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Google Video Quality Report

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Re: Google Video Quality Report

#91
Not that I have the time to do this, but it would be ideal if something like this existed for multiple services and was run by a third-party. Kind of like http://speakeasy.net/speedtest that speaks the APIs of various streaming video publishers. If it's crowd-sourced and non-profit, then it could be more credible and less subject to allegations of impartiality by the ISPs themselves.

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#92
post #3

Good. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewher…

Are you by any chance using non-TWC DNS servers? I had this same frustrating problem on Comcast, and it turned out that their CDN works by using DNS to direct you to local servers; by using the Google 8.8.8.8 etc I wasn't getting that. Even still, though, I run into certain Youtube videos that absolutely refuse to ever fully load -- it's always non-popular ones, and it's like they cache miss and just never get surfac…

I am using different nameservers, but I've tried switching to the default nameservers and nothing appeared to change at the time, maybe I'll have to try it again

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#93
post #67
post #3

Good. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewher…

I have TWC and have had a lot of success in speeding up Youtube by blocking access to the caching servers that TWC uses. If I block 206.111.0.0/16, I can stream at full speed. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13kmvd/have_time...

I tried blocking some of the relevant IP ranges, but it seemed like it wouldn't fallback or something. Instead of getting perfect streaming quality, I would not be able to load the youtube video at all

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#95
post #3

Good. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewher…

Same here! Youtube is faster for me from China through a VPN connection than in the US via Time Warner.

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#96
post #29
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you go out and vote. The absence of true competition is because the average Joe isn't quite clued into the underlying problem of why things are slow. I suspect this is Google's way of raising awareness.

It's not that simple. Comcast/Time Warner are monopolies in their area because we tax payers subsidized the laying of the lines. Verizon tried to expand FIOS to compete and took huge losses. My wife works for a fiber company, and seeing the numbers, it's basically impossible to make the investment worth it unsubsidized at at a price competitive with Comcast.

Agreed that fixing the root problem isn't simple. But citizens being pissed off en masse about their internet connectivity is a necessary precondition to any real change, and Google certainly seems to be trying to fan those flames.

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#98
post #15
post #3

Good. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewher…

I think Comcast is doing the same thing here in Colorado. Lately, I've been seeing quality drop in videos where it shouldn't. Running speed tests or downloading from newsgroups I'm hitting 60mbps.

You'll be happy to know that Comcast's Denver ibone switching/routing has been over capacity for many months at this point...Same goes for their Oregon switches (which service SV and the PNW seaboard)

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#100
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, this also puts ISPs at a severe disadvantage for ratings if they decide to do net neutrality violating throttling on youtube or netflix. I hope every bandwidth-heavy service starts publishing reports like this

Or, even better, a neutral 3rd party that reports throttling for many services/domains.

Like the FCC?
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