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Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

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Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#131

Post by stepanhruda »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #123
stepanhruda wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we need DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello to become widely used. Then there would be no way of knowing, as long as Netflix uses the same infrastructure to serve fast.com and netflix.com

That wouldn't really help; the network activity signature of a speed test is noticably different from browsing or video streaming, and even if it wasn't, the connection for streaming lasts a lot longer than the test. You could defeat it with a timer.

Netflix can literally implement fast.com to do the exact same operation as when streaming and then measure performance of the stream.

Yes you could do a timer, but that would mean e.g. first 30s of all Netflix streams to be much faster and then slow down just in case they were in fact speed tests. Also would be difficult to differentiate between running a speed test vs a stream that gets its connection closed and reconnects.

All of this is an order of magnitude for ISPs to deal with than unthrottling traffic for specific domains. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but making it prohibitively more expensive helps a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#132

Post by KerrAvon »

vmception wrote: post #60
pojzon wrote: post #19

I was cursing on my ISP for a long time till I understood that Im on a 100Mbit wifi. Then added a wire connection to my server and instantly 10x the speed :^] Dont be like me, have wires set up everywhere where needed.

My local wifi is faster than my 1gb/s ethernet. This holds true in the same room and one room over. I like this.

If you’re happy, great. But you might want to figure out what’s interfering with your wired bandwidth, because wired 1G ethernet should basically win every time compared to current WiFi standards. Maybe not ax under ideal conditions. But that’s a maybe.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#133

Post by ineedasername »

bmitc wrote: post #86
bzxcvbn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.

It's also an example of how it's already been lost.

In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.)

That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level departments with wide latitude to set regulations with the weight of law behind them but not the same high barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law. Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other hand it means that very important pieces of public policy are even further removed from election accountability and subject to the whims of different administrations.

Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It was approve & construction begun on one administration, a final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all. Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects, this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#134

Post by stepanhruda »

denton-scratch wrote: post #98
stepanhruda wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we need DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello to become widely used. Then there would be no way of knowing, as long as Netflix uses the same infrastructure to serve fast.com and netflix.com

"Need" is too strong. Without going into the arguments against DoH, we don't "need" it, because there is an alternative: run your own recursive DNS. That should be something that a consumer could switch on or off. A default install of Unbound, for example, seems to /just work/. Downside: if you have any kind of home network, running your own recursive DNS probably implies running your own DHCP, which isn't normally a…

What if I want privacy on a non-home network? Huge part of my traffic is over 5G/LTE.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#135

Post by stepanhruda »

denton-scratch wrote: post #129
DanAtC wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursive DNS is still unencrypted and would be visible to your ISP

Yes, they can observe my queries to authoritative servers. But I didn't claim that running your own recursive DNS guaranteed privacy; I only claimed that it dispelled all problems arising from relying on someone else's DNS recursors. I happen to trust my ISP, BTW; I really just like running my own because I can observe what it's doing.

So your “alternative” is strictly worse / solving a different problem.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#136

Post by mrtksn »

ranger207 wrote: post #26

Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to prioritize fast.com content they'll have to prioritize Netflix content as well. Of course, that doesn't help non-Netflix sites...

Strangely, fast.com still reports faster connection speeds than my broadband is supposed to offer. No, my broadband is not faster than what I'm paying for, I can see that when monitoring actual transfers(including the transfers when doing the tests). They do offer about %95 of the promised speed, not %110 that fast.com or speedtest.net measures.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#138

Post by mpalczewski »

rglullis wrote: post #128
beowulfey wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.

Honest question: is there any place in the US where electricity is subsidized or has discriminatory pricing?

California, sort of: They figure out what sort of place you own, pigeon hole it with other "similar" places and charge you more per kilowatt hour if you use more than they think you need. It's a procrustean bed approach.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#139

Post by dataflow »

traceroute66 wrote: post #36

Lots of people here have already mentioned the Netflix fast.com test, which is indeed good. But also worthy of recommendation IHMO is the Cloudflare one (speed.cloudflare.com). Main reason I say that is its one of the few that measures jitter (or at least openly exposes the measurement).

CloudFlare one is giving me less than 1/3 the download speed fast.com shows, and in fact, testing by downloading a Linux ISO [1], the latter seems to be the correct one. I don't know what CloudFlare's test is doing (their server is geographically nearby) but I obviously can't trust their measurement.

[1] https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/archlinux/iso/2022.04.05/arc...

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#140

Post by jrockway »

mnd999 wrote: post #114
bmitc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also an example of how it's already been lost.

That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.

There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that, it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and then run them into each house along that street. People that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to do that, and that's why the business is tough.

My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to existing power lines (which not every city has, they're all underground here). When they ran out of easy install opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve you. If not, you were out of luck.

If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal after proposal for trenching, microtrenching, nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none of these worked in the real world. (I might have made some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and ugliness.)

The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth. (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so well that people are switching from their fiber connection to Starlink or whatever.)

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