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Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

bbc.co.uk

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

#361

Post by iagovar »

lxgr wrote: post #323
op00to wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech was full of shit. This happens literally all the time. You probably won’t get a “node split” unless more people loudly complain. It’s cheaper for them to roll a tech and hope you get fed up than it is to actually fix the problem.

My ISP has been playing the same game with me for months. I finally cancelled the contract when it was about to renew, and I got a very interesting winback call from sales: Not only did the rep freely share the utilization numbers with me (80% during the day and 90% at night), he also mentioned that things would not get better until end of the year when they would do a node split. As consolation, they offered me 10x…

I work in this field in Spain. Margins in this sector are slim, deployment is expensive. EVERYONE works with simultaneity rates, it's the only way to have cheap connections.

In fiber connections is actually not that expensive to split a fiber after a CTO, you can actually sort of daisy chain it, but you want to keep everything as standard as possible.

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

#362

Post by _squared_ »

cortesoft wrote: post #63
whoo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you pay a month in advance

Well, I hate to tell you the devastating news... you might have to eat the $3 this month.

$3? Where I live (in Europe) the 4K plan is 15.99€ a month. That's $17 USD. I pay less for my phone's data plan!

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

#364

Post by megablast »

jasoncartwright wrote: post #88
tyingq wrote: 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

Wow, they SAY they can keep up, that proves nothing.

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

#365

Post by capableweb »

orcasauce wrote: post #278
jazzyjackson wrote: post #256

Maybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading "The Avengers" for the millionth time, you would just download it from the nearest host (also the way the internet worked before HTTPS, there used to be way more local caching of content being downloaded over and over again)

As I understand it Netflix has hardware in ISP data centers to do exactly that. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

Netflix might have data centers that gets closer, but nothing will ever get as far reaching and close as P2P would. A residential building who are all watching the same movie would only have to download the movie from building internet once. Replicate this system on every level (local network building city country) and you get so much more bandwidth available.

Of course there are other considerations and we (humans) haven't worked as much on P2P as centralized systems, so only the future can tell us where the limit is.

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

#366

Post by miguelmota »

Avamander wrote: post #123
cortesoft wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the whole world is trying to deal with the worst pandemic in 100 years, you are going to have to adjust your expectation levels for bullshit.

The pandemic doesn't affect what are good business practises. I understand that Americans might be more lenient in those terms, but Europeans tend not to be.

I assure you that Americans are just as annoyed as Europeans when it comes to abrupt changes in service.

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

#367

Post by lxgr »

texthompson wrote: post #282
rococode wrote: post #246

I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunate…

If you didn't know, that 80% number is probably the result of Little's Law. That's the result where if your demand is generated by a Poisson process, and your service has a queue, 80% utilization of the service is where the probability of an infinite queue starts to get really high. People Here's a nice blog post about the subject: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/01/30/server-utilization...

This law does not apply to queueing as encountered in routers. It assumes unbounded queues and a poisson arrival process (i.e. a memoryless channel); both assumptions don't hold for packet routers and senders using congestion control (TCP or otherwise).

There is, however, a high chance of encountering buffer bloat if countermeasures are not taken at the chokepoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

Modern cable modems, for example, are required to implement such countermeasures. My ISP is at over 90% capacity and round trip times are still mostly reasonable. (Bandwidth is atrocious, of course.)

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

#368

Post by isoskeles »

_squared_ wrote: post #362
cortesoft wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I hate to tell you the devastating news... you might have to eat the $3 this month.

$3? Where I live (in Europe) the 4K plan is 15.99€ a month. That's $17 USD. I pay less for my phone's data plan!

What's the next tier below that? Now subtract the one number from the other number, it should be less than 15.99.

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

#369

Post by miguelmota »

dogma1138 wrote: post #206
miguelmota wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a fear based decision. ISP companies sell more bandwidth than is actually available during peak times but because of everybody staying home now their services are oversubscribed creating slow downs or outages.

The ISPs came out and said bandwidth isn't an issue.

Is there a link to the source? (not that I don't believe that but just want to know the details)

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

#370

Post by lxgr »

fibers wrote: post #343
martin_bech wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked at a major ISP, for a decade, and spotting something like this should be so easy to spot. There are tools on monitoring of load all the time, and areas are routibely getting split etc. to improve bandwith, so I think your ISP are basicly amateurs..

how can i as a subscriber find out whats the capacity?

It used to be possible to determine the downlink capacity and even current usage with a DVB-C receiver and some Linux software, since DOCSIS is essentially just IP encapsulated in MPEG transport streams on a digital TV channel.

More recent versions of DOCSIS have moved away from that layer of backwards compatibility, so you would probably need some specialised equipment, if it is possible at all (I don't know at what layer exactly encryption happens).

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