[AusNOG] Netflix, AWS and Softlayer vs. Australia

[Tony]

I think you'll find that if you look at nearly any residential ISP T&C's you'll find something like this:

"we do not guarantee that your connection to the Internet will achieve anyspecific speed specified in the Pricing Schedule at any given time asvariables such as signal strength, distance from exchange, traffic and loadhave an effect on the connection speed;"

How users deal with this is another question and depends a fair bit on how bad the congestion is, how often it is and how grumpy the user is.
The "better" (ie. less budget) ISP's typically try to maintain enough headroom that they don't suffer from much congestion at peak times (if any). Whether these ISP's continue to maintain the same bandwidth availability is purely a matter of pricing.
I also think that if/when Netflix is available 'natively' in Australia it's not like a flood gate will be opened. The people who are super-keen on it are already using it, so that won't change. Those who think it's worth trying, but were put off by the minor hoops required to access it now might start to sign up. Those who don't care for it, well they still won't care for it. There might be a gradual increase in traffic volumes, that most semi-competent ISP's will deal with in the same way that they currently deal with the fact that users are consuming ever more data. They will purchase more backhaul/transit/intercap/CVC/whatever, revisit pricing plans & quota's and adjust as necessary to maintain margins/profit.
If an ISP fails to do this, then they will either become unprofitable or lose customers (or both) and cease to exist.
I don't see the sky falling in any time soon.

regards,Tony.


      From: Alan Maher <alanmaher at gmail.com>
 To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net 
 Sent: Thursday, 4 December 2014, 19:37
 Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Netflix, AWS and Softlayer vs. Australia
   
The analogy with motorways/highways is quite reasonable.
During peak hours, the traffic is slow, and at other times flows quite 
well.
Depending on your journey and location, or an accident up ahead.
In this present situation where the content is user driven, and is traffic
intensive, we may find "roadblocks" more often.

I am curious as to how the various providers intend to deal with this.

While I understand local caching & peering, and people like Netflix 
installing their
boxes to avoid global transit, the fact remains that the average punter at
home who just does Facebook, or Youtube entertainment, or watches the
news videos, is likely to find their network connection turning into a snail
because the kid next door is watching the latest video in HD while 
simultaneously
playing a mega game on the Steam engine.

Using the highway analogy, it is like everyone owns a Ferrari, and wants 
to put the foot
down, but can't.
At the serious x-border network level, the capacity is there, but at 
street level we
are looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

The change will not be driven by you, the network gurus, but will be 
driven by
consumer demand and angry letters to the local Member of Parliament because
number 1 son/daughter can't do his/her homework when the internet goes 
so slow.
Which, of course, puts them in the under-privileged class , which is not 
why they
paid a fortune to buy a house in this prestigious suburb, near this 
prestigious school.

These are the kinds of things that drive change, and any political 
analyst could likely
show you a map of where fibre is likely to be laid , versus where it 
isn't, unless hell
freezes over. And the poor people's end of town isn't top of the list.

Quotas are a mysterious beast, invented by Telcos/ISP's (here in NZ) to 
create a
series of layered marketing "opportunity".
"Premium" users have unlimited data, regardless of their connection speed.
And so on down to the ordinary user who is happy to see their email come in.

These marketing ploys, well loved by ummm marketers (they didn't get 
that degree
by staring at the ceiling) are just that. And have little to do with 
network connection.

But the next phase of consumer demand for "all you can eat" data, at 
anytime,
on any platform, is likely to create some wireless contention issues, 
and some backhaul
snags.

But, that is my simple observation, from an ancient perspective.

Alan
On 4/12/2014 9:32 p.m., Oz Nog wrote:
>> If you choose to use up your quota with other things, then obviously you've got less possible hours of 1080p Netflix per month.
>    Obviously. In the end total consumption is what matters and in that total Netflix is the largest chunk in the US, so my statement still stands.
>    Root cause analysis of large Internet consumption has been identified as a phenomenon called "teens" based on comments. It seems to correlate with large consumption and large expense in general. In addition to Netflix, an oft quoted service causing large bandwidth usage is Steam with 30GB game downloads.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Baz
  
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