{"id":140,"date":"2014-05-17T23:12:25","date_gmt":"2014-05-17T23:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/weblog\/?p=288"},"modified":"2014-05-17T23:12:25","modified_gmt":"2014-05-17T23:12:25","slug":"another-love-letter-to-marguerite-reardon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2014\/05\/17\/another-love-letter-to-marguerite-reardon\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Love Letter to Marguerite Reardon…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"C-Net’s Maggie Reardon wrote another PR-release, fluff\u00a0piece for Comcast on the issue of the Comcast-Netflix peering\/extortion issue.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this supposed, “learned” explanatory piece, Ms. Reardon\u00a0details all the thousand reasons Comcast embodies all that is goodness and right and how NetFlix is a horrible bandwidth hog, free-lunch expectant monster!\u00a0 Yeah, right.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s the piece:\u00a0 <\/strong>C-Net article: Comcast vs. NetFlix<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s obvious who’s paying Maggie’s salary.\u00a0 So I called her on it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

Yes Maggie, it’s obvious you are indeed a shill for the Telco’s.<\/p>\n

A few years back, Ed Whitacre, who at the time was the CEO of AT&T, came up with the bright idea of creating a new revenue stream for his company.<\/p>\n

He wanted to charge Google and others like them for connecting to his end users.\u00a0 “They’re not gonna ride our pipes for free” was his battle cry.\u00a0 There was a great deal of negative publicity and a huge outcry.\u00a0 And so Whitacre’s plan went down in flames.<\/p>\n

But it wasn’t forgotten.<\/p>\n

It took them a while, but Comcast took Whitacre’s idea and ran with it.<\/p>\n

And what they came up with was so very beautiful!<\/p>\n

Rather than make out-front demands like Whitacre, Comcast chose the sneaky, underhanded method:\u00a0 On their edge routers, they deliberately let port traffic to Netflix saturate, the goal being to degrade video quality.\u00a0 Not all at once, but gradually over time.<\/p>\n

And Joe Consumer tests his connection and finds it just great, but still Netflix is always buffering.\u00a0 What gives?\u00a0 D’oh!\u00a0 Well maybe if you ran a line test to the edge router serving Netflix to that area of Comcast, you’d see a slightly different picture:\u00a0 really high latency and substantial packet loss.\u00a0 Which equals bad video quality and lots of buffering.\u00a0 Like I said, this was a sneaky, underhanded method.\u00a0 Too complex for some “journalists”\u00a0 to understand.<\/p>\n

“It’s a peering issue.\u00a0 There’s an imbalance of traffic.\u00a0 Not our fault,” said Comcast.<\/p>\n

Horse pucky.\u00a0 These issues were 100% completely manufactured by Comcast.\u00a0 Deliberately, with malice and aforethought.<\/p>\n

And it’s really no different than the mob guy coming into a restaurant and telling the owner, “You know this is a really bad area of town.\u00a0 Without our ‘insurance’, all sorts of bad things could happen – might have the place all busted up, get your windows broken.\u00a0 Hell, the place might catch fire.\u00a0 How many customers you gonna have then?”<\/p>\n

Comcast got away with their extortion.\u00a0 Netflix paid up.\u00a0 They had to.<\/p>\n

That’s what happens when a company like Comcast has no meaningful competition – they’re willing to sacrifice their customer’s content viewing experience, all while knowing the customers are held captive; they have no other ISP to turn to.\u00a0 Comcast can get away with anything they want.<\/p>\n

In a market where there was meaningful competition that wouldn’t happen.\u00a0 Where there’s competition, ISP’s (like in Europe, for example) are happy to carry content to their customers, knowing that if it isn’t delivered flawlessly, the customers will go elsewhere.\u00a0 If they tried the kinda hocus-pocus Comcast did, they’d be dead in the water.<\/p>\n

Not in the USA.<\/p>\n

In the US, there’s no meaningful competition.\u00a0 The Telco’s have all carefully carved out their territories so they don’t impinge on each other.\u00a0 It’s a duopoly.\u00a0 Carefully set prices all to maximize their profit.\u00a0 Customers are just an after-thought; something to be “tolerated.”\u00a0 Which makes it no surprise these companies all place near the bottom of the heap in customer satisfaction surveys.<\/p>\n

We’re a Third-World nation when it comes to broadband.\u00a0 It’s shameful!<\/p>\n

So when Comcast and Verizon, et al, want to carve out new revenue streams, basically they can do what the hell they want and the consumers just have to put up with it.\u00a0 The companies have bought and paid for the FCC.\u00a0 When it really comes down to it, they ARE the FCC.<\/p>\n

What we have now from Tom Wheeler is just an attempt to further those goals started by Ed Whitacre; to completely legitimize and even legalize the extortion.<\/p>\n

And in doing so – creating the fast lanes like they want, they also get as a glorious byproduct, to finally kill off their Public Enemy Number 1:\u00a0 Internet video – like Netflix.\u00a0 Because streaming video is the single biggest threat to cable TV.\u00a0 And let’s face it, when everything is said and done, first and foremost, Comcast is a cable TV company.\u00a0 They have to protect their traditional business model.\u00a0 Hallelujah brother!<\/p>\n

The Pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance<\/em><\/strong>:\u00a0 Put caps on the amount of data for customers per month – Like Comcast just announced – then with the pay-for-play fast lanes, force services like Netflix to raise their prices and then you can make the internet video streamers uncompetitive!\u00a0 Voila!<\/p>\n

And we’ll all be forced to continue to buy a 300 channel bundle (of which we actually watch 10 channels) forever and ever, ad nauseam.\u00a0 Just like Comcast wants.\u00a0 Cable TV’s the way to go!\u00a0 Who wants a la carte viewing anyways?<\/p>\n

With the acquisition of Time-Warner, Comcast’s duopoly will be complete.\u00a0 They’ll have a lock on their territory that can’t be beat.\u00a0 Content development and delivery; from cradle to grave.\u00a0 What a deal!\u00a0 They’ve got the whole enchilada.<\/p>\n

All thanks to Comcast’s man in the FCC:\u00a0 Tom Wheeler.\u00a0 And of course, their PR flak – Maggie Reardon.<\/p>\n

Bend over America!\u00a0 Ain’t living with monopolies grand?<\/p>\n

WRITE YOUR SENATORS AND CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVES AND TELL THEM THE FCC’S RULES MUST NOT PASS!\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE FCC MUST CLASSIFY ISP’S AS COMMON CARRIERS UNDER TITLE II.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE INTERNET MUST REMAIN OPEN AND FREE!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

C-Net’s Maggie Reardon wrote another PR-release, fluff\u00a0piece for Comcast on the issue of the Comcast-Netflix peering\/extortion issue. In this supposed, “learned” explanatory piece, Ms. Reardon\u00a0details all the thousand reasons Comcast embodies all that is goodness and right and how NetFlix is a horrible bandwidth hog, free-lunch expectant monster!\u00a0 Yeah, right.\u00a0 Here’s the piece:\u00a0 C-Net article: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-broadband"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}