For the longest time, Verizon’s FIOS service was considered the fastest in the land and everyone oogled over living in an area that offered Verizon FIOS. It also had some of the best upload speeds available at the time, which would make anyone looking to upload their own content an incredibly happy camper. However, Verizon’s FIOS service was an assymetrical fiber optic service which meant that users were getting services like 50 Mbps download and 25 Mbps upload, and 100 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload. However, in some other countries their fiber services are symmetrical, meaning that 100 Mbps download also has a 100 Mbps upload and this was illustrated by when Google launched Google Fiber and offered 1 Gbps up and 1 Gbps down.

Yes, Google’s own Google Fiber did take away some of the luster away from Verizon’s highly held FIOS service, but the real reason for Verizon’s move today has more to do with Comcast and Time Warner Cable and a bit AT&T. The fact is that in many areas Comcast and Time Warner Cable are offering speeds upwards of 100 Mbps with Time Warner Cable and AT&T delivering 300 Mbps to some customers in the Austin, TX area. Because these companies are finally starting to offer download speeds that actually compete with what Verizon has to offer, Verizon has decided that Verizon FIOS needs to set itself apart and the easiest way to do that is to have an upload speed that’s in some cases 10 to 20 times faster than their competitors’.

A good example is Time Warner Cable’s 100 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up service, which would be 20 times slower upload than what Verizon would offer their customers, making Time Warner Cable’s offering look much worse and to make Verizon’s marketing for Verizion FIOS incredible easy. Having more upload will ultimately not really cost Verizon much more money in terms of network capacity since most consumers barely use upload on a daily basis and the most network intensive thing they’ll do is upload photos to Facebook. However, there will be users that upload large images to their Flickr accounts or videos to Vimeo and YouTube. What will be interesting is to see how the increase in upload speeds will encourage users to start using online backup services and cloud storage more often now that it will take virtually no time to back things up anymore.

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The FCC recently released their fourth Measuring Broadband America report, which I believe to be their most damning. This year’s broadband report hit on five major points:

1. Speed consistency
2. Download speed performance varies too much
3. DSL is lagging behind fiber and cable speeds
4. Consumers continue to move to faster speeds
5. Upload speeds vary sharply

In terms of speed consistency, The FCC stated that very few ISPs were delivering 100% of the speeds that they were promising to consumers. Most of the broadband ISPs claim their speeds as ‘up to’ in order to save their skin, however some ISPs like Cablevision are delivering 100% or better of advertised speeds to roughly 80% of customers roughly 80% of the time at peak periods. However, only half of ISPs delivered 90% or better of advertised speed and several ISPs delivered less than 60% or better of advertised speeds 80% of the time. This means that the other half of consumers are getting worse than that, which means a lot of people are not getting consistent speeds whatsoever. This new metric clearly indicates that a lot of ISPs still have a lot of work to do in improving the speeds that they’re promising consumers when they sell them their plans.

However, download speeds are not quite hitting the targets they should be, with some ISPs delivering less than 80% of advertised speeds. Also, in terms of broadband download speed improvements only one ISPs in the US (Qwest) saw speeds improve 10% or more (16%). All other ISPs in the US only saw their speeds improve less than 10% when compared to last year, mostly unchanged from last year. However the FCC still somehow stated that they believed overall trends were encouraging. Ten of 14 reporting ISPs show slightly improved download performance with four being virtually unchanged and only one (Verizon DSL) actually had worse performance than last year. Also, the FCC called out Windstream’s DSL service for only delivering 78% of the advertised speeds in their 1.5 Mbps speed tier (1.178Mbs effective), the worst among all ISPs in the US.

As you could tell above in our mention of download speeds, DSL is clearly struggling to keep up with fiber and cable connections with DSL ISPs like Verizon and Windstream delivering some of the worst numbers in the nation. As such, it comes as no surprise that broadband DSL is lagging behind fiber and cable speeds. Even though, in places like Europe ADSL is still delivering speeds of 20 Mbps+ which American providers are nowhere near delivering to their customers. So, there is no technological limitation here for them, merely a desire for them to deliver the bandwidth to DSL customers when they want to push customers over to fiber, cable and ethernet.

Contrary to what ISPs like Time Warner Cable are trying to lead the public to believe, people are always looking for faster speeds. If you offer 1 Gbps to people at a price they can afford and believe to be reasonable, like say Google’s 1 Gbps fiber connection, people that can afford it will absolutely without a doubt jump on it. The FCC is finding that consumers continue to move to faster speeds moving from slower tiers to higher offerings as well as through upgrades of standard offerings by ISPs. But even so, people are actively paying more for their internet just to get faster speeds, something that the ISPs aren’t openly admitting. We already know that ISPs aren’t upgrading overall speeds much (by less than 10% for the most part as stated above). But, the average of service tiers surveyed in 2013 shows an average advertised speed of 21.2 Mbps, an increase of nearly 36% from 15.6 Mbps in 2012.

The FCC also found that broadband upload speeds vary sharply, something that any consumer of internet service can easily find. With certain ISPs, like Time Warner Cable, you can get upload speeds as low as 5 Mbps even when your download speeds are as high as 100 Mbps. Their current speed tiers start with 1 Mbps upload with their 5 Mbps service and only go up to 5 Mbps even with their 100 Mbps. Certain ISPs like Verizon offer uploads of up to 35 Mbps and Frontier offers upload speeds of 25 Mbps, more than DOUBLE that of the next ISP. Both Verizon and Frontier are fiber-based ISPs  and as a result they are faster than most of their competitors and in fact no other ISP in the US came anywhere near 10 Mbps, which is incredibly depressing.

There was also a mention about problems regarding network congestion but said that they hadn’t fully compiled their data for this current report. They stated that they are looking for ways to test video services and how network congestion affects the quality of these services. However, we already know that most of the congestion is not happening due to a lack of bandwidth. We know that these issues are a result of poor peering and interconnects between tier 1 ISPs and the ‘last mile’ ISPs which are the ones that serve consumers. This is what has led to the entire debate about paid prioritization and net neutrality and whether or not these last mile ISPs such as Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon have the right to charge for prioritized traffic on their networks when they are neglecting the state of their interconnects with tier 1 ISPs as Level 3 Communications had blatantly called AT&T out for.

If you’d like to read the full report, head on over to the FCC’s Website for the Measuring Broadband America – 2014

We will continue to follow the FCC’s reports and break things down for you to better understand exactly what is going on with the state of the internet and broadband.

The post FCC Broadband Report Finds US ISPs Failing to Deliver on Many Levels appeared first on VR World.

Level 3 Communications has announced that they will be buying the former Time Warner Cable internet service for enterprise division (TW Telecom) for $5.6 billion ($7.3 billion with debt), further increasing their size and scope. Some news sites have made the mistake saying that Level 3 Communications is buying Time Warner Cable, which is simply not correct. TW Telecom was started as a joint venture between Time Warner Cable and US West which is now a part of Centurylink. However, TW Telecom has operated as an independent entity for quite some time and is publicly traded on the NASDAQ as TWTC.

The deal is currently structured as 24% cash and 76% stock (in Level 3 Communications) and will come to a total sum of $7.3 billion after the purchase price and debt are accounted for. We already know that Level 3 Communications is quite a big tier 1 ISP because they stated how many different companies they serve when they talked about the problems they’ve been encountering with US ISPs. If you read our article about it, you will find out that Level 3 Communications currently has something like 180,000 miles of fiber laid around the world and has a total interconnect capacity of nearly 14 Tbps.

Adding TW Telecom to Level 3 Communications’ network would simply strengthen the company’s offerings and broaden their customer base, allowing them to achieve better efficiency and possibly even more importantly, be a protector of things like net neutrality. After all, if Level 3 Communications is all about making sure the internet is a fair place, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing if they’re in control of more of the internet. However, companies like Level 3 Communications may also become easier targets for hackers and governments to attack or approach in terms of getting easier access to the internet. So, as thing always are, there are both good and bad things that will come with Level 3 Communications getting better. With this deal, though, Level 3 Communications gains 27,000 route miles of fiber and over 16,000 “on-net” commercial buildings connected. As well as two National Operations Centers (NOCs) in Littleton, CO and O’Fallon, MO, where its solutions are monitored for quality 24/7/365 to assure the best and most reliable service.

The post Level 3 Communications Buys TW Telecom for $5.6 Billion appeared first on VR World.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about ISPs (internet service providers) with the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable as well as all of the Net Neutrality legislation and news going around. In this era of essentially no competition among internet service providers, many customers are generally stuck with 2, maybe 3 choices for internet service in their area, which is actually worse than the current state of wireless which is also essentially an oligopoly.

In most places, you have the choice between some sort of cable TV provider that also provides internet service and a telephone provider, usually being Comcast, Time Warner or Cox on the cable side and AT&T on the telephone side either with a DSL service or U-Verse. Now, in some areas you have none of these choices and you’re stuck with either dial-up from some local phone operator or you have to shell out tons of money a month for satellite internet from Hughesnet (owned by Echostar, parent company of DISH). The problem with this service is that it offers speeds of 15 Mbps/2 Mbps down/up for $130 a month, which is about triple what land line operators charge, AND they cap users at 40 GB a month of data. And the company is touting these speeds as “15x faster than before” which makes this all the more ridiculous.

Also, if you want internet service from say Time Warner Cable, you would be forced to pay $35 a month (promotional for 12 months), which will eventually come to $40 or $45 a month. This service will get you 15/1 Mbps down/up and unlimited bandwidth, unlike some of their competitors, AT&T. They also have a fairly new 100 Mbps download service which they sell for $70 a month that only has 5 Mbps upload.

AT&T on the other hand, offers an 18 Mbps service for $45 a month which is about the same as Time Warner Cable, but also requires a 1 year contract and will go up after the promotional price ends. Their fastest service that they offer is 45 Mbps for $65 a month, but this is slower than what Time Warner Cable used to offer at 50 Mbps, but now offers for 100 Mbps.

Now that we’ve shown a small bit of how ridiculous the current ISP climate is in the US, we wanted to talk about an ISP that we recently heard about. This ISP is called Webpass and they’re a very small internet service provider, but they serve urban customers in San Francisco, San Diego and Miami. Their model is to deploy to a single building or complex and to get a large deployment of customers at once in order to make their capex (capital expenditures) worthwhile.

What makes Webpass so great is not just their unbelievably fast speeds, but also their reasonable prices and their commitment to Net Neutrality. Webpass offers their internet to consumers for $55 a month or $500 a year, whichever they wish to pay. Granted, if you pay for a full year of service upfront, you also save $160 over the course of that year. What does $55 get you? It gets you a jack anywhere in your apartment or condo that delivers a minimum of a 100/100 Mbps symmetrical line and in some areas a 200/200 line depending on the neighborhood and building.

Here’s a video of how it works:
So, not only is Webpass incredibly fast and cheap, it is also incredibly easy because you no longer have to deal with a modem anymore. You only need to have a router and any network connectivity beyond your router are immediately Webpass’ problem. This also removes one of the potential factors for messing up an internet connection and makes the overall process smoother and easier.

But if their price, speed and simplicity weren’t enough they are also very principled in how they treat their customers’ data. They specifically state in their net net neutrality policy that they will or will not do the following 6 things:

1. Our customers pay us to deliver the entire Internet.

2. All packets are treated equally. Exceptions are made for violating the acceptable use policy or activity we deem malicious.

3. We do not accept payment from content providers to increase the prioritization of their packets or to decrease the prioritization of a competitor’s packets.

4. We do not pay content providers to deliver service to our network.

5. We adjust our peering relationships often to provide the best routes possible to our customers.

6. It is normal for a customer’s experience with each website to be different. The customer’s experience is a combination of Webpass’ network performance, the destination’s network performance, and the distance to the destination.

So, Webpass is actually an ISP that you can like. Sure, they’re small but more and more ISPs like them are popping up around the country and we need to be able to support them to create competition where we likely will only get less if we stick with the big cable companies. Unfortunately, the process for getting Webpass in your building or complex is much more difficult than it should be, but they also need to preserve their profitability and need to be able to pay off their investment and be sure they will get a substantial commitment from residents. I have personally requested to get Webpass at my residence but have yet to hear back from them, after all, it isn’t entirely my decision.

The post Webpass, The Best Little ISP You've Never Heard of appeared first on VR World.

In a recent blog posted on Level 3 Communications’ own website, Mark Taylor VP of Content and Media at Level 3, spoke about how Level 3 Communications’ own networks work and even made a small plug about how the company has spent over $40 billion on building up their 180,000 miles of high speed fiber to help interconnect the internet. However, where their connections terminate with their peers is ultimately where they are the most vulnerable. However, Level 3 obviously does not cover the entire globe and their customers need to be able to connect to the whole globe, so there are peering agreements that allow for the sharing of data across these networks to enable fewer, better and faster connections from point A to point B. To understand how huge Level 3 communications really is, they actually provided a map of all the places where their fiber lies and where they may be leasing fiber to complete connections that they themselves haven’t laid or own.

Level 3 Communications Network Map

Now, looking at the map above, the orange lines are built and owned by Level 3 Communications while the yellow lines are either owned by multiple carriers or are leased. But this map represents the entire global network that Level 3 has access to and can connect with other carriers or ISPs. Now, these guys, Level 3 Communications are sort of a ‘middle man’ in the internet’s grand scheme. They aren’t a middle man in the sense that they exist for no purpose other than to skim money off the existence of the internet, they are a middle man because they quite literally sit between your ISP and the destination of where you are trying to go. Or, they sit between the servers of the company that is serving you data and your ISP. Your ISP connects you to the internet and Level 3 Communications and other carriers are responsible for helping you get there. Now, Level 3 Communications themselves has tens of thousands of customers that they help connect to the internet with 51 peers in 45 different physical locations, listed below are a total of 66 actual connections (since some locations are repeated).

In all of Level 3 Communications connections globally, only 12 of those are actually experiencing any sort of bottlenecking or packet loss. And of those 12, 6 of them are already in the process of being upgraded to remove these bandwidth issues. Since after all, Level 3 communications has a total interconnection capacity of over 13,600 Gbps (1,360 10 Gigabit ethernet ports, plus a few smaller ones) they have distributed capacity with individual peers ranging from a single 10 GigE port to 148 ports, depending on the peer. The average number of interconnection cities per peer is five, but ranges from 1 to 20, so there is quite a bit of variance between peers and between cities. But what’s most important is that the average utilization of those interconnected ports is 36 percent, while congested ones near 90 percent and start to experience packet loss and connectivity issues.

However, these 6 peers that are problematic have been problematic for the past year on a consistent base and have chosen to do nothing about it. They maintain their interconnect utilization at nearly 90% all the time and as a result are dropping packets like crazy. 5 of those peers (companies/ISPs) are US based and 1 is in Europe. Level 3 communications did a pretty good job of explaining exactly how this problem manifests itself by showing one of their 100 Gbps connections to Dallas on April 3rd with a problematic peer and then one located in Washington D.C. that isn’t problematic. While Level 3 Communications has chosen not to name and shame these peers, I can tell you with 99% certainty that the Dallas peer is none other than SBC aka AT&T. So, while Level 3 didn’t directly name and shame their problematic peers, we already know that one of them is AT&T and it isn’t going to be much of an assumption to think Comcast is going to be among that list as well. However, we have pretty concrete evidence from Level 3 that AT&T is doing a piss poor job of maintaining their interconnections with Level 3.

First, you can see the congested peer… (AT&T)

Followed by the uncongested peer….

Notice, they are both getting close to 100% utilization, but the uncongested one is not dropping any packets or having any sort of errors because it isn’t plateauing and getting overutilized. But even in this scenario, Level 3 communications is working with their peer to augment the connection to improve the performance so that there isn’t a chance of packet loss in the future.

Overall, Level 3 Communications is further making clear as to why providers like Netflix are crying out against companies like Comcast and speaking out against the Comcast – Time Warner Cable merger (both probably on Level 3’s list), as well as how such behavior is affecting Net Neutrality and how certain companies are using neglect to force companies like Netflix to pay for dedicated lines into Comcast’s network even though companies like Level 3 are already doing so and their interconnects are merely being neglected.

If you’re interested, here’s a list of the best and worst ‘middlemen’ like Level3, which according to these claims, is the best.

The post Level 3 Communications Calls Out US ISPs for Intentionally Slowing Down Networks appeared first on VR World.

So, late last week the good people over at Netflix that have been battling the ludicrous battle with the ISPs posted a blog about why they believe Comcast’s behavior is something that they vehemently oppose. While the post itself talks about their opposition of ‘ISP tolls’ where ISPs like Comcast charge them more money to deliver their content to consumers more quickly, they also mentioned their opposition to the Comcast-TWC merger. Netflix’s Kevin Florance, VP of Content Delivery at Netflix, took the time in their post to explain how their performance had been suffering with Comcast customers and amid talks with Comcast eventually came to the conclusion that they would need to bend to Comcast’s demands and pay the company for a direct connection pipe to Comcast’s networks. Netflix works with companies like Level 3 communications, Cogent, XO and other transit networks in order to provide interconnection across different networks and assist in the delivery of their content at high speeds to those ISPs. This is already something that Comcast is paying for in order to deliver a good level of video quality to their customers on various ISPs, however, Comcast has allowed these interconnecting providers’ connections to their networks to clog up and instead has told Netflix they must pay for a dedicated pipe into their network. The reason why these transit networks are so important is because they can carry traffic over longer distances and provide access to every network in the internet (rather than a single ISP like Comcast). They are providing a service that is beneficial to the entire internet as a whole and the content providers that wish to improve their connectedness across the net.

Now, there is no denying that Comcast is the biggest ISP in the United States, but by them forcing people to pay for faster access to their networks they are making it virtually impossible for any upstart or fledgling business to compete with much larger and more established businesses. In fact, because they are the biggest ISP they should not be allowed to do any of these kinds of things specifically because of its impact on the greater Internet. If Comcast starts violating Net Neutrality (which they already are) and starts making people pay (like Netflix) for faster pipes and passing those costs on to consumers it hurts everyone except for the ISPs who are already making a ton of money but want to protect their ‘legacy’ businesses.

Netflix is arguing that because they are spending all of the money to send their traffic directly to Comcast and that the data isn’t traveling long distances that they are not actually paying any transit fees at all to Comcast, but in fact paying Netflix in order to get access to their customer base. This, they believe is the form of an ISP toll which should not be allowed or encouraged by anyone. Because, ultimately, Comcast is double dipping on the same traffic by charging the customers they have for getting access to the internet to sites like Netflix and then charging sites like Netflix to get access to their customers. Not just that, even thought there are multiple CDNs and transit providers out there competing for business, they all ultimately stop at Comcast and the end result is still the same with Comcast throttling whatever traffic they want at the consumer’s end because they still ultimately control the ‘last mile(s)’ of traffic. Netflix actually showed an example of what happened when they started cooperating with Comcast’s racket. Yes, I said it. Comcast is participating in racketeering. Sure, Comcast will say whatever they want to in order to claim that their networks are struggling under the load of heavy video traffic, but the ultimate truth is that they’re making money hand over fist and aren’t suffering at all. While Netflix can’t openly say it, they’re clearly implying that Comcast has created an issue here that really doesn’t exist and are extorting money out of people to help ‘solve’ it.

As you can see in the graph above, from Netflix, Comcast is clearly operating a racket where by magically installing (and paying for) a direct interconnection with Comcast they are suddenly elevated from VHS quality video to 720P+ quality, a more than doubling of video quality. This is supported by real testing that Netflix has been doing over the past few years where they test their direct connection to various ISPs and determine who has the best quality connection to Netflix. Before Netflix installed the direct connection to Comcast, Comcast was ranked some of the worst among internet service providers (they’re the biggest in the US) in terms of speed, delivering a connection of 1.51 Mbps, after the direct interconnection was installed Comcast suddenly shot up to 2.5 Mbps (5th place among big ISPs) and finally joined the ranks of all the other internet service providers in the US with a reasonable connection speed, making AT&T Uverse the worst of the biggest ISPs. They are now 3rd among the top 6 ISPs, but realistically among larger ISPs their average historical speed still puts them in 5th and among ALL ISPs it puts them in 28th. Since the rankings have continually expanded month to month we cannot accurately state what number they were pre-direct connection.

Internet Service Provider speeds when connecting to netflix

The post Netflix Calls Out Comcast, Comcast is Ruining the Internet for All appeared first on VR World.