One might point out that the person whom many consider to be the best peering analyst/negotiator/coordinator in existence moved from Comcast to Apple this past September.
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Apple Forging Deals with ISPs to Bolster Delivery of iTunes, Apps, and iCloud Content to Users
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One might point out that the person whom many consider to be the best peering analyst/negotiator/coordinator in existence moved from Comcast to Apple this past September.
So now companies have to pay to be on the internet in the US?
US is one of the top 5 most corrupt countries in the world.
US is one of the top 5 most corrupt countries in the world.
It is relevant, if ISP's decide that customers should no longer have decent access to Apple services, than Apple is screwed.
Comcast just bought Time Warner, becoming the largest cable provider in the U.S. (70%+ market ownership). I, along with many others, have been closely following Net Neutrality. Comcast is against it. If they have their way, they will control what information we have access to and/or how fast that connection may be. Think China. This effects many as Time Warner has been the only cable provider in many closed markets (Rochester, NY with Frontier is one prime example), in which rates are double that of competitive markets such as New York City.
One aspect that is alarming, Comcast's CEO and top level executives support initiates such as "Creationism" being taught in the classroom. Imagine students with the inability to access educational sites regarding unbiased information, and instead force-fed what Comcast demands.
If Comcast wants to push their services, they could easily block access to Apple's services and/or lower broadband speeds. Say bye-bye to freedom of information, and hello to corporate dictatorship. Why hasn't the government stopped this deal as they did with AT&T and MaBell in the 80's and AT&T and T-Mobile last year? This isn't a free market, it's a megapoly.
Its good for Google if net neutrality goes away because then they can market Fiber as the only neutral provider. But since internet is modern utility this should never happen but given how the US gov is always open to corporate bribes who knows.
Here is how i understand it and I will use comcast as an example. Net neutrality says that comcast must treat all data packets on its network the same. However, the issue is how does data get on its network. That is outside the definition of neutrality and is where the problem lies. Apple has huge server farms ready to send information to wherever. At my house I am stuck with comcast as my only option. So for apple or Netflix to get their content from their server onto the comcast network and to me, they need to rely on a pipe provided by a third party or build their own pipe. The issue I think is that for cost and quality it is better for apple to strike direct deals and build their own pipes versus having to rely on the third party pipes and their deals. This is essentially what Netflix did with comcast.
You can argue that the pipe connection and fees should be part of net neutrality, but the reality is that it is not currently, so laws would need to change to incorporate that into the definition. At least in the US this is how i understand it.
You can argue that the pipe connection and fees should be part of net neutrality, but the reality is that it is not currently, so laws would need to change to incorporate that into the definition. At least in the US this is how i understand it.
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I think Google Fiber would help competition, which we lack today also causing these net neutrality issues.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/03/12/google-is-fiber-its-next-disruptive-technology.aspx
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This has NOTHING to do with Net Neutrality. Thats a misunderstanding. Heres a good definition of Net Neutrality: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144
All that is happening is that Apple on their end needs to buy a huge connection to the net in order to move all that data. Its a really huge amount of data and moving it efficiently is hard. They used to hire outside companies to do that. Now they are proposing to do it themselves.
That has nothing at all to do with Net Neutrality.
All that is happening is that Apple on their end needs to buy a huge connection to the net in order to move all that data. Its a really huge amount of data and moving it efficiently is hard. They used to hire outside companies to do that. Now they are proposing to do it themselves.
That has nothing at all to do with Net Neutrality.
Ok, again, it does not tell me what it has to do with Apple building their own CDN, nor does it say if Apple is with or against neutrality. By your logic, you should be boycotting all CDN providers on the planet because they're providing a reliable and fast networks for every company who needs it.
Do you know what CDN is right?
Apple cannot serve its content reliably from a single egress from its internal network to the entire population. It has to rely on dozens of third-party CDN networks around the world that have local servers and networks to serve Apple's content.
For an example, if Apple wants to serve its content locally and quickly in UK, it needs to have an edge server in UK. It has to pay somebody in UK to hold Apple's content and serve them to UK customers.
Without CDN, Apple's network will be overwhelmed with all US and international customers requesting the same data from Apple's local data center.
Going directly to certain ISPs to pay for faster access for delivering your content goes directly against net neutrality. Paying anything for delivering specific content online is not neutral. I'm sorry, but I think you're the one who is confused here. This gives Apple an unfair advantage as they can buy their way to better servicewhen net neutrality states that every company should have equality of service online. No companies should get priority access. The internet should be dumb pipes like water and electricyou pay for what you use and the capacity of the line going to your house. Users would be less likely to sign up with a music service that doesn't download as fast as Apple's because their ISP is screwing with their connection. If CNN takes five minutes to buffer but Fox News takes two seconds because they paid for priority access (or vice versa), then that's probably going to tick off a lot of people. You shouldn't be able to prioritize the flow of information. That's an extremely slippery slope where if you theoretically get enough money, you can stomp out all information contrary to your own beliefs by buying up 99.9% of capacity. That's an extreme example but you get the point. Large corporations already have too much power through lobbyists, campaign donations and morebut that's a reform discussion for another day.
THIS TYPE OF STUFF HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH NET NEUTRALITY.
Get educated people:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014...etflix-comcast-deal-getting-basics-wrong.html
Get educated people:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014...etflix-comcast-deal-getting-basics-wrong.html
No, that's not what it means. You're listening to what the ISPs and fear-mongers are saying, not what the actual meaning is.
It basically means that the ISPs must treat all data packets the same, it cannot isolate or filter packets for different benefits. It has nothing to do with speed.
In this case, Apple's simply buying bandwidth for its local edge servers around the world in order to have a local cache of Apple's files. That allows customers in UK to grab from Apple's UK servers instead of Apple paying a UK company to hold the cache and serve it to UK customers. ISPs, transmit and other companies are the only one you can buy bandwidth from, that's why it is easily confuse this with network neutrality when it is not.
It does NOT tell ISPs to treat Apple data packets differently from other packet. It is the same packets, just from a local server instead of a remote one. It does not guarantee faster experience since the server is limited just like any other servers. The difference is mainly latency and localized set of traffic, in other words, only UK customers grab files from the Apple's UK servers (short trip, makes it quicker to grab files), US customers from US servers, etc etc (more bandwidth for each locations to be served to the specific ones).
Again, Comcast can still block/degrade Apple's content, they'd just be doing it on the local servers instead of the remote servers.
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Megalopoly, or maybe even a Corporatocracy. IMO the reason they haven't stepped in is because they actually want this to happen. Our freedoms have been slowly eroding away over decadesslowly enough for people who aren't paying attention to notice, and this is the perfect way to control the information a population receives without technically violating the constitution. You know as well as I all of the money from these corporations flowing into political campaigns. I mean for crying out loud, the current FCC chairman is a former cable industry lobbyist! And he was unanimously approved by the senate. Those bastards can never agree on anythinganything except controlling the information we receive (such as reports that their approval rating is less than cancer). Republicans and democrats really aren't all that differentit's just a distraction to keep our eye off the ball. We're too busy hating on the other side to see that they're really both screwing us over while raking in tons of cash.
They already do that, for your entire life.
Also, read the 2 posts directly before yours.
Could be...most in the neighborhood have switched to FIOS (which we had right before this last switch) I can see how things pan out for a while...switch back in 2 years
Interesting. I thought the point of a CDN (such as the one Apple is building) is to have your own servers located around the world which you then use to distribute content. I've heard about this caching before (I think it's one of the reasons why big games downloaded on Xbox Live take a while if you first download it at midnight before others do, but if you do it the next day then it loads faster from a local cache). If that's truly all that is happening, then I don't have a problem with that as they are just fleshing out their distribution network even further to fill in the gaps. But for the record, I believe throttling speeds is against net neutrality as I perceive it. But if it's as you said, then that's not the case here. I'll have to do some more research on this tonight. Good discussion *shakes hand*
Core Business?
It sounds like a calculation that building a stickier portfolio of services is worth the risk of straying so far outside Apple's core business.
A customer might switch his phone, might switch his HTPC, laptop, or cable service.
But I can imagine accepting all kinds of compromises not to have to swap them all out in the same transaction. A customer for life is born.
It sounds like a calculation that building a stickier portfolio of services is worth the risk of straying so far outside Apple's core business.
A customer might switch his phone, might switch his HTPC, laptop, or cable service.
But I can imagine accepting all kinds of compromises not to have to swap them all out in the same transaction. A customer for life is born.
I did and if that's the case, then ok fine. And maybe that wasn't the best example, but I know for a fact my iPhone doesn't use $15/mo worth of electricity to charge. I'm just saying that if they start putting smart chips into every charging port to determine what kind of device is plugged in and charge different rates depending on if it's an Apple device or an Android devicethat would be scary. And not outside the realm of possibility. If I was an evil person then I would totally be working for these companies inventing new ways to charge people for stuff that they are already getting at a much lower price. I've got all kinds of bad ideas.
That's precisely the point of CDNs, to have local cache of the same data in various parts of the world instead of one single cache for the entire world.
In the case of Xbox Live, in order to avoid overloading its main network from tens of million of gamers downloading 40GB of games all at the same time, Microsoft has to pre-load the data to various edge servers it uses for its own CDN network before making it available to gamers. So that UK gamers can grab it from the local UK cache, which doesn't use any bandwidth allocated for the US cache once US customers wake up.
Apple has hundreds of millions of iOS users all over the world, serving 600-1GB update files all from a single server in US is simply not going to work. They have to pay millions of dollars per year to have other third party companies to do this for them. With today's article, they are simply cutting those companies out and wants to serve its content locally in those locations. This would probably save them a lot of money because you can buy bulk amount of bandwidth from those transits/ISPs/etc companies and bandwidth costs always decline over time. However, third-party CDN providers may not pass on those savings to customers right away, they'll use it to build out their own networks to speed it up in addition to paying their shareholders some profit.
In the case of the throttling speed, yes, that's absolutely against the network neutrality since ISPs are filtering those packets out intentionally to slow it down.
As long as ISP doesn't treat any packets differently, it's not violating any network neutrality. If an ISP makes a deal to prioritize Apple's data over other packets, that's against network neutrality. However, if an ISP makes a deal to let Apple store content within their networks for Apple's servers and does not prioritize it over other packets, than it is not against network neutrality. (Note routing customers to the local Apple server instead of remote servers out of state or country is not the same as prioritizing it over other packets).
PS: CDNs are also used to localize contents. For an example, instead of using up a lot of space for different media in different languages in one US server, you can simply store the Russian content on servers hosted in Russia.
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I think you need to re-read Wheeler's proposal: "pay-for-priority arrangements"
http://www.fcc.gov/document/protecting-and-promoting-open-internet-nprm
This basically means he's leaving the table open for QoS on specific services. I'm not saying that is what Apple, Netflix, or anyone else is currently doing, but Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, et al are pushing for the ability to do so.
I've got no problem with paid/free peering agreements, but the ISPs can't force someone to peer with them. If Apple wants to create it's own CDN and purchase way more capacity from transit networks, like TATA, Level3, Cogent, Hurricane Electric, et al than more the power to them. ISPs shouldn't be able to purposely degrade services though because they want to force a CDN into a paid peering agreement with them. The only reason they can do this in the US is because we don't have an open market on last mile access, unlike much of the civilized world.
This is exactly it. CDNs are just proxies. Simple example of why they are good, and have nothing to do with net neutrality:
A new hit movie comes out, and AppleTV users around the world want to rent or buy it. Lets say the movie is 1GB in size. The master file sits in the data center in North Carolina. For the example, lets say 1,000 people watch it around the same time. 500 on the east coast, and 500 on the west coast.
Without a CDN: You have one terabyte of network traffic to push out of North Carolina, and to each individual person 1GB total. 500GB ends up transiting across the US to users on the west coast, passing through at least 5 major hops. 500GB stays somewhat local on the east coast, going through 1-2 hops. Each hop must have the bandwidth to push 500GB in total quickly till you start getting closer to the end users and the last mile.
With a CDN: 500GB of data is still pushed out of North Carolina to people 1-2 hops away. But, for the people on the west coast, only 1GB goes across all 5 major hops. Then it gets to the CDN server sitting in say San Francisco. From there, 500 individual connections are made to push 500GB along 1-2 hops.
The big difference here is that 501GB of traffic came out of North Carolina when a CDN was used, not 1,000GB. And only 1GB went across the entire country. Thus leaving more bandwidth available on the cross country links on the backbone. This benefits every internet user, as those cross country links are not serving as much redundant data, and have room for legitimate unique traffic, such as personal FaceTime calls between families that are split between the coasts.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. This circumstance is making more sense now. I just get really riled up about net neutrality and this sounded like another case of it being violated so I got upset. I apologize. However, I do think Apple should be a leader in pushing for an open internet. Considering Steve Jobs' vision for the internet and sharing knowledge going back decades, you'd think it would be ingrained in their entire mindset that the internet needs to be protected and open. And maybe they do think that. But considering their position as a leader in the technology world, they are in a prime position to actually do something about it and influence the path being taken. So far they haven't really done much. We'll see.
I absolutely can blame them. They should be putting that money towards abolishing this absurd notion of internet fast lanes.