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Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

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Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#121

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Well, I've had this experience as well, where I note the performance is so bad that I go to the speed test page of my internet provider and then it ends up being ok. However I have a pretty solid suspicion that they have not done anything to monitor usage and stop throttling when seeing a check because:

1. I used to consult (for two years) in the department of my internet provider that would have had to do the reporting to the people who would have controlled throttling and even worked on the speed test page at times and there was no project to do that.

2. There was evidently no known and talked about throttling project among the hundreds of techies working at the business.

3. This place would not have been able to pull off the coordination between departments required to do this and also keep it a secret, and I'm betting most Internet providers would be even more incapable of doing something so nefarious.

4. The department providing customer support would have had to be in league with whatever department providing throttling, however KPIs for the customer support would of course have been negatively impacted by the many people calling in to report negative bandwidth usage. Thus they would have had to be in league with another division of the company to make sure they underperformed and thus did not get good bonuses etc. That would be an enviable level of dedication I must say.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#122

Post by beowulfey »

ComradePhil wrote: post #111
bzxcvbn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.

Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you use the internet primarily for something else, with "net neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream video.

Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#123

Post by tomatotomato37 »

stepanhruda wrote: post #85
aaomidi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's a bit of an odd choice because it's pretty easy to detect if a user has "opened fast.com in the past few minutes"

That's why we need DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello to become widely used. Then there would be no way of knowing, as long as Netflix uses the same infrastructure to serve fast.com and netflix.com

That wouldn't really help; the network activity signature of a speed test is noticably different from browsing or video streaming, and even if it wasn't, the connection for streaming lasts a lot longer than the test. You could defeat it with a timer.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#124

Post by mmastrac »

mlyle wrote: post #119
mmastrac wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pi is definitely limited in terms of CPU. This is a fairly old, but beefy Xeon chip on my unraid box. Might be native vs Python code on ARM?

Yup, native vs. Python would explain a lot on the Pi, but I've also seen this on my big Threadripper machine here and on my Hetzner server in Virginia. I'd assumed it was just something intrinsic. On the other hand: speedtest's own thing uses multiple parallel connections. So if you have low amounts of loss that prevent one TCP connection from going super fast, it'll do better on speedtest than speedtest-cli. Thanks…

No worries.. best of luck with that. As a total aside, fast.com is giving me 420mbps which should be impossible given my wifi setup. :/

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#125

Post by mlyle »

mmastrac wrote: post #124
mlyle wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, native vs. Python would explain a lot on the Pi, but I've also seen this on my big Threadripper machine here and on my Hetzner server in Virginia. I'd assumed it was just something intrinsic. On the other hand: speedtest's own thing uses multiple parallel connections. So if you have low amounts of loss that prevent one TCP connection from going super fast, it'll do better on speedtest than speedtest-cli. Thanks…

No worries.. best of luck with that. As a total aside, fast.com is giving me 420mbps which should be impossible given my wifi setup. :/

fast.com tends to be 10-20% high for me versus what goes by at the router.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#126

Post by KMag »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #83
dboreham wrote: post #68

Unlikely your suspicions are correct. Provisioning high QoS to the speedtest site is common practice (see fast.com for countermeasures), but changing the entire subscriber QoS because traffic to one particular destination is detected seems like too much work and doesn't really achieve anything useful. If you are on a wireless network (either your upstream from a WISP, or internally on your own network), then I'd susp…

> and doesn't really achieve anything useful At my previous apartment, I would get a full month rebate off my internet bill if I could document speeds considerably below average on a computer plugged in with ethernet. I could very well see an ISP with such a policy looking for nefarious ways to "fix" that money loss.

There's that, and also visiting a speed test site is an indicator that a particular user is more sensitive to speed than the general user base (and perhaps considering jumping to another ISP). It absolutely makes business sense to prioritize traffic to users who pay more attention.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#128

Post by rglullis »

beowulfey wrote: post #122
ComradePhil wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you use the internet primarily for something else, with "net neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream video.

Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.

Honest question: is there any place in the US where electricity is subsidized or has discriminatory pricing?

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#129

Post by denton-scratch »

DanAtC wrote: post #110
denton-scratch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Need" is too strong. Without going into the arguments against DoH, we don't "need" it, because there is an alternative: run your own recursive DNS. That should be something that a consumer could switch on or off. A default install of Unbound, for example, seems to /just work/. Downside: if you have any kind of home network, running your own recursive DNS probably implies running your own DHCP, which isn't normally a…

Recursive DNS is still unencrypted and would be visible to your ISP

Yes, they can observe my queries to authoritative servers. But I didn't claim that running your own recursive DNS guaranteed privacy; I only claimed that it dispelled all problems arising from relying on someone else's DNS recursors.

I happen to trust my ISP, BTW; I really just like running my own because I can observe what it's doing.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#130

Post by ComradePhil »

beowulfey wrote: post #122
ComradePhil wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you use the internet primarily for something else, with "net neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream video.

Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.

This is already done in sensible parts of the world to some extent where consumer electricity is priced differently from electricity for business purposes... but yes, a more fine grained control would lead to better prices for most users.
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