Net Neutrality: Comcast Blocking Netflix

Aside from Google and Amazon fighting it at over apps, this hasn’t really happened before, that I know of. Internet black outs seem a lot more damaging to me than the TV versions.

As for above, for about a month my region wasn’t reading right for reasons no one ever explained to me… the server read as in Canada and blocked me from viewing content.

The only thing I’ve ever seen is that complaint that with net neutrality the ISPs feel they cannot invest in enhancing service. “Hey, if you force us to be more competitive, we can’t make as much and that means we can’t invest in our service!”

Will nobody care for the job creators?

It also prevents “innovations” that might “lower-costs” to consumers. For example, without net-neutrality, an ISP could offer a free Facebook-only option, subsidized by Facebook, like they had in India a while back.

As I recall, the argument goes something like: Well, we’d love to be able to be able to give priority to your Overwatch/Destiny/Quake packets to minimize lag, but Net Neutrality says that all those cat videos being watched by your neighbor have equal standing. Sorry.

Companies could always follow the Riot (League of legends) playbook. I’m sure this wasn’t at all expensive to do.

Before they did this, there were huge problems with certain ISPs and the game, and there was a certain large router somewhere in NYC that dropped all my packets, making the game unplayable. Now it’s as lag free as I’d ever ask for. I imagine this is (unfortunately) what the world will look like for multiplayer games after net neutrality is over - pay up huge money and time, or have a crap game.

So, what Riot did was cut out as many legs of that trip as it could. The collection of routers in dozens of different datacenters? The 13 connections and four layovers? Gone.

They did it by lighting up so-called “dark fiber” that’s been buried in the ground, unused for years and supplementing that new, private network with a set of leased connections to fill in the gaps and provide redundancy.

So now, when you want to fly out to San Jose for some LoL, you’ve got a direct flight.

I’d be willing to bet that what they actually did was use Equinix to host their servers, and then pay Equinix for use of unused fiber between their locations. Since most carriers have major presence points with Equinix, that would also reduce carrier induced latency to a much lower amount.

Equinix is the largest retail datacenter hosting company in the world. They own their own fiber between a lot of those locations, and only recently have allowed customers to lease use of some of that.

Which is observably false, given that net neutrality did correlate with any reduction of infrastructure expansion. Indeed, the obvious took place.

From the posts at the time made by the network team, they had to come up with agreements with each peering provider and ISP seperetely. Each week they would annouce traunches of ISPs (Verizon one week, AT&T another, etc) where they had finalized agreements and your traffic would be routed properly. It sounded like a massive undertaking. I don’t know of many other companies that would do this sort of thing, and I imagine they had to pay some of the ISPs off to get the peering agreements worked out.

Wow that sounds like a ton of work. But are they just hosting in Chicago? It makes me wonder if so.

The US servers are Chicago. They have servers in EU, china, japan, south america, etc. They did the same sort of writeup for the european servers that they did for NA.

I commend them for being that dedicated to low latency gaming. Hell, I’d commend them no matter what business they were in for doing that. It must have been extremely costly.

Pai and the rest of comcast/att/verizon (aka., FCC) can go die in a fire.

I suspect that there is a group of consumers who think they will be perfectly happy with some sort of basic service and thus expect to end up with cheaper internet since they won’t have to pay for the gaming, streaming video and music, and so on that they don’t use.

Joke is on them when the basic service will be the price we already have now. Did these people never have cable TV?! Maybe once they have to pay an extra $10.99/mo to get espn.com they’ll understand.

Will they? Or will they bitch a little about how expensive things are before saying that at least they don’t have to pay for all the stuff they never used anyway. If you don’t stream media do you really need a fast connection? In effect it is the flip side of the old 640k fake quote - other people can pay for fancy new features if they want but I’m ok with the current state (or even less).

Well sure - I’m not saying they aren’t *^&^ing morons still. That’ll never change.

Aside from gamers or people who work in IT like positions, most the people I know under 30 don’t use traditional internet, they use cell services and spend a ton on that. They could care less what their laptop brings in, if they even have one.

Yeah. I remember this beautiful moment in the early-to-mid-00s where it felt like everyone had a computer of some sort. Maybe it was a 6-year-old decrepit, cigarette-smoke-stained Gateway mouldering in the family room or maybe it was a Hot New Netbook or whatever, but everybody and their grandma knew they needed a PC and it was starting to feel so cool. Even my less-nerdly friends were on AIM chat, setting up LiveJournals and MySpaces, figuring out how to use Napster-knockoffs (hey we were kids), and trying out stuff like The Sims. For the first time in the decade+ of owning a “modern computer,” it was starting to feel like my passion/life was kinda going a little mainstream and opening up new avenues of conversation and interaction with everyone I knew.

And then smartphones came out and gave everyone Spotify and texting/Facebook Messenger and timer-based cute-thing clicker games, which were the only parts they cared about anyway from the whole PC experience, and that was, well, that.