4 ms·

This is not a very useful graph to assign blame. :) I've always wondered why I don't always get movies in streamed in HD even for movies available in HD. Almos

This is not a very useful graph to assign blame. :) I've always wondered why I don't always get movies in streamed in HD even for movies available in HD. Almost anytime of the day, I can saturate my DSL line's download bandwidth from fast sites such as Amazon S3. But Netflix doesn't always stream in HD even though my link is faster than what's required (4800 Kbps). I suspect the bottleneck is at Netflix's end.

illumin8 16y ago
The bottleneck is most likely not at Netflix's end. They use a number of CDNs, such as Akamai and Level 3. These CDNs usually co-locate a box right at your ISP. So, it is entirely up to your ISP how much of that bandwidth makes it through to you. I can assure you, Akamai content is fully capable of saturating your tiny broadband connection. I regularly download large files hosted on Akamai (commercial software) and achieve download rates of 2MB/sec on my 20 megabit Cablevision line. However, ISPs do "manage" Netflix traffic. How they choose to manage it varies by ISP, but it might be something as simple as giving streaming traffic a different priority over web traffic, which tends to be more latency sensitive. Joe sixpack tends to complain when his browser takes longer than a few seconds to load a page, which ties up a customer service line. If your Netflix stream automatically switches from HD to non-HD, you might not even notice because they've made their software pretty good at adapting to changes in available bandwidth.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
Are you using a dns provider like opendns or google? I am and it drastically affects streaming rates because you get sent to the wrong place in the cdn. I changed my streaming box's dns server to my isp's and got much better service from Netflix.
- anonymous246 16y ago
  Thanks a lot. Yes, I use Google DNS. I will be sure to try this out.

illumin8 16y ago

The bottleneck is most likely not at Netflix's end. They use a number of CDNs, such as Akamai and Level 3. These CDNs usually co-locate a box right at your ISP. So, it is entirely up to your ISP how much of that bandwidth makes it through to you. I can assure you, Akamai content is fully capable of saturating your tiny broadband connection. I regularly download large files hosted on Akamai (commercial software) and achieve download rates of 2MB/sec on my 20 megabit Cablevision line. However, ISPs do "manage" Netflix traffic. How they choose to manage it varies by ISP, but it might be something as simple as giving streaming traffic a different priority over web traffic, which tends to be more latency sensitive. Joe sixpack tends to complain when his browser takes longer than a few seconds to load a page, which ties up a customer service line. If your Netflix stream automatically switches from HD to non-HD, you might not even notice because they've made their software pretty good at adapting to changes in available bandwidth.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago

Are you using a dns provider like opendns or google? I am and it drastically affects streaming rates because you get sent to the wrong place in the cdn. I changed my streaming box's dns server to my isp's and got much better service from Netflix.

anonymous246 16y ago
Thanks a lot. Yes, I use Google DNS. I will be sure to try this out.