The title says it all. Not only has Verizon's performance become dramatically worse, the company has continued to try and foist the blame for the problem on Netflix, claiming that the online streaming giant is deliberately degrading performance by attempting to stuff data down specific congested Verizon pipes. Unfortunately, a growing body of evidence suggests this isn't true.
In related news, here's an interesting graph of NetFlix speeds from around the time this 'fast lane' discussion was started until now. These ISPs sure make a case for treating them like common carriers.
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So we now have a very clear-cut case of the NSA causing damage to American business: The German government has cancelled a contract with Verizon because of the danger of NSA spying. The contract is about an internal Government network for communication between the ministries. The contract is going to the German company Deutsche Telekom AG instead. From the article:
Verizon has been providing network infrastructure for the German government's Berlin-Bonn network, used for communication between ministries, since 2010, the statement said. The contract is set to expire in 2015.
The government said Deutsche Telekom AG would replace services provided by Verizon, and noted Deutsche Telekom was already responsible for the most sensitive communications between ministries or between the government and German intelligence agencies.
Information on the value of the contract was not immediately available.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:21PM
Interesting that Cox didn't throttle its bandwidth, even though they are a directly competing interest as an ab-initio cable TV company. Verizon and AT&T were originally telcos, although Verizon does offer a TV package now. I wonder what business logic went into this: why did the more direct competitor not try to screw over the upstart competition, while the companies with less history of direct competition in the entertainment sector jump to throttle Netflix?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RaffArundel on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:53PM
Not sure if this is true around the country, but Verizon (FiOS) and ATT (uVerse) got exclusive rights to geo-areas around here - probably to offset the expense of laying fibre. I don't recall a time that either didn't have data/phone/tv packages and they were originally MUCH better in terms of speed and (you will laugh or cry) customer service than the cable companies at the time. In my case the fibre is Verizon's and my buddy about 2-3 miles away only has ATT.
So, I believe that the answer to your question is that they DIDN'T have real competition and now that they do, they would rather blame others than actually fix the infrastructure.
(Score: 1) by EQ on Wednesday July 23 2014, @04:14PM
Here in my part of Texas, we have Fios, Uverse and TWC, all laid in when they built the neighborhood in 2009. Competition is nice.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday July 23 2014, @03:28PM
I'm on Cox and I have to say I'm VERY happy, they don't bitch (or charge me) when I go over thanks to Steam sales, the pipe is crazy fast even in the middle of the day, and it hasn't been down more than a couple hours in 3 years and that was due to some drunk taking out a pole. My only complaint is they won't lay another inch of line in my area so you REALLY have to be picky about where you choose to live as one block the wrong way and you are stuck on shitastic AT&T DSL.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @05:51PM
Cox is very different in different parts of the country. Where I am, I've had nothing but great service from them, with good bandwidth for a reasonable (for America) price. On the other hand, I put my mother online with Cox a few years ago in Virginia: her wiring is twenty years old and service has degraded considerably, to the point where her connection resets repeatedly during the afternoons (something to do with the temperature and metal expansion?). Cox sent out several servicemen, none of whom knew about each other (poor internal communications) and none of whom could figure out the problem until the third or fourth guy, who couldn't fix the wiring that day, however. Mom walked into a Verizon FiOS display set up on a sidewalk somewhere and figured it was fate, so she signed up to switch there and then; Verizon came out and ran brand new fiber to her house (part of the neighborhood had fiber, but not her street) and she was up and running two days after signing up, and apparently it's much cheaper. Yay for competition.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Geezer on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:58PM
There has always been good reason to classify the big internet providers as common carriers. However, given the current makeup of the FCC, I estimate the odds against this actually happening to be incalculably large. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it, but I'd love to see world peace and a cure for the common cold too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cafebabe on Wednesday July 23 2014, @03:05PM
A Soylentil predicted this situation about six weeks ago [soylentnews.org].
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 23 2014, @03:56PM
And I'm in Brooklyn, where broadband availability is ridiculously bad. You would think that NYC, the data and finance capital of the world, would have great connectivity but my wife's pre-teen relatives visiting from Seoul comment that they might have gone the wrong direction and wound up in Pyongyang, not NYC. So I'm watching the Comcast and Murdoch bid to takeover Time-Warner with interest, because what is a bad situation could get suddenly much worse. Google Fiber would be a godsend here, but the politics lockdown by Time-Warner and Verizon is so bad it will effectively never happen.
Why on God's green earth can we not craft an alternative that takes these monopolies and their utter control of government out of the loop entirely? With the equipment available to us today and a robust DIY movement, there has got to be a way to craft ad hoc networks that don't kill you with latency.
Should we start a Johnny Appleseed movement to seed free broadband everywhere? What about something that uses lasers or ultrasound to transmit information so we don't run into spectrum licensing BS?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fliptop on Wednesday July 23 2014, @04:09PM
One of my bigger clients is a local phone company. They're a C-LEC but don't own any infrastructure. From my experience working w/ them, it won't matter if the monopolies get broken up or not.
Because the carriers that own the copper/fibre are the only ones that can do repairs, new order hook-ups and disconnects. My client is not allowed to send out a truck and work on Frontier's copper. And what does Frontier do when they get a work order from my client? It goes to the bottom of the pile, the work is done in a shoddy manner, the techs are downright rude, and Frontier doesn't care.
Frontier knows they can provide crappy service to all the C-LECs w/ the hope their customers will leave and come over to them. So even though they don't have a monopoly per se on the actual product they deliver, they still have their monopoly on the copper they own. And they work that angle very, very well.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 23 2014, @05:27PM
Beyond common carrier, it needs to be broken up further then. A company that owns the wires cannot have an actual ISP on the wires. They maintain the wires and sell bandwidth to resellers or service providers.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:49PM
in the UK this sort of happened, but the former state monopoly (BT) has managed to get in the way of most unbundling, so service is highly non-uniform.
It is almost as if those in power don't want the people to access the web...
Roll on Google Fiber *everywhere*, so it will force these retarded companies from stalling any longer...
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 23 2014, @11:31PM
As long as Google stays as well behaved as they have been. Luckily for us, it's in their best interest to have an open internet at the moment.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 24 2014, @12:04AM
That makes sense when we're talking about physical infrastructure that someone else has built and that someone else owns. But what if we're not talking about physical lines anymore, but radio signals that evade spectrum restrictions or flashes of light from lasers or ultrasound? I have seen many articles on SN and elsewhere where people are doing stuff like this. Lightbulbs that transmit data by controlled flickers in the light that the human eye cannot detect. My Android phone has an app on it called SonicShare that shares data via ultrasound. And a long time ago I read that Lucent made communications equipment that used lasers on a direct line-of-sight basis (though I have not seen or heard of such a thing since). There are obviously challenges with each of those means but they all do an end-run around the powers-that-be who control existing infrastructure.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 24 2014, @02:15AM
> I read that Lucent made communications equipment that used lasers on a direct
> line-of-sight basis (though I have not seen or heard of such a thing since).
They are not uncommon. Here's one:
http://www.laser-link.co.uk/ [laser-link.co.uk]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by redneckmother on Wednesday July 23 2014, @04:11PM
I'm in the boonies, with no physical communications infrastructure (no land line, no cell signal). I am hoping that IEEE 802.22 will allow ISPs to provide an inexpensive alternative to HughesNot. I suspect that 802.22 won't help much or at all in metro areas, though.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rune of Doom on Wednesday July 23 2014, @04:31PM
We can build a better alternative - there are several different ways to approach it, with various positives and negatives. What you're missing is that we (the public) are not allowed to do so, because it would negatively impact America's ruling class.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 23 2014, @11:58PM
What are those ways to approach it? I'm truly interested. I have thought we could use existing wifi nodes and daisy chain our way to freedom, but the latency would be killer. An after-market wifi dongle in your car that can ad-hoc network with other cars that have it can have a lot of benefits (I was stuck on a freeway in a blizzard in downstate Illinois for hours once, wondering what the heck was going on but unable to get a traditional signal at all to try to find out--how nice, I thought, it would have been to have the cars networked together so we could *see* what the guys in front could see). But again, latency.
As far as what America's ruling class want, well, they manifestly do not care what we want, so why should we care what they want? Let's do, and let them tumble in our wake.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday July 24 2014, @05:05AM
That's why it's still handy to have a radio
(Score: 4, Insightful) by doublerot13 on Wednesday July 23 2014, @05:10PM
This is why you don't negotiate with terrorists. They will never keep their word.
When the nation can't be bothered to turn off Duck Dynasty long enough to keep regulatory capture(in this case Comcast installing their personal FCC Chair) at bay, bad things are gonna keep happening.
(Score: 2) by Rune of Doom on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:13PM
It's been made pretty damn clear that the corporations and not the public are the ones calling the shots. Why should Joe Sixpack go try to protest? The best he's going to do is end up like Occupy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @11:04PM
> This is why you don't negotiate with terrorists. They will never keep their word.
Oh bullshit.
Could you water-down "terrorist" any more?
Verizon wants money, money, money. They don't care what politics gets them there. They aren't terrorists.
Terrorists tend to have specific addressable goals - they are almost always about more autonomy for various social groups. Like the IRA in Northern Ireland, the ANC in South Africa or the Sons of Liberty in the Thirteen Colonies. Generally you can negotiate with them because they have concrete goals.
The whole "we do not negotiate with terrorists" thing is just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent. Don't be one of those tools who turns off their brain in response to rhetoric.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday July 23 2014, @05:11PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Wednesday July 23 2014, @06:59PM
I was having a lot of issues with Verizon FIOS over the last year. The performance gradually got worse and worse. Youtube sucked. Google maps was almost unusable. Even Soylent News behaved like it was on a dialup connection. Other sites seemed OK. It wasn't my router: they replaced that.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:07PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:58PM
Of course YMMV and we never figured out what was wrong with it. I left the US a month ago, so obviously I cut the service. Netflix was always fine, as it happens. Personally, I think what was going on was over-subscribed capacity. netstat showed loads of dropped packets to domains that were behaving slowly at the time. It varied by time of day, I think; it certainly had shitty epochs then good epochs. Things like the Verizon and Speakeasy speed tests worked as expected, likely because the downloads were cached locally. Actually, even Youtube wasn't that awful. It was unexpected things like maps.google.com and soylentnews that were problematic. Amazon too, at times.
The Verizon rep said that I "had to understand that they have no control of stuff outside of their network" and tried to blame the issues on others. However, when I was at work, which is only 3 miles, none of these problems happened. Neither do I recall them happening at a friend's place which was 20 minutes walk away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @11:23PM
Too late now, but traceroute would have told you exactly where the packets were being dropped.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @11:19PM
Buy a VPN subscription. They are really cheap, like $40/year. That will get your packets routed through a different exchange point and netflix will go full-blast. Plus you'll get the benefit of being able to change your IP address at will which will help stymie web stalkers and most of them let you run multiple VPNs simultaneously so you can put it on your phone too so free wifi won't snoop you nor will the cell phone company.
http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Verizon-Fios-Netflix-Vyprvpn.html [iamnotaprogrammer.com]
These guys even let you pay anonymously with nearly any store-bought giftcard (but you'll pay $50/year instead of $40).
http://privateinternetaccess.com/ [privateinternetaccess.com]
(Score: 1) by Tork on Thursday July 24 2014, @12:29AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 24 2014, @10:48AM
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/cancelnetflix [defectivebydesign.org]