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Netflix teams with eyeIO to lower bandwidth use on movie night
Kicking up a fuss about Netflix hogging all your bandwidth? Perhaps the company's latest partnership could induce a rapid change of heart. The streaming service has paired up with eyeIO in hopes of keeping bandwidth usage during streams to a minimum, which they claim won't affect the content's overall quality. While the joint venture just became official, the startup's "ultra-low-bandwidth" encoding technology -- that allegedly can reduce usage on a 720p HD stream by more than 50 percent -- began its testing phase on the streaming-giant's offerings months ago. Although eyeIO's service has already been implemented by Netflix, it's worth mentioning this isn't an exclusive deal, thus it's possible for its competition to jump on the bandwidth conservation bandwagon in the future. More importantly, we're interested to find out if you have noticed any difference in your streams lately, so drop us a line in the comments below.
Siri VC Morgenthaler weighs in on iPhone 4S bandwidth badmouthing (Updated)
Back in early January, wireless optimization firm Arieso released a report on the bandwidth usage profiles of various smartphones and other devices. It noted a surge in download and upload usage for the iPhone 4S, moving the new phone ahead of the iPhone 4 and various Android devices to take over the top spot for smartphone bandwidth consumption. At the time, coverage by Reuters and Bloomberg (reiterated by several sites, sorry to say, including TUAW) put the onus for this bump in the pipe on one of the marquee features of the 4S: the voice-controlled digital assistant, Siri. [Arieso's CTO Michael Flanagan spoke about Siri's role in bandwidth usage in a video interview with Bloomberg back when the report was released, and while he doesn't exactly pin all the blame on Siri -- he says the usage is due to increased utilization of 'cloud services' -- Siri does come in for some of the blame. It's not nearly as emphatic as subsequent reports would have it. Video embedded below. –Ed.] Fast forward a few weeks: an op-ed from Paul Farhi in the Washington Post dives back into the Arieso report, recycling the charge that Siri is singlehandedly responsible for pumping up the load on America's cellular networks and degrading data service for everyone. (Farhi stopped short of blaming her for fluoride in the water and the rise of reality television.) This time, however, some consideration of the facts in evidence led us to question his (and our) original conclusions; we know that the math around Siri's data usage just doesn't add up to a consequential amount. We also reached out to Arieso for a copy of the full report, which the company happily and promptly provided. Now there's another voice weighing in, and it belongs to someone who's in a position to know what's what: former Siri board member Gary Morgenthaler. He wrote a guest post for Forbes's web site that thoroughly debunks the notion of Siri as a bandwidth bandit. Siri actually uses only small bites of wireless data, as tested by Ars Technica and backed up by Morgenthaler's inside info. What does Morgenthaler suspect might be at play in the 4S bandwidth numbers? He's careful to couch it as speculation rather than assert it as fact, but the addition of iCloud to the iOS service mix is a likely culprit (especially since buyers of new phones are more likely to set up Apple's cloud service than users of older models, who may be slower to update to iOS 5). Other possibilities include iTunes Match, Photo Stream, or simply the wider chunk of image data captured by the iPhone 4S's improved camera. As Mel noted earlier, the 4S also supports faster 3G downloads than the earlier models. [Photo Stream is WiFi-only, as pointed out by David Barnard.] There's only one issue I saw in Morgenthaler's response, but it's an important one. Morgenthaler suggests that Arieso committed a logical error in citing Siri as the cause of the 4S results: Arieso presents no data to support their claim that Siri causes the increase in iPhone 4S data usage. Most likely, Arieso committed a logical fallacy which, in grammar school, was called "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" - that is, "after the fact, therefore, because of the fact." In other words, Siri is new and associated with the iPhone 4S; therefore, it must be the cause of this increased traffic. It's an appealing argument, but it doesn't hold water. That's also an appealing argument, but he may be pinning the propter hoc on the wrong donkey. Even a cursory review of the Arieso report is sufficient to discover that it does not mention Siri at all, and it makes no such claim that the voice assistant is responsible for the bandwidth hunger -- at least, not in the body of the report. When it comes to the cause of the iPhone 4S's download desire, in fact, the report makes it very clear that it's too soon to draw any specific conclusions (emphasis mine): The iPhone 4S showed an increase of 176% in downlink data volumes over the iPhone 3G. Since the downlink-to-uplink data volume ratio was almost 7-to-1 on average for the devices under study, this downlink increase of 176% corresponds to a larger total volume of data than a 220% uplink increase (discussed in the last section). As noted earlier regarding the increases in total numbers of data calls, it remains a topic for further study to characterise the root cause of this downlink data volume increase. Arieso's research never said Siri was completely to blame, at least not in so many words; it's not clear whether a company representative said something to Reuters to encourage this conclusion in CTO Michael Flanagan's interviews he does say that Siri is a potential part of the issue, but that conclusion is clearly not backed up by the report itself. Did the firm make an effort to correct the record, or was there a calculation that the Siri-related media attention would be more valuable than getting the accurate information out? We don't know, but we've reached out to Arieso's PR folk for comment. It begins to look less like an error of logic and more like a calculus of publicity. Update: Shortly after this post was published, I did speak with Flanagan about the report and the surrounding controversy. While he acknowledges that some of the media coverage of the bandwidth report may have weighed overmuch on Siri, he disavowed any conclusions not present in the original report (despite the fact that the report was only available on request, and as such most interested parties would not have read it). As noted above, the report specifically does not point any fingers regarding the cause of the bandwidth bump. Flanagan did allow that perhaps Arieso will be a bit more assertive about correcting unfounded assumptions the next time the company issues a bandwidth usage report. The Next Web also picked up a key tidbit from the research: the iPhone 4 utilization numbers were from 2010 (rather than comparing the 4 and the 4S during the same time period), meaning that the overall landscape may have shifted during the intervening months. Meanwhile, we're left with the unavoidable conclusion: The Washington Post and Paul Farhi picked a fight with Siri for something she does not do, picking up the "Siri is a data guzzler" concept from the original coverage -- but not from the actual data. Hanging the 4S bandwidth bulge on an innocent intelligent assistant may be great for headlines, but it looks to be wrong on the facts.
Rogers Communications violates Canadian net neutrality rules over WoW bandwidth throttling
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission recently ruled that Rogers Communications, one of the largest internet service providers in Canada, has violated federal net neutrality rules. Last year, I wrote a few Lawbringers about the subject, which discussed what Rogers had to actually do to escape violation of certain internet traffic throttling complaints. Basically, Rogers was making WoW players' internet access slower because WoW looked like peer-to-peer traffic on their network. Rogers is finally going to have to answer for the throttling issues, even after all of the requests and demands to change their packet inspection protocols. The communications company has until Feb. 3 at noon to respond to the complaints about internet throttling or face a hearing with the CRTC board. Hopefully, the same type of rules can make their way to America, where internet service is abysmally slow and throttled like crazy. Prior to the Cataclysm launch, Blizzard released the new WoW client, which used a peer-to-peer system to upload and download information, patches, data, and all that jazz. This data accidentally triggered internet service providers' bandwidth alerts for torrent traffic and was subsequently throttled to lower speeds. After realizing that many users were experiencing lag issues with the new launcher and their ISPs, Blizzard began its outreach to ISPs in order to work together to fix the problem. A year later, people are still having problems, and Rogers in Canada has admitted to throttling WoW bandwidth.
The big memory cube gamble: IBM and Micron stack their chips
Manufacturers have been murmuring about 3D memory chips for years, but an escalation in recent radio chatter suggests the technology is on the cusp of becoming commercial. Intel unveiled a Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) at IDF, which promises seven times the energy efficiency of today's DDR3, and now IBM and Micron have shown their hand too. The pair just struck up a partnership to produce cubes using layers of DRAM connected by vertical conduits known as through-silicon vias (TSVs). These pillars allow a 90 percent reduction in a memory chip's physical footprint, a 70 percent cut in its appetite for energy, and -- best of all -- a radical increase in bandwidth: HMC prototypes have already scored 128Gb/s 128GB/s, which makes 6Gb/s SATA III look like a bottleneck. It certainly sounds like a game-changer, unless of course some rival technology like ferroelectric memory gets there first. Update: Doh, sorry for the wrong caps, which were shrunken by a factor of eight. For comparison, current high-level DRAM delivers around 12.8GB/s. [Thanks, Maximilian]
Shaw plants 100Gbps fibers in Canada, watches them grow
Consumers can dream of 1Gbps, businesses might ask for 10Gbps, but here's the next step along that logarithmic curve: Shaw and Alcatel-Lucent just launched a new 100Gbps inter-city fiber optic network in Canada, following a successful trial between Calgary and Edmonton. The network can purportedly handle 133 million simultaneous voice calls, 440,000 HDTV channels, or transmit the equivalent of 44 Blu-ray discs in a single second. More redweed details in the PR after the break.
Verizon to offer APIs to give your data rate an on-demand boost, for a price
There's a ton of data-dependent apps these days, and with services like iCloud and Spotify gaining steam, your precious bytes of data can get bogged down with all the additional traffic. Help is on the way for Verizon customers, however, as the company plans to release an API that will allow users to speed up their connection at will from within apps. This network optimization API will be joined by a microtransaction API (developed in conjunction with Vodafone) to make sure Big Red gets paid for every bit of bandwidth nitro you ask for. Work on the APIs is ongoing at VZW's Innovation Center in San Francisco, but neither API will be ready for prime time until next year. That's a long time to wait, but the idea of improving our data connection at the press of a button has us positively giddy. What about you?
The Daily Grind: Is your bandwidth too slow?
Pando Networks recently released a study measuring internet speeds all across the world. Not surprisingly, South Korea came out at the top of that list with an average download speed of 2,202 KBps. To MMO gamers, our connection is our life. We don't enjoy a hiccup in the tubes, but it gives us a handy excuse when we die in PvP, right? Government restrictions, lack of proper infrastructure, and a general lack of technological understanding and foresight all contribute to the slow speeds that plague the rest of the civilized world. So with this Pando study in mind, we'd like to conduct an informal study of our own among the greatest internet citizens of all time: the Massively readers. What's your internet speed? Is it too slow, too fast (impossible!), or just right for your gaming needs? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Verizon starts 'optimizing' (read: throttling) network for the most data hungry users
We can't say we weren't warned, since Verizon updated its data policy way back in February, but it's still a punch in the gut to hear its "network optimization" plan went into effect yesterday. A new policy page pointed out by Droid-Life explains how the policy will affect only the "top 5 percent of data users with 3G devices on unlimited data plans" (LTE and tiered data users are in the clear) by managing their speeds when connected to towers it has deemed are congested. Those conditions, termed network intelligence by Big Red, are what it feels separates this scheme from mere data throttling since it will only affect a few users (those consuming 2GB or more of data per month) at certain times and places, but it's hard to see it any other way. If you're one of those affected, expect a message on your bill or My Verizon account, although you may go into and out of the affected group depending on your usage. Hit the source link below for all the details -- anyone else think it's not a coincidence this policy popped up just before the iPhone 4 came to Verizon and is being implemented only weeks before the next iThing is expected to arrive?
The Lawbringer: Letters to Rogers, letters to Congress
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? We've got two stories to talk about on The Lawbringer today, both interestingly involving letters. That's right -- letters. To you from me, that sort of thing. These letters, however, are instruments of change in a world where we as consumers seem not to have much control or ability to change the big picture concepts that dot our path to consistent entertainment. The amount of energy that we have to put into just getting in a decent WoW session is staggering at times. The first story revolves around Rogers, one of the largest Canadian internet service providers, famous for its lame bandwidth caps and my old Canadian guildmates shouting "Rogers sucks!" as much as they could on Mumble. Yes, it is another chapter in the Mathew McCurley Guide to Awful Bandwidth Throttling -- but hopefully, this new information and story chapter will get us on the path to better WoW experiences in the face of the immense throttling of WoW data as peer-to-peer traffic. The second story is all about letters that you will want to send. Last week, I wrote The Lawbringer about Senate Bill S.978, colloquially being referred to as the anti-streaming bill. While not directly prohibiting video game streaming or even mentioning video games anywhere in the proposed legislation, video games are nonetheless obliterated in the crossfire of the entertainment industry and would-be illegal streamers making millions off of pirated entertainment, movies, music, and more. The Entertainment Consumers Association has begun a letter-writing campaign to inform and implore Congress to not pass a bill with such broad and language lacking description.
Visualized: a zettabyte
Remember the good old days when a gigabyte was considered a lot of space? Improvements in hard disk technology have allowed the humble magnetic drive to reach the dizzying heights of multiple terabytes of storage, but Cisco foresees a future that's a few orders of magnitude more impressive. Pinpointing 2015 as the commencement of what it calls the zettabyte era, the company has put together a handy infographic to show us just how much data can be fit into one: you can alternatively think of it as the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs, 36 million years of HD video, or the volume of the Great Wall of China if you allow an 11oz cup of coffee to represent a gigabyte of data. So "zetta" must be Greek for one hell of a lot, but what Cisco expects is that we'll be pushing that much information around the web each year by 2015. Any bets on how many exabytes of it will be to stream videos of cats diving into cardboard boxes?
PCI Express cables could take us to 32Gbps speeds by 2013
Thought Thunderbolt was the only superfast interconnect in town? Well, it is and will be for a little while yet, but the PCI Special Interest Group has just held its annual meeting and developer conference in California, where plans for a 32Gbps PCIe cable were revealed. Details are still fluid on precisely what such a connector would look like and do, but the expectation is that it'll be built out of copper wire, will be flatter and thinner than Thunderbolt's rotund construction, and will be able to channel power as well as data through to devices up to 10 feet (3m) away. Targeting consumer applications, and extra skinny tablets and laptops in particular, this cabled variety of PCI Express will start off based on the 3.0 spec in 2013, but will then move on from there to PCI Express 4.0 and, potentially, optical data conveyance. Oh yes, PCIe 4.0 also got announced by the PCI SIG, though that's at least four years away at this point -- no need to sweat about having it in your next motherboard, not yet anyway.
Verizon data plans leaked, unlimited users will be grandfathered in
Android Central says it's nabbed an official document laying out the brand new Verizon data plans that are scheduled to take effect next month, and there's good news for those of you currently using an iPhone on Verizon with an unlimited plan: it looks like you'll be grandfathered in. We weren't quite sure if that would happen yesterday, but if this document is real, Verizon will be going the way of AT&T and allowing those with unlimited data plans to keep them (presumably as long as they're not changed or added onto any other deals). Elsewhere on the deals, the smartphone plan will start at 2 GB for $30 a month, up to 10 GB bandwidth for $80 a month. Mobile hotspot access costs $20 a month extra for 2 GB on the hotspot. Unlimited plans will still be available up to July 7, and those unlimited plans will continue even when you upgrade your phone in the future. So if you want to get in on an unlimited plan before the caps get put in, now's the time to do it. We'll keep ears open for official confirmation on this one, and you can read all the details over here. [via Engadget]
Verizon unlimited data to end in July
Bad news, Verizon users. The rumors were true, and Verizon will be ending its unlimited data plan this July. According to AllThingsD, Verizon confirms it's moving "to a more usage based model in July," with exact details to come later on. Unfortunately, it's unclear what Verizon still plans to do -- the company has said that its unlimited plans were always only for a temporary time, though AT&T, of course, grandfathered its unlimited plans in (and I'm still using one, though I can't ever change it or add things like hotspot or tethering). It sounds like Verizon wants to shut down the plans for good, but there may still be a chance for someone on an unlimited plan currently to keep it. We'll have to see. In the meantime, yes, change is in the air for affected Verizon users. With mobile bandwidth rising as quickly as it is, these companies are pushing as quickly as possible to move towards more usage-based plans.
Netflix's day: Sony movies pulled, new bandwidth options, no more DVD API access and a lawsuit
In an apparent ode to Rebecca Black, Ice Cube and any number of body switch movies, Netflix has had an incredibly active Friday, so sit back while we get you up to speed. Sony Pictures movies from Starz Play are no longer available (on any device, not just the Xbox 360 this time) due to a "temporary contract issue" according to the official blog. According to NewTeeVee, the problem is an "IP distribution cap" that was reached due to Netflix's explosive growth, but with no word on when the movies will be back, you'll be missing The Other Guys. Up next was the National Association of the Deaf, which has filed a lawsuit in Springfield, MA against Netflix, claiming that its failure to provide closed captions on all streaming content puts it in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Netflix last claimed 30 percent of titles were subbed with plans to reach 80 percent by the end of the year, but the press release (and captioned YouTube video) make the case that as a leader in streaming video, it should do better. Netflix also quietly gave US subscribers access to the same bandwidth management options provided to Canadians a few months ago. The new Manage Video Quality settings (shown above) can be found in the Your Account section, and if you're trying to stay under bandwidth caps or just keep seeing buffering, they should help you out at the cost of a few pixels. As if that wasn't enough, the Netflix Tech Blog squeezed in news that it was ending access to "DVD-related features" for apps using its Open API later this year. The move is apparently preparation for expanded international streaming, so if you're trying to manage discs through a third party things may change soon.
Motorola's Jha blames apps for poor battery life, says Blur can save the day
Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha took time yesterday to talk business strategy, the advantages of Android, and to take developers to task for poorly optimized apps. At several points during the 50-minute chat the topic turned to lackluster battery life, and Jha placed blame squarely at the feet of hastily tested apps -- which he said can sap between 30 and 40 percent of your phone's juice. The chairman even suggested their effect on longevity and performance were the impetus behind 70 percent of handset returns. But, the company has a solution, and (surprisingly) its name is Blur. In a moment of presumably unintentional creepiness Dr. Jha said, "MotoBlur allows us to know, with precision, what battery life you're seeing," before suggesting that future phones could warn you about power draining apps and bandwidth hogs. What wasn't clear though, was if he was talking about the existing Android battery manager or if Motorola has been collecting usage data -- since we never opted-in to such a program, we're really hoping it's the former. Hit up the source link for the entire conversation, you'll find the relevant bits at the 4- and 25-minute marks.
Bigfoot updates gaming NICs, practices blatant bandwidth favoritism
You didn't shell out on a monster graphics card only to see your YouTube-worthy Black Ops killstreak interrupted by a network slowdown, did you? Well, Bigfoot's tried and tested solution to limited bandwidth is smarter network management -- delivered most recently by the "Advanced Stream Detect" technology in its Killer Wireless N adapters. ASD is meant to automatically classify traffic and prioritize gaming, video and audio streams that demand consistently high network performance. Now the company has annouced at Computex that it's extending this capability to its older standalone Killer 2100 NIC as well as the E2100 embedded NICs in gaming motherboards from MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte. Owners of any of these products can benefit from a "free and easy" software update via Bigfoot's website -- you'll find full instructions in the PR after the break. Go on, kill, kill, kill.
Eutelsat's Ka-Sat satellite goes into service, provides broadband to 13 million homes across Europe
Europe's already extensive broadband coverage may be expanding even further, now that Eutelsat's Ka-Sat satellite has officially gone into service. The new craft, which launched from Kazakhstan in late December, uses spotbeam technology to generate areas of connectivity that are about 250 kilometers wide, with each beam carrying a total capacity of 900Mbps. Unlike the Hylas 1, its reach will extend far across the continent, providing Tooway's high-bandwidth services to 13 million households in remote locations. Subscribers will have download speeds of up to 10Mbps and upload rates of 4Mbps, though they'll still have to put up with latency on the order of 250ms, making life even more difficult for Eastern European OnLive gamers. Of course, this access won't come for free, but Ka-Sat's 82-beam network structure significantly lowers its operating costs, allowing Eutelsat to offer prices that are on par with market rates. According to company CEO Michel de Rosen, customers should expect to pay around €30 for basic service, in addition to €250 they'd have to spend on a 77cm satellite dish. That's not necessarily a small amount of cash for low-income families to fork over, but at least they'll have an option that didn't exist before. Head past the break for a video about Tooway's Ka-Sat services, along with a full PR.
ESPN will go all MPEG-4 in July
For better or worse, ESPN is planning to pull its MPEG-2 feeds at the end of June and transmit to affiliates solely in MPEG-4. Like HBO, ESPN already transmits all of its channels in MPEG-4 via satellite and will save money by cutting out the older backups, but since most cable companies are still sending streams to customers in MPEG-2 (although some are following DirecTV's lead) they'll need to transcode the signal an extra time which could affect the picture quality. Multichannel News mentions ESPN is supplying the necessary Motorola decoders to affiliates that need them, at this point all we can do is wait until July and see if there's any notable difference in sports quality on our end of the pipe. [Thanks, Chevelleman]
US lags in broadband adoption and download speeds, still has the best rappers
U, S, A! We're number nine! Wait, nine? At least according to a recent broadband survey by the FCC, yes. The good ol' US of A ranked ninth (out of the 29 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in fixed broadband penetration on a per capita basis, and 12th in terms of pure percentage -- behind the UK, South Korea, Iceland, the Netherlands, and plenty of others. Though, granted, these nations lack the sprawling amber waves of grain that America must traverse with cables. The US also trailed in wireless broadband adoption, ranking ninth yet again, behind the likes of Ireland, Australia and Sweden. Worse still, even those with broadband reported slower connections than folks in other countries. Olympia, Washington had the highest average download speeds of any US city with 21Mbps (New York and Seattle tied for second with 11.7Mbps), but was easily topped by Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul (35.8Mbps). Well, at least we beat Slovenia... if only just barely.
Study finds Netflix is the largest source of internet traffic in North America
In your daily Netflix news, the latest report on Global Internet Phenomena for spring 2011 from Sandvine has called out the movie service as the largest single consumer of bandwidth on the internet in North America. The last report in October suggested it made up around twenty percent of internet traffic during prime time, but this time around the stats say it accounts for 30% of traffic during prime time, and 22.2% of daily internet traffic. Sandvine gets the data from ISPs using its broadband technology and now foresees "Real-Time Entertainment" (which includes Netflix) shooting up over 55% of peak internet traffic by the end of this year. It also reports on net traffic from other regions, noting social networking outpaces YouTube traffic in Latin America, while European subscribers use twice as much data as North Americans. We'll have to wait and see if these stats are waved in our faces to justify the next round of bandwidth caps or throttling, in the meantime you can click through for more stats or hear about it from Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo discuss them in a video embedded after the break.
