Live data from Hacker News

Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

bbc.co.uk

141–150 of 763 posts

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#141
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to strawman but are you saying luxury businesses should be able to get away with not delivering on what their customers pay for because we are in an unexpected situation?

Yes because the luxury business customer's wants to have the UHD they paid a small sum for do not trump other people's needs to be able to work from home in order to eat and keep the real economy working because of a pandemic.

Now we just need to establish that Netflix streaming is actually hurting working remotely.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#142
post #24

Is this for the entirety of Europe? Because I imagine we're not having any issues with this in Finland.

It's a made up problem. In Germany, journalists asked the network providers and they said everything is fine. Such a ridiculous and pointless thing to do by the EU. Especially since all the apps drop the quality automatically anyway if the connection is slow.

It's not an invented problem. In Spain, ISPs like Telefonica and Vodafone are posting tweets are telling newspapers that people need to use the Internet with responsibility [0]. They also passed a law yesterday that allows ISPs to close connections if they know they're being used to spam the network.

Maybe in Germany is different because people are more used to work from home or just being at home while watching Netflix but Spanish people like to go out a lot and now the network needs to serve all these people as well.

[0]: https://www.xatakamovil.com/movil-y-sociedad/operadores-se-u...

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#143
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's what they are relieving...edge traffic volumes. If the local ISP cache box lowers it's maximum quality, the ISPs get relief. The ISPs oversubscribed, and can't deal with this many people being at home all at once.

Citation needed. In the UK... "UK broadband companies say they can cope with increased demand as many more people stay at home during the coronavirus crisis." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732

That's what they say now. Give them a few weeks and they'll start squealing. Every ISP oversubscribes for consumer segments. In the UK I guess not enough people are quarantined.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#144
post #127
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet doesn't have QoS.

Last mile networks do.

Yeah, but nobody trusts ISPs to prioritize traffic; that's what the decade of net neutrality discussion has been about. If they start prioritizing Zoom over Netflix now, it just opens the door to continuing that prioritization (for pay) after the crisis.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#145
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to strawman but are you saying luxury businesses should be able to get away with not delivering on what their customers pay for because we are in an unexpected situation?

Yes because the luxury business customer's wants to have the UHD they paid a small sum for do not trump other people's needs to be able to work from home in order to eat and keep the real economy working because of a pandemic.

that's fine, but how is that a retort to giving someone their money back after you can't provide that service anymore

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#146
post #13
post #5

Does anyone know of public ISP dashboards that show used/total capacity on their network in terms of customer usage? I'm sure its trivial for an internal employee to pull up solarwinds or whatever, but I'd be curious to see if these ISPs are merely running above normal, running hot, barely hanging on with intermittent "isp brownouts" etc. This is probably a pipe dream but not gonna get any questions answered if I don…

The largest backbone in the world publishes statistics: https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...

The CTO of de-cix recently gave an interview regarding the current situation. They monitored the situation in Italy, put some upgrades in place earlier than originally planned and are not worried about a 40% increase within the next four weeks.

https://www.golem.de/news/internet-traffic-de-cix-sieht-kein...

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#147
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Berlin my DSL connection has been awful since the social distancing began. And many of my friends have complained of similar problems. Frequent disconnections, broken up zoom calls. Though ironically the streaming has been fine from both Netflix & Amazon.

I've had disconnected Zoom calls here (Netherlands) as well, but it seems that's just Zoom not being able to handle the traffic because Google Hangouts and MS Teams are both fine. And Netflix and Disney+ are also working fine.

Didn't MS Teams already go down once due to the additional traffic in Europe?

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#148

Does it mean they’ll pay me back for the 4K package?

Pretty sure they will have a clause in their TOS agreement to the terms of "we cannot control your ISPs network quality, or regulations placed upon us"

No one has forced them to do so, not a single ISP seems to be having any issues.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#149
post #32
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarification, this is not a "backbone" - it is an exchange fabric.

And for further clarification, you won't see much Netflix traffic there because the big ISPs have Netflix caches within their infrastructure.

Yeah, you will not see the additional hundreds of Gbps of "internal" Netflix traffic, but you may very well see smaller increases as small ISPs that aren't approved for "full rack Netflix appliances" pick up Netflix traffic over the routeservers.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#150

Are there any illustrations of the volumes of traffic that are being sent through core networks for netflix? I was under the impression the vast majority of traffic was served at the edge.

That's exactly what I was wondering! With my (relatively small) Cable ISP in an affected country it obvious to me that any Netflix content gets served from very close to the edge, with higher bandwidth and lower latency than almost any other content from the internet. The last mile does not appear to be close to oversubscribed either, as indicated by my firewall which tracks RTT to the first hop (which is interesting…

What firewall do you use that has that?
Post reply on HN