Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

news.northeastern.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 180 posts

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#141

Post by Paul-ish »

resters wrote: post #126
Finch2193 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. Do you really think this outweighs all the other downsides of losing net neutrality?

The core issue Net Neutrality intends to solve is the excessive market power of last mile providers. Of all of the possible ways to address that, having lawmakers regulate QoS is silly. People act as though NN means that everyone deserves a dedicated bandwidth circuit. That's simply not what everyone gets even under NN. Regulators should be doing things like figuring out ways to get more last mile transmission lines…

> Regulators should be doing things like figuring out ways to get more last mile transmission lines installed so there can be real market competition.

It's not clear to me why we can't or shouldn't do both. Keep NN in place until we have followed through with making the broadband market is competitive.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#142

Post by p49k »

nbhuik wrote: post #133
p49k wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still the responsibility of the ISP to deliver connectivity to other hosts on the internet at their promised speed, regardless what is necessary to do so or how it operates internally. That's the service that they are advertising to the consumer. If UPS decided to change the way they internally route their packages, it doesn't mean that they can just brush off promised delivery dates because "it doesn't work how…

It just doesn't make any sense. It is like saying that UPS should deliver to everywhere on earth in one day for the same price, despite large differences in cost between local delivery and e.g. air freight to a war zone. The Internet is a bunch of interconnected networks. Any of those networks can largely have whatever conditions they want. That is what the Internet is. Do I think it should be different, yes, but a l…

> It is like saying that UPS should deliver to everywhere on earth in one day for the same price

No, it's not like that at all. UPS makes it clear to the customer in advance what the cost is, how long it will take, and the customer agrees. Also, UPS is not held responsible for delays that they couldn't reasonably prevent (bad weather, etc).

It's also an exaggeration of the situation; it's essentially saying "If we can't achieve perfection, then we might as well not have any standards and we can't hold anyone accountable for anything." The fact is that those speeds are obtainable in most of the common situations that people actually need them, and the throttling only occurs out of unwillingness on the part of ISPs to negotiate agreements that would allow those speeds; it's greed and/or laziness, not physical or technical limitations.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#143

Post by lainga »

josefresco wrote: post #84

"To start, he said, consider an internet service provider that doesn’t throttle." Is this a joke? While reading an article about how every US cell provider throttles they recommend to choose an ISP that .... doesn't throttle?

I was expecting that to lead somehow to the line "...however, this implies that no ISP exists which doesn't throttle, a contradiction. QED"

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#144

Post by rayiner »

p49k wrote: post #108
rayiner wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just not how the Internet works and it’s never how it worked. This old article from Cisco (based on a 1999 book) explains that there can be various kind of business arrangements in an interconnected network: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/press/internet-protocol-... . The article likens the situation to airlines, where multiple transit providers might be involved and where there may be complex fee sharing…

It's still the responsibility of the ISP to deliver connectivity to other hosts on the internet at their promised speed, regardless what is necessary to do so or how it operates internally. That's the service that they are advertising to the consumer. If UPS decided to change the way they internally route their packages, it doesn't mean that they can just brush off promised delivery dates because "it doesn't work how…

Internet "access" is, and always has been, a link to an "access network." ISPs promise that that they'll route packets from that access network to the Internet, but nobody promises you end-to-end connectivity at a particular speed (unless you pay for a dedicated line). (Verizon, for example, caveats it's product as being a "gigabit connection to your home.")

People like to pretend like internet access service is a promise to get your packets from point A to point B anywhere on the internet at a given speed. That is based on the fiction indulged by the software folks, who just think about getting bytes between a pair of sockets and don’t care how the internet actually works. But as explained in that Cisco article, interconnection and transit has always been distinct from access, and has been the subject of separate commercial negotiations between network operators. That reflects the technical reality that the internet is not a single network, but an agglomeration of private access and transit networks. The idealized software abstraction of the internet doesn’t define what it actually is. If you read the contract that defines what you're buying, it's not promising you that idealized abstraction.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#145

Post by slyn »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #112
close04 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... until you grandma can’t Skype with you because Microsoft didn’t pay the “decongestion” tax to that neighborhood IP she’s using or every ISP along the way. Or when the firefighters get throttled because their unlimited data is consumed and your house goes up in smoke.

I really hope firefighters and other emergency services don't depend on the unreliable mobile network. Those will be some of the first things to go down in case of an actual emergency, along with the power grid.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#146

Post by jandrese »

gsich wrote: post #78
lucb1e wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your own comment it sounds like rights holders are forcing them to implement a VPN check..?

No. Right holders want this. Netflix could just say no. Of course some stuff might not be available then, but at least their integrity would be intact.

Could we come up with a solution where Netflix's streaming catalog isn't even thinner?

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#147

Post by jandrese »

mcny wrote: post #63
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure if Netflix had their way they would not have spent resources on doing a VPN check.

Why do they have to enforce VPN check for Netflix originals? It seems that Netflix does not own rights for Netflix originals? Wouldn't it be easier to simply say some videos have restrictions but these videos do not?

A lot of "Netflix Originals" are just shows they've brought over from overseas. They will be rights restricted in their home countries still. I don't even know what the Netflix Original logo means anymore.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#148

Post by close04 »

rayiner wrote: post #99
close04 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you compensate that person for not being able to provide the service. Just as you'd expect in any other case when a service is not delivered. And if we're being honest, that's not actually the reason most of us get throttled. Most of the time it's not even network management, it's just a money grab. I don't intend to go into the technicalities because they're irrelevant. The point is they should offer a quality…

Wireless ISPs don’t advertise any particular speed level. They sell “best effort” service and advertise it that way. What you’re asking for is an SLA (presumably for consumer level prices).

Unlimited - not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.

Best effort is when your taxi driver tries to take you to the airport as fast as possible but traffic gets in the way and you're late. When he stops in a tunnel and requests more money because he has to drive through his lunch break, or else he'll just inch forward that's not best effort. That's what I said before: squeezing for money.

Reading the article helps: this is not network congestion, this is artificially limiting the speed.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#149

Post by jandrese »

gst wrote: post #46
hamandcheese wrote: post #24

Throttling video speeds may very well be a good thing for many (most?) users who have a fixed data cap. Throttling means Netflix/Youtube/etc react by sending lower quality video to your tiny screen, where you won’t be able to appreciate higher quality anyway.

> Throttling video speeds may very well be a good thing for many (most?) users who have a fixed data cap. I would assume that most users with recent contracts are going to have an "unlimited" amount of included data, given that most (all?) major US providers sell unlimited data by default.

By default? Don't fall for the marketing bullshit, "Unlimited" is like 20GB and then you're sent down to the penalty box and EDGE data speeds. Real unlimited is very expensive if it exists, which it usually does not.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#150

Post by ti_ranger »

belorn wrote: post #94
timr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The article is not about congestion control but rather marketing choices where one streaming service is favored over the other within the captured market of an ISP customers." I wonder if that's true, or this is simply a result of the peering agreements that content providers have engaged in since forever. For those who don't know: if Netflix is colocated in the same datacenter(s) as CSPire, it's possible to "throw…

Could there be other causes than differentiation to explain the data collect? That would be an excellent questioning to ask the team at University of Massachusetts if they made a dissertation or research paper, since all the article says is that they used a established peer-reviewed technique that assumingly has gone through such questioning. It would be interesting to know the statistical probability that collocated…

> What kind of different class of traffic would give throttled traffic to different forms of on-demand video stream services? NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime.

There may be a small amount of packet loss at the time due to the ISP shaping their traffic to prevent congestion.

The higher the latency, the more the packet loss will affect the throughput.

The services you mention all use different CDNs, which may all have different latencies at the point of observation:

> NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime

NBCSports - I would guess Akamai, who deploys at IX and ISP Netflix - Usually Openconnect CDN devices at IX or ISP YouTube Premium - Google Global Cache deployed at IX and/or ISP (GCCs are deployed in most consumer ISPs, probably the best-distributed CDN at the moment). Amazon prime - Cloudfront, deployed mainly at IX, I am not sure if they have deployments in ISPs yet.

(I haven't tried to find more information on their approach, but https://dd.meddle.mobi/index.html seems to indicate that CDN issues shouldn't affect the way they measure, but until I do some checking on whether popular DPI platforms would be able to be fooled by this, and without them providing timestamped data, I'll have to test myself against DPI policies I wrote and I hope my ex-colleagues haven't changed too much ...)

Post reply on HN