10 ms·
This is from Netflix, it downloads Netflix content and reports the speed back. This is important because unlike your average Internet speed test (which ISPs ta
by exhilaration 10y ago
This is from Netflix, it downloads Netflix content and reports the speed back.
This is important because unlike your average Internet speed test (which ISPs take pains to optimize), there's a very real possibility that your ISP is happy to let your Netflix experience suffer - assuming they don't throttle it outright - as previously mentioned on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7183682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7183682
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853603
- Vraxx 10y agoI've had a tech who came to deal with a reported issue I was having tell me to test on a specific Time Warner Cable speed test. He then got upset/flustered when I used a different speed test to demonstrate that the issue was still present. I had to explain that I use the internet connection I was paying for to do things on domains that aren't owned and optimized by TWC.
- jmtulloss 10y agoTo give the tech the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that he just isn't certain he can trust other speed tests. They may point to issues beyond his control.
- Vraxx 10y agoYeah, it's tough to find the line of when to stop giving the benefit of the doubt though. I was using speedtest.net at the time, which is pretty well known and widely used. I had also had multiple visits recently regarding the issue that still had not been resolved, and so my impatience made the decision for me.
- ckuehl 10y agoFor what it's worth, ISPs are definitely shaping traffic to try to game results on public speed tests. I had an issue with Comcast last year where I would have large latency spikes for ~2 hours every night, and speedtest.net always remained at normal latency: https://i.fluffy.cc/kNCxLMbkF2wx7NHFJxbzcgX35Bsb5nvl.png https://i.fluffy.cc/kNCxLMbkF2wx7NHFJxbzcgX35Bsb5nvl.png I couldn't find any non-speedtest sites where my latency was less than 100ms, but Comcast's own speed test, several other public speed tests, speedtest.net, and even ookla.com (the company behind speedtest.net) were perfect (the ~20ms you see on the graph).
- Vraxx 10y agoUgh. That's terrible. I kinda figured that it's an eventual conclusion though, so when speedtest.net starts giving me contradictory results to what I am experiencing I have a pretty good idea of what the check first. On a separate note, what tool did you use to create that graph?
- icelancer 10y agoLooks like just redirecting a recurring ping command output to a text file then graphing the results in google docs or any other spreadsheet. I've done the same to shame Comcast.
- cfallin 10y agoOoh, a chance to plug a toy side-project! I wrote "pingd" [1] to ping an address continuously and dump (timestamp, latency, dropped) tuples to a SQLite database, and also report results (tables only, no plots) via a web interface. Slightly less hacky than "ping host > logfile". Also to shame Comcast. [1] https://github.com/cfallin/pingd https://github.com/cfallin/pingd (in Rust, requires liboping)
- mcpherrinm 10y agoSpeedtest.net and other speedtests often choose the speedtest server that's close to you and has low ping. What you describe is probably congestion in the network somewhere that isn't the last mile. Speed tests aren't a good indicator for any issues occurring anywhere but the last mile, as they won't take the same path with fairly high probability.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gruez 10y agoGiven that he has a nice graph with hundreds of data points, I'm guessing he got the ping results from the ping command, not by running the speedtest.net test(which would actually select the lowest ping server)
- Steko 10y agoFWIW I've had TWC phone techs ask me to use speedtest.net by name on a couple occasions.
- hackney 10y agoJust today I switched back to TW from Frontier(FIOS). Using fast gave me more than double the speeds of fios. The tech was super cool and he normally uses speedtest but I told 'em, try fast. Plus now I finally get to use my brandnew surfboard modem and brandnew RT-N66U router.
- lstyls 10y agoI have TWC in Brooklyn and for a while was on the phone with Level 3 support often. Every time they had me use speedtest.net. So even their network engineers trust that site more than their in-house one.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y agoI agree to a point. If you use speedtest.net and show several different testing sites and the results are consistent, that should be good evidence. And you need to use a hard-wired connection because a lot of peoples wifi isn't very good.
- Spooky23 10y agoAbsolutely. The tech has a limited scope and typically doesn't have the ability to escalate engineering issues. You need to keep complaining and Twittering until you get a senior guy. In my case, the TWC guys replaced every piece of coax and splitter from my cable modem and TVs to the pole. Turned out the issue was the changed out the cabling on the big avenue near my house and used the wrong grade of cable. I called the TWC state lobbyist and told him I represented 150 homeowners who were filing a complaint with the regulator and the city council just head of their franchise agreement renewal. Trucks were replacing those lines the next morning.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- basseq 10y agoYou are a hero! > In my case, the TWC guys replaced every piece of coax and splitter from my cable modem and TVs to the pole. I am surprised by the coax inside the house. Usually they'll help if they can, but your house wiring is your problem. (Unless their solution is stapling a coax cable to your baseboard.)
- Spooky23 10y agoThanks! :) The techs were observing erratic behavior, but there wasn't any evidence of bad cabling -- I had actually replaced it about 3 years before. Also, my wiring is low-complexity... I terminate everything in the basement, and have 1 TV. The TV cable ends about 6 feet from the cable box. Even in other circumstances, the techs are pretty good.
- xanderstrike 10y agoOn the other hand, when I worked at Verizon we used SpeedTest.net because our in-house tool often reported speeds slower than users would experience/
- JensRex 10y agoFormer telephone technician(* ) here. What I'm interested in is the connection from your home to our PoP. Anything beyond that is irelevant to me. I don't know why he would trust customer equipment to run the test. I used one of these. http://www.viavisolutions.com/en-us/products/network-test-and-certification/copper-dsl-wifi-and-broadband/smartclass-tps http://www.viavisolutions.com/en-us/products/network-test-an... (* )I'm not sure what the english word is for that.
- hueving 10y ago>Former telephone technician(* ) here. What I'm interested in is the connection from your home to our PoP. That's only relevant if the complaint is about the connection from your home to the PoP. If the technician was sent out to solve an issue with the Internet being slow in general, he/she needs to actually find what the bottleneck is, not call it a day when some traffic makes it to a PoP.
- toast0 10y agoOTOH - the technician doesn't need to be at your house if you have a good connection to the PoP. Field technicians may not be trained in troubleshooting network beyond the PoP and likely don't have the right access to tools to make the changes that need to be made.
- walrus01 10y agoIt's a stupid idea to do a truck roll to resolve upstream peering/transit/congestion issues with the IP network. The technician's job is to diagnose OSI layer 1/2 issues to your local DSLAM or CMTS.
- dsl 10y agoYet broadband providers continue to do it.
- walrus01 10y agoUsually because a customer can't properly articulate on the phone what's wrong with their connection. Last mile broadband providers want to do as much as possible to avoid a site visit to a home. Unless they're charging $95 per visit one technician visit for 30 minutes can eat up all the profit from that customer for an entire year.
- rdtsc 10y agoVerizon FIOS in my area was throttling down Youtube and Netflix to unusable speeds. I was paying for a higher end connection speed and getting constant speed issues. So then switched to a cable provider, pay half what was paying with Verizon, get lower advertised speeds yet have a much more reliable and consistent connection. Also Verizon had free installation at that time when I signed up, so they installed a bunch of their equipment on premises, even a phone (including a battery pack) and now after I dropped them they come to door, in person, every other month begging me to reconsider.
- NathanKP 10y agoVerizon FIOS was doing this about a year ago in the NYC area. I was getting crappy YouTube and Netflix playback but everything else was fast. My solution was to use a VPN service, and suddenly I was magically streaming Netflix and YouTube in crystal clear HD. I think what was happening is that the VPN service had servers in the NYC area that had great connections to the local ISP network, and they also had a great connection to the Netflix servers, vs Verizon was deliberately keeping their pipe to the Netflix servers small so that there was limited Netflix bandwidth entering the local ISP network.
- ryao 10y agoSetup the hurricane electric IPv6 tunnel broker and you should be immune to disputes between Verizon and Netflix or YouTube as long as the peering links between Hurricane Electric and Verizon remain congestion free. Both Netflix and YouTube traffic will run over IPv6 and HE is a tier one ISP known for aggressively peering with everyone. They would likely be the last ISP to try to charge Netflix and YouTube for connectivity.
- Klinky 10y agoThey're not actually begging you to come back. They just pay someone shit wages and commission to engage in real-life spam. If they really gave a shit, they would not have lost you as a customer in the first place. Why improve business fundamentals when it's cheaper to manipulate human emotion through marketing?
- guimarin 10y agoI work for the CDN Fastly and we have something very similar to Fast.com. fastly-debug.com. The goal of our site is to gather debug information but I use it as a reliable speed-test to a good portion of the internet's websites. I think this is a good tool like fast.com because unlike the 'official' speedtest sites, if you optimize ours or Fast's you're actually making the internet much faster for a lot of sites for users.
- dsl 10y agoYou should move your JavaScript off your analytics domain for your debug site. It is getting clobbered by uBlock and Privacy Badger.
- guimarin 10y agoThanks for the tip. In this case the JS is performing a very important function, helping us to measure distances to multiple pops, so it is better to stay in. I will forward your point about the domain, but I think there is a reason for that particular domain.
- mikey_p 10y agoOr you could file bug reports with uBlock and Privacy Badger. There's nothing wrong with the Fastly site.
- duaneb 10y agoThe whole point of them is to block analytics domains. If you don't value their users that's your problem.
- mh- 10y agois the JS client or the backend for any of the fastly-debug/perfmap stuff open source? I like the approach.
- rpgmaker 10y agoIf they care so much about carriers throttling their traffic perhaps they should go easier on users trying to access Netflix through a VPN.
- ryao 10y agoThey should have done this during the peering disputes with Comcast and Verizon.
- athenot 10y agoIf I turn on my company VPN, the result is 4x faster than if I have it off. That's a large difference.
- hobarrera 10y agoHow is that possible? The VPN still tunnels via the same internet connection.
- neurostimulant 10y agoI guess his company's ISP has better peering with Netflix than his home ISP.
- athenot 10y agoYes but through the VPN, Comcast doesn't know that the destination is Netflix, so they don't QoS it down to a slow speed.
- jonathankoren 10y agoTo Netflix's credit they do link to speedtest.net
- hobarrera 10y agoWhich still uses flash (so last decade!), and has a non-working flashless beta.