Is Netflix Strangling the Internet?

Sandvine, a leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators, today announced the release of their Global Internet Phenomena Report: Spring 2011, including Internet trends from North America, Latin America and Europe, with specific spotlights on events just as Netflix adoption and March Madness® On Demand. Overall insights since the last report in the fall of 2010, reveal a growing appetite for on-demand applications that will continue to drive data consumption and network quality requirements.

In North America, Netflix is now 29.7% of peak downstream traffic and has become the largest source of Internet traffic overall. Currently, Real-Time Entertainment applications consume 49.2% of peak aggregate traffic, up from 29.5% in 2009 - a 60% increase [see figure 3]. Sandvine forecasts that the Real-Time Entertainment category will represent 55-60% of peak aggregate traffic by the end of 2011.

A report issued Tuesday showing Netflix makes up a third of total Internet traffic is inaccurate enough - or until further notice the reports about it are inaccurate enough - to show not very many people in either the press or vendor marketing understand the network they base their business on.

First, the report didn’t say Netflix eats a third of the whole Internet; that assumption was off base enough to prompt Forbes to run a piece trying to correct it, nevertheless not quite succeeding.

Sandvine - an Ontario-based networking vendor - issued a report Tuesday estimating that streaming media from Netflix make up 30 percent of downstream traffic while peak times.

Further, there are times when Netflix is the peak user of bandwidth, however it’s only for a brief window in the evenings when business traffic slows and subscribers are at home watching something other than network or cable TV.

It’s the effort to upgrade the nets to support their own streaming-media services, which not only compete with Netflix, nevertheless also come supported by internal business cases that have to show how quickly each new major upgrade will pay for itself through new services or the ability to support more subscribers.

Upgrades justified to regulators by saying Netflix is about to bring down the Internet go into the books pursuant to this agreement the category Gravy, and slide straight down to Net Profit at the bottom of the page.

We here on the internet prize the fact that we can connect up to any other public site using any TCP/IP port and whatever data we sent to the site gets there, and any data the site sends back gets to us, because TCP/IP is a reliable, guaranteed delivery, transport. [I ignore best effort however unreliable UDP/IP used primarily by gamers] The fact that bandwidth might be throttled is an issue which each protocol must handle it’s own way to be viable, and most, just as netflix or youtube, do. When ISPs start playing games with the TCP/IP protocol by sending reset or termination packets, or silently dropping content, the question of their customer’s rights to uncensored access to content comes to the fore.

What my ISP provides service wise

When I look at what my ISP provides service wise, there are several bandwidth-limited offerings; within those bandwidth limitations, there is a contracted requirement for best-effort delivery — which means that the ISP is indemnified against network congestion, however that the ISP cannot expressly not attempt delivery of your packets. Now, every ISP has peering arrangements with other ISPs, and those peering arrangements as well specify best-effort delivery. The Internet, being a set of interconnected tubes, is sensitive to stoppages of any sort. The protocols are such that if Comcast specifically drops packets, the network by degree figures out that something is broken in Comcast land and tries to route around it. This works so then where packets have alternate paths around Comcast’s network, yet is ineffectual when one of the endpoints is squarely in the middle of Comcast’s network. Far worse is the artificial creation and transmission of RST or FIN/ACK packets by Comcast, which cause both sides to close their connection because they think the other side has gone away — this is censorship at its worst — the deliberate sabotage of attempts to deliver data.

I as well have no trouble with providers charging for network usage by either volume or instantaneous bandwidth. What I do have trouble with is providers who censor our content, either because they offer a competing service or because they expressly want to shift transiting packets onto their peers.

I hate netflix. They spend time developing for ridiculous platforms just the same they totally neglect linux. There is no reason they can’t do it, there already are some specialized internet TV boxes which run on linux that support it, not to mention apple OSX support.

The backbone traffic

There are less than 10 destinations that account for about 85% of the backbone traffic. Google, Facebook, Netflix, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, and such account for most of it.

Netflix doesn’t use any bandwidth on my account. I won’t have anything to do with them. They are by a long way the worst offenders where popups are concerned. Anybody who annoys me that much with their advertising has no chance of getting any business from me.

hate netflix. They spend time developing for ridiculous platforms even so they totally neglect linux. There is no reason they can't do it, there already are some specialized internet TV boxes which run on linux that support it, not to mention apple OSX support.

I say this as a former computer programmer who on the whole has a hard drive partition with Ubuntu on it: Nobody cares about Linux: You’re joking, right? I don’t know anyone who uses a Linux OS who couldn’t as well explain the difference between a standard binary search and a red-black algorithm. And even amongst that miniscule subset of the market, most of those folks will have Windows too.

The sense that nearly everything they said

Amazed in the sense that nearly everything they said was factually incorrect or misleading. Whoever wrote it has in broad outline zero clue about broadband infrastructure.

Netflix is the bomb.Get a Roku box and turn any of your televisions into Internet TV’s.I just go done watching “Tora Tora Tora”, “The Gallant Hours” and I’m half way through “Midway”.Life is good.

And no, net neutrality isn’t needed to keep the 1′s and 0′s flowing. Look at the mobile phone market, people are willing to pay for unlimited data and the companies have to compete for those clients, ISP’s ignore that at their peril, people will go to the providers that offer unlimited data. Government stepping in will only impede that competition and hurt consumers in the end.

They are out and away the worst offenders where popups are concerned. Anybody who annoys me that much with their advertising has no chance of getting any business from me.

Furthermore, that the vast amount of Netflix traffic occurs primarily while peak hours is the problem- it occurs when ISP network congestion most commonly takes place.

How many people do you suppose want to watch netflix on a nintendo 3ds? 2 perhaps 3 people, and only to say they did, once? But they are working on it. Same thing with android phone. Linux is a much bigger market of people who would as a matter of fact USE their software.

The evening

I don’t care who is eating up bandwidth while the evening, it hoses my latencies to the servers I connect to. And my ISP refuses to do anything to upgrade their network. It even messes up netflix, and an HD movie immediately becomes low quality because there is more traffic than the bandwidth can handle.

Exactly how much should they have to spend in order for Netflix to make a profit? How many businesses are expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for the sake of 5% of their clients?

And no, net neutrality isn't needed to keep the 1′s and 0′s flowing. Look at the mobile phone market, people are willing to pay for unlimited data and the companies have to compete for those clients, ISP's ignore that at their peril, people will go to the providers that offer unlimited data. Government stepping in will only impede that competition and hurt consumers in the end.

Imagine if AT&T refused to allow some calls from Verizon subscribers to reach AT&T clients and never disclosed it.

That’s the issue. Private companies should be able to manage their networks any way they please however they should be forced to disclose it so consumers can make informed decisions and should not lock you into long-term contracts that say one thing during they decide to do another.

Discrimination: The Internet was designed as an open medium. The fundamental idea since the Internet’s inception has been that every Web site, every feature and every service should be treated without discrimination. That’s how bloggers can compete with CNN or USA Today for readers. That’s how up-and-coming musicians can build underground audiences previously they get their first top-40 single. That’s why when you use a search engine, you see a list of the sites that are the closest match to your request — not those that paid the most to reach you. Discrimination endangers our basic Internet freedoms.

Double-dipping: Traditionally, network owners have built a business model by charging consumers for Internet access. Now they want to charge you for access to the network, and at that time charge you again for the things you do during you’re online. They may not charge you directly via pay-per-view Web sites. However they will charge all the service providers you use. These providers will then and there pass those costs along to you in the form of price hikes or new charges to view content.

Stifling technology: Net Neutrality ensures that innovators can start small and dream big about being the straightway EBay or Google without facing insurmountable hurdles. Unless we preserve Net Neutrality, startups and entrepreneurs will be muscled out of the marketplace by big corporations that pay for a top spot on the Web. On a tiered Internet controlled by the phone and cable companies, only their own content and services — or those offered by corporate partners that pony up enough “protection money” — will enjoy life in the fast lane.

It undoubtedly is a net neutrality question — look at the second part of your post. Netflix is going to bring down the Internet — that’s been the Comcast refrain for the past couple of years.

The evening

I don't care who is eating up bandwidth while the evening, it hoses my latencies to the servers I connect to. And my ISP refuses to do anything to upgrade their network. It even messes up netflix, and an HD movie without warning becomes low quality because there is more traffic than the bandwidth can handle.

It’s obvious that the FCC is the right place to regulate this, and that regulation is in order given that content-specific “taxes” are being levied by some ISPs. You are right — the FCC needs to be explicitly authorized by law to handle the Internet as a communications network, nevertheless, sadly, the guys I’d expect to be all for that are against it, and the guys I broadly speaking detest are all for it. The root reason is obvious — our guys don’t know when free enterprise ends and the government enforced monopolies begin, and when said monopolies should be treated differently from free enterprise.

I say this as a former computer programmer who nevertheless has a hard drive partition with Ubuntu on it: Nobody cares about Linux: You're joking, right? I don't know anyone who uses a Linux OS who couldn't as well explain the difference between a standard binary search and a red-black algorithm. And even amongst that miniscule subset of the market, most of those folks will have Windows too.

Yes, however that was with torrents where the ISP’s anyway had the flimsy excuse of piracy to excuse their behavior and people caught on to it because it’s easy to tell when your bandwidth is being throttled. That situation was resolved without government stepping in so just imagine the outcry if ISP’s tried to do that with a service like Netflix, they would lose clients in droves. Streaming video is set to be the way people watch movies hereafter, Netflix already offers a streaming only package and people will go to the providers that offer them the capability to watch. The idea that things would remain static if ISP’s colluded to throttle service just isn’t correct, people want their internet and they’ll go to whoever provides it, so someone will provide it.

Of course, “free market” is a concept up for grabs. Should an internet service provider — a utility — which attained that position by obtaining a monopoly from government — be allowed to prevent the delivery to or acceptance of packets originating from your home based on legally acceptable content? Some here with ideas in opposition to mine of what a free marketplace comprises will undoubtedly say “yes” — the ISP owns the connection afterwards it leaves your home and has every right to deny its competitors access to their network — and, obliquely, to your home. Clearly, in my universe that kind of balkanization of the Internet will mean that certain content on the Internet will be forever unavailable to me — unless I move to a place where the network blockages are not in place. I’d in other words have the FCC do the job, thank you — their definition of Net Neutrality is fine with me.

The hype around net-neutrality is greatly exaggerated

The hype around net-neutrality is greatly exaggerated and deeply misunderstood by people who have strong emotional positions nevertheless don’t understand the innovation.

The issue is what do you want your experience to be when your 14yo begins to download some huge video. Do you want your VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone and your web browsing to however work?

But even besides, the ENTIRE issue is in fact based on a misunderstanding by Comcast over network congestion. Comcast did some things in their network to cause peer to peer file sharing to “back off” its bandwidth use by randomly dropping a packet in those streams. This was because people were complaining of poor web browsing experience and Comcast mistakenly concluded that the problem was bit-torrent.

The REAL problem is that they have too much buffering in their network gear. In their striving to prevent dropping even a single packet while congestion, they have huge amounts of packet buffering in various network devices throughout the network. This as a matter of fact defeats TCP congestion avoidance and causes flows to overcompensate to congestion.

What you mean

I know what you mean. A lot of conservatives here act like Comcast and the other major cable-TV-ISP’s are operating in a free market and that any attempt to regulate them is some kind of socialist intrusion. However in practice, these companies are de facto government-granted monopolies. They were once the sole providers of cable television, and this led to them being the major broadband providers as so then.

This was all so then and good previously the internet came into direct competition with cable television, nevertheless the explosion in online video has created a fundamental conflict in the cable-ISP monopoly structure that induces anti-competitive behavior. Cable-ISP’s now have a direct incentive to discriminate exactly against video content so as to keep clients buying their cable TV services. This applies ten-times over to Comcast since they’re now in the business of buying up television networks.

Put another way, why do you have to buy a $60, 80-channel cable package from Comcast when you only to tell the truth watch one or two channels? Why not just subscribe to those channels online and stream them over the internet, for lets say $5/month, paid directly to the content provider? The market would be more inclined to move in this direction were it not for the anti-competitive connection between cable television providers and internet service providers. Disintermediation is the name of the game, and its what monopolies fear most. The cable-ISP’s are afraid of losing their monopoly over content delivery via cable television, and with it the leverage to compel consumers to buy content that they wouldn’t if not purchase. Comcast and its kind don’t just want to be ISP’s, they want to be media monopolies so that they can protect their cable cash cows.

Agreed. I’m not against the ISPs charging for bandwidth utilized, or even against per-packet charges — however I am against them charging based on the originator or consumer or type of the content. I contract with my ISP to allow me access to any location on the Internet, and to upload or download whatever I want from those locations. When the ISP starts expressly substituting, dropping, or inserting packets to prevent my activity is when the fighting begins.

“bufferbloat” induces latency — however only on heavily loaded networks. If the latency extends beyond TTL values, the packets are dropped. Those buffers are there for a reason — if they weren’t, many more TCP packets would be dropped. I could care less about UDP, because there are no reliability requirements levied upon the UDP protocol.

Suffice to say that the issue is more data entering the network over a sustained period of time than the network is designed to handle. If the problem is an impulse issue, the “excessive buffers” solution is specifically what is needed to handle same. It’s only when the problem becomes systemic that the “excessive buffers” solution fails — but at that time, any other solution short of not transmitting would have failed as then.

The implications of “bufferbloat” are that the network in effect is incapable of handling the capacity assigned to it, and something has to give. If we were to reduce the sizes of the buffers at every level of the network, congestion avoidance would at the time become the issue, because the window times would increase substantially to the point where your realtime streaming app fails to realtime stream due to your own network drivers’ local idea of how the network has recently behaved.

In other words, the reservoir of non-received packets is either on premises, off premises, large, or small, and in an oversaturated network, none of this matters.

Of course, "free market" is a concept up for grabs. Should an internet service provider - a utility - which attained that position by obtaining a monopoly from government - be allowed to prevent the delivery to or acceptance of packets originating from your home based on legally acceptable content? Some here with ideas in opposition to mine of what a free marketplace comprises will truly say "yes" - the ISP owns the connection afterwards it leaves your home and has every right to deny its competitors access to their network - and, obliquely, to your home. Clearly, in my universe that kind of balkanization of the Internet will mean that certain content on the Internet will be forever unavailable to me - unless I move to a place where the network blockages are not in place. I'd or rather have the FCC do the job, thank you - their definition of Net Neutrality is fine with me.

The problem

That is the problem. The market is not in fact free, and if the government effectively grants a partial monopoly to a private business, they at that time have a certain amount of right to regulate that business.

Put another way, why do you have to buy a $60, 80-channel cable package from Comcast when you only as a matter of fact watch one or two channels? Why not just subscribe to those channels online and stream them over the internet, for lets say $5/month, paid directly to the content provider?Lawdawg86 on May 22, 2011 at 1:51 PM

I have ALWAYS wanted this.It is WHY I do not have a large cable package.I have basic cable from my provider for a few network channels & the locals.I would love to be able to pick & choose, which is why I’ve considered Hulu & Netflix.My daughter got both of them & it’s cheaper than her cable & she is much happier.

The fact that Netflix doesn’t offer a Linux client doesn’t in effect prove anything about Linux. It more likely has something to do with DRM, or that Netflix has a proprietary system built on Windows that could not be easily ported to Linux.

The current flat rate plan is working fine for me

The current flat rate plan is working fine for me. But at that time, I’m not currently using my internet connection for business, except for a LOT of time connected to work by VPN.

Since joining Netflix, I’ve been receiving for the moment 8 first run DVDs through the mail each month and have watched countless hours of streaming entertainment on my Wii, iphone, and PC. All this for $10.69 per month POST tax.

The wall in Santa Fe

Comcast screws you to the wall in Santa Fe, NM. $58 plus tax for internet is a screw job. If the day ever comes when I can get fast internet service other than Comcast, I’ll drop Comcast like a hot potato. The phone company thought they had a license to steal however they’re history at both homes I own. I use Ooma at my main home and cheap Magic Jack at my vacation place.

The fact that Netflix doesn't offer a Linux client doesn't in effect prove anything about Linux. It more likely has something to do with DRM, or that Netflix has a proprietary system built on Windows that could not be easily ported to Linux.

The silicon valley mentality

Yeah most Techies are Liberals…goes with the silicon valley mentality.I find tons of stuff to watch however I look for old movies and tv shows I might have missed or others that look interesting. The only thing I don’t watch there is news and I get that on the internet. I’m not into sports so I as a matter of fact don’t care about it much and I can taking everything into consideration live stream from another site if I want.

Virtualization is not a solution. Not on my CULV machine. Truly not on any atom based machine. Their claim of ‘we only support playready’ falls short when their apple client surely doesn’t use it, nor their wii, nor boxee, nor roku, nor 3ds, ps3, etc.