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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

#21

Post by bilekas »

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....

> "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope

Interesting how ISP's outside of the EU are uncapping their data limits all of a sudden..

So when people (me included) say it's better in Europe, its because the vast majority of us are not capped.. In normal times.

Sources : https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/12/21177538/att-broadband-in...

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-follows-optus-with-ex...

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

#22

Post by ilogik »

bilekas wrote: post #17

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…

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

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

#23

Post by dylz »

qayxc wrote: post #13
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...

For clarification, this is not a "backbone" - it is an exchange fabric.

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

#25

Post by monkpit »

rsynnott wrote: post #11
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

Does anyone know if something like this graph exists for the US? I tried googling for one but I’m not sure of the right search terms to use.

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

#26

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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.

This question turned up a few hours ago over here [0]. Apparently some ISPs are perversely hostile to peering.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22627764

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

#28

Post by KevinEldon »

unethical_ban wrote: post #14
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.

You should not knock Netflix at all. The request came from the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services. Netflix helped out when they were asked to. If Europeans are upset about this decision they need to take it up with their elected officials not Netflix.

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

#29

Post by qayxc »

dylz wrote: post #23
qayxc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest backbone in the world publishes statistics: https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...

For clarification, this is not a "backbone" - it is an exchange fabric.

Thanks for clearing that up!

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

#30

Post by whalesalad »

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…

I would love to see this too. Anecdotally I have certainly been noticing a difference in the general behavior of the internet recently that I can only attribute to the sudden stress on the network.
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