My parents recently had 100mbps fibre installed, I told them to visit fast.com to test their speed and they were pleased at how easy it is to use and hassle free
Good work by Netflix.
Building fast.com
51–60 of 180 posts
Re: Building fast.com
#52It's a little odd that they elected to invent their own way of requesting just a range of bytes in a file. It's built into HTTP: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7233
YouTube also put the byte range in the URL rather than using a range request header. Perhaps it mitigates against proxies stripping the headers, or it simplifies caching.
you can also send a link that way (e.g. via email/Slack.) No way to send a link with an http header
Re: Building fast.com
#53I see this as a tool for netflix to immediately raise concerns about ISP neutrality. The link to another speed test (using some minor server) is there not by chance. If speed test is far better than netflix fast.com the ISP is clearly limiting the customer.
Re: Building fast.com
#54Several years ago I used this wonderful tool. http://software.internet2.edu/ndt/.
It provides the ability to do lots of troubleshooting in a private network.
Re: Building fast.com
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's intentional throttling, fast.com would actually not be much of a problem. It'd still be easy to selectively apply traffic shaping to streaming but not to the speedtest traffic. It would be harder (though not impossible) if there is an actual capacity problem, and the bottleneck is outside of the ISP's network. For example insufficient peering capacity, which seems to be where most of the Netflix / ISP frictio…
> It'd still be easy to selectively apply traffic shaping to streaming but not to the speedtest traffic. That presumes they aren't fully emulating streaming traffic to test speed. Not only is this the correct thing to do from a video streaming company that wants to test connection speed for their services (the quantity and size of packets can affect the delivery through different mediums and devices), but it also mak…
> That presumes they aren't fully emulating streaming traffic to test speed.
It's not really a presumption, it's the actual facts on the ground. The actual benchmark file is served over HTTPS from, but there are still multiple simple ways to distinguish the current speedtest testcase from normal streaming.
Re: Building fast.com
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes sense but wouldn't they then use the netflix domain? Something like netflix.com/fast? I could image that if providers throttle it would be a mix of IPs and domain.
Some ISP's (we don't throttle anything) throttle based on several factors, mainly packet signatures. Traffic coming from big/known sources, such as Netflix, contain unique signatures (probably the headers, etc, that are unique to Netflix Traffic). You can then check all incoming packets that match those signatures and throttle them. So unless Netflix went out of their way to mask every request to look like video cont…
The files that fast.com has you download ARE chunks of video files :)
Re: Building fast.com
#57Fast.com is a lot slower than both speedtest.net and http://speedtest.dslreports.com/speedtest for me... I get 78mbps on fast.com and 350 on the other two. Not sure what's going on? Maybe they don't have servers near me, I'm in Paris, France.
What does testmy.net show?
Re: Building fast.com
#58First, I thought why another speed test, then I saw that they link their results directly to speedtest.net (the reference) and finally, I realized that fast.com is so much faster in detecting the download speed (but lacks upload and ping). Not bad. EDIT: And they secured a fantastic domain.
They bought slow.com too.
I believe another HN user, CyrusL, owns slow.com and redirected it to fast.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11723650
Re: Building fast.com
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
We display our data publicly on the map. http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/broadband_speed_in_my... Granted we do not have many results in the US (maybe ballpark 200k+ results in last 6 months), still you should be able to find some results in your area.
200k is a pretty good sample size is it not? Even with multiple providers. Most election/political polls use far less data and very big decisions get made because of them.
Sample size is only a tiny part of the relevance of a sample. You can take a thousand gallons of water to test water quality, but if all of it is from the same faucet the sample isn't representative.
Re: Building fast.com
#60This is beautiful. By using Netflix's actual CDN and requesting actual video files over HTTP, they're preventing ISPs from whitelisting fast.com without also whitelisting Netflix itself. Of course there'll be a game of cat-and-mouse with DPI, but it's a super-neat way of making it much harder for the ISPs to misrepresent actual video download speed...