering is. Both parties agree to connect their networks for mutual benefit of each other. If one side is lopsided on traffic usage, this really is no longer a mutually beneficial relationship. See Wikipedia for more definition information.

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