Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

news.ycombinator.com

141–150 of 356 posts

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1G ethernet is 125 megabytes (spelled out to avoid acronym ambiguity) per second

802.11ax is much faster than that, my wifi router is good for 1.5G or so while the protocol allows for 3.5G or so and my file transfer speeds are easily more than 125 megabytes per second

I’m not going to run more wires either way

So……. you sure I should care?

Its great fast speeds that scale to the file sizes I want to handle, which are pretty large for prosumer needs.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you use the internet primarily for something else, with "net neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream video.

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.

Industrial usage rates and rules are different in every country I believe if you use huge amounts. At least here in Spain I pay more for monthly fees because I tend to use more for hearing with electricity. So it's baseline kwh a month consumption. Also different contracts when you want to use a lot of current at the same time.

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

#144
post #77

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...

I mean, it's a bit of an odd choice because it's pretty easy to detect if a user has "opened fast.com in the past few minutes"

I mean, it's just as trivial for netflix to make periodic requests to fast.com fron their streaming apps if ISPs were using that as a metric to throttle their traffic.

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

#145
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses,

The same way we got power to the homes which was government assistance and the private companies not expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.

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

#147
Test it out by parallelizing a ton of downloads from a known good server and really overwhelm your connection. I find that it's not my ISP thats doing the throttling, its the content host at the other end. Steam/microsoft/even small third parties all throttle downloads after a while. If it was my ISP, I would see the throttling when I run my tester array on a server that I know for a fact doesn't throttle, but I don't, so its clearly the third party at the other end of the line trying to save money on upload costs. I can't blame them when everything is 4k now.

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

#150
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW In my place grave diggers is a synonym for a least paid profession.
Post reply on HN