Biggest improvement I found came from replacing the ISP provided modem/router with my own modem and router. Both improvements in overall speed and latency in gaming. I'm guessing they have less remote access control over third-party modems, and the quality of name brand is generally better. I use a Netgear cable modem and Ubiquiti router gear.
Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
171–180 of 356 posts
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#172Earlier 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…
There are plenty of feasible wireless ISP technologies. They have a directional antenna on the subscriber side, pointed at a shared tower.
I've had mixed experiences with them. The wireless link itself tends to be 100% uptime with no bandwidth contention. The quality of the network between the tower and the internet backbone varies wildly depending on the ISP.
Anyway, last mile of 10's to 100's MBit symmetric over multiple miles is a solved problem these days.
The remaining problems are mostly political. Sadly, that's been true since dial up modems became obsolete.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#173> Is there a way I can test this more scientifically? How about the following?: 1. Choose a dozen or so public files on hosts known to have high bandwidth (Google or Microsoft perhaps). Maybe choose a couple of public legal torrents too. 2. Write a script to download all the chosen files (either sequentially or concurrently), and emit timing information. 3. Run that script a couple of times a day at random times. Try…
Just have ping running in the background. You can observe the difference yourself
A lot of network providers treat ICMP traffic differently.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, you solve the ISP's problems. I Same as they did with electricity a century ago. If you want to provide service to the profitable urban area then you must run wires to the non-urban areas too.
Heh. Instead, you just need to sell the unprofitable parts of your network to Frontier.
Their business model seems to be using sales volume to make up for marginal losses.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 de…
You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.
It's not about "half the country hates it", though. Plenty of projects have widespread support, but are only backed by one party (or no party). It's clearly a bug, as it causes undue preference for the status-quo above and beyond the popular will (and the common good).
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#176Yes, 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...
This is not necessarily true. It’s trivial for an isp to exempt Speedtest.net traffic so it doesn’t get throttled while the rest of your traffic does. It’s unlikely they would do something more complex like lifting all traffic limits once a connection to Speedtest.net opens.
At least in the old days, they'd have to unthrottle everything to get decent speedtest numbers. The cable modems the ISP issued around here had FIFO network buffers capable of buffering 5-10 seconds of traffic.
So, any slow connection would stop the entire household from having decent internet.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#177ISPs screwing with speedtest results is quite common and plausible.
The claim that it affects other tabs...seems wildly unlikely to me though. QoS and shaping is per service and per target.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity is routinely subsidized for large companies building new factories such as the GigaFactory Tesla is building in Nevada. You can also look up "name of area / state" and search for electrical tariffs.
Ok, but these subsidies are not based on a specific group. Some might think to be bad to subsidize Tesla, but would there be such a thing as subsidies for weed farmers? The reason I am asking: unless there are such subsidies, it would mean that people pay proportional to their usage, so OP's joke about "electricity neutrality" would not only be wrong, it would be against net neutrality as well.
By way of example some states have discounted rates / special rates for cotton gins. Here is one. https://www.epelectric.com/files/html/Rates/TX_Tariff_Schedu...
Such things are complicated to figure out fully, the subsidized power might not be subsidized directly by the power generators / power distributors. In some cases two bills are generated for the duration of the power subsidy so the subsidized part only sees the subsidized rate.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#179Yes, 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.
In New Zealand it is somewhat well known that our local fibre providers actually provisions each connection for slightly more than the agreed speed. E.g. 100mbits is usually provisioned at around 110mbits. So our speed tests are usually just over 100mbits (due to TCP etc overheads taking some of the overprovisoned parts). Wonder if that is what is happening to you.
Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
#180Earlier 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?
A lot of electricity in the US is charged differently during "off-peak hours". I know some EV owners who take advantage of this by scheduling when they charge their cars.