31–40 of 305 posts
My guess is that Netflix is throttled, and given that fast.com is a Netflix site, fast.com is throttled too.
While everyone knows that all wireless carriers are universally terrible, I've actually had a fairly noneventful (read: good) experience with T-Mobile over the last decade. I've never observed evidence of traffic shaping or any other shady business (like capturing NXDOMAIN DNS responses and directing you to a sponsored search page). I've also never observed significant performance degradation from congestion-based pr…
Many of their plans downscale video, or at least they used to
While everyone knows that all wireless carriers are universally terrible, I've actually had a fairly noneventful (read: good) experience with T-Mobile over the last decade. I've never observed evidence of traffic shaping or any other shady business (like capturing NXDOMAIN DNS responses and directing you to a sponsored search page). I've also never observed significant performance degradation from congestion-based pr…
Yeah, except they leak customer data regularly and have offshored tons of customer service to India -- including onboarding. When I tried to sign up, they didn't know what an esim was and wanted my SSN, along with other data that could easily be used to steal my identity. I don't want to spend my days arguing with people, definitely not about the existence of esim; but I did that day. It went all the way up their cus…
Be careful there, because T-Mobile rot spreads to any downstream MNVO. Sim-jacking is still possible and data breach is happening above Google Fi level. There were articles about that IIRC.
That's not traffic shaping, it's just dumb. Traffic shaping is slowing down types of traffic like torrents or video in order to prioritize regular sites. But this is degrading regular sites that are usually what benefit from traffic shaping if there's overall network congestion.
I'm not questioning anything the author reports, it all seems extremely well documented.
I am questioning what AT&T is trying to accomplish here though. It makes no sense, unless they're in some kind of negotiation with Cloudfront right now, punishing them until they pay up or something? But that doesn't explain why it would only happen on a data-only plan. I'm mystified.
This I think is because they throttle ip addresses for known video streaming sites. That is one of (the only reliable) ways an ISP can get the streaming provider to drop the stream to a lower quality one by default. Since fast.com is a Netflix ip, and the isp can’t distinguish whether it’s video that is being transferred or a file to measure throughout, the speed test gets caught up in it. Said the other way around: fast.com is great to see actual throughput from Netflix as opposed to some fake throughout from a dedicated speed test site for the exact same reason.
> Why AT&T wants bandwidth to appear lower than reality is a mystery to me, but I digress For you a speed test is just once in a life time event. For a wireless provider this is a thing what clogs the shared media of a radio channel for quite a lot (modern speed tests try to push 100 or even more M Bytes ?) and cause a disruption for everyone else on the same channel. I don't know why ATT throttles (if at all, not a…
This coverage from when Netflix launched Fast.com in 2016 alludes to the reason why the results on Fast.com may be slower than on something like Speedtest.net. ISPs like AT&T throttle connections to streaming video providers like Netflix, in order to force a lower quality stream. By offering a speed test from the same infrastructure that delivers your TV show, they are revealing the 'traffic shaping' that is degrading your connection. Sites like Speedtest.net are all excluded from this throttling, so it will always appear that you are getting 'full speed' when testing your connection.
[0] https://variety.com/2016/digital/news/netflix-fast-internet-...
While everyone knows that all wireless carriers are universally terrible, I've actually had a fairly noneventful (read: good) experience with T-Mobile over the last decade. I've never observed evidence of traffic shaping or any other shady business (like capturing NXDOMAIN DNS responses and directing you to a sponsored search page). I've also never observed significant performance degradation from congestion-based pr…
Many of their plans downscale video, or at least they used to
Even if this were technically feasible, it sounds like a massive infrastructure investment with little to no value. T-Mobile would need to have enough compute and network horsepower to DPI all outbound traffic, intercept every video stream, detect if it's over some resolution threshold, and re-encode it at a lower resolution or bit rate, all in real time.
When I switched to an ISP with local peering, ping times between my home and my server downtown dropped to a few milliseconds. It's like being on my LAN.
If this is still an issue for AT&T, traceroute+reverse DNS of each router may indicate it.
This poor peering isn't directly a throughput problem, but really increases the chance of being routed through a congested link, which you could sometimes guestimate from ping times and peeringdb.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of their plans downscale video, or at least they used to
This is interesting, I don't see how this is possible from a technical sense
I'd probably double check assumptions on the cloudfront issues. Switching carriers or adding VPN might connect you to a different edge node.
Some web assets being throttled for specific AT&T accounts seems a little too targeted to just be traffic shaping. I'd expect them to throttle traffic for all users, like they do with the speed tests.