51–60 of 238 posts
I have also noticed a similar effect on Verizon FIOS, where some video services work perfectly well during the day, but around 5pm or so start getting incredibly slow to buffer. Whether this is intentional throttling I'm not qualified to say, but it makes me quite hesitant to use Verizon in the future.
Oh dear. Looks like the work left for Google Fiber isn't done yet. Hoping they'll make a run in New York (or at least upstate where I intend to move), but that's a long shot. I wonder how much independent ISPs could make if they stick to a small list of customers, but take up the "We Don't Throttle" stance.
I understand that it's a great service for a great price, but the question is how long that remains sustainable. Right now they're sitting on such a pile of money that it doesn't matter whether they provide internet access in a few cities at a super cheap price. They benefit enough in reputation and in extra usage of other services when people are able to use very high quality internet.
Proof of this is that Google disallowed running servers (the very thing that makes the internet the internet, end to end communication) up until their reputation was almost completely tarnished in the hacker community. Only then did they relent and allow servers to be run. They're not much different from other for-profit companies.
To quote from the Washington Post [1]: "Broadband is currently classified by the FCC as an information service, a category that gives the agency a fairly limited set of regulatory options. If Internet providers were classified instead as common carriers, the FCC's rule would likely stand. In fact, the federal ruling on Tuesday upheld the FCC's net neutrality rules as a matter of principle; the problem is that the agency effectively tried to apply its powers in the wrong context."
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/14...
might have been a good idea to black out his name. poor fellow might lose his job for being caught saying that.
As long as there is at least one ISP provider who is not throttling traffic, we should reward that ISP that does not discriminate on web traffic, and punish the ones that do. You might have to show some differences across different regions and cities, but this is critical. I don't know enough about monitoring web traffic to figure this out but it sounds like an awesome project to spearhead. How do we get started?
It's just that I'm just a little sick of the finger pointing, and would prefer to do whatever I could to fix the problem or use the markets to promote the good companies and punish the bad ones. If there is a market where all the ISP providers are throttling then you have a better case for government regulation. Who's with me?
might have been a good idea to black out his name. poor fellow might lose his job for being caught saying that.
Sure enough, when on the VPN, I get the highest quality picture. When I disconnected the VPN, Netflix dropped down to about 500kbps. Terrible.
I would not take some offhanded remark from an outsourced, minimum wage, offshore worker as confirmation of anything.
By far the most correct observation. These guys are just following a script - they probably don't even know what half of the words mean. Please don't read anything into it or assume the outsourced support is somehow privy to anything at all that goes on inside Verizon other than what the FAQ system he's using tells him on screen.
1) Verizon decided to enter some router configurations that affect the packet forwarding to Netflix (well, most likely FROM netflix, as the internet is not actually symmetrical). What we should see as a result of this is a sudden change in bandwidth.
2) The load on the interfaces in between is changing, either because of more netflix subscribers, more AWS traffic, or more netflix traffic. Since these are things happening slowly over time, you'd see a gradual worsening of traffic conditions.
I think it's pretty fucking likely that what's happening here is 2). Now granted, Verizon could solve this problem by cooperating with Netflix. But for them that's an expense with no upside, so likely they're demanding Netflix make it worth their while to upgrade the interconnects.
This is one of the basic problems with the internet today. It used to be the case that bandwidth between providers was much more plentiful than last-mile bandwidth. So we upgraded last-mile bandwidth. Problem : doing that resulted in an exponential increase in load on the core network and the interconnects between different networks. Needless to say, nobody can keep up with exponentially rising demands (especially without subscriber growth). The basic problem is that a linear increase in bandwidth for the customer results in an exponential increase in costs for the ISP (so -surpise- small ISPs don't feel the effects nearly as badly).
So ISPs are desperate. Their costs are spiralling out of control, with everyone demanding they follow this exponential curve, but of course their customers not willing to pay for it (and all the money in the world would only buy time if thrown at this problem). Demanding the ISPs pay for it is simply not going to work. Right now, yes, they could theoretically pay for it, but that won't last long.
Plus Netflix is being a rather bad netizen themselves. The polite thing to do is to carry the traffic to very close to the user on your own network, and only use other's links, especially transit, as a last resort ("cold-potato" routing, for content providers). Netflix has caches, but no own network.
There's other problems that result from this cost problem. Already transcontinental and other long-haul links are strained to the limit. This has resulted in a massive degradation of non-local internet traffic, and it's getting worse fast.
It is really a very simple problem. You have consumers, and you have producers. And you get more and more of each. To a limited approximation you can assume everyone on the internet is both. To simplify things, let's say everyone uses a tiny amount of everyone else's services. Now given N participants in the network, what is the load on the core network ?
N * (N - 1) =~ N^2 (assuming full duplex links, which would be generally correct for the internet)
So adding more participants in the internet increases resources required to give every existing participant in the network his "old" speed. These need to be paid for. But unless everyone want to start paying an amount for your internet connections that rises with the square of the size of the internet, we're going to see progressively worse and worse throttling. Right now the strategy is fast becoming limiting interconnect capacity to prevent the core network overloading, which would have far worse consequences.
While, yes, historically this has mostly been monopolies cheating the market, that's less and less true. This is going to get worse, fast. And since those resources are obviously not going to be made available, there's only one thing to say :
Get used to it.