Netflix sued by South Korean ISP after Squid Game fans swell traffic to '1.2Tbps' Netflix should cover bandwidth and maintenance costs of a surge in our network traffic, says South Korean ISP SK Broadband, which has taken legal action after subscribers flocked to watch the streaming giant’s latest Korean-language TV show Squid Game. SK Broadband is unhappy that the flow of packets through its systems …
I am not surprised this type of douchebag comment is right at the top of the pile. Netflix are leeches who built their business on this kind of attitude shown by the original poster.
Domestic Internet supply is contended - get used to it. You would complain fast enough if they charged for supplying uncontended access. This is no different to one of those open buffets being abused by a gang coming in with the intention to put the owner out of business.
If you do not intend to provide all you can eat, Then it may be in your interest to be honest in that intention and specify specific limits and enforce them consistently.
An ISP's customers pay the ISP to deliver the packets from any endpoint on the net to them, and to transmit from their end to any another.
If the isp has dishonestly represented their costs by abstracting that from their customer service fees, then they should be left to learn from their choice of strategy.
They are already being paid for that traffic. If they mismanaged their own resources, it should be on them.
They could always partner with Netflix and put a Netflix box on their data center.
"Netflix are leeches "
No Netflix are a business selling movie viewing, and without businesses like Netflix, there is not reason to pay for ISP's high speed links. They drive the demand that this ISP cashes in on by selling services.
"Domestic Internet supply is contended"
No, that's not the agreement the customer is paying for. It's totally reasonable for customers to use what they paid for and expect the ISP to deliver on their promises, just like every other business everywhere (including all you can eat buffets).
"This is no different to one of those open buffets being abused by a gang coming in with the intention to put the owner out of business."
How would that even make sense?
Look, you have a weak argument there, and you've tried to fluff it up with childish insults like douchebag.
Go away, rethink your argument to be cogent, and come back with a proper claim like a grownup.
Actually, you're both right but he's operating off a better knowledge of the network than you.
The ISPs are not the cable providers. They are charged for traffic. They compete on price by modelling usage patterns and scaling retail price accordingly. Netflix breaks that model deliberately -- treats transmission as free. It's not -- the cost is borne by 3rd parties.
Most of the Internet giants pay for transit, but not peering. Most big ISPs have loads of customers using Google/Amazon/Microsoft/etc, so instead of paying for transit for that traffic, they agree to free peering. This saves money for the ISP, as well as for the big Internet companies, and gives a better experience for their mutual customers.
"The ISPs are not the cable providers."
They are SK Broadband, the Korean cable provider, its in the article:
https://www.skbroadband.com/eng/Main.do
So their 3 year contract KRW 38,500 pcm, about £25 pcm for gigabit unlimited cable, assuming every single customer uses UHD, that's 2.5% of the bandwidth they sold to those customers.
"They are charged for traffic. They compete on price by modelling usage patterns and scaling retail price accordingly. "
This is not Netflix's problem. Models fit markets, not markets fit models. If they sold 100% of the service and cannot deliver even 2.5% they have a very bad model. They need to fix their model, not try to force the market to cap it at 2.5% just to make their model work.
The ISP aren't a cable providers, they are an internet provider.
The ISP provide bandwidth regardless what the customer do or how much he consume : netflix, pornhub or open exit relay tor node is at the discretion of the consumer
They are the only responsible: over sell, can't deliver, end.
"without businesses like Netflix, there is not reason to pay for ISP's high speed links"
Netflix doesn't require the 180Mb connection I have, and not only because I don't have Netflix. I use it for working from home and transferring large amounts of data around to different sites and servers.
If I only wanted to watch TV shows I could do that with a tenth of my current bandwidth.
The problem here is that the Internet is a hugely inefficient way to deliver television to millions of people compared to broadcasting radio-waves, and that's not going to change any time soon.
"No, that's not the agreement the customer is paying for."
In terms of contention, it probably is. Read the small print on your agreement.
"The problem here is that the Internet is a hugely inefficient way to deliver television to millions of people compared to broadcasting radio-waves, and that's not going to change any time soon."
It's not that inefficient for delivering specific videos. If I want something that you don't want, then the internet gets it just to me without impacting you. Radio waves work very well for people who all want the same thing in the same format at the same time, but a lot of modern videos don't work on that basis. People want video on-demand, they want to watch things that others don't want to, they want full streams which aren't popular with their neighbors, and in each case wire works better than radio waves. This isn't new or limited to the internet. Although digital broadcast has increased the number of channels you can send through the air, it's nothing to the number you can send over a wire.
they want to watch things that others don't want to, they want full streams which aren't popular with their neighbors
did you read the article ? It specifically talks about videos that everybody wants to watch ! Which means that this should be broadcasted and not streamed. Netflix is using/abusing a system which was not meant for that.
Not at the same time they don't. Plus I'm not sure about Korea, but so far I don't believe there are many 4K broadcast facilities in the UK. Sky might have an occasional one, but most of their 4K content is (you guessed it), downloadable/streamed.
"Netflix is using/abusing a system which was not meant for that"
That's a pretty bold statement. I'd say 90% of internet traffic wasn't conceived of when the internet was.
I think you need to read up on what streaming services do. Broadcasting is not on that list.
Not to mention there are multicast protocols available to do what you're suggesting. But funnily enough, people aren't gathering around the box all at the same time to watch the same thing anymore. They're not any likelier to do it just because a few die-hard ISP zealots think that people shouldn't use the bandwidth they think they've paid for...
People are watching the same episodes at different times. You can't broadcast that without setting up the Squid Game Marathon Channel, and that's a lot more expensive than using a wire. And when people are done with this show, they'll still be using video a lot, but no longer watch the same thing. It's not broadcasting because it's different things to different people at a time of their choice.
"The problem here is that the Internet is a hugely inefficient way to deliver television to millions of people compared to broadcasting radio-waves, and that's not going to change any time soon."
Clifford Stoll made the very same point in Silicon Snake Oil about 25 years ago
And there is a solution for broadcasting: Multicast/mbone - which ISPs ignored
But the bandwidth used by Netflix on any particular home Internet connection is just a fraction of the bandwidth you're allegedly being supplied by the ISP.
If I'm paying for, say, 30mbps ISP bandwidth and Netflix is consuming at most 10Mbps then I'm only using 1/3 of my total bandwidth. Therefore the ISP should easily be able to provide the bandwidth for everyone to watch Netflix. Not Netflix' fault if the ISP is overselling their bandwidth.
@W.S.Gosset
I have long since learned there are times where I can be right and almost everyone else is wrong :-D This seems to be one of them ha ha.
It's one of those emotive topics that brings out a massive sense of entitlement in people. It's been a race to the bottom for many years and though this does mean that most low-income families can afford to have some form of Internet access (which is brilliant) the average joe seems to be losing all sense of reality. What's more worrying is that I guess most people using The Register should know better but seem to be even more deluded :-D
I am in this line of business by the way which is why I understand how it works. So downvote away guys as you only prove my point further ;-)
@W.S.Gosset "By the downvotes and the other posts here, you would seem to be about the only person who understands how the networks (and pricing) _actually_ operate, rather than how people would like them to operate."
You didn't even read the article:
"SK Broadband urged the Korea Communications Commission in November 2019 to get web video giants like Netflix and Google’s YouTube to pay for network usage."
That's not how they operate, its how they WISH they could operate having failed to get their way in 2019.
No I am not saying that. But if some greedy pig comes in with the intention of eating until they puke and then stuffing food into their pockets then I would totally support the buffet owner for banning them. Once again I will use the word "entitled" as this describes the category of personality that has no willingness to be reasonable and behaves like it's a challenge. In the past I have described The Register as the Daily Mail of I.T. and certainly reading some of the comments in this thread I feel like got that correct.
Downvote away you Daily Mail lovers :-P
The "greedy pigs" in this case are the customers watching Netflix streams. Netflix does not force people to watch, it's the customer that initiates the transaction, its the customers that choose that service.
Cable providers like SKBroadband are paid by those customers to let them watch Netflix and other internet sites. They are in effect, reselling those websites and reselling that content to their customer.
Without those websites and that content they have nothing to resell.
So SKBroadband should pay Netflix a cut of the customer money they make on the resale. That would cause a flow of money to content creators who make the actual content. Stimulating content creation and stimulating internet use and increasing broadband in the process. Also ultimately good for the ISPs since their ability to sell fast services to content depends on there being content that needs fast services to resell.
SKBroadband are a parasite on Netflix here, getting to sell broadband to customers that customers otherwise wouldn't need to buy. But in a broader sense these ISP parasites get to resell the works of others for huge profits, without paying the content creators.
ISP's customers click on Google and cause processing on Google's servers and bandwidth across Google's network.
That parasitic relationship needs to stop, ISPs need to pay for the content they resell. They need to pay their way.
Haven't the ISP subscribers already paid for this bandwidth? If they all happen to use it to access the same internet site, that's not the fault of Netflix.
The ISP is just being greedy. If they can't supply the bandwidth the customers paid for, then they should change their pricing structure.
Yeah, pretty much this. The analogue in the physical world would be an airline overbooking its flights and then demanding that a destination city compensate it for putting on a festival that made people want to go there.
Oversubscribing any resource you sell should be illegal unless your contracts create explicit tiers of access. Want to be in a higher-priority tier? Pay more. Want to pay less? Accept that you'll sometimes get nothing. Promising something and failing to deliver should mean prison time.
Well, when I was running a CDN we'd put the hardware in - they'd pay for power/cooling.
It makes a huge amount of sense from both parties, since you only deliver once to the cache, and don't pay central bandwidth fees for all the deliveries downstream, and the ISP obviously gets a huge benefit as well.
So both save on bandwidth costs - the ISP by more than enough to pay for the power.
The CDN also gets to provide a better service to it's customers in that region.
Netflix could offer a way for ISPs to opportunistically cache data by not unnecessarily using HTTPS to deliver their video content. Send the client a compressed+encrypted wad of checksums/keys and then deliver the exact same DRM-encrypted data to every subscriber.
Problem sorted.
Oversubscribing any resource you sell should be illegal unless your contracts create explicit tiers of access.
I don't totally disagree with you but we're talking about resource contention here and it is a very complicated problem that all businesses have to deal with (talk to a restaurateur about how they plan staffing levels and manage bookings throughout the week). The only reason private individuals can afford a home network connection is because it's contended. Lower contention is the reason business packages cost more (lower bandwidth and lower engineer contention). Lack of contention is why leased lines are so expensive.
Residential contention is sometimes a fixed figure if the connection rates are fixed. In the early days of fixed rate connections in the UK it was 50:1 for residential, 20:1 for business. With today's variable rates that doesn't work so the ratio varies across the network according to local demand with the ISP trying to balance cost v customer complaints. Spikes in demand are particularly tricky because bandwidth isn't something you can just increase and decrease on a whim. Who knows how long Squid Game will capture attention? When viewing figures drop off SK could be left with under utilised routers losing them money.
The only reason private individuals can afford a home network connection is because it's contended.
Yup. It's one of the key arguments/problems behind the whole 'Net Neutrality' debate.
Customer pays ISP $10/month
Customer pays Netflix $10/month
Netflix pays ISP $0
So Netflix and their customers generate 1.2Tbs, which is a cost to the ISP. ISP is generally forced to provide 'free' peering to Netflix, because otherwise that traffic will go via a transit ISP, which means more costs to the consumer's ISP. The transit ISP will probably peer with Netflix, or if the the cost of carrying Netflix's traffic is too high, may want to charge Netflix for transit.
But changing from a 'free' peering to a paid transit connection generally ends up leading to peering (or PR) wars when there's a trafic imbalance. Which there always will be with content like streaming. But such has been the Internet since the '90s. Netflix doesn't want to pay carriage because it's loss making.
So we're left with an uneasy status quo, and lobbying. This ISP has identified the cost element, and that cost is due to Netflix. If Netflix has to pay to deliver it's traffic, it's subscription charges will have to go up (again). If the ISP has to, consumers will find their $10/month subscription has to increase.
It's an old problem, and one that really needs the regulators to solve. The model is pretty simple, ie the old POTs model with orignation & termination costs, and settlement betwen operators. But that would add costs to the OTT content providers, hence why they lobby for the ISPs to carry all the costs.
(There's also been some fun with Amazon's new MMO game. Launch day for those generally gets interesting. Amazon's created instances for 2,000 players, >2,000 players have attempted to join. So people have found themselves sitting in queues of 10k+ players trying to get into the game. Which is fun because if anyone could 'flex' server capacity to support surge demand, you'd think it'd be Amazon and AWS.)
There's one huge problem with your theory:
"Customer pays ISP $10/month"
Sure, or whatever. The customer does pay the ISP for both connectivity infrastructure and packet transport.
"Customer pays Netflix $10/month"
Sure, or whatever the price is.
"Netflix pays ISP $0"
Netflix don't pay *the end user's* ISP, no. Because they aren't (in general) receiving any services from it. But Netflix absolutely do pay their own ISPs, from whom they receive both connectivity infrastructure and packet transport. Eventually the two ISPs' ISPs etc. meet at some giant peering exchange or backbone provider where the tier-1 comms vendors have decided, probably correctly, that it's in their mutual interest to make sure packets can move freely among their networks.
The important point here is that there is symmetry in these commercial arrangements: each party pays its own provider for infrastructure and transport. As has been pointed out elsewhere, no one is freeloading: it's in everyone's interests to see that packets can flow among providers, because if (for example) SK's upstream providers won't accept packets from Netflix's upstream providers, then neither of those providers is going to have packets to move, which means neither of them can charge their customers (SK and Netflix) for moving packets. Everyone loses. That's why peering exists, and why it works.
This problem is fundamentally about SK not wanting to invest in its network nor charge its customers more for pulling more packets to fund that investment. They would prefer to blame a competitor at the distant end of the pipe and hope a court will be dumb enough to hand them a pile of someone else's cash which their executives will then pay to themselves as a bonus instead of improving the network. In the meantime, SK's customers need to get real about the cost of the service they're consuming. If you want to move TB of data around, you're going to need to pay more than the local equivalent of $20 a month for it. If you won't, then you're going to have to accept that during peak demand periods you are likely to have very limited throughput, high latency, and packet loss. That's what happens on a contended network, and a network on which everyone is promised fantastic throughput at a tiny flat rate is usually going to end up heavily contended. Priority costs money, and bigger pipes cost money, and you have to choose between paying for them and suffering a contended network. I'm not sure how TANSTAAFL translates into Korean, but it's a message both SK and their customers need to hear. SK want customers, and connecting them with services like Netflix is what attracts customers. SK's customers want reliable service. There's a market there, it just hasn't found its clearing price.
>They would prefer to blame a competitor at the distant end of the pipe and hope a court will be dumb enough to hand them a pile of someone else's cash which their executives will then pay to themselves as a bonus instead of improving the network.
Sorry mate but SK Broadband's network is much faster, better and cheaper for the customers than anything any UK ISP has to offer. South Korea consistently ranks among the best for the Internet access, while the UK... well... it's a bit of a shame really, maybe as you said it's all about the bonuses.
As for the court, you see, S. Korea has some sort of different mentality (like chaebols, "Koreans buy Korean" etc) and the courts there do not really appreciate when some American company tries to get other's piece of pie from the local market. I would say, SK Broadband have very good chances at the Korean court against the US company.
As for the court, you see, S. Korea has some sort of different mentality (like chaebols, "Koreans buy Korean" etc) and the courts there do not really appreciate when some American company tries to get other's piece of pie from the local market. I would say, SK Broadband have very good chances at the Korean court against the US company.
Perhaps the remedy should be as follows:
1. Netflix blocks SK Broadband's IP addresses. After all, it's what they asked for: no Netflix traffic peaks on their network.
2. Netflix offers refunds to affected Netflix subscribers who are on SK Broadband.
3. SK Broadband goes out of business, when its customers realise that they can't reach the whole Internet through them, and move to a different provider
This however assumes that Korea has a somewhat competitive ISP market, unlike (say) much of the US.
Some Netflix traffic goes via backbones, but most Netflix data is streamed from cached content served by appliances installed at reasonably local peering exchanges.
“Each Open Connect Appliance (OCA) stores a portion of the Netflix catalog, which in general is less than the complete content library for a given region. Popularity changes, new titles that are added to the service, re-encoded movies, and routine software enhancements are all part of the nightly updates, or fill, that each appliance must download to remain current.” — https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035618071
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