S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge

Mon Oct 11 16:13:46 UTC 2021

> I am almost sure Netflix have some degree of presence in South Korea. What I'm not sure about is what else SK wants them to do beyond that.

They’ve made it pretty clear… They want Netflix to pay their protection^wbandwidth charges.

>> And for the record, not only have I never worked for an ISP, I was saying all the way back in the late '90s that the oversubscription business model (which almost always includes punishing users who actually use their bandwidth) is inherently unfair to the customers, and when the Internet becomes more pervasive in daily life will come back to bite them in the ass. I was laughed at for being hopelessly naive, not understanding how the bandwidth business works, etc.
> 
> Totally agreed. However, we are sort of forced to use this model because of the underlying technology. Whenever a finite resource has to be shared amongst several people, there has to be some way to manage that sharing.
> 
> Maybe if Internet services were circuit-switched, we wouldn't have this problem. But then again, we wouldn't have an Internet like we do today either.

The oversubscription model is perfectly valid if rational numbers are chosen for oversubscription ratios and providers expect a reasonable number of customers to actually use what they paid for.

Many businesses outside of the internet depend on oversubscription to keep prices affordable while still making a profit.

Imagine if everyone actually used their gym memberships, for example.

Consider the standard practice of airline overbooking.

Hotels also often overbook.

Imagine if everyone who bought a season pass to an amusement park showed up every day they were open.

Now 50:1 oversubscription is probably insane and I agree that when you have a problem because your oversubscribed customers have difficulty when a few of them
use what you sold them, it’s not the customers’ fault and you need to reduce your oversubscription ratio to accommodate. That’s the business you’re in and if you
didn’t factor that into your pricing, you have a poor pricing structure.

For all I love to criticize Comcast for the many many things they do wrong, they have a reasonable model where you can buy your way out of bandwidth caps
for $30/month (at least in my case) and they don’t punish me when I use my full connection (or close to it).

YMMV.

Owen