More Data Transparency Seen Needed on Video Latency Post-Netflix ‘Test’

Netflix’s latency messages were a “public service” that could in the long run improve service in much the same way as publication of airlines’ on-time performance improved airline arrival reliability, said Gig.U Executive Director Blair Levin, former FCC chief of staff under Chairman Reed Hundt and more recently head of the National Broadband Plan. “We make progress, but nothing ever solves 100 percent of the problem.” Frost & Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn faulted Netflix for backing off from the messages without providing more concrete data to back up its argument, noting the company had said before Verizon’s cease-and-desist letter that it stood behind the claims. “If you stand behind the data, then show it,” he said.

Netflix and Verizon should have settled the dispute privately, but it was likely an impetus behind the FCC decision Friday (CD June 16 p1) to collect interconnection information, said Distributed Computing Industry Association CEO Marty Lafferty. DCIA’s members include AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and peer-to-peer networks. The dispute over the latency messages has also drawn more attention publicly to interconnection, which is separate from net neutrality but is “just as important,” Lafferty said.

It was worth Netflix “raising the issue in the way Netflix tried to raise it because it makes it personal to the end-user and does so at the time when there may be a problem with the streaming,” said Mark Taylor, Level 3 vice president-media and Internet Protocol services. Netflix’s methodology is certainly up for debate, but “I think the notion that trying to be transparent about it and trying to provide their customers better information is much better than simply doing a press release,” Levin said. Netflix also releases a monthly ISP speed index that ranks ISP streaming performance during prime time, including the average downlink speed. “That’s useful information because it does pretty much for the first time give consumers some sense of the fact that different networks perform differently for a common application,” Taylor said. “If more people did that, you might start to build up a picture that’s not Netflix-only but across multiple other applications."

ISP Data Sought

Many large content providers collect data on traffic quality for every “client interaction” and use it internally to improve the customer experience, Taylor said. “It would be good, in my view, if more content providers published that data than just Netflix,” he said. “There could be a very high degree of data showing where there are hotspots, and if you saw that across multiple content owners, you'd know if that network had a problem with its interconnects or with the network itself.” ISPs should also release data showing how saturated their interconnection ports are, Taylor said. “Verizon could have shown all their edge interconnects with the other networks and showed whether they were saturated and congested or not,” he said. “That would have been a more compelling way of arguing against Netflix than just saying they didn’t like what Netflix did.”

Verizon published a blog post soon after initial reports about Netflix’s latency messages, that said Netflix’s claims were “not only inaccurate,” but “also deliberately misleading” (http://vz.to/1lBuYKb). Verizon is “looking forward to the FCC review on this topic while we continue the engineering work to fulfill the connection agreement we have with Netflix, due to be completed during 2014,” a spokesman said.

Level 3 has begun publishing some traffic data information on its blog, while Google launched its Google Video Quality Report in late May for YouTube users. Level 3’s released information includes graphs showing port saturation for unnamed ISPs and network providers that Level 3 connects with, Taylor said (http://bit.ly/1g3a3Kw). “That’s the sort of data that I think starts to shine a light on what’s going on here and potentially how consumers are impacted.” Still, that information isn’t “directly tangible to what a consumer is doing at a particular moment in time,” Taylor said. “If we publish some interconnect data from a network, it’s much less obviously linked to one particular consumer.” The Google Video Quality Report tool detects a user’s ISP and location and displays a graph showing average peak congestion periods for that ISP over the previous 30 days (http://bit.ly/1uBlZtr). “No one’s quite sure what to make of Google’s data because it just doesn’t add up,” Rayburn said, noting inconsistencies in the data displayed for some ISPs. YouTube did not comment.

Content providers and ISPs will eventually need to increase the release of traffic data “that’s valuable for the public discourse,” Levin said. As other forms of streaming media like healthcare information and gaming become more prevalent along with entertainment videos, “these issues absolutely become more important,” he said. If the anticipated upgrade cycles at AT&T, Cox Communications and Google Fiber occur in the coming years, “that minimizes these kinds of disputes, because for the first time people will have more bandwidth than they ‘need,'” Levin said.