Is Verizon a Network Hog? 310
pillageplunder wrote to mention a piece in BusinessWeek asking whether or not Verizon has the right to set aside bandwidth for its own projects. They're planning a television service, and have allocated a swath of their bandwidth (which could otherwise be used for net and phone traffic) to back this service. From the article: "Leading Net companies say that Verizon's actions could keep some rivals off the road. As consumers try to search Google, buy books on Amazon.com, or watch videos on Yahoo!, they'll all be trying to squeeze into the leftover lanes on Verizon's network. On Feb. 7 the Net companies plan to take their complaints about Verizon's plans to the Senate during a hearing on telecom reform."
It's *their* network (Score:4, Informative)
It's their fiber... (Score:5, Informative)
It's their fiber, why can't they allocate it as they wish?
There seems to be a confusion in TFA about whether this applies to any backbones managed by Verizon versus the optical fiber that Verizon is supplying to people's homes via their FiOS service.
Regarding the backbones, as long as they are meeting their contractual commitments, why should anybody else have any say over how they allocate any additional bandwidth they may have.
Regarding fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), they are planning on allocating it as follows using three wavelengths (according to John Dix at Network World):
In the FTTH case, historically the Telcos have been required to provide fair access to their wires (thus you're not required to use Qwest as your ISP if you have Qwest DSL, for example), I would expect that the fair access rules would apply to FTTH.
The surest way to delay getting fiber bandwidth to your home or internet infrastructure is by taking away the incentives (read: profit) for the corporations involved. Verizon is currently making major investements in having a large share of the next generation networks, their competition is being caught flat-footed and behind the curve and will probably try to make legal challenges to slow their growth.
Re:Verizon networks - built with Google's money? (Score:2, Informative)
At the risk of sounding like Saddam's minister of propaganda, "There is no such thing as the Internet!!!" I wish more people would understand this. There are lots of individual networks linked together that have been cooperating in terms of peering and protocols for some time. If you think of it as anything beyond that, you've made 1 assumption too many.
Inaccurate report (Score:3, Informative)
Article on FIOS here - http://news.com.com/Verizons+fiber+race+is+on/210
Enjoy.
Re:The markets... (Score:3, Informative)
If the local government goes along with it, then they do not have to ask anyone because the right-of-way is already there. It was there when you bought the property.
Try building a subdivision and bypassing all that process. It is a significant pain in the rear because of all of the different players that get involved.
Why Fiber is expensive to light up (Score:3, Informative)
While the latest hardware can pack a lot more information in a fibre line than in the past, the hardware is also a lot more expensive.
Once you figure in the cost of signal boosters, lighting up any longish stretch of fibre gets expensive pretty quick.
Re:Verizon's recent purchase makes this subject mo (Score:3, Informative)
That's an incredibly stupid way to setup your network though when there are better ways like QoS to prioritize your "premium" traffic over the commodity Internet traffic without carving out arbitrary bandwidth limitations. Basically they'd be far more likely to configure their routers to prioritize Verizon's VoIP (if they do that) or video-on-demand service over general non-tagged web traffic for instance. The way you're describing it is that they're carving out fixed-size PVCs which may or may not be utilized efficiently. That's just a silly way to do it.
Re:They Paid For It (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They Paid For It (Score:2, Informative)
Sources:
And some taxes are OLD like from 1898! (Score:3, Informative)
NewsNet5.com [newsnet5.com] reports that there is a call to repeal a telephone/phone (including cellular/cell phones) tax most Americans probably don't even know they are paying. Anybody who has ever tried to decipher a phone bill knows how tough it can be. One of the charges is a 3 percent fee on every phone bill in America. The origin of the tax predates the invention of the phone by nearly a century.
Every time a person use their his/her phone, he/she supports the war effort -- the Spanish-American War [loc.gov]. The 1898 war involved Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. The fee began as a luxury tax on phones at the turn of the 19th Century. And we're all still paying for it today. Phone bills don't specify that the tax originates from the Spanish-American War. It is labeled as the federal excise tax, which amounts to 3 percent of every monthly bill...
Seen on Shacknews [shacknews.com]. Posted on my site [aqfl.net] recently.
Re:"Free" market (Score:3, Informative)
That's why it's called a "regulated monopoly." The gov't recognizes that it's a monopoly, but that it's a more efficient use of resources, so they set up special rules by which these telco monopolies must operate. Stuff like, minimum service reliability. As critical infrastructure, telcos are required by law to provide near-perfect service uptime. Think six sigma or better. When was the last time you picked up a POTS line and didn't get a dial tone? Contrast the cable companies; how often is your cable out? Telcos are also regulated to provide a minimum service at a specified cost. In Texas, I know that the local residential service is $26 bucks/mo, for no-frills all-you-can-eat local calling. That's six dollars a month less than the cost of maintaining the line, so Verizon loses money on the absolute base service (add one calling plan, and it's back in the black, tho...)
What this is talking about isn't verizon's customers, but rather network traffic that has to go over Verizon's network. So, in essence it could cause an aggregate slow down of other network providers. Customers of those other networks might be pissed but there's nothing they can do about it save for switching to Verizon which is causing the problem in the first place.
In the case of the content providers, Verizon's already made deals with them to distribute content. For the data carriers, the case where Verizon cripples access to their customers is a net loss for everybody. Verizon's customers are paying for the whole internet, not just the Verizon internet. They'd be leaving in droves if VZ ever pulled a stunt like that, and I'm certain the company knows it.
Re:You know what? It doesn't matter! (Score:5, Informative)
As a large bandwidth customer, while nowhere near the levels of Verizon, I am constantly playing the game of deciding what is needed where. I have multiple GigE connections and many servers. I float things around to (hopefully) ensure that I don't run out of bandwidth in any particular spot.
I have places, where I have "essential" services, which I want to leave extra bandwidth available. Those are for my own purposes.
Just on my own scale, I put mail, DNS, and some other internal use machines on a higher priority than say a free hosting server.
Why can't Verizon allocate X for Internet, Y for phone calls, and Z for 'internal' use? Who's freakin' business is it on how they allocate their services. If X suffers because Y and Z get prefered treatment, it's their own business which will be hurt. Customers will get frustrated at slow speeds and high latency, and go somewhere else. Likewise, if they were forced to make X use all available bandwidth, obviously Y and Z will be hurt. Verizon without the ability to pass phone traffic would be interesting. How do you explain to a whole bunch of residential phone customers that they can't make phone calls (frequent all circuits busy tone), because the Internet traffic sucked it all up.
The article references Verizon's new fiber that they've spent a freaking fortune installing. Now that they've put it in, are they under some sort of obligation to allow that to be used for whatever they are told? That really screws with any sort of plans they may have. Ok, so they're going to offer television over IP. Great. Why should they be required to sublet that to me for my latest/greatest ISP venture, or dedicate it to Internet bandwidth. It's their lines. They installed them for a reason.
I know Tier 1 providers frequently sublet fiber as they have it available. It's not like Verizon will hold onto a bunch of dark fiber just for the sake of telling another provider to go screw themselves. Well, it may happen, but they're in the business of making money.
The whole "who gets priority" thing is kind of silly. Providers have been doing it for years anyways. It may not be obvious, but it happens. Here's an example. Like I said, we use lots of bandwidth, and we're frequently checking on how things look. If we aren't, one of our roughly 2 million daily viewers is. People like to complain, and I guarantee at least a few of those 2 million viewers can run a traceroute. If things are slow through a city, either we'll already know about it, or a viewer will complain. A few times, a provider has made the mistake of lowering our quality of service. Someone else was given the prefered routes, and we were left with the crap. A few phone calls to high places in the company, and we can see things start working better and we suddenly get calls from high ranking people in the company apologizing that the mistake ever happened. Sometimes they'll play it off as a simple mistake, but in the end, it's all the same. They changed something (QOS), we complained, they changed it back.
I guarantee, we'll get the prefered routes, over someone with a T1 or even a 10Mb cross connect. It's all in who pays more. Obviously, if we have equipment on the provider in question, we'll always appear faster than someone on another provider, especially across a bad peering. Are we "paying" for this service? Sure. We pay out the ass to have equipment in a facility and bandwidth to support them. Are you as a home DSL/cablemodem customer going to have the same influence with a provider that we have? No freakin' way. On the other hand, we only deal with Tier 1 providers, so you won't be dealing with them directly. Even as a Verizon DSL/cablemodem customer, you aren't talking to the Tier 1 part of the company.
With all that said, we're not Verizon customers. We have been on occasion for lesser services (backup DSL for offices, and the like), but not for our main services. They don't offer the killer deals that others do.