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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?

#231

Post by zw123456 »

hackernewds wrote: post #209
zw123456 wrote: post #203

Yes, and, the joke in the industry is that network speed tests are to network performance what the Volkswagen Diesel was to emission tests :). All carriers implement various types of throttling or rate limiting, for a lot of reasons (anti-ddos, cost control, etc.) But; universally, they bypass these rate controls such as Cisco PGW ADC (Application Detection and Control) and LTE eNB ABR for wireless as examples, and m…

even if it were well understood, it is not common knowledge. if it were common knowledge, it isn't common enough of an annoyance. the last part is definitely not correct. isn't throttling and selective benchmark fakery illegal for the same reasons VW got into trouble? one would assume FTC has a far narrower and well-fanged positioning to punish the perpetrators. what prevents this? (I think monopoly power + no design…

It's not illegal to make a speedtest that says you got some big value that is BS.

It's illegal to put arsenic in a bottle and label it Vitamin C.

It's not illegal to call you TV channel "something" news then just make things up.

Maybe it should be illegal to call what you are saying is news when it is made up? it used to be (google fairness doctrine)

Maybe there should be some regulated valid speed test, but there isn't.

there are a lot of things that are legal that are unethical.

there are a lot of things that are illegal that are sort of marginally unethical.

But, when you elect congress people who are not very technical, probably not going to happen. Just saying.

I don't have a good answer for you, just a lot of interestig observations.

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

#232

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

User23 wrote: post #187
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. > However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would t…

> Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. Categorically false. There’s no “net neutrality” legislation enacted or proposed that doesn’t have giant and vague QoS and general network operations carve-outs.

The EFF was fairly happy with the FCC's Title II proposal back in 2015:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet...

In 2018 Markey and others proposed simply overturning Pai/Trump's overtuning of Title II.

I don't know precisely what you're referring to ... the closest I could find was the EFF's objections to the FCC proposals from 2011 which had things like "vague QoS and general network operation carve outs":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fc...

The EFF seemed much happier with the FCC proposals 4 years later.

What am I missing?

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

#233

Post by throwaway290 »

zw123456 wrote: post #203

Yes, and, the joke in the industry is that network speed tests are to network performance what the Volkswagen Diesel was to emission tests :). All carriers implement various types of throttling or rate limiting, for a lot of reasons (anti-ddos, cost control, etc.) But; universally, they bypass these rate controls such as Cisco PGW ADC (Application Detection and Control) and LTE eNB ABR for wireless as examples, and m…

Same, expected better from this community. I assumed it is common knowledge that most ISPs run traffic shapers and whatnot that take into account what you are connecting to, what sort of data you send, how intensively are you using your connection over whatever time window, etc.

And IMO secure DNS is not a solution. Either this ISP behavior is made illegal, or it will remain an arms race (with ISP being clear winner for most regular users).

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

#234

Post by tawhk »

I don't know if it's related but some time ago when I was testing the Arch distro, Garuda, I noticed that my Internet was very slow (Kbps) when updating. To test my speed I loaded fast.com and something strange happened, while the test lasted, the update speed was normal (at the top of my Internet plan). Once it finished loading it was slow again. At first glance it seemed that my ISP (Tigo) gave priority to Netflix and released the 'normal' speed when loading the test (fast.com is Netflix's). I made a script that called fast.com every time I updated my OS and it worked super well. I even used the script for other downloads. After switching to Arcolinux I stopped noticing that network behavior and stopped using the script.

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

#235

Post by zw123456 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #233
zw123456 wrote: post #203

Yes, and, the joke in the industry is that network speed tests are to network performance what the Volkswagen Diesel was to emission tests :). All carriers implement various types of throttling or rate limiting, for a lot of reasons (anti-ddos, cost control, etc.) But; universally, they bypass these rate controls such as Cisco PGW ADC (Application Detection and Control) and LTE eNB ABR for wireless as examples, and m…

Same, expected better from this community. I assumed it is common knowledge that most ISPs run traffic shapers and whatnot that take into account what you are connecting to, what sort of data you send, how intensively are you using your connection over whatever time window, etc. And IMO secure DNS is not a solution. Either this ISP behavior is made illegal, or it will remain an arms race (with ISP being clear winner…

Agree. It's funny how people I know who are "non-tech" intuitively understand that of course speed-tests are rigged, but tech people somehow think that the same place that allows Facebook pages that say that the jews have space lasers, that same place somehow is completely honest about speed tests. I am just pointing out, fake world is fake world. Just because it's says Mbps does not exempt it from fakeness. Fake is as fake does.

Just interesting that people who are smart enough to understand other fake things on the internet (that maybe some people not as smart as you are not understanding). But when it is some ISP tricking you, all of a sudden, everyone is up in arms about it.

It's interesting.

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

#236

Post by scarface74 »

ComradePhil wrote: post #111
bzxcvbn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Through peering agreements, when one peer is handling a disproportionate amount of traffic, they already pay.

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

#237

Post by dunco »

hnick wrote: post #228

My ISP's support told me to always use their local copy ( https://speed.aussiebroadband.com.au/ ) as it avoids routing issues downstream but more importantly, it logs the history onto my account for them to view. The numbers are often higher than what I pay for, but I think they are honest. When I was having connection issues (dialup-tier download speeds, 20 megabit upload) it was reflected accurately. Since I trust…

I was a TPG refugee who switched to Aussie. TPG had the same setup and it always showed me that I was getting the full speed I payed for, but whenever my traffic went overseas, measured some other way, it would be shockingly slow (like sub 2mbps and with a noticeably bad experience) Every call to TPG was painful and they would just refer me back to their own speedtest.net site and tell me nothing was wrong. switched to Aussie and everything was golden, fast everywhere.

You're right that Aussie are uncommonly trustworthy, and the publishing of cvc use publicly is kind of their market prop. Their CEO seems like a legend; like he got the shits with badly behaved ISPs and just made his own or something.

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

#238

Post by 300bps »

zffr wrote: post #218
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...

I’m not sure why, but I’m seeing 1mbps on fast.com, and 20mbps on speedtest.net. Weird how there’s such a huge difference

Are you on mobile? Some mobile providers limit streaming quality and they do this by limiting bandwidth to streaming providers.

For example, Visible will never be faster than 2 Mbps to fast.com.

You’ll get faster on Speedtest.net because it doesn’t throttle non-video related sites.

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

#239

Post by LocalPCGuy »

Have you tried using custom DNS (or an alternate provider) to attempt to bypass your ISP? Or run through a DNS (saw another comment saying to try a few different ones). Might just be slow all the time then (if they can't determine when to un-throttle your connection, ha). But at least you'd have something to look at.

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

#240

Post by zw123456 »

jl6 wrote: post #46

> 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…

Yes, I do this as part of my job.

I help manage a system that does something like this for a large network operator. We have test phones that run TWAMP, RFC 6349 and iperf (and a few other tests) on a routine schedule to special test servers. generating data which you will never ever see.

But you could do something similar if you had the desire. I have yet to see anyone do that yet.

All network providers have various throttling systems set up to limit your throughput, that is pretty universal, and, most of such systems are intentionally bypassed based for speed tests. They know the 5 tuples for all the speed test servers and bypass throttling for those test.

Yes, speed tests are rigged, think, Volkswagen Diesel, an inside joke pretty widely known in the industry.

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