Posted on 03/30/2020 6:50:52 AM PDT by rktman
Netflix app downloads have exploded across Europe over the last several weeks as "Netflix and chill" "Netflix and quarantine" has been all the rage during countrywide lockdowns in Italy, France, Spain, and the UK.
We noted last Thursday that Netflix had to reduce traffic to its European networks by 25% for 30 days to preserve internet functionality as streaming traffic surged among tens of millions of people in quarantine.
Days after Netflix pledged to reduce streaming traffic, experts are saying that European countries could start rolling out large-scale "internet rationing" to prioritize critical apps and websites.
"If we end up in a situation where worldwide, 850m children start to receive lessons virtually for an extended period of time, then networks might want to start prioritizing video traffic over gaming traffic," said Matthew Howett, principal analyst at Assembly, who spoke with The Telegraph.
British internet provider BT Group said their communication network could handle the extreme levels of data of millions surfing the internet while in quarantine. But they warned that video streaming services could start bogging down the system and leave critical networks, reserved for emergency services, exposed to slow speeds.
Besides Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube are other streaming services limiting ultra-high definition videos to European users to preserve the functionality of the internet.
The French and UK governments have reportedly asked Disney to suspend the launch of its new streaming service in both countries on March 24.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Hmmmm. Just put everything on the web they said. It'll be fine they said. There's plenty of room they said. And the U.S. handed control of the internet to.............. Doesn't matter. We GAVE up control. Kinda like the Panama canal zone. Like depending on china making yuge replacement transformers for our grid. So, writing things down not such a bad idea after all.
[Since ICANN’s creation, it has been overseeing how web addresses on the Internet are passed out and has been regulating the IANA. Now, it formally owns the IANA.
"Ultimately, the transfer of IANA to ICANN is more of a formality than a real change of policy. But it’s an important formality," wrote Wired. "The fact that the U.S. government had the final say over the domain name system never sat well with the rest of the world, especially after 2013 when Edward Snowden revealed the scope of U.S. Internet surveillance. Severing that last tie to the US will allow foreign governments and companies to have confidence that the Internet is outside of the U.S.’ control."
Politicians who opposed the handover—the quest to keep the technical management of the Internet in U.S. control is led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has previously called the handover a “giveaway of our Internet freedom”—argue that online freedom is in jeopardy and allege that authoritarian governments who are members of ICANN can inhibit freedom of speech on the Internet. According to Cruz, “foreign governments and global corporations will have an increased voice within ICANN moving forward,” which can allow them to censor speech.]
Perhaps rationing of resources would fall under their purview now?
This sounds like financial people drying to drum up some panic.
It doesn’t matter if there’s scarcity or not, someone in government or other powers that be will profit from rationing so there will be rationing.
This is about the ISPs being greedy and not installing enough capacity - in the form of routers - for the load. They designed their systems like a party line betting that only so many of their users would be using services at a time. Bandwidth is almost certainly not a limiting factor.
And with USA internet services being more expensive than most anywhere else in the world they look even greedier.
I don’t know——seems everyone in my area is either working, doing yard work or walking miles per day. We only watch about an hour of TV (at most) per day. Praying, reading our Bibles as well.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Part of the issue is that the European countries, while having far faster home and business internet connections than the US on average, are actually often oversubscribed for their available inter-country bandwidth in a scenario like this, unlike the US. In many of those countries, the government itself runs the telco providing most of those inter-country connections, either directly or through public-private partnerships, subsidiaries, etc., and they have been loath to upgrade what they spent an awful lot of money on ‘not too many years ago’ by their reckoning.
This is less an issue of rationing per se than bureaucrats being cheap and being caught out.
This (then networks might want to start prioritizing video traffic) already happens all over the place. I am and many others are working and have been working doubletime to increase Internet pipe sizes over the last couple of weeks for a large provider.
BTW, and for those thinking a fully functioning 5G is coming soon, the densification of available cellular coverage and bandwith is really just starting. 5G is really nothing more than a promise at this point no matter what the commercials say.
I remember from the sci-fi book (and movie) ‘Ready Player One’ that one of the events leading up to the time of the story was the ‘Bandwidth Riots’. The author didn’t go into detail about it, but this sure sounds like the lead-in to something like that.
Um, this is specifically *Europeans* crashing the *European* segments of the internet. The US segment of internet isn’t actually having too many problems with this.
Also, in many European countries, one or more of the big ISPs in their nation are run by the government. TMobile? It’s the German post office.
This is a bad idea. If people can’t get their interweb nommies then they will sit around and start to think.
I think this is about cutting speeds and even access to conservative online media as we get closer to election day.
I am noting youtube only craps out if I am watching something to the Right...
Pretty sure FR is critical and essential.
> Um, this is specifically *Europeans* crashing the *European* segments of the internet.
The euros led the “out of china” corona pandemic which got extended to the US, and now they’re leading off with a “oh no, the internet is a restricted resource” nonsense. Soon to be tried in the US.
Pfffftttt! Speak for yourself. Mrs. rktman does my thinkin’. Right honey? :-)
Temporarily denying Europeans access to the Online Nicholas Cage Film Festival does not seem like a horrible burden. :)
“Pfffftttt! Speak for yourself. Mrs. rktman does my thinkin’. Right honey? :-)”
Believe me, I know what you mean.
Online lessons by public schools will be practically worthless.
Unlikely. This problem was going to end up rearing its ugly head in the near future anyway. They’re selling home connect packages in the gigabit range, but they don’t have the upstream connectivity to actually service them at advertised speed if only a quarter to half the home users are maxing out. They were already seeing problems as the Internet Of Things became a reality there.
Not so much here. In a twisted way, the slower average US connection combined with the massive ‘piping’ we have and the fact that the primary servers for all major Western streaming media providers is here and doesn’t have to cross transoceanic links means that we have less of an issue.
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