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I'm still confused by all of this. Surely most video services are capable of adapting to lower bandwidth (and congested) links very easily. I personally have a

I'm still confused by all of this. Surely most video services are capable of adapting to lower bandwidth (and congested) links very easily. I personally have a fibre line directly to my house, and whilst the peering isn't great with my provider (Frontier), the network is more than capable of doing basically any video task. Why should the video bitrate be dropped because some second rate ISPs are oversubscribing super badly? Isn't all of this totally against the principles of net neutrality?

121789 7y ago
you're making a big assumption that most of the world has great in-home broadband access. this isn't true in many places (e.g. India). mobile networks would get crushed by the uptick in traffic combined with the shift in geographic usage that will be caused by the lockdown
IndrekR 7y ago
It is not about the last mile. Problem is mostly with increased international traffic saturating the large pipes.
- GhostVII 7y ago
  How would lowering YouTube quality help with that? Pretty sure videos are going to be served to users by CDN servers close to them.
  - unethical_ban 7y ago
    ...and initially those videos have to be seeded by central servers. CDNs are caches. I am sure it gets much more complex with systems at Youtube scale, but they don't keep all files at all edges. Furthermore, they know what the fuck they are doing, and if ISPs and governments are going "shit, our bandwidth is nuts, hey Youtube/Netflix can you cool it a little?" then maybe there is something to it. Why and how is everyone an armchair NOC operator/epidemiologist/supply chain manager? How is it so hard to believe that when you get past certain politicians/bureaucracies, there are smart people working to figure out these hard problems that likely know a little bit more than we do?
    - the8472 7y ago
      Google has private fibers to shovel things between their data centers. And the point of a CDN is that it acts as a force multiplier. You cache once and it can serve the same video to many users, conversely this means far less data needs to traverse many hops
    - GhostVII 7y ago
      I'm not saying that the throttling is useless, just that I don't think it is due to congestion in international pipes.
- xhrpost 7y ago
  Curious, do you have a source on this? The article doesn't seem to get very specific.
- aaomidi 7y ago
  This isn't an area that's having problems from what I have read
- crazygringo 7y ago
  Do you have a source for that? Everything I've read is about the last mile. And considering the major uptick is caused by video for work and for classes, I would guess that is 99% domestic, so what would be the cause of a massive increase in international traffic?
  - ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
    In optimal situations, what impacts you is about the last mile. In large congestion scenarios, what impacts people is large amount of data being transacted by large nodes.
- markedathome 7y ago
  Could watching over VPN to other territories be an issue? or would that just be noise in the metrics? I'm primarily thinking of something like watching disney+ from countries outside their current distribution
illumanaughty 7y ago
Yes, you're right. Better let this play out and see what happens, people's lives are less important vs. your ability to stream HD content because you have a great connection.
Aunche 7y ago
Youtube and other sites are voluntarily lowering their bandwidth because 4k video is probably less important that somebody's online class. I'm sure they save a pretty penny as well.
- perennate 7y ago
  I imagine that many classes that moved online are providing video lectures via YouTube.
  - gpderetta 7y ago
    It is at least plausible that 4k might not be a strict requirement to fully benefit from an online class.
    - perennate 7y ago
      That's true (although in some cases it may be hard to see text on blackboard), anyway it's just about YouTube making the default SD, but HD option is still available. > Users will still be able to watch in high definition if they want, but will have to choose to do so.
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    That's more applicable to large classes at the college level. College seminars, as well as all of grade school, are conducted live. High school doesn't have "lectures" the way college does, or middle school or elementary school.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      You can live stream on youtube. And in fact, it is one of the few free options if you plan to have more than a few dozen viewers.
      - protomyth 7y ago
        Its a really hard option for instructors who aren't computer folks and stuck at home. The Business tier allows for 250 participants which is damn good for most classes. I get the feeling a lot of schools will come up with the money for a couple of months for a paid service. We're out $380 a month for our 20 instructors. Also, some of the paid services are allowing schools to use free accounts.
crazygringo 7y ago
The unplanned for surge has been in videoconferencing (for work and for school), and while yes they adapt in theory to lower bandwidth, they're terribly affected particularly by the higher latency that tends to come with it. The problem isn't that your videoconferencing goes from 1080p to 360p -- it's that it stutters and stops working for seconds at a time, so students completely miss content, and introduces a lag that makes it impossible to have conversations because people are always talking over each other. While YouTube buffers ahead, so playback tends to be smooth regardless. And clearly this has nothing to do with net neutrality, which is about ISP's throttling types of content. This is the content provider itself. And they're giving you the option to manually go back to hi-def. So I hardly see what there is to complain about. YouTube is just trying to make sure kids are more likely to have usable online classes.
- the8472 7y ago
  > latency AIUI google uses BBR which attempts to not fill up buffers and thus only add minimal extra latency. Plus in many cases the last mile is the bottleneck, in which case proper queue management on the router or its counterpart can keep the latency low. I think fq-pie is a mandatory part of docsis 3.1 for that reason. Congestion should only result in limited bandwidth, not in significant latency spikes, and youtube will automatically lower resolution anyway if available bandwidth is too low to sustain playback. So no changes should be needed at this point.
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    I think you're talking about a theoretical best-case scenario for YouTube where I'm talking about the real world with videoconferencing. For people at home, the bottleneck is often something like their apartment building or block or neighborhood -- wherever their ISP didn't provision enough. Obviously "proper queue management" on your home router doesn't affect this. To the contrary, a series of routers full of buffers means that congestion absolutely does increase latency, and drastically. "Bufferbloat" is a known phenomenon. We may wish it didn't exist, but it does. So your claim that "no changes should be needed" to ensure videoconferencing latency is unimpacted is just wrong, and flat in the face of all real-world evidence. Have you ever tried personally using videoconferencing on a saturated network? This isn't theory... it's something you can try yourself. (I used to work in videoconferencing and latency caused by network congestion was the #1 quality issue.)
HenryBemis 7y ago
Others are commenting on the second-rate ISPs that you mention. I will only comment on the "net neutrality". This virus can potentially kill every man and woman over 80. That's our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. If I get to watch videos of cats for two months on 480 instead of 1080, and that may save 500 people, bring-it-on! Unfortunately there may be/will be people that because they can't enjoy a movie, they will go for a walk. That doesn't help. So we're captive of the second-rate-ISPs, the stupid people that want to go for a walk because "internet is slow". I'll take "that bullet" to just save even ONE grandparent.
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  I'm a little confused, would you mind explaining how the lethality of the virus is related to your thesis? The way I interpreted your post makes it seem like it's just two unrelated thoughts (net neutrality and the lethality of covid) that got mixed together
- bacon_waffle 7y ago
  What exactly is wrong with going for a walk? So long as you're keeping some distance from others, I'd think walks would be encouraged.
  - HenryBemis 7y ago
    100% on going for walks. The issue is that it is being abused/misused and thus we see one (European) country after the next one imposing bans on circulation. Common sense is not so common. If govs encourage "people going for a walk" then majority of Greeks, Italians, Spaniards would be in the parks with a bottle of wine and sandwiches having picnics "while out on a walk". It's the stupid ones that ruin it for all. The ones who don't want to limit themselves for a couple of weeks for the greater good.
    - Symbiote 7y ago
      > Greeks, Italians, Spaniards That seems like an attempt to stereotype, when the same has been observed in Denmark, Ireland and Britain.
walshemj 7y ago
I think your going to find countries that have prioritised connection speeds over the core network are going to have a rude awakening.
AndyMcConachie 7y ago
https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/60002/what-is-oversubscription-in-networking https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/60002...
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  The linked stack exchange question is about network oversubscription.
yuliyp 7y ago
It's not just the ISP that are oversubscribed. Google probably didn't budget for people all around the world suddenly sitting at home watching Youtube all of a sudden.
Florin_Andrei 7y ago
The point is to avoid congestion to begin with.
temptemptemp111 7y ago
To obfuscate whatever is going to happen :)
richbhanover 7y ago
You wrote: > Why should the video bitrate be dropped because some second rate ISPs are oversubscribing super badly? Isn't all of this totally against the principles of net neutrality? No. This is entirely separate from net neutrality. That principle says, "No ISP should discriminate on the basis of content." In the case of an oversubscribed ISP, the "magic of the markets" that so many lobbyists talk about is that you can simply switch to a new provider. Oh, you only have one provider? Tough cookies.

121789 7y ago

you're making a big assumption that most of the world has great in-home broadband access. this isn't true in many places (e.g. India). mobile networks would get crushed by the uptick in traffic combined with the shift in geographic usage that will be caused by the lockdown

IndrekR 7y ago

It is not about the last mile. Problem is mostly with increased international traffic saturating the large pipes.

GhostVII 7y ago
How would lowering YouTube quality help with that? Pretty sure videos are going to be served to users by CDN servers close to them.
- unethical_ban 7y ago
  ...and initially those videos have to be seeded by central servers. CDNs are caches. I am sure it gets much more complex with systems at Youtube scale, but they don't keep all files at all edges. Furthermore, they know what the fuck they are doing, and if ISPs and governments are going "shit, our bandwidth is nuts, hey Youtube/Netflix can you cool it a little?" then maybe there is something to it. Why and how is everyone an armchair NOC operator/epidemiologist/supply chain manager? How is it so hard to believe that when you get past certain politicians/bureaucracies, there are smart people working to figure out these hard problems that likely know a little bit more than we do?
  - the8472 7y ago
    Google has private fibers to shovel things between their data centers. And the point of a CDN is that it acts as a force multiplier. You cache once and it can serve the same video to many users, conversely this means far less data needs to traverse many hops
  - GhostVII 7y ago
    I'm not saying that the throttling is useless, just that I don't think it is due to congestion in international pipes.
xhrpost 7y ago
Curious, do you have a source on this? The article doesn't seem to get very specific.
aaomidi 7y ago
This isn't an area that's having problems from what I have read
crazygringo 7y ago
Do you have a source for that? Everything I've read is about the last mile. And considering the major uptick is caused by video for work and for classes, I would guess that is 99% domestic, so what would be the cause of a massive increase in international traffic?
- ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
  In optimal situations, what impacts you is about the last mile. In large congestion scenarios, what impacts people is large amount of data being transacted by large nodes.
markedathome 7y ago
Could watching over VPN to other territories be an issue? or would that just be noise in the metrics? I'm primarily thinking of something like watching disney+ from countries outside their current distribution

illumanaughty 7y ago

Yes, you're right. Better let this play out and see what happens, people's lives are less important vs. your ability to stream HD content because you have a great connection.

Aunche 7y ago

Youtube and other sites are voluntarily lowering their bandwidth because 4k video is probably less important that somebody's online class. I'm sure they save a pretty penny as well.

perennate 7y ago
I imagine that many classes that moved online are providing video lectures via YouTube.
- gpderetta 7y ago
  It is at least plausible that 4k might not be a strict requirement to fully benefit from an online class.
  - perennate 7y ago
    That's true (although in some cases it may be hard to see text on blackboard), anyway it's just about YouTube making the default SD, but HD option is still available. > Users will still be able to watch in high definition if they want, but will have to choose to do so.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  That's more applicable to large classes at the college level. College seminars, as well as all of grade school, are conducted live. High school doesn't have "lectures" the way college does, or middle school or elementary school.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    You can live stream on youtube. And in fact, it is one of the few free options if you plan to have more than a few dozen viewers.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      Its a really hard option for instructors who aren't computer folks and stuck at home. The Business tier allows for 250 participants which is damn good for most classes. I get the feeling a lot of schools will come up with the money for a couple of months for a paid service. We're out $380 a month for our 20 instructors. Also, some of the paid services are allowing schools to use free accounts.

crazygringo 7y ago

The unplanned for surge has been in videoconferencing (for work and for school), and while yes they adapt in theory to lower bandwidth, they're terribly affected particularly by the higher latency that tends to come with it. The problem isn't that your videoconferencing goes from 1080p to 360p -- it's that it stutters and stops working for seconds at a time, so students completely miss content, and introduces a lag that makes it impossible to have conversations because people are always talking over each other. While YouTube buffers ahead, so playback tends to be smooth regardless. And clearly this has nothing to do with net neutrality, which is about ISP's throttling types of content. This is the content provider itself. And they're giving you the option to manually go back to hi-def. So I hardly see what there is to complain about. YouTube is just trying to make sure kids are more likely to have usable online classes.

the8472 7y ago
> latency AIUI google uses BBR which attempts to not fill up buffers and thus only add minimal extra latency. Plus in many cases the last mile is the bottleneck, in which case proper queue management on the router or its counterpart can keep the latency low. I think fq-pie is a mandatory part of docsis 3.1 for that reason. Congestion should only result in limited bandwidth, not in significant latency spikes, and youtube will automatically lower resolution anyway if available bandwidth is too low to sustain playback. So no changes should be needed at this point.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  I think you're talking about a theoretical best-case scenario for YouTube where I'm talking about the real world with videoconferencing. For people at home, the bottleneck is often something like their apartment building or block or neighborhood -- wherever their ISP didn't provision enough. Obviously "proper queue management" on your home router doesn't affect this. To the contrary, a series of routers full of buffers means that congestion absolutely does increase latency, and drastically. "Bufferbloat" is a known phenomenon. We may wish it didn't exist, but it does. So your claim that "no changes should be needed" to ensure videoconferencing latency is unimpacted is just wrong, and flat in the face of all real-world evidence. Have you ever tried personally using videoconferencing on a saturated network? This isn't theory... it's something you can try yourself. (I used to work in videoconferencing and latency caused by network congestion was the #1 quality issue.)

HenryBemis 7y ago

Others are commenting on the second-rate ISPs that you mention. I will only comment on the "net neutrality". This virus can potentially kill every man and woman over 80. That's our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. If I get to watch videos of cats for two months on 480 instead of 1080, and that may save 500 people, bring-it-on! Unfortunately there may be/will be people that because they can't enjoy a movie, they will go for a walk. That doesn't help. So we're captive of the second-rate-ISPs, the stupid people that want to go for a walk because "internet is slow". I'll take "that bullet" to just save even ONE grandparent.

chipperyman573 7y ago
I'm a little confused, would you mind explaining how the lethality of the virus is related to your thesis? The way I interpreted your post makes it seem like it's just two unrelated thoughts (net neutrality and the lethality of covid) that got mixed together
bacon_waffle 7y ago
What exactly is wrong with going for a walk? So long as you're keeping some distance from others, I'd think walks would be encouraged.
- HenryBemis 7y ago
  100% on going for walks. The issue is that it is being abused/misused and thus we see one (European) country after the next one imposing bans on circulation. Common sense is not so common. If govs encourage "people going for a walk" then majority of Greeks, Italians, Spaniards would be in the parks with a bottle of wine and sandwiches having picnics "while out on a walk". It's the stupid ones that ruin it for all. The ones who don't want to limit themselves for a couple of weeks for the greater good.
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    > Greeks, Italians, Spaniards That seems like an attempt to stereotype, when the same has been observed in Denmark, Ireland and Britain.

walshemj 7y ago

I think your going to find countries that have prioritised connection speeds over the core network are going to have a rude awakening.

AndyMcConachie 7y ago

https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/60002/what-is-oversubscription-in-networking https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/60002...

Godel_unicode 7y ago
The linked stack exchange question is about network oversubscription.

yuliyp 7y ago

It's not just the ISP that are oversubscribed. Google probably didn't budget for people all around the world suddenly sitting at home watching Youtube all of a sudden.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago

The point is to avoid congestion to begin with.

temptemptemp111 7y ago

To obfuscate whatever is going to happen :)

richbhanover 7y ago

You wrote: > Why should the video bitrate be dropped because some second rate ISPs are oversubscribing super badly? Isn't all of this totally against the principles of net neutrality? No. This is entirely separate from net neutrality. That principle says, "No ISP should discriminate on the basis of content." In the case of an oversubscribed ISP, the "magic of the markets" that so many lobbyists talk about is that you can simply switch to a new provider. Oh, you only have one provider? Tough cookies.