Big Tech Firms Should Pay ISPs To Upgrade Networks, Telcos In Europe Claim (arstechnica.com) 87
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The CEOs of 13 large European telecom companies today called on tech giants -- presumably including Netflix and other big US companies -- to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs. In a "joint CEO statement," the European telcos described their proposal as a "renewed effort to rebalance the relationship between global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem." The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize the cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband access. These arguments generally don't mention the fact that tech giants already pay for their own Internet bandwidth costs and that Netflix and others have built their own content-delivery networks to help deliver the traffic that home-Internet customers choose to receive.
Today's letter from European ISPs was signed by the CEOs of A1 Telekom Austria Group, Vivacom, Proximus Group, Telenor Group, KPN, Altice Portugal, Deutsche Telekom, BT Group, Telia Company, Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Orange Group, and Swisscom. They wrote: "Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model -- which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation -- can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to network costs." The European telcos didn't mention any specific tech giants, but Reuters wrote today that "US-listed giants such as Netflix and Facebook are companies they have in mind." The letter also discusses other regulatory topics related to fiber and mobile broadband, saying that "regulation must fully reflect market realities... Namely, that telecom operators compete face-to-face with services by big tech."
Today's letter from European ISPs was signed by the CEOs of A1 Telekom Austria Group, Vivacom, Proximus Group, Telenor Group, KPN, Altice Portugal, Deutsche Telekom, BT Group, Telia Company, Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Orange Group, and Swisscom. They wrote: "Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model -- which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation -- can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to network costs." The European telcos didn't mention any specific tech giants, but Reuters wrote today that "US-listed giants such as Netflix and Facebook are companies they have in mind." The letter also discusses other regulatory topics related to fiber and mobile broadband, saying that "regulation must fully reflect market realities... Namely, that telecom operators compete face-to-face with services by big tech."
Translation (Score:3, Funny)
Pay for upgrades so we can charge you more...
Re: Translation (Score:2)
Be careful what you wish for (Score:3)
I wonder how the ISPs would feel if Netflix reduced the load on their network by providing satellite service...
Re: Be careful what you wish for (Score:4, Interesting)
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Article, or at least the summary is about European ISP's. Could be wrong but I don't think they're so vertical as in N. America where ISP also owns studios, content and streaming service.
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Here with the push for FTTH they regulated it to accomplish exactly that: if you don't have FTTH yet but live where it's possible to get the last mile installed you can do that by contacting any ISP and subscribing a 1 year contract. That ISP gets 1 year exclusivity, but after that year you can switch to any other ISP and they can use the existing connection.
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Not sure that would actually help. In the UK we already broke BT up, so now the parts that manage the network and that manage consumer services are separate companies. It hasn't really fixed anything.
The bandwidth issue is the backhaul from the local exchange. Any company can install their equipment there to take on subscribers, but they have to provide enough bandwidth to the exchange for all of them. Typically they work on a 1/20 ratio, i.e. they supply 1/20th of the maximum bandwidth all of their subscri
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Put another way, for decades they've been partying with a twenty to one oversell and now the party is toning down to only fifteen to one overselling.
That is, God forbid, they might actually have to provide a larger fraction of what they've been selling for years.
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It helps but the bottleneck is probably the connection to the local exchange, which it does nothing to improve.
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Sounds expensive. They would need to buy a building near the local exchange, and get it cabled to the exchange. Can't just be any building either, it needs to be suitable for servers running 24/7. Repeat that for every exchange.
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That would be interesting, and actually quite doable with modern technology:
Netflix launches their own satellite. If they use Ka and multiple spot beams, the dishes become very small. The bandwidth potential is in the gigabtyes and to fill up a cache on what amounts to a multicast/broadcast system, 10s of gigabytes is probably all that's needed, but I'd have to run the numbers to say for sure..
So, here's how the system could work. Netflix would push out the newest and most popular titles, which would be cac
Netflix made the internet more valuable (Score:2)
If you're an ISP and suddenly more services are available on the pipe that your customers pay to use, then feel free to charge what you think is fair for that pipe. Netflix won't even ask for a cut of your profits.
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Well that's the question, do these large European telecom's set their own rates? If they are regulated as monopolies maybe they don't. Though even in that case it seems they should petition the regulators for a rate hike rather than demanding straight b2b payments.
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European telcos can set their own rate for data services.
In most of Europe, competition is intense so this keeps prices down.
Telcos just want someone else to pay for their network build-out so they can continue to get lots of operating revenue without first having to do capital spending.
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This. Rather than facing the market with an honest offering, they want to lowball on their offer and then pick your pocket for the rest by sneaking the cost into other company's bills.
then charge your customers less (Score:1, Offtopic)
Year Revenue (IN BILLIONS)
2016 80,403
2017 85,029
2018 94,507
2019 108,942
source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Brian Roberts, Comcast CEO earned $32M in 2020. ( https://deadline.com/2021/04/c... [deadline.com] ) Apparently, revenue in the 100's of billions per year isn't enough and they want to have tech companies pay their C level creatures even more. Enough with the greed.
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This is European telcos, that in many countries behave in far less ridiculous ways. I had a Telia broadband which delivered a typical 100/10 VDSL2 connection (which actually was usually around 110/12 in reality on the modem) for 19,90 EUR a month.
They did try to upsell me on random garbage, and I didn't want any. That's the real problem. They want to get subscribers to buy the cable package, the media package, the audiobook package, etc. And a lot of people don't because they just go to youtube, netflix, au
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Re:then charge your customers less (Score:4)
More recently put in, maybe? I bet AT&T got away with what they could when it came to copper infrastructure and didn't bother to do a lot of maintenance on it.
You'd win that bet. I'm a former MST and I can assure you that AT&T stopped giving a shit about maintaining the copper (yet still trying like hell to extract money from it) over 15 years ago.
When we started the Lightspeed project (U-Verse) they were dumping insane amounts of money into it and we were fixing EVERYTHING and fixing it right. Rehabbing entire cities was matter-of-fact. Then a few years in, they just stopped and went back to doing shit on the cheap. I walked away from the project, after a couple of years, in disgust. They were trying to sell U-Verse of some of the most poorly maintained lines I had ever seen. Everything became a band-aid fix. It literally got to the point I wouldn't tell anyone I was working on U-Verse because it sucked so bad.
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Ah yes, U-Verse.
You are correct. It did start out on the right foot. From a technical view (my expertise) it looked attractive to me and I could have been a subscriber, but multiple things turned me away:
- The buildout was SLOW ... even for a customer who lives no more than 15,000 cable-feet from the Central Office it took YEARS to become available for me.
- The marketing was full of promises but calling AT&T about them revealed them to simply be "promises". I don't remember the details now.
- Past servic
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- The buildout was SLOW ... even for a customer who lives no more than 15,000 cable-feet from the Central Office it took YEARS to become available for me.
The max range we could get out of the system, even when they figured out bonded-pairs, was about 2,000 feet (give or take). AT&T had to put in distribution nodes all over the place because of the limited range.
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I'm in Vancouver BC and get 75/25 DSL. Totally adequate for the three in the household.
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They (Telus) have been busy in my very rural neighbourhood north of Mission stringing up fibre. The basic package is 300/300 for $85 a month with no quota for the first 2 years, then IIRC, 1 GB a month, they have the better plans too if someone needs them.
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I get 225/225 over copper (cable) in Berlin for 10€ a month.
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They haven't upgraded most of Berlin to docsis 3.0 yet?
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No, it's just US telcos aren't interested in maintaining the copper plant or selling you anything over copper. They want everyone on cell so they can ditch the expensive to maintain copper.
I'm in Vancouver BC and get 75/25 DSL. Totally adequate for the three in the household.
Yes/No. Fiber-optic networks are still being built and maintained quite well. Those cell towers have to get their bandwidth from somewhere and that somewhere is a fiber line.
Cellular / Fixed Wireless for homes and fiber for business. That's the direction it is going. Copper will be dead in the next 10 years (at least in California). AT&T is just waiting to go below the subscriber threshold, mandated in legislation, that forces it to maintain the network now. As soon as they can they're going to
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I'm in a small US city with a municipal fiber network and I'm pretty sure there are no powered components anywhere between my ONT and the main switch in the city building downtown.
You're probably right. 10 years ago we were getting 20 km distances out of high-powered SFP modules. I'm sure it's improved since then.
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I'm in Finland, and it's all CAT3 phone cabling in my building, which was built in 1970s. Typical setup is fiber to the building company (one company owns the building or a certain set of buildings that are located in a single area, all residents own a share that allows them to live in a specific apartment and right to vote in the yearly elections to elect the board of the building company and certain key issues that board cannot decide by itself). DSLAM goes into the telecommunications room in a specific p
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VDSL2 isn't meant to run distances more than 300m. It's literally in the standard. If you need to run several kilometers, you do it over ADSL2+, usually via a local ATM belonging to telco located in the same neighbourhood. I had that until they tore up the streets to pull fibre across the neighborhood. It was running pretty much maximum theoretical speed ADSL2+ is capable of, up to 24/3 (when you utilize all of the upstream, downstream lost a little bit of performance because of how ANNEX M is set in the AD
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Wait ... you had twisted pair DSL capable of 100 mbps? Is the copper network in Sweden that much better quality than in the US?
We have twisted pair DSL at 100 mbps here in the US too. For about 2,000 feet. Then it rapidly drops off.
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The key is to bring the fiber infrastructure pretty close to the end users though and have your DSLAMs at nearly every street corner which can yield as much as 300Mbit/s downstreams with VDSL2+.
That's probably what happened there compared to other places where ISPs didn't invest as much money into the required DSLAM density to keep the 'last mile' short.
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The copper lines are owned by the old incumbents, resp. KPN and TDC and generally in good condition.
Often it's only the famous last mile that's copper, the rest is fiber and those copper lines can depending on the distance to the nearest fiber connection give up to 200/25 on a bundled double line (which is pretty standard for most homes).
Fiber to the home is often laid by specialised companies that then o
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Wait ... you had twisted pair DSL capable of 100 mbps? Is the copper network in Sweden that much better quality than in the US?
It's likely FTTC or even FTTB. Only the last few metres will be copper.
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VDSL is way better than ADSL2, but requires you to be a lot closer to fiber access. A lot of the US either doesn't have a convenient way to install infrastructure or everyone lives too far apart. On the other hand, there are areas where AT&T calls VDSL "fiber" and I almost didn't get my FTTH because I thought it only went to the pole.
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https://www.languageediting.co... [languageediting.com]
It comes alongside doing measurements in systems that are divisible by tens so help count them easily, rather than comparing length of our feet to the size of our penises whenever we want to figure out the distance, or whatever it is you measure in inches.
>:)
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Like 1 million dollar is $1.000.000,00
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This is European telcos, that in many countries behave in far less ridiculous ways. I had a Telia broadband which delivered a typical 100/10 VDSL2 connection (which actually was usually around 110/12 in reality on the modem) for 19,90 EUR a month.
Irrelevant. That's a home connection.
The big tech firms are paying for enterprise class fiber-optic connections. Youtube probably has a dozen 100G connections directly into multiple Tier 1 backbones (redundancy). Those backbone operators are ISPs. YouTube is an extremely lopsided connection. i.e. they UPLOAD a fuck-ton more than they download. They're not getting any breaks on the interconnect fees because of that. If they data flow is more... balanced, you can often negotiate no-fee interconnecti
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Except with those enterprise class connections they are getting SLAs and they are paying for X amount of connectivity. Any imbalance issues are up to the next hop on the routing path. NetFaceTube has been online long enough that their service providers know what kind of traffic patters to expect from them and if they haven't adjusted their contractual price yet, well, sucks to be them.
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In real world on the other hand, we have specific balancing legislation in place which is aimed at disarming monopolies before they properly form. For example, every corporation working in telecommunications with a proper network has received public assitance to build out that network, but is also legally mandated to separate the hardware side of networking into a separate business. And that separate business must charge a market rate for use of this network from the parent company, AND it must charge the s
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Year Revenue (IN BILLIONS)
You mean millions. Unless they bring in greater than the US GDP each year several times over.
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I believe media companies prefer a lower third crawl for their shakedowns.
What a crock of bull (Score:5, Informative)
Those tech firms aren't getting a free ride. Enterprise class data lines still cost a LOT of money. You can't run your company off of a residential-class service. You have to get business service. And pay.
YouTube has got to have horrendous amounts of upload bandwidth. They ain't getting that shit for free. In fact, they're paying those same ISPs for all of that capacity. Maybe not the local ISPs, but they're probably dealing with MULTIPLE Tier 1 providers.
The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize the cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband access.
Yeah, and it's B.S. when American companies say it too. What idiot doesn't realize that YouTube (or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc) all probably have dozens of multi-homed 100G connections directly into a Tier 1 backbone? You know how much AT&T (for example) charges for one of those fucking connections? Hell, I'm giving those vampires $2000 / month for a 1 G pipe (main & protect).
Things may be slightly different in Europe, but everybody has to connect to a Tier 1 provider, eventually. The more data you upload the more money that Tier 1 is gonna want because of interconnect fees.
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Companies such as Netflix already provide ISPs with cache servers under Open Connect for their content so that rather than the ISP having 10,000 customers call to Netflix's servers they only have the content being pulled once from Netflix to their local cache, then the ISP only has to use their own Network to shift content to end users from that cache.
/quote>
Shoot, I totally forgot about those. I checked into them years ago for my own WISP, but the minimum requirements (bandwidth needed and minimum subscriber numbers) were far beyond what I was, and am, at. I think it was a minimum of 50,000 subscribers, at the time, but I wouldn't swear to it.
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YouTube, or rather parent company Alphabet, is big enough to have its own Tier 1 stuff. They actually make money selling bandwidth to other companies, as well as carrying their own traffic.
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YouTube, or rather parent company Alphabet, is big enough to have its own Tier 1 stuff. They actually make money selling bandwidth to other companies, as well as carrying their own traffic.
Not even close.
In the United States, the Tier 1 providers are AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, CenturyLink (owned by Qwest Communications), Level 3 Communications, Verio (owned by NTT Communications) and Cogent Communications.
Tier 1 ISPs are able to reach any Internet region without paid agreements with another ISP.
On August 10, 2015, Google announced its intention to restructure the company, moving less central services and products into a new umbrella corporation, Alphabet Inc. As part of this restructur
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YouTube has got to have horrendous amounts of upload bandwidth. They ain't getting that shit for free. In fact, they're paying those same ISPs for all of that capacity. Maybe not the local ISPs, but they're probably dealing with MULTIPLE Tier 1 providers.
Maybe if you're Netflix you're paying well. If you're Google, you ARE a Tier 1 provider and you just make sure your contract gives you whatever peering arrangement you want. Who would sign that contract with Google? Probably nobody - but Google can buy whatever provider the other providers do sign with.
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Maybe if you're Netflix you're paying well. If you're Google, you ARE a Tier 1 provider and you just make sure your contract gives you whatever peering arrangement you want. Who would sign that contract with Google? Probably nobody - but Google can buy whatever provider the other providers do sign with.
Google is not a tier 1 provider. Good grief.
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Guess you're right. These days even laying undersea cable is not enough to get you to that top tier.
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Guess you're right. These days even laying undersea cable is not enough to get you to that top tier.
I'd attribute it more to the fact they haven't laid any fiber since 2016, and they only have about 500,000 customers. Now, that's a lot.. But.. relatively speaking, it's nothing compared to AT&T & Verizon who have north of 100,000,000 customers each (cellular, fiber, dsl, etc). Or a company like Comcast with 30 million+.
What use is the local loop.... (Score:2)
if it doesn't have the content. The only reason to connect is for the content. Maybe the local ISP's should start paying for the content that they connect to for free. It's not the local ISP who pays your Netflix bill...
I wish both sides would chip in for better routers (Score:2)
I pay more for my ISP! (Score:3)
Aren't the customers already paying for the last mile?
I pay more to my ISP than I do for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Hulu, combined.
Who makes more per customer?
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Aren't the customers already paying for the last mile?
Their customers only pay a few times.
Once directly in the form of a monthly bill, once again in taxes explicitly to pay for upgrades, and once more in taxes to give them monopoly rights to the last mile, enabling their very existence to be possible.
[sarcasm] Obviously we aren't paying them a forth time, and this problem must be fixed [/sarcasm]
Make the customers pay... (Score:3)
If the customers are using more bandwidth for all these new things these big tech firms are offering and the ISPs have to invest money into their networks to handle the load, they should pass the cost of upgrading their networks onto the customers who are using all that bandwidth.
The solution is known, Interconnection fees. (Score:2)
So just let the big data providers like Youtube and Netflix pay the correct amount to their trunk and they will via the Interconnect Fees distribute it downstream.
Let's turn this around (Score:1)
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We are all one big plannet (Score:2)
It doesn't matter if you're American, Australian, European, Korean, Black, White, Latino, Asian, it's lovely to see that we as a human race are united in one area: ISPs bitch and moan and make completely stupid arse requests.
The USA ISPs wanted governments to give them money.
The Australian ISPs wanted governments to build them infrastructure.
Korean ISPs sue Netflix because they dare to send them traffic.
And now the EU ISPs say "hey wait for me!!!! I want in on this too!"
I'd tell the EU ISP's the same thing I told US (Score:2)
This isn't rocket science, YouTube / Pandora / Spotify / Netflix / Disney+ / fill_in_streaming_service isn't sending this data out at random unsolicited... No, YOUR CUSTOMERS are REQUESTING this data.
I pay you for a connection to the Internet, nothing more or less, at a specific speed. If you can't handle that, then don't oversell it bucko. Now if I want to stream movies and music 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in my home, using the connection I pay your comp
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Overselling ratios work if your customers only need a fraction of the bandwidth they are buying most of the time. The bandwidth available in packages to consumers has not been rising with usage - so they are choking themselves out. If they were overselling 500Mbps connections 20:1 instead of 20Mbps DSL there would be no problem.
All the providers working together ... (Score:2)
....is called a Cartel and is illegal
Commercial Real Estate (Score:2)
This reminds me of the commercial real estate development down the road from me. The buildings were ugly and needed remodeling. So the city raised sales taxes in a special TIF district to pay for the remodeling. The landlord is still collecting rent. I don't know the details of the financial arrangement, but it seems like the property owner is getting huge benefits for not doing their job - even if it's a loan that has to be paid back.
ISPs are starting to do the same. How did we end up with 50 year old
Net neutrality (Score:2)
This is what net neutrality looks like. As market forces break down, governments have to step in and create a command economy to support their socialist Internet.
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This is what net neutrality looks like. As market forces break down, governments have to step in and create a command economy to support their socialist Internet.
That is not remotely what net neutrality means. Net neutrality means that ISPs do not discriminate based on traffic content, origin, or destination. I pay my local ISP for a certain amount of bandwidth. Netflix pays their ISP for a certain amount of bandwidth. The intervening ISPs all have peering agreements to carry that traffic from Netflix to me. These may be no-fee agreements, or if the relationship is not symmetrical, then these ISPs may be paying each other. That's net neutrality: you only deal
Re: Net neutrality (Score:2)
And without net neutrality, your ISP would throttle Netflix, then use that leverage to cut a deal with Netflix to pay for the obscene amount of traffic they take up.
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And without net neutrality, your ISP would throttle Netflix, then use that leverage to cut a deal with Netflix to pay for the obscene amount of traffic they take up.
The ISP has already been paid for that "obscene amount of traffic", by their customers! If the ISP is losing money on the deal, then they are not charging their customers enough or are doing a poor job of network maintenance.
What if instead of just Netflix dominating the streaming market, it was common practice to subscribe to 12 smaller streaming services? What if it was a different combination of services for each household? Total bandwidth used remains the same. Does the ISP get to extort each of thos
Futurama Quote (Score:2)
I'm gonna build my own __fill_in_the_blank__ with blackjack and hookers!
- Bender Rodriquez
Where in this case it's "network"
How about the tech firms getting together to repla (Score:1)
If the Tech firms pool their resources it may be better for them to replace the ISPs totally. Maybe partner with Musk or Amazon for their satellite network to bypass the land based providers in Europe.
Should Car Companies Pay For Roads? (Score:1)
I'm asking in all seriousness. It is one way to approach the problem.
However, I would second what others have written: be careful what you wish for. If they pay for it then they own it and you have no seat at the table anymore.