A lot of people might have been left broken hearted with the slow streaming of the second season of "House of Cards" on Netflix released on Feb. 14. If hopes are crumbling down, the fingers should be pointed at the death of net neutrality and Verizon's stand off with Netflix.
The hit political drama series of Netflix kept about 60,000 subscribers glued onto their screens on Valentine's Day to watch the whole 13-hour production. However, the shifting behavior of consumers to watch videos on demand over the Internet is causing some clogged pipes on the information highway.
Delivering online videos to consumers does not involve a scenario that can be compared to a car going from point A to point B. The data must pass through a number of bandwidth companies, these are like the stop lights at intersections, that make the flow of traffic efficient. These bandwidth companies have "peering" agreements, a way of helping each other by carrying the traffic of the other.
Then there are the "telecom carrier hotels." Here, we have the bandwidth companies such as Cogent that serves Netflix and the big names such as Verizon, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and Comcast. The exchange and flow of traffic here is very crucial. So we can compare Cogent to the airport shuttle that brings the passengers to Verizon that can be likened to the airplane that will bring the data to their next stop, the end users.
Now, with the changing behavior of people and popularity of bandwidth demanding services such as Netflix, the peering agreements are often not honored. With increased flow of data, Verizon wants higher fees before carrying the "House of Cards" stream, for example, to viewers at home. Unless, this issue is resolved, Netflix, and possibly other similar services, will suffer.
"They are more than full. They are so full that today a significant amount of packets are being dropped between the networks," said CEO Dave Schaeffer of Cogent Communications about the infrastructure of Verizon.
While Netflix and Cogent point their fingers at Verizon and other ISPs, these companies are saying that Netflix is to blame, for not spreading out efficiently its traffic delivery.
"When one party's getting all the benefit and the other's carrying all the cost, issues will arise," said public policy and government affairs head of Verizon, Craig Silliman.
With the pipe of data full and nobody wanting to give in, the bottleneck at one point will eventually affect traffic on other channels and will slow down the Internet.
"...generally our members are able to watch Netflix, albeit perhaps at a lower quality and with potentially some startup delays at the busiest times of day," said Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers.
A potential agreement between Netflix and Time Warner Cable has reportedly broken down, with the latter being bought by Comcast.
Now, on net neutrality.
When an appeals court scrapped the Internet openness rule of the Federal Communications Commission in January, the likes of the Netflix-Cogent-Verizon scenario is the one feared by many. Without net neutrality, ISPs can essentially dictate who gets to do what and for how much.
The FCC has proposed [PDF] a new set of net neutrality rules that intend to enforce transparency rule, no discrimination rule, no blocking goal, and call on major ISPs to honor open Internet.
For now, one can skip the "House of Cards" or deal with the slower speed.
