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Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

arstechnica.com

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Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#11

Post by scottrb »

stock_toaster wrote: post #8
CamperBob2 wrote: post #7

Hint: never use Comcast for residential service. Sign up for business service, even if you're just one person in an apartment. You get better support, less BS, and (likely) improved immunity to copyright-trolling law firms. They will still route about 10% of your packets via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of course, but that's just the nature of the beast.

This also prevents you from using your own modem and requiring you to lease one of theirs (not to mention requiring a year contract), doesn't it?

When I signed up for their business class service about a year ago, it was not required that I use their modem, but they did suggest it (noting that any failure of equipment would be taken care of on their end). It was the bosses dime and my time if a failure happened, so I just went with their leasing options.

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#12

Post by dangrossman »

samstave wrote: post #10
dangrossman wrote: post #4

I'm on Verizon FiOS in Pennsylvania, with the standard residential 15/5 service, it's 10:44PM, and Netflix is streaming at a steady 3-4Mb/s. I guess I'm lucky? http://i.imgur.com/akih9HA.png

You're on FIOS and you're getting 3-4MB/s and you're feeling lucky? How sad.

It's higher than Google Fiber's average speed per the article. Netflix doesn't saturate connections, it doesn't take that much to stream an HD movie. They also don't stream "Super HD" to browsers which is the only way to get a higher bitrate than that.

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#13

Post by bithive123 »

stock_toaster wrote: post #8
CamperBob2 wrote: post #7

Hint: never use Comcast for residential service. Sign up for business service, even if you're just one person in an apartment. You get better support, less BS, and (likely) improved immunity to copyright-trolling law firms. They will still route about 10% of your packets via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of course, but that's just the nature of the beast.

This also prevents you from using your own modem and requiring you to lease one of theirs (not to mention requiring a year contract), doesn't it?

You can use your own modem with Comcast business service (I do) but it took about two weeks of calling all the tech support numbers I could find until I finally got a tech who was able to do it. Not because it's hard to do, but because most of the people I talked to were lying or incompetent.

The guy seemed a bit weirded out at how profusely I thanked him -- after all, all I'd done was tell him the model and MAC address of my generic Motorola modem.

Don't waste your time explaining to them why you want to use a real modem (I have my own router/firewall, their modem had NAT I could not disable) or that it's the same modem that works on the residential service (which is the same physical network). It won't help, just say "I bought a modem, can you set it up on my account?" and hang up and try again if they act like your request is bizarre.

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#14

Post by etcet »

stock_toaster wrote: post #8
CamperBob2 wrote: post #7

Hint: never use Comcast for residential service. Sign up for business service, even if you're just one person in an apartment. You get better support, less BS, and (likely) improved immunity to copyright-trolling law firms. They will still route about 10% of your packets via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of course, but that's just the nature of the beast.

This also prevents you from using your own modem and requiring you to lease one of theirs (not to mention requiring a year contract), doesn't it?

It requires at least a year long contract and a hefty set up fee ($200 for a one year contract and $100 for a 2 year if I remember correctly).

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#15

Post by DannyBee »

stock_toaster wrote: post #8
CamperBob2 wrote: post #7

Hint: never use Comcast for residential service. Sign up for business service, even if you're just one person in an apartment. You get better support, less BS, and (likely) improved immunity to copyright-trolling law firms. They will still route about 10% of your packets via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of course, but that's just the nature of the beast.

This also prevents you from using your own modem and requiring you to lease one of theirs (not to mention requiring a year contract), doesn't it?

If you don't want a static IP, you can use anthing on their approved list:

http://mydeviceinfo.comcast.net/

(Which has all the usual SB* suspects).

If you want a static IP, AFAIK, you still have to use what they give you.

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#16

Post by xxpor »

samstave wrote: post #10
dangrossman wrote: post #4

I'm on Verizon FiOS in Pennsylvania, with the standard residential 15/5 service, it's 10:44PM, and Netflix is streaming at a steady 3-4Mb/s. I guess I'm lucky? http://i.imgur.com/akih9HA.png

You're on FIOS and you're getting 3-4MB/s and you're feeling lucky? How sad.

He only has 15 Mbit service. He's actually getting ~2x what he's paying for.

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#17

Post by malandrew »

TheMakeA wrote: post #2

What if we started netneutrality.js? Something that shows a banner on sites for people using Verizon/Comcast. Perhaps that will raise more awareness for the issue?

It would be interesting if such a script used WebRTC to collect data from many users in a distributed manner and stored the information in a DHT that researchers could query for data to determine which providers are and are not being a good netizens.

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#18

Post by tzakrajs »

xxpor wrote: post #16
samstave wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're on FIOS and you're getting 3-4MB/s and you're feeling lucky? How sad.

He only has 15 Mbit service. He's actually getting ~2x what he's paying for.

3Mbps is 0.20x (of 15Mbps) what he is paying for.

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#19

Post by tzakrajs »

The problem here is that Comcast and Verizon don't want to pay for the upstream bandwidth to the Netflix Open Connect CDN which means that as Netflix increases quality and gains additional subscribers, the time-weighted bitrate (TWBR, the metric they use to compare ISP performance) will continue to plummet. This isn't to say that all Comcast and Verizon customers will feel this pain, some markets have better performance than others (e.g. SF Bay being an example of poor performance).

Edit: Other CDNs such as Akamai, Level 3 and Limelight pay to peer with Comcast; whereas Netflix refuses to since Comcast will simply gouge them for the opportunity. Netflix is increasingly moving away from third-party CDNs and onto their Open Connect CDN which will escalate this to a fever pitch.

Re: Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months

#20

Post by willvarfar »

tzakrajs wrote: post #18
xxpor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He only has 15 Mbit service. He's actually getting ~2x what he's paying for.

3Mbps is 0.20x (of 15Mbps) what he is paying for.

Bits != Bytes.

Mbps == Megabits/sec

MBps == Megabytes/sec

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