21–30 of 223 posts
It's so strange, I live in Bolivia and Netflix never buffers for me at all. I have a laughable 200kbps real download speed (1768kbps plan) and I only wait for Netflix to load for about 2 seconds on my PS4 and off I go watching on 480SD quality. I would expect the US to be much much better.
The ISPs' problem is that they aren't willing to change their pitch to customers. As long as their product is "internet service at ~x gbps," they are on the wrong side of this issue. So they go ransoming the content folks.
The funny thing is that the dream world of the big modern ISPs would appear to be something like AOL circa 1994, where you can have "the internet," but it's a cheap lo-fi interconnect [1], and what they mainly want you to consume is a bunch of low-quality in-house content channels. [2]
[1] http://images.appleinsider.com/leopard-preview-ichat-3.jpg
[2] http://www.jeffwright.com/portfolio/portfolio_aol_main.jpg
Can anyone recommend networking resources analogous to Learn C the Hard Way or Dive into Python ?
They can claim whatever they want, but when you tunnel Netflix traffic through a VPN so all the ISP see's is encrypted traffic and bandwidth issues disappear, it removes all mystery. I've tried several VPN's to test out my theory, and with each one, as soon as the ISP couldn't inspect traffic, all throttling seem to magically vanish. considering what we're paying for broadband, we should be getting what we pay for wi…
> Our network is fine. Netflix is buffering because we won't allow the traffic Verizon customers request onto the Verizon network until Netflix pays us more money.
They can claim whatever they want, but when you tunnel Netflix traffic through a VPN so all the ISP see's is encrypted traffic and bandwidth issues disappear, it removes all mystery. I've tried several VPN's to test out my theory, and with each one, as soon as the ISP couldn't inspect traffic, all throttling seem to magically vanish. considering what we're paying for broadband, we should be getting what we pay for wi…
That's because your VPN providers are no doubt using a different transit provider than Netflix (Level 3) so your traffic is bypassing the congested peering points. The peering disputes are affecting not just Netflix traffic, but traffic between Verizon and any site using Level 3 for transit. (Not to take the blame away from Verizon. I'd love to see them try to use their logic to explain why other, non-Netflix service…
First off, the chart makes it sound like Netflix is preferring subpar transit providers, and that by simply switching to different transit providers, they'd be fine. But there's no numbers on total bandwidth. For example, if Verizon has 100Gbps to Netflix's content providers, and only 40Gbps to their other content providers, then the additional 20Gbps is going to be a drop in the bucket.
It could be the reverse: Netflix is choosing the 40Gbps provider where they could be choosing the 100Gbps, in which case they could easily triple the available bandwidth they have to send to Verizon.
But, we all know that's not the real issue.
Finally, if peak utilization means that netflix is saturating the router with reduced bitrate video, then increasing that could very well lead to saturation in the internal Verizon network.
EDIT:
I ran some numbers. If Netflix's providers are saturating at 100%, and other providers are only at 44% peak, and then peak incoming traffic is exiting the Verizon router at 56% peak, that should roughly mean that Netflix has roughly 3.6x the amount of bandwidth from "other transit providers" than it does from Netflix's transit providers, which, in turn, means that Verizon has roughly 2x the total bandwidth that Netflix uses available on it's network. What isn't mentioned is what percentage Netflix uses of it's current providers, how those "other providers" are split up, the maximum theoretical utilization, etc...
What isn't mentioned is how that's split up. It's probable Netflix can't use on most of those links even if they wanted to, and there's no word on how many links there are. If it was one giant link, and Netflix could use on it, sure, Netflix should probably try to do that.
Bottom line: I don't think there's anything technically limiting Verizon's capacity to Netflix's transit providers, as according to their numbers, Netflix's transit providers only constitute ~22% of the total bandwidth into Verizon. Down the line, it's probable that, even if these link issues were fixed at the border router, they would pop back up again in the Metro Area router or aggregation router, and really gum up Verizon's network.
http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/chicken-game-play...
Here's a letter Level3 wrote to ATT on the subject [pdf]. http://www.level3.com/~/media/Assets/legal/cicconi.pdf
