The idea that ISPs bear the cost of Internet traffic which benefits tech companies is at the centre of their agreement against net neutrality, and it's a fallacious argument.
The ISP is free to decide the price and the quality of the service offered. That's how they recoup their costs, by charging their customers the correct price for the service.
What customers pay is an averaged out bandwidth usage from my understanding.
They can, and should, respond by modifying their plans accordingly. Once the consumer's contract is up, renew them with a more modern usage model. Until then, you eat the cost for not doing your only job.
The theory that "we didn't build in a margin of error and therefore someone else is responsible" is dangerous to society.
ISPs SHOULD see losses. Their investors aren't entitled to guaranteed profits.
In Europe, as usage goes up, prices stays flat, because ISPs there know that the cost of a marginal bit of data is almost nothing, and they actually have to compete with each other on customer service and price.
Until you get to that last bit that your wires and equipment can handle. Then it costs a bunch of money to upgrade those to handle the extra traffic.
Cell phone plans have data tiers and pay-per-use. There's no reason cable companies can't do this either, except it prevents them from fudging costs.
I probably use as much bandwidth as anybody else, and I'd prefer to be accurately charged for it rather than have my provider pull shady net neutrality things or try to become an ad network or buy a media company to "bundle" their services or sell my data to third parties to juice their income.
I see both sides. Honestly, I think there was a better argument for it when the heavy users were a small percentage of users downloading a bunch of "Linux distributions" on bittorrent. Today, it's more likely to be a family that uses Netflix a lot.
Metering would change usage for better or worse and the fact is that a lot of domestic phone plans don't have caps, or at least meaningful ones any longer, although they may throttle data at some point.
https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
It's a smart move really. Netflix saves bandwidth and ISPs save transit capacity.
Might also be the reason Netflix is so good at detecting if you're connecting from a "residential" IP block.
They could also have offer their Encoding System as Services. I upload a video file, sets a few requirements and I get Netflix Quality encoding in return without me fiddling anything.
The Market for CDN and Online Video Encoding that Netflix could get are properly in the sub annual $1B range, may be too small for Netflix to even consider.
I just thought the more traffic passing through those FreeBSD Server the better.
Can an ISP subsidize access to Netflix because they save on transit?
So, are there CDNs without their own racks anywhere?
See "Edge nodes": https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure
Obviously anyone streaming video, it's different.
I wonder if BBC iPlayer (major streaming service in UK) collocate with ISPs.
Will those servers have a local (to the ISP) IP, or do the Akamai IPs get physically routed to the AS?
Fascinating stuff.
The only thing that matters is peak usage because then you have to buy faster network equipment. If I buy 100MBit internet from my ISP, they basically need to spend, once, whatever 100Mbit of a port looks like, 1/10th of a gigabit port, 1/100th of a 10G port etc. They only have to do that once, yet I pay them every month, they're fine.
ISPs also need a way to get your packets off their network and across to other people’s networks, which are possibly on the other side of the globe. A lot of this is done via peering agreements with other providers, where both parties will agree to connect their networks at a common data centre without charging for data going across that link, but there will still be some data that needs to go across transit providers - these are the companies providing things like transatlantic fibre, or interconnects between different parts of the US. They charge for a pre-agreed amount of bandwidth, and when you burst above that it gets expensive.
These agreements are the core of the net neutrality debate. Traditionally peering agreements would see both parties having a roughly equal amount of traffic going back and forth, however in a world with services like Netflix what you see is a huge amount of bandwidth being used on side of the link. This is why ISPs think Netflix and co should have to pick up the cost of those links.
I don’t agree with that stance since the reason ISPs have customers is often the ability to access those services. However, it’s not quite as clear cut as people make out.
If you want more bandwidth, it's "free" as long as there is room available, otherwise the whole chain needs to upgrade so as not to degrade the service of other customers. On a competitive market, the margins available and the prices should tend to go as tight as possible and the economics will lead to pay for usage.
That's price led though, not cost led.