So...Net Neutrality

[Berkut]

I don't think we should consider him at all. He stopped being amusing a few days ago.

[derspiess]

Isn't Lacroix the old Count? 

[grumbler]

Isn't Lacroix the old Count?

There are similarities.

[Admiral Yi]

Isn't Lacroix the old Count?

The dude that wanted Russ Feingold for president? 

[Barrister]

Isn't Lacroix the old Count?

No.  Count was from New England.  Lacroix is from North Dakota.

Plus Count was a lefty, and Lacroix a Branch Trumpidian.

[katmai]

I don't think we should consider him at all. He stopped being amusing a few days ago.

Too generous.

[DontSayBanana]

Not really. The chokepoint is the last mile to the private customer. Netflix pays its internet service provider for the network connections to their network or maybe directly to the big internet exchange points. But from thereon its the open internet or the network of the internet service provider of the consumer of Netflix' service.

Except that for residential networks, usually only the first and last couple of hops are on the "open Internet" and not crossing ISP backbones.  And you're not factoring in bloat/extended wait from deprioritized traffic.

A 1080p stream is on average 8 Mbps, so if it crosses 10 hops with an average ping of 20 ms each, the total ping is going to be 200 ms.  Just to buffer enough to account for a dropped frame in the latency, that's an additional 1.6 Mb that's going to have to be downloaded before playback begins.  So let's say one of those hops decides to deprioritize Netflix traffic in a spot where it doesn't really have an efficient alternative, and lowers the response to 100 ms.

That one hop now jacks the total ping up almost 50% to 280 ms.  Now, we need 2.24 Mb just to counter for latency, and that's a perfect route with no dropped packets.  If 5% of the packets are dropped, we're going to have to up the speed to allow retries- bringing the minimum speed up to 8.4 Mbps and making it unreliable until 1/3 of a second has gone by.

And this is for 1080p video.  For anything offering 4k, the baseline numbers go from 25  to 26.25 Mbps, 7 Mb downloaded bare minimum at 280 ms ping, and from 7 to 7.35 Mb downloaded as a safe buffer, which is coincidentally just enough to make a Comcast customer go from safe with a 25 Mbps 2nd-tier service to unreliable and needing to bump up (for additional money) to their 3rd-tier 100 Mbps service.  All by throttling one router.

[LaCroix]

You can almost see, post by post, LaCroix becoming as intellectually dishonest as his hero.  He's still got a ways to go, as he acknowledges it about 10% of the time when his lies are shown to be lies, but I'm sure he's working to eliminate that last bit of impulse towards honesty.   

nah, I did misremember. I remembered seeing a bunch of flip flopping with net neutrality and thought obama had done it

[Admiral Yi]

Did all the horrible things y'all mentioned come to pass when Bush unneutralized the net?

[LaCroix]

it's more important to discuss (1) how obama didn't get rid of net neutrality; (2) how I'm a liar; and (3) whether I'm one of many white dudes (because all white men look alike I guess?)

[DontSayBanana]

For your reading pleasure, Yi, I present the saga of Netflix, Level 3 Communications, and Comcast:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/29/AR2010112907024.html

TL;DR- Comcast was charging fees to Level 3, Level 3 said it was charging extra for switching video traffic coming from Netflix, Comcast swore up and down it charged every CDN (content delivery network) the same fees.

[LaCroix]

without reading the link, were those all the companies that did maybe bad things?

[Capetan Mihali]

It seems like the Internet has changed a lot in the last ten years, so I'm not sure how valuable comparisons to the Bush era are going to be.  How much streaming was there in 2007?

[frunk]

It seems like the Internet has changed a lot in the last ten years, so I'm not sure how valuable comparisons to the Bush era are going to be.  How much streaming was there in 2007?

The big fight then was over whether Comcast could throttle BitTorrent by sending fake reset packets.

[DontSayBanana]

without reading the link, were those all the companies that did maybe bad things?

The accusation was that Comcast was charging to route video traffic that competed with its Xfinity content.  Level 3 was complaining that they were getting unfairly whacked with fees because they handled Netflix traffic.