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Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#11

Post by rsynnott »

schnable wrote: post #9

Interesting counterpoint to the "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope. Unless of course we are under strain here in the US as well....

The US response has so far been fairly muted, with a few notable local exceptions. There are a lot more people stuck at home in Europe.

In practice, though, at least in Ireland there's been little obvious problem, though you can definitely see an increase: https://www.inex.ie/ixp/statistics/ixp

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#12

Post by ketzu »

schnable wrote: post #9

Interesting counterpoint to the "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope. Unless of course we are under strain here in the US as well....

Isn't the trope "broadband is better somewhere else" for most places? Anecdotally, most people I know complain about the connection where they live.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#13

Post by qayxc »

myu701 wrote: post #5

Does anyone know of public ISP dashboards that show used/total capacity on their network in terms of customer usage? I'm sure its trivial for an internal employee to pull up solarwinds or whatever, but I'd be curious to see if these ISPs are merely running above normal, running hot, barely hanging on with intermittent "isp brownouts" etc. This is probably a pipe dream but not gonna get any questions answered if I don…

The largest backbone in the world publishes statistics:

https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#14

Post by unethical_ban »

dogma1138 wrote: post #2

Does it mean they’ll pay me back for the 4K package?

That's truly a good question - they could pull that data quickly and prorate people somehow. Maybe not for a bill already gone out, but perhaps going forward (even if they re-enable it).

I'm not going to knock them for this, given that we're talking about keeping critical infrastructure from being overrun while the remainder of the economy works distributed.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#15

Post by tyingq »

noodlesUK wrote: post #7

Are there any illustrations of the volumes of traffic that are being sent through core networks for netflix? I was under the impression the vast majority of traffic was served at the edge.

I think that's what they are relieving...edge traffic volumes. If the local ISP cache box lowers it's maximum quality, the ISPs get relief.

The ISPs oversubscribed, and can't deal with this many people being at home all at once.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#16

Post by bobthepanda »

schnable wrote: post #9

Interesting counterpoint to the "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope. Unless of course we are under strain here in the US as well....

I feel like when people are arguing that point, they are arguing about broadband competition. In most US markets your choices are not great and/or are expensive, and if you are in a market with limited competition there is often not a reason to invest in the network.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#17

Post by bilekas »

I was working with a semi-competitor of Netflix a few years back and their tech is great of course, their product offering is amazing, but their real magic is with their contracts with ISP's.

I don't know the details of the contracts of course, but they are likely to get a dedicated bandwidth within the ISP, if that comes under strain, of course, that contract comes into play. So I think it's not just the datacenters involved..

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#18

Post by KevinEldon »

dogma1138 wrote: post #2

Does it mean they’ll pay me back for the 4K package?

No, in the same way that you wouldn't expect a refund if you personally chose to use less than 4K for a stream. In this case Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, has made that downgrade choice for all Europeans.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#19

Post by scrdhrt »

myu701 wrote: post #5

Does anyone know of public ISP dashboards that show used/total capacity on their network in terms of customer usage? I'm sure its trivial for an internal employee to pull up solarwinds or whatever, but I'd be curious to see if these ISPs are merely running above normal, running hot, barely hanging on with intermittent "isp brownouts" etc. This is probably a pipe dream but not gonna get any questions answered if I don…

Netnod, one of the largest IX in the nordics, has public stats here: https://www.netnod.se/ix-stats/All.html

Don't know about any ISPs that do this.

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