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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> So, will this make it illegal for GoGo to block streaming video sites on airplanes during domestic flights?

It should allow them to be consistent about it and rate-limit everyone evenly, which would have the same effect.

The really interesting question would be what happens with their on-plan video systems – my understanding is that they cache a selection of videos on the plane which are pre-seeded to avoid clogging the connection. Even running a public proxy wouldn't help with that unless everyone is watching the same Netflix/Hulu/etc. videos. I'm not sure whether they could get some sort of waiver but it's definitely something to look for as the policy details emerge.

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> It should allow them to be consistent about it and rate-limit everyone evenly, which would have the same effect.

That's an allocation of about 450kbit/sec (~56kb/sec) down per seat on a 737 assuming the plane is outfitted with GoGo's latest tech. Upload would be a tiny fraction of that. It's in everyone's interest to disallow high-throughput usage while permitting burstable high-bandwidth low-throughput usage.

"Bright line" rules that no type or source of content may be discriminated against by carriers only make sense if bandwidth is not a scarce resource.

400kbit? That sounds like enough to let everyone stream, cool.

If you want bursting then tell the router to allow bursting. Such as a 15 second window on the throttling.

> It's in everyone's interest to disallow high-throughput usage while permitting burstable high-bandwidth low-throughput usage. > "Bright line" rules that no type or source of content may be discriminated against by carriers only make sense if bandwidth is not a scarce resource.

There's no reason to believe that this couldn't be solved with some variation of fair queuing with bursting and since that's content and source neutral because it applies to all users equally.

This is a basic network admin skill and the technology is already pervasively deployed – in the 90s, 56kpbs was the speed you assumed for the average home users and businesses used to have a hundred people behind a 1.5Mb T1. The only challenges since then have either been extreme scale or the more expensive things the major ISPs have tried to do to throttle traffic selectively.

Hah, why not have a Netflix OpenConnect box on the plane then? That would be... interesting.

It just seems like the cache hit rates would be dismal if it had to handle so many content providers and such a wide range of content, even if you had some Hollywood-doomed way for e.g. Netflix and Hulu to use the same cached MP4 for titles which they both offer.

I don't see how that could work without some protocol where e.g. Netflix, et al. could preload content in advance and how could that work – voting at the gate, only being able to see the top n most-popular on <service>?

This is actually kinda what united is doing with their in-flight entertainment system. It's a limited selection of movies that you can stream. I am assuming it doesn't need internet to stream them.

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