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Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
- schnable 7y agoInteresting counterpoint to the "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope. Unless of course we are under strain here in the US as well....
- rsynnott 7y agoThe US response has so far been fairly muted, with a few notable local exceptions. There are a lot more people stuck at home in Europe. In practice, though, at least in Ireland there's been little obvious problem, though you can definitely see an increase: https://www.inex.ie/ixp/statistics/ixp https://www.inex.ie/ixp/statistics/ixp
- monkpit 7y agoDoes anyone know if something like this graph exists for the US? I tried googling for one but I’m not sure of the right search terms to use.
- rsynnott 7y agoIt's a neutral exchange. Note that it doesn't give the whole story; really big players like Netflix may have hardware directly in some of the ISPs and bypass the exchange completely. The US doesn't have many significant neutral exchanges, but here's one: https://www.seattleix.net/statistics/ https://www.seattleix.net/statistics/
- gonesilent 7y agoFCC is handing out extra radio spectrum as fast as it can. Took a bunch of white space channels gave them to TMobile. Letting some stay on 3.5ghz little longer before selling it off.
- cortesoft 7y agoPretty much all of California is stuck at home, and California has 40 million people... that would be the 8th largest country in Europe.
- rsynnott 7y agoShelter in Place is basically just the Bay Area, right? And a lot of people still seem to be leaving the home for work there; notoriously, people are still making Teslas! Also, California is mostly fairly urbanised and well-off. If Germany was the only place in Europe where people were being discouraged from leaving the home, this would be less of a concern. This is really targeting places, especially rural places, with poor infrastructure.
- cortesoft 7y agoI am in Los Angeles, and we have been told to stay home except for absolutely necessary trips to grocery stores or doctors. Also, there are very large parts of California that are rural.
- rsynnott 7y ago> Census 2000 found California’s rural population totaled 1,876,753 persons That's about 5%, which is pretty low.
- desas 7y agoIt'd probably be the 6th largest in the eu. Smaller than Italy, France and Spain which all have lockdowns.
- ketzu 7y agoIsn't the trope "broadband is better somewhere else" for most places? Anecdotally, most people I know complain about the connection where they live.
- throwaway894345 7y agoEuropeans seem pretty proud of their Internet, at least relative to the US, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22631036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22631036
- Hamuko 7y agoAs a European, I'm quite happy with my Internet connections.
- agumonkey 7y agoit's mostly the cost/quality ratio, it's not asia levels of modernity (they seemed to be the first on most things) but it's accessible and stable on the other hand the web is filled with horror stories emanating from C....st customers.
- jbarberu 7y agoMoving from Sweden to the US (Florida) I can't say I've noticed much of a difference in connectivity. 100, 200, 300 & 1000MBps is readily available in both places but usually around at 3x the price in the US. Rural America seems to be an entirely different story.
- bobthepanda 7y agoI feel like when people are arguing that point, they are arguing about broadband competition. In most US markets your choices are not great and/or are expensive, and if you are in a market with limited competition there is often not a reason to invest in the network.
- bilekas 7y ago> "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope Interesting how ISP's outside of the EU are uncapping their data limits all of a sudden.. So when people (me included) say it's better in Europe, its because the vast majority of us are not capped.. In normal times. Sources : https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/12/21177538/att-broadband-internet-data-cap-coronavirus-suspend https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/12/21177538/att-broadband-in... https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-follows-optus-with-extra-mobile-data-in-virus-response-539389 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-follows-optus-with-ex...
- refurb 7y agoI had the exact same thought. I was under the impression that Europe had much more robust broadband infrastructure and a surplus of capacity, compared to the US.
- Hamuko 7y agoFinland at least has uncapped mobile connections up the wazoo. Also the highest amount of mobile data per head in 2016 at least: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/11448.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/11448.jpeg Edit: same for 2018 as well: https://www.statista.com/statistics/956188/monthly-mobile-data-usage-per-sim-worldwide-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/956188/monthly-mobile-da...
- rsynnott 7y agoOn average, yes, probably. But both the US and Europe have areas (especially rural areas) with very poor coverage, and in much of Europe most people are staying at home at the moment, to a much greater extent than in the US.
- bjoli 7y agoI pay $30 for 250/100 and i live 20 minutes outside a town if 120k in a small community of 25 houses, about 7 km from the nearest store of any kind. Is that competitive? I have no idea. I could however chose from around 10 ISPs that all have to compete in the network, which I understand is quite rare on the other side of the pond.
- aembleton 7y agoWhere are you? There are many different deals across Europe; many aren't as good as what you have.
- bjoli 7y agoSweden. Has I lived in an apartment in town it would probably have been 5-10 dollars less depending on where I lived. The city operates its own net with very low costs for large parts of the city
- this_user 7y agoEurope is not a single county, and Internet connections are widely different for a variety of reasons. On one end of the spectrum you have the Nordic countries where the average connection has > 20 Mb/s, and at the other end of the spectrum you have Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus where it is below 10.
- alkonaut 7y agoThere are many aspects of good broadband (Competition, fiber access in rural areas etc). Europe is also a group of very different countries. There are many countries where most rural areas still rely on DSL connections, for example.
- _jal 7y ago'Better' can mean multiple things. I'm pretty sure you'd agree that paying 1/3rd of what you pay now for the same bandwidth is 'better'. Is there sufficient idle capacity to handle an nearly-overnight transition to whatever the load is now? I don't know, but suspect most ISPs are going to keep similar capacity buffers - nobody sells end consumers non-oversubscribed pipes.
- unixhero 7y agoYou will
- Avamander 7y agoSuch a blanket reduction is stupid, yes.
- reallydontask 7y agoI've just run four different speed tests and all say that I'm getting ~100/10 which is what my ISP advertises (Virgin Media in the UK) One of them shows a ping of 27 ms (I think it's normally ~ 10 ms)
- Youden 7y agoIt's not a counterpoint. Netflix's actions, from a network perspective are not neccessary, at least not Europe-wide. My ISP is more than able to cope with it. I've been checking at peak times and I can consistently saturate my gigabit connection piping traffic to/from Amsterdam, about 800km away. Maybe Netflix feels the need for its own business reasons (e.g. it pays for some of its bandwidth and now users are using enough that they're unprofitable) but it's not needed to ensure the integrity of Europe's networks. Were it necessary, the ISPs can simply shape Netflix and let adaptive bitrate take care of the user experience, the same way mobile ISPs do in the US.
- MrSouth 7y agoThis move is just a solution in search of a problem. We still have better internet than you in ALL places, including mobile connectivity, literally everywhere. I can say fiber to the home 250/250 & coax 500/500 dominate the market. There is pumped up ADSL everywhere country-side. This move is coming unilateraly from a person who doesn't understand internet and woke up and had to be busy with something. Many IX report a slight increase in capacity, from 10% to 20%.
- mindslight 7y agoKodi and mpv continue to work as normal...
- olyjohn 7y agoMy stash of BluRay rips are still working at full quality as well.
- karatestomp 7y agoJellyfin is really nice if you have a semi-powerful, wired-network machine to run it on. Former Kodi user, now a convert. Kodi on an Rpi makes a good cast target for it, though.
- Hamuko 7y agoI've gone for Infuse and Apple TV 4K, since I haven't been able to find anything as fast as the 4K Apple TV that's not an actual computer.
- slenk 7y agoI am using Emby, since that seems to be the only one of those platforms that can handle IPTV
- mongol 7y agoWhat is semipowerful, approximately?
- karatestomp 7y agoThe main thing is being able to handle transcoding for certain clients that need it. I’ve got it in Docker on an oldish workstation I bought for like $100 on eBay and threw an SSD in for the OS, but that thing’s surely serious overkill. If you’re only streaming to one or two clients at a time, being on a wired network and having hardware support for any codecs you’ll be dealing with are probably the most important factors.
- dogma1138 7y agoDoes it mean they’ll pay me back for the 4K package?
- unethical_ban 7y agoThat's truly a good question - they could pull that data quickly and prorate people somehow. Maybe not for a bill already gone out, but perhaps going forward (even if they re-enable it). I'm not going to knock them for this, given that we're talking about keeping critical infrastructure from being overrun while the remainder of the economy works distributed.
- KevinEldon 7y agoYou should not knock Netflix at all. The request came from the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services. Netflix helped out when they were asked to. If Europeans are upset about this decision they need to take it up with their elected officials not Netflix.
- dependenttypes 7y agoIt was just a request. If any Netflix consumers have an issue with this they should take it with Netflix.
- KevinEldon 7y agoYes, a request made on the behalf of all Europeans by their government.
- eganist 7y agoSounds like it's effective immediately, so if you don't like it, cut your plan. No one's on contract.
- whoo 7y agoyou pay a month in advance
- myu701 7y agoDoes anyone know of public ISP dashboards that show used/total capacity on their network in terms of customer usage? I'm sure its trivial for an internal employee to pull up solarwinds or whatever, but I'd be curious to see if these ISPs are merely running above normal, running hot, barely hanging on with intermittent "isp brownouts" etc. This is probably a pipe dream but not gonna get any questions answered if I don't ask.
- qayxc 7y agoThe largest backbone in the world publishes statistics: https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statistics https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...
- dylz 7y agoFor clarification, this is not a "backbone" - it is an exchange fabric.
- qayxc 7y agoThanks for clearing that up!
- aeyes 7y agoAnd for further clarification, you won't see much Netflix traffic there because the big ISPs have Netflix caches within their infrastructure.
- dylz 7y agoYeah, you will not see the additional hundreds of Gbps of "internal" Netflix traffic, but you may very well see smaller increases as small ISPs that aren't approved for "full rack Netflix appliances" pick up Netflix traffic over the routeservers.
- hobofan 7y agoThe big German ISPs don't have Netflix caches within their infrastructure, which might be part of the problem here. Last mile infrastructure might be even worse though.
- noodlesUK 7y agoAre there any illustrations of the volumes of traffic that are being sent through core networks for netflix? I was under the impression the vast majority of traffic was served at the edge.
- tyingq 7y agoI think that's what they are relieving...edge traffic volumes. If the local ISP cache box lowers it's maximum quality, the ISPs get relief. The ISPs oversubscribed, and can't deal with this many people being at home all at once.
- jasoncartwright 7y agoCitation needed. In the UK... "UK broadband companies say they can cope with increased demand as many more people stay at home during the coronavirus crisis." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732
- oblio 7y agoThat's what they say now. Give them a few weeks and they'll start squealing. Every ISP oversubscribes for consumer segments. In the UK I guess not enough people are quarantined.
- philjohn 7y agoThat has changed somewhat of late. With WBC there's no more "fixed" contention ratios and you pay for the last mile and then peer at national aggregation pops. It's a far cry from the 50:1 IPStream product.
- rossmohax 7y agoSome ISPs like Andrew & Arnolds don't oversubscribe, but they dont have unlimited plans either
- 7y ago
- bilekas 7y agoI was working with a semi-competitor of Netflix a few years back and their tech is great of course, their product offering is amazing, but their real magic is with their contracts with ISP's. I don't know the details of the contracts of course, but they are likely to get a dedicated bandwidth within the ISP, if that comes under strain, of course, that contract comes into play. So I think it's not just the datacenters involved..
- ilogik 7y agohttps://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
- ChrisArchitect 7y agosimilar to the other discussion thread about this.... what is this based on? Who's pressuring who to get a meeting with Netflix to make this kind of request?
- Hamuko 7y agoIs this for the entirety of Europe? Because I imagine we're not having any issues with this in Finland.
- turbinerneiter 7y agoIt's a made up problem. In Germany, journalists asked the network providers and they said everything is fine. Such a ridiculous and pointless thing to do by the EU. Especially since all the apps drop the quality automatically anyway if the connection is slow.
- Skunkleton 7y agoI think the point is to protect things like remote desktop, zoom, etc from being pushed out by netflix traffic.
- fdghfg 7y ago"how to lose a large portion of your customers in 30 days"
- quotemstr 7y agoThis sucks. If bandwidth were metered, the market would ration is appropriately. Generally speaking, anything "free" or "unlimited" gets misallocated. When you put a price on something, it gets better.
- iptrans 7y agoWhat’s the point of rationing something that costs a hundredth of a cent per GB? You get 10TB of bandwidth for a dollar. Once average usage per subscriber goes over that, then we can talk.
- wtallis 7y agoI think the real problem is that the supply is too inelastic. The marginal cost of delivering more data is trivial, until part of your network gets congested, and then your short-term options are limited. This is the same problem that water utilities often face: it's cheap, until you run out. Assigning a single rate ($/TB) requires you to make some assumptions that are at risk of being violated in exceptional circumstances. Using variable pricing to charge more during peak hours is too complicated for consumers to keep track of and their options for changing behavior are limited, so this earns the ISP more money but doesn't eliminate congestion during peak hours.
- quotemstr 7y ago> Using variable pricing to charge more during peak hours is too complicated for consumers to keep track of Why? It works for electricity.
- wtallis 7y agoPeak vs off-peak prices for electricity aren't that far apart—up to a factor of 3 in my area for residential service. And that's for a fixed schedule of peak/shoulder/off-peak hours. More dynamic demand-based pricing of electricity doesn't work all that well for residential service; it basically requires automated load-shifting that's far more practical for industrial customers than residential. The cost curve for internet service during peak hours is a lot steeper. I think it would take much more than a 3x price multiplier during peak hours to get any noticeable demand reduction beyond what streaming applications already do by dropping down to lower resolutions automatically. (Assuming that the base cost for off-peak usage is remotely realistic, ie. orders of magnitude lower than the metered prices we pay for cellular data in the US.)
- sergiotapia 7y agoMakes you think, how much further we could stretch things if we were all using the Nims/C/C++ of the world instead of the Ruby's. Please don't immediately flame, I'm just saying objectively, we could stretch hardware out much further. What do you guys think about this?
- bradstewart 7y agoThis about network bandwidth capacity, not server hardware load. Netflix is going to send the same bytes over the network regardless of what language it's using for the server code.
- NegativeLatency 7y agoSounds like an ISP bandwidth issue, the bottleneck is the network not the cpu.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- NortySpock 7y agoIt's always been a trade-off of engineering time to improve performance vs shipping new features. That said, I have been enjoying maxing out my Raspberry Pi to see what I can get it to do. (File server, PiHole so far, transcoding audio files so far...) Looking forward to writing some node.js servers for it to see what it can support.
- Qasaur 7y agoI strongly subscribe to this view. Opinions like this get dismissed by the usual premature optimisation argument and that engineer-time is expensive, but I think that if we built our stacks with performance and efficiency in mind a significant chunk of operating and indeed development costs would be eliminated from corporate expenditures and would outweigh the potential initial development costs (which I don't think is that much of an issue, especially when you have competent and skilled engineers building said software).
- saagarjha 7y ago
- sniperjzp 7y agoThis is interesting, would YouTube cut the quality too? If no, does this mean Netflix has much higher traffic than YouTube?
- navidr 7y agoIt is kind of unrelated to this, but I am asking maybe somebody could help me. Do you guys know where can I read and learn more about the details of the Netflix network? I looked at their technical blog, but I wanted something more detailed and technical. Is there something like Netflix research papers (e.g. Google published Bigtable IIRC).
- rckclmbr 7y agoIts not a whitepaper, but look into OpenConnect, since i believe thats how they serve a majority of traffic https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
- BenJong-Il 7y agoA few months ago there was blog post posted here from a guy making movie reviews. In the blog post he described how he managed to get 4k Netflix screenshots on his Chromecast. The effort he made was enormous and involved reverse engineering the Netflix data protocol (I probably worded this wrong). When doing that he found out that Netflix streaming in 4k isn't actually 4k. Again not exactly sure how this worked but that was the result. And he put some kind of device between the Chromecast and the TV. And at the end of the post he shared his top movies of the year or in the previous post. Does anyone know what I am talking about? I've thought about this pist several times in the past weeks.
- rwol 7y agoThis one? https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netflix/ https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netfli...
- BenJong-Il 7y agoExactly! I also just found it. Don't know how I didn't manage to find it before. The comments were quite critical. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669234
- wmf 7y agoThere's nothing in there about 4K not being 4K, just some griping about low bitrates. On computers you can access some debug stats https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2fkylx/hidden_netflix_menu_to_set_quality_bonus_hidden/ https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2fkylx/hidden_netf... and Roku also has it https://community.roku.com/t5/Channel-Issues-Questions/Somehow-got-Netflix-playback-statistics-in-top-left/td-p/462513 https://community.roku.com/t5/Channel-Issues-Questions/Someh...
- nrp 7y agoI think in the end the author's only complaint was that it was difficult to figure out what bitrate the Chromecast was streaming at, is a pretty minor problem. It reads like a complaint post, but that seems to just be the author's writing style.
- gaius_baltar 7y agoBest approach is just cancel Netflix (saying this was the reason) and go back to the torrents -- they will still have the best quality. They are lowering quality (of service or the catalog size, not always video) and keeping or increasing the prices for a while. Using a global pandemic as an excuse is just a new low.
- echelon 7y agoHogging bandwidth is detrimental to everyone, especially emergency personnel. Please don't do this. The government wouldn't ask if there wasn't a need. The alternative is having everyone's internet cut outright.
- martin8412 7y agoI'm sorry - I'm sure you mean well, but this is downright false. This is not the US. In most European countries bandwidth is plentiful and this is completely unneeded political intervention based on not understanding technology. ISPs do actually upgrade their infrastructure without it being past collapse in Europe.
- leetcrew 7y ago> The government wouldn't ask if there wasn't a need. I wish I lived in this blissful world.
- bmmayer1 7y agoIsn't this sort of rationing exactly the thing that anti-Net Neutrality advocates have been warning about?
- Hamuko 7y agoThere might be special circumstances afoot.
- codazoda 7y agoI don't think so. This is one company reducing the quality of their own content.
- coffeefirst 7y agoNo, that would be the ISP playing "you can't use Netflix or Zoom unless you pay for Super Premium." This is the services themselves downgrading to handle the highest peak service they will ever see.
- op00to 7y agoNot just that. Eyeball network ISPs also shake down companies like Netflix with extortionate fees when peering points are overloaded to upgrade the connection.
- zymhan 7y agoNet neutrality is the idea that your ISP shouldn't deprioritize content from someone else in order to benefit their own competing service. For example, Comcast not counting their on-demand, over the internet, streaming against your data cap. Whereas watching Netflix/hulu/etc would count against it.
- BurningFrog 7y agoCan't tell if that "anti-" should be there or not...
- jeffrallen 7y agoBBC: It is not clear if this applies to the special snow flakes on the island off of Europe. Netflix: You're Europeans again, England. Suck it. Scotland: Ha ha.
- joshuahughes 7y agoActually, we've never NOT been Europeans, and we've never NOT been in Europe. Europe's just a continent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe). However, we did recently leave the European Union. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union.) Completely different thing, but very commonly confused.
- cowmix 7y agoWhen I had my Internet from Cox here in Phoenix and they started to invoke data caps, I was forced to rate limit my TVs here in the house. I have to say, Netflix does a GREAT job making sure their content works well under lower bitrates as compared to HULU and Amazon Prime. I was getting pretty good 1080 quality at 2.5mbs. If I didn't do the caps, Netflix (and other services) will stream as fast as they can.
- Dumblydorr 7y agoI have Cox in Rhode Island, ostensibly 150 mbps but meanwhile my TV buffers on simple medium quality content. I am wondering if the apartment building's connection isn't prepared for so many streamers?
- Izmaki 7y agoAre they gonna cut my bill also? I would hate to pay for a service i a, not getting (4k streaming)
- echelon 7y ago> Are they gonna cut my bill also? I would hate to pay for a service i a, not getting (4k streaming) In a desperate time of need, 4k streaming isn't really all that important. I imagine you can make that change to your account yourself. Whether Netflix will prorate this for everyone automatically remains to be seen.
- Slartie 7y agoYou will still get 4k resolution. Just at 25% less bitrate. But since the thing that's necessary to fulfill your contract is the number of pixels, which have not changed, you are out of luck, unless you find some clause in your contract with Netflix that guarantees a certain bitrate.
- agumonkey 7y ago2020, year of the VHS
- admax88q 7y agoSuch a shame that multicast never took off. Would save tremendous amounts of bandwidth in times like this.
- basilgohar 7y agoThis may work when a live stream is being watched at many locations from a single or few sources, but in the case of video on demand, the utility of multicast would be very limited – maybe some folks would coincidentally request the same packets at the same time, but the chance of that should be vanishingly low.
- tomaszs 7y agoLately i was looking for internet transfer data for last, say, 60 days per day to confirm / reject claim transfer is higher now in Europe. But couldnt find it. And broken Google results does not help much. Do you know of any of such resources?
- axegon_ 7y agoThat explains a lot. Fair enough though > But it said viewers would still find the picture quality good. I beg to differ and I'm watching on my tablet in bed and it reminds me of the Avi files we used to watch on lan networks in the 90s.
- N0RMAN 7y agoSo they are throttling because they can't fulfill the demand and want to save money on network traffic?
- jedberg 7y agoThe EU asked them to. They were having no problem keeping up.
- N0RMAN 7y agoWhy would anyone in Europe ask for that. All ISP publicity said they have more than enough capacity available. Also it would be the first time that a U.S net company does something voluntarily just by kindly asking.
- jedberg 7y agohttps://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/tech/netflix-internet-overload-eu/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/tech/netflix-internet-ove... "European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the EU internal market covering more than 450 million people, spoke to Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday and again on Thursday about the strain video streaming was placing on networks." Apparently the EU thinks it's a problem. The truth is that this will probably make little difference, but it makes sense for Netflix to do this since it doesn't cost them anything and now they are owed a favor by a regulator.
- gandalfian 7y agoSo they are rolling out gigabit fibre in homes but 5mbs is overloading the system?
- mabbo 7y agoEveryone's road is big enough to drive to their home, yet if we all got on the same highway at once it would be a traffic jam.
- Hamuko 7y agoJust because they're selling you Gigabit, doesn't mean that they actually have the capacity to provide you a guaranteed Gigabit pipe. They're overprovisioning their network and hoping that not enough people want to max their connection out at the same time.
- op00to 7y agoIn other words, a bill of goods.
- mschuster91 7y agoWhat an utter joke. This is only needed because unlike the backbone operators who are pushing ridiculous record traffic through the IXs these days and don't even hit any limit on their capability, the last-mile operators have not done any major investments in their infrastructure. Cable TV internet is horribly oversold - Kabel Deutschland was already infamous, when they got bought up by Vodafone shit got even worse. DSL ... let's just say most of Germany is happy to have 16/1 ADSL. I have 100/10 FTTB via M-net and even they have load problems. Cellphone internet is even worse but as data is horribly expensive in Germany no one dares streaming Netflix over that anyway... tl;dr: it's not Netflix fault, it's last mile telcos who have done jack shit the last decade to build out new FTTP infra coupled with appropriate uplink capacity to the nearest IX, but people are too dumb to understand this and blame Netflix instead of directing their anger towards politicians and telcos where it belongs!
- dewey 7y ago> Cellphone internet is even worse but as data is horribly expensive in Germany no one dares streaming Netflix over that anyway... Luckily we have net-neutrality infringing features like Telekom's "Stream On" where it's included /s
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- syntaxing 7y agoKind of off topic, but has anyone used Nvidia's Shield TV "AI Upscaling"? Super curious if it would make the viewing experience better for situations like this.
- rococode 7y agoI've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunately they said they'll be able to fix it within a few weeks by doing a node split. The tech mentioned he'd never heard of capacity issues before in his ~20 years as a tech and that some smaller ISPs have been having issues keeping their internet up and running at all. I've been tracking the performance with PingPlotter, if you're curious how bad it is right now here's the last 10 minutes: https://i.imgur.com/AnUqv3j.png https://i.imgur.com/AnUqv3j.png (red lines are packet loss) Pretty interesting how current circumstances are pushing even tried and tested infrastructure to their limits.
- martin_bech 7y agoI’ve worked at a major ISP, for a decade, and spotting something like this should be so easy to spot. There are tools on monitoring of load all the time, and areas are routibely getting split etc. to improve bandwith, so I think your ISP are basicly amateurs..
- cpitman 7y agoAlternatively, load has gone up across the board in a short period of time, so that preventive scaling has fallen behind and are in recovery mode.
- martin_bech 7y agoYes it can, but why would it take several techs, to spot something like load, which is the first thing you would do, it should take no more than 10s to look it up in a tool.
- sulam 7y agoA "last foot" tech might not even have access to those tools, much less know how to use them.
- dabei 7y agoAre they going to deliver the lower quality videos with AV1?
- jazzyjackson 7y agoMaybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading "The Avengers" for the millionth time, you would just download it from the nearest host (also the way the internet worked before HTTPS, there used to be way more local caching of content being downloaded over and over again)
- amelius 7y agoExcept residential upload speeds are usually only 1/10th of the corresponding download speed.
- codyb 7y agoIf you’re downloading ten segments from ten different uploaders it can all balance out I think. Bittorrent can be damn quick. Haven’t used it in a while but it was certainly fast on well seeded items.
- notyourday 7y agoBittorrent would eat all of the available bandwidth if the content is popular enough that there are always new leachers available. With enough bandwidth Bittorrent would be less efficient than a single stream TCP between the source and destination because of the protocol overhead.
- TrickyRick 7y agoDoesn't really matter though, still means (Slightly oversimplified) that a peer can connect to 10 hosts and not have to download at all from the origin server. Also this simply isn't true in a lot of European countries where upload and download speeds are equal, but that's a different thing.
- throwaway744678 7y agoCan you explain what you mean by that last statement? It does not sound true to me. As far as I can tell (in my country) almost all consumer offers are asymmetric: ADSL, obviously, but also fiber. Symmetric offers are very much for professional access, and typically more expensive.
- bluedino 7y agoI'm curios to what load the cellular networks are seeing
- chacha2 7y agoAnyone know where that remote is from in the picture?
- vimslayer 7y agoThis is totally offtopic but since bunch of people are talking about torrenting here I figured I'd ask - are you getting subtitles from somewhere? I think my English is pretty good but still watching shows without subs feels like it takes more work and doesn't let me focus on the content. I used to use opensubtitles.org but it's gotten from difficult to use to impossible to use due to all the popups and crap like that.
- robocat 7y agoThere’s so much that seems wrong about this. 1: home network capacity used to be at peak around 7PM IIRC. There should be significant spare headroom on the network during the working day. 2: Netflix already downgrades when bandwidth is limited. The smart move would be to tell Netflix to downgrade more aggressively, on the theory that would allow more “important” traffic to get priority, while still allowing people to watch Netflix (important to keep people from social contact!), and not affecting quality for consumers where ISP capacity isn’t an issue (edit: added clause). 3: Allow individual ISPs to ignore agreements and bandwidth limit Netflix traffic from their POPs, if ISPs are having capacity issues. This seems political, possibly pushed by Netflix so they can sell more subscriptions while having a third party to blame for reducing service levels. Or maybe just knee jerk dumb reactions from politicians - stupidity seems like an option too!? Edit: I keep being amazed at how consumerism drives side benefits. Without Netflix and gamers, how much worse off would we all be right now?
- itg 7y agoRegarding point 1, I imagine capacity is much higher during working hours due to so many people working from home.
- majewsky 7y ago> home network capacity used to be at peak around 7PM IIRC. There should be significant spare headroom on the network during the working day. That's because people used to be in the office over the day. Now many are working from home and thus at home all day.
- rsynnott 7y ago> There should be significant spare headroom on the network during the working day. Remember that essentially every kid in Europe is home from school right now. > Netflix already downgrades when bandwidth is limited. It downgrades when bandwidth constraints and congestion start bothering _it_. By the time all the Netflixes which are competing with you do so, your Zoom conference will be long gone. Netflix is quite tolerant of an unreliable network. Many work-from-home things, VC in particular, less so.
- rb808 7y agoHad my first Netflix problem today at 5pm. Has always been solid before today. Other streaming services were good (though YouTube searching etc looked loaded)
- softwarejosh 7y agoi severely lucked out being in a college town during all this, so many people just left the town, our networks are blazing :P
- StreamBright 7y agoTorrent as means of distribution would have been just perfect for the bandwidth.
- Slartie 7y agoI am really wondering whether this means they have to re-encode all the streams at 25% less bitrate, or whether they already have them available at that exact bitrate and can thus just change a default. Because what I usually observe when Netflix compromises the streaming quality because of bandwidth problems with my connection is a far larger drop in quality than would be expected at just 25% less bits - it normally feels more like 75% less bitrate, if it doesn't switch down from HD to SD entirely.
- jedberg 7y agoI'm sure they already have the entire library at that bitrate as one of the standard bitrates. In fact, you've probably gotten that bitrate in the past and just not noticed, because you have to be looking hard to see the quality difference.
- rhizome 7y agoI think they use DASH or HLS, which would generally mean they have everything pre-encoded.
- louiechristie 7y agoTime for the Negroponte Switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negroponte_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negroponte_switch
- Havoc 7y agoNetflix is full of BS anyway. I have yet to see a single instance of 4K despite paying for it & having suitable gear and fiber line.
- jedberg 7y agoGo to http://fast.com http://fast.com and see what bandwidth you're getting. There is a good chance your ISP is limiting your bandwidth to Netflix, preventing you from getting 4K. If you get a good speed from that test, you should call Netflix customer service to help you diagnose.
- Havoc 7y ago970 mbps. >good chance your ISP is limiting your bandwidth to Netflix Possible, but unlikely. Forunate enough to be in a jurisdiction where broadband generally does what it says on the tin. Also using the netflix win10 app and hdcp screen so that I can get all that juicy DRM. >you should call Netflix customer service to help you diagnose. Yeah probably a good idea
- RubberShoes 7y agoAnd Disney+ hasn't even launched yet. March 24th will be interesting
- franciscop 7y agoOn totally unrelated news, Popcorn Time 4.0 was recently released and using it is decriminalized in many European countries (but not in others, so stay safe): https://popcorntime.app/ https://popcorntime.app/
- koheripbal 7y agoWhat is the advantage of this over simple old torrenting?
- risho 7y agoyou can start watching immediately as it is downloading and it has a player built in, whereas the traditional torrent client needs to finish the video first and you need a separate video player.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y agoMost torrent clients have a "download in sequential order as far as feasible" feature, addressing the first issue.
- Seirdy 7y agoIt's generally a good idea to download the first and last pieces first when doing sequential downloading to ensure that the file doesn't appear too corrupted. Also, always using sequential downloading isn't very good for the swarm; it means that disproportionately fewer seeders are available for the later chunks of a torrent. I'd recommend downloading the first episode or two sequentially, but downloading the rest of the torrent normally (or perhaps just first/last parts first).
- sebws 7y agoit seems that popcorn time 4.0 is something to be wary of for now, at least that is the impression I got from the subreddit.
- neteng 7y agoThe reality is that there is no capacity issue. ISP networks are perfectly capable to handle the demand (spoiler: it hasn't increased much, see public IX stats). This is an attempt to revive the net neutrality debate from big ISPs through the EU. This is about the wish of ISPs to double-dip (be paid once by their end users, and another by the content providers).
- ginsing 7y agoThats all what you need to know about efficiency of remote work! Niiice
- kabapadum 7y agoThat's all that you need to know about the efficiency of remote work
- tpmx 7y agoSwede here: Ok, I'll unsubscribe from Netflix. I've been eying those HBO shows anyway. Edit: 8-year running subscription now cancelled. I have no polite words for what I feel for this action by Netflix. Fxxk them.
- anonymouswacker 7y agoPaying isn't enough to get what you paid for, so... https://github.com/SickChill/SickChill https://github.com/SickChill/SickChill - automatically download TV episodes (about Linux) https://github.com/CouchPotato/CouchPotatoServer https://github.com/CouchPotato/CouchPotatoServer - automatically download Movies (about Linux) https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent - torrent client for downloading your Linux tv/movies...
- tpmx 7y agoWhen you cancel the Netflix service (like I just did, after 8 years), please make sure to specify the reason. There's a form (Go to "Account", then look for a cancel button in the upper left part of the page) where you can enter some text. I'm pretty sure this text is read by a real human in the end. Each cancellation likely represents a pretty significant loss of recurring revenue on average. Clarification: This was a total BS move. A French EU politician yesterday tweeted a random idea, with no support (or even any request) from any network provider. They all seem to be saying traffic is slightly higher than usual, but they're coping. Then Netflix just randomly decides to do this, to everyone in Europe. To me this was the straw that broke the camel's back. Goodbye, Netflix.
- onedr0p 7y agoSonarr and Radarr are 10x better.
- brrrrr1 7y agogood grief - shows where eu’s priorities lie. countries struggle to get antiviral equipment yet the eu wastes time on this non issue.
- justlexi93 7y agoNetflix forced to give customers a lower quality product instead of ISPs forced to give customers the product they're paying for. Classic!
- beamatronic 7y agoIf we have Ultra HD plan, should we downgrade?
- radicaldreamer 7y agoComcast has been doing some emergency maintenance and/or upgrades with 1-2 hour downtimes for the last week or two in San Francisco. Haven't noticed any slowdowns here though. I imagine they had a few upgrades ready to go and decided to pull the trigger on them/roll them out ahead of schedule.
- tyler24henry 7y agoasfdsf
- ineedasername 7y agoI don't quite understand the "how dare they!" attitude some of the comments here convey. If you want to talk legality etc., most contracts have a "force majeur" clause that would cover this sort of thing. And even if it didn't, if enough businesses start having to modify or break service agreements in these ways through a world-wide crisis then governments will step in and legislate them out of liability. There won't be too much sympathy for the "victims" of Netflix either. Not from the general public, especially those who lose friends or family to the pandemic. Not over someone's pixelated experience of End Game or The Office. I know people who are sick, one closely, and I don't know if they're going to survive. Suffering through SD quality (or worse!) isn't what I concern myself with at the moment.
- YayamiOmate 7y agoYea. And what was the process here? One guy told another he's afraid. That's not how we in EU are used to governing. This is not a dictatorship. There is absolutely no legal reason to downgrade performance of service. It's a big WTF. What's next. A guy telling other to sell lesser quality of what?
- johnghanks 7y agoman everyone here's an expert all of a sudden.
- kryptokommunist 7y agoWith Netflix having content caches this seems like incompetency from the EU commissioner paired with an openness to virtue signaling in this time from Netflix. Isn’t it the job of the ISP to shape the traffic accordingly if they overprovisioned and are now failing their customers due to that?
- iod 7y agoReminds me why I love my ISP. My residential fiber ISP in Rochester New York, Greenlight Networks, decided to give everyone symmetric upload connections for free upgrade in the name of Corona Virus (used to be 10:1 download:upload). So now I have a 1gbps symmetric for only $100/mo as their mid-tier option. They even have a 2gbps symmetric option also. That is how ISPs should be handling this.
- Gatsky 7y agoIf there ever was a quintessential example of a “first world problem”, this is it right here.
- dntbnmpls 7y agoMakes one wonder, why doesn't europe have a netflix of their own? Considering europe has a GDP comparable to the US and a few hundred million more people, you'd think they'd have one or two or more netflixes of their own.
- dschuetz 7y agoWell, I hope Netflix is going to cut prices just as well.
- newbie578 7y agoThis is pure bullshit. If Netflix won't commit to it's part of the deal (FULL HD and 4K) then why should I commit to my part (13.99 monthly)? You cannot decide by yourself to lower the quality of your services and keep the price same. Sometimes I wish I had enough money and time to seek "legal retribution" from these type of situations. I would love for this case to make it to the European Court in Strasbourg. "The video-streaming provider said lowering the picture quality would reduce Netflix data consumption by 25%. But it said viewers would still find the picture quality good." How would they know what I find still good, if I found it still good than I wouldn't have taken the premium plan!! So many fallacies in this way of thinking..
- moonbas3 7y agoThis was basically requested by the EU so we don't run into anymore trouble by crashing the interwebs.
- ralusek 7y agoDon't you think it's okay for us to be slightly understanding and forgiving that there are some individuals and companies that aren't simply capable of flawlessly and immediately adjusting to major changes in their realities at the drop of a hat? I'm sure their usage is through the roof, and they probably didn't predict a pandemic with quarantines into their infrastructure improvements modeled around predictable usage. Also, it wouldn't surprise me at all if ISPs are also feeling a bit of a strain, and are putting some degree of pressure on streaming platforms to lighten their loads if possible.
- wor3q 7y agoJust cut the price to match SD plan and everything is OK. Will Netflix be understanding and forgiving if pandemic would cut our income, so we wouldn't be capable of paying for subscription and started pirating their originals?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> Will Netflix be understanding and forgiving if pandemic would cut our income, so we wouldn't be capable of paying for subscription and started pirating their originals? Perhaps. Amazon Videos and Pornhub Premium are both free in Italy, for example. I don't see anything about Netflix being free there, though.
- keriati1 7y agoIt won't be just for 30 days. How can people complain about Netflix quality now? I will be grateful if we have anything still working in a few months...
- izacus 7y agoNoone is complaining about quality, people are complaining about having to pay for quality they're not getting. Netflix can easily charge everyone the SD package price during this time.
- nabla9 7y agoTreating Europe as a one block seems like very low resolution decision. Netflix content delivery network is sufficiently large in Europe to take into account much smaller areas.
- henriks 7y agoYes, I doubt this was a very well-informed request by the EU as much as a PR move. I doubt the fiber between me and Netflix's edge cache at my ISP is significantly more saturated due to more people staying at home.
- glenneroo 7y agoYou might have missed it but yesterday it was all over the news that the EU had asked Netflix to do something. Here is one of many articles: https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/19/eu-netflix-sd-streaming-to-conserve-internet https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/19/eu-netflix-sd-streaming-... Today the Australian government is making the same request.
- mk3 7y agoAnd this is how I will switch to lower tier plan. As paying and not getting service seems to be unfair even with COVID-19 in sight
- john_alan 7y agoThis drives me fucking mental. It's not about being insensitive about the quality reduction, I KNOW PEOPLE ARE DYING, I KNOW that's more important than Netflix. I don't care if they stop ALL services, but DONT FUCKING CHARGE ME THEN.
- mgoetzke 7y agoWell if 'doing your part' only means 720p instead of 1080 or 4k at the same price for a little while, I think that is more than acceptable
- john_alan 7y agoI don't get this. It's not that I'm unwilling to donate a few bucks or take a hit for this situation. I have helped as much as I can. I still don't think its acceptable for Netflix to decide to charge me the same for a worse service. Why do people equate dissatisfaction at a large entertainment company charging for something they are not delivering with being insensitive?? I don't care if they reduce quality, stop the service entirely and cease to exist, but don't charge me for something you're not delivering. I'm happy if they want to immediately cease all online video, just don't fucking charge me! If this move saves lives GREAT! Just don't CHARGE ME as if you are still delivering the contracted product.
- ornornor 7y agoI don’t understand that. It’s not like Netflix is saving lives or is a non profit. Why should it be our responsibility to subsidize their baseline? The nature of business is that you’re taking risks. Offloading that risk to your customers is bad taste. Netflix doesn’t share its profits with its customers so why should we be shouldering their losses/subsidizing them as paying customers?
- john_alan 7y agoPrecisely.
- alexellisuk 7y agoShould we look forward to a 25% discount too? :-) Hopefully this is not going to be downgrading to SD.
- qsdfhhRR 7y agostupid nerds stop whining for your HD subscription
- qsdfhhRR 7y agostop whining for your HD subscription you selfish nerds
- rjyoungling 7y agoThere seems to be a big divide between two groups: One is of the mind that we should be empathetic and since it's not a lot of money, people shouldn't complain. The other is of the mind that, Netflix can certainly take those actions but shouldn't pass those costs on to the consumer. I'm in the second camp. In Holland, all the big gym companies still charge their memberships even though the gyms are closed. Since they're legally required to refund the money, they hide that from the consumer and get ahead of it by offering to 'give' consumers their own money back on their membership card. Thus not losing any money. I think that people in this thread don't have a problem with the measures being taken, but specifically with companies not eating the cost and trying to pass those on to the consumer. That's the shady part and it's not right IMO. I also find it fascinating that people don't have an issue with paying for services that they didn't receive if they're on a subscription yet they wouldn't pay an invoice should their favorite club(s), restaurant(s), etc. start sending them those. While I'm open to having my mind changed, all of these practices do strike me as kinda unethical. It appears to me as taking advantage of the user in order not to sacrifice revenue and I think that that's what most people here are objecting to. edit: My perspective on companies whether the P&L of a company should be taken into account. I don't believe so. I think people should be given the option to make an informed decision. Actions like these feel like they're purposefully designing a choice architecture such that there's an asymmetric information flow that can be taken advantage of to serve one's own needs as a company. That's unethical IMO; not unlike a shady 20th century used car dealer.
- lkramer 7y agoThe divide I have seen was between people who didn't mind as long as they got a reduced rate and people who, at least on the surface, seems to complain that they get lower quality than they are used to and this could easily be solved by ISPs just giving everyone more bandwidth. Your post makes me think that maybe 99% are actually in the Just Lower The Charge And It's Fine camp, and everything else is either a vocal minority, or due to miscommunication and a desire to be outraged.
- rjyoungling 7y agoCould be. My perception wasn't so much, people being irritated due to lower quality but rather being annoyed that they still needed to pay $X while not getting what they're paying for. I personally think most people are in the If Lower Charge Then Okay camp. From what I can tell it's specifically the feeling of injustice that rubs people the wrong way.
- pankajdoharey 7y agoI dont understand the issue here, as far as i am aware Netflix installs media boxes at the data-centers of every ISP. And a video demand from netflix device is directly resolved to these media boxes instead of resolving the content and downloading through Internet. So arent they already saving Internet bandwidth and rely on a Intranet like solution for distributing its contents?
- sunflowerfly 7y agoThe real news is that Europe's internet backbone cannot handle this stress test. Once this blows over that needs addressed.
- 0xEFF 7y agoIs it just me or has Hulu been down entirely for the past couple of days?
- AtOmXpLuS 7y agoEverything in AtOmXpLuS.CoM
- tripzilch 7y agoLet's first address the elephant in the room. If it weren't for the ridiculous power of the copyright industry, there would be no problem. Because non-live streaming doesn't make sense except as an artificial way to control copyright. There literally is no other reason why you would download an entire movie and then throw it away. Instead of this bullshit, people could easily have a small box of microSDs with their favourite films and series. You could exchange them with friends, it would be fun. Again, why did Netflix used to be mailing around DVDs instead of much more efficient read-only SDs? Oh yeah, copyright bullshit. It's very easy to forget that everybody together made up this one completely artificial rule that, unlike normal data, this is "magical data" that we have to pretend cannot be copied or stored. What ever.
- yu_chen 7y agoCrazy