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Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

bbc.co.uk

461–470 of 763 posts

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

#461
Comcast has been doing some emergency maintenance and/or upgrades with 1-2 hour downtimes for the last week or two in San Francisco. Haven't noticed any slowdowns here though. I imagine they had a few upgrades ready to go and decided to pull the trigger on them/roll them out ahead of schedule.

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

#462
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what motivation a tech would have for lying about this.

I asked a Comcast tech when IPv6 would be available and he said “IP v what?”. Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

That's like asking a telephone lineman about IPv6. Diff layer in the OSI stack.

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

#463

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…

> have had 4 techs come try to figure it out Doesn't sound ideal for distancing.

The way the story is written it sounds like their attendance was there was serial temporal distance involved (they didn't come at the same time)

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

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

> 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. This assumes that residential internet connections act like a larger version of your home LAN. For all the ISPs that I know about in Australia, all of those connections are ter…

With the NBN, most providers don’t use PPPoE anymore but instead just plain IP.

Every NBN connection goes back to one of 121 Points of Interconnect (PoIs) (which is way too many by the way but was a dumb and misguided decision imposed by the ACCC). At the PoI it gets to the provider through a Network to Network interface (NNI). The provider’s switch that plugs in here is the earliest that a P2P connection could loop back (but only to somebody in the same region, that is, connected to the same PoI), and is also the closest that a Netflix OpenConnect device could be (although it might not be cost effective to rent the rack space there vs. putting it in a data centre in a capital city).

A lot depends on the provider, however, on how they have structured their network. Apparently some do tunnel all their connections back from the PoI to a central location even though they don’t have to.

But for most, I expect the provider’s backhaul to the PoIs in a state would all go back to the capital city of that state, which would then be interconnected to the neighbouring states capital cities (this is what the ISP I use, Aussie Broadband does at least).

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

#465

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…

A free alternative to PingPlotter: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality My connection: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/... In case anyone is shopping for broadband in the UK, I only have great things to say about Zen pictured above. It's so good I just called to upgrade my 80 Mb to a 300 Mb just for fun, meanwhile my quarantined Italian friends are suffering awful in…

That's a neat alternative to PingPlotter. I like that it pings from outside, so no client required. I'll check it out, however, I'm in the US, so I bet it's always going to be high latency.

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

#466

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)

It sounds like it's time for some popcorn.

seems to me like there's some concern over the latest edition of popcorntime in its subreddit, so I'd be wary of it for now.

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

#467

On totally unrelated news, Popcorn Time 4.0 was recently released and using it is decriminalized in many European countries (but not in others, so stay safe): https://popcorntime.app/

it seems that popcorn time 4.0 is something to be wary of for now, at least that is the impression I got from the subreddit.

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

#468
post #323
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…

Maybe being in the system with a higher speed tier gets you higher priority?

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

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still bullshit.

All you need is a handful of small court claims to wake Netflix up. They'll spend a magnitude more on sending Netflix employees to represent them, than all these prorated refunds would cost.

The idea of many small claims "waking up" a company is nice in theory, but not reality. In reality, the entity being sued asks the courts to consolidate them into a class action, that's part of why class actions exist, because it makes very little sense to have to play out the same legal case a dozen or a hundred etc. times around the country.

I'm sure a law firm somewhere is already looking to form that "class" and rake in their % of a settlement, and I'm sure Netflix understands that and has factored it into their plans, so it's all a moot point except that at some point in the next 3-7 years you'll get a $5 service credit. Maybe.

Also, most contracts have a "force majeur" clause that would cover this sort of thing. And even if it didn't, if enough businesses start having to modify or breach service agreements in these ways through a world-wide crisis then governments will step in and legislate them out of liability. There won't be too much sympathy for the "victims" of Netflix either. Not from the public at large, especially those who lose friends or family to the pandemic, over someone's pixelated experience of End Game or The Office. I know people who are sick, one closely, and I don't know if they're going to survive. Suffering through SD quality (or worse!) isn't what I concern myself with at the moment.

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