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Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

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Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#211

Post by ogurechny »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183
ogurechny wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Anywhere in the world there are local and global popular services that generate high volumes of traffic. Providers naturally care about getting shortest paths to them, plan in advan…

> It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. > However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would t…

I am not talking about media propaganda, I am talking about what is happening at the source. This is just another chapter of peering wars, far from being the first in Cogent and its enemies' histories. The actual question here is whether ISPs see themselves as equals (so they can peer with each other, and let traffic fill the links naturally), or belonging to different levels of virtual hierarchy (so one has to pay the other). Netflix and its traffic volume and asymmetry is used as public attention grabbing leverage here, and government decrees are supposed to make one side weaker than the other. Anyway, that has been going for a decade, and lots of bullshit has been promoted by both sides to mud the waters.

As for the latter, my point was exactly that in “normal country” it's hard to imagine, but giant corporate clashes managed to turn this into some big argument about “freedom”.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#212

Post by hackernewds »

serenitylater wrote: post #166
ineedasername wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level de…

You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.

something half the country hates can be good for the whole country. think COVID vaccines and lockdowns

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#213

Post by gotaquestion »

I test my speed by uploading/downloading huge files to my AWS instances. It always matches SpeedTest; I have centurylink fiber, it is >800Mbps up/down.

As others have said, if your destination has a slow connection, you're pretty screwed. Not to mention lots of slow file transfers = more latency impact.

Transferring 1x1GB file vs 1,000x1MB files is a HUGE difference, the latter will take much longer due to the initialization of the transfer. That's why we used to use FTP to transmit files instead of HTTP way back in the dialup days.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#214

Post by withinboredom »

serenitylater wrote: post #166
ineedasername wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level de…

You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.

One entire point of government is to work on multi-generational projects — like nuclear waste storage.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#215

Post by jrochkind1 »

ranger207 wrote: post #26

Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to prioritize fast.com content they'll have to prioritize Netflix content as well. Of course, that doesn't help non-Netflix sites...

This doesn't make sense to me as an explanation for OP reported behavior, that opening a speed test would make other content load faster than it was before opening the speed test. (Doesn't make sense to me whether or not the other content was netflix, but presumably it was not (all) netflix).

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#217

Post by ineedasername »

serenitylater wrote: post #166
ineedasername wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level de…

You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.

It's a feature and a bug. A bug because it doesn't take anywhere near half the country to block something or push it through. A vocal minority or well-funded politically connected group is all it takes. Refer back to my net neutrality example. Polls generally showed a significant majority of the public was in favor of net neutrality, I've seen polls peg it anywhere from 57% to 83%.

Popular policies around the issue created by legislative statute instead of agency rules would have been a lot harder to repeal.

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#218

Post by zffr »

ranger207 wrote: post #26

Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to prioritize fast.com content they'll have to prioritize Netflix content as well. Of course, that doesn't help non-Netflix sites...

I’m not sure why, but I’m seeing 1mbps on fast.com, and 20mbps on speedtest.net. Weird how there’s such a huge difference

Re: Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

#219

Post by KMag »

kortilla wrote: post #181
KMag wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's that, and also visiting a speed test site is an indicator that a particular user is more sensitive to speed than the general user base (and perhaps considering jumping to another ISP). It absolutely makes business sense to prioritize traffic to users who pay more attention.

No, as an isp these are the worst customers. It’s better to piss off an dump people who consume a lot of bandwidth an are obsessed with throughput if you’re “business obsessed”.

I'm assuming "an" is a misspelling of "and". If they're using lots of bandwidth, that's one thing, but I sometimes see 480p YouTube videos laggy and wonder what's going on. Maybe I'm in the minority, but there are at least some customers who aren't using a lot of bandwidth and still check their speed regularly.

Dumping bandwidth hogs makes business sense, and bandwidth hogging is probably correlated with checking bandwidth, but the correlation isn't 1.0.

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