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There’s something rotten in the state of online video streaming

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Re: There’s something rotten in the state of online video streaming

#61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, Ookla /actively partners/ with the ISPs. Comcast's site is actually at speedtest.comcast.net. There's a financial dis-incentive for them to do so.

Of course this is not all that dishonest. It is just a matter of what you want to measure. For last-mile speed measurement (which is what I personally use speedtest.net most for) using ISP provided local servers makes a lot of sense because it also removes most external factors from the measurement. And really there is no "central point of Internet" which to measure speed to/from.

How many servers on the Internet sit on the same switch on the same data center from your ISP's cable modem head end, though?

Re: There’s something rotten in the state of online video streaming

#62
post #19

As a comcast customer, I've noticed that if I am having a problem with streaming video that if I go to speedtest.net, the video streams fine after the initial ping test from speedtest.net. It will be fine for a few moments (seconds to minutes), but will slow down or stutter again eventually. A fresh visit to speedtest.net again corrects the problem. I have a hunch that a visit to speedtest.net will disable traffic sh…

I would love to see some further investigation into this. My initial thought is that if it's shown likely, someone needs to make a little utility that just loads speedtest.net every minute or so in the background.
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