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> Said the other way around: fast.com is great to see actual throughput from Netflix as opposed to some fake throughout from a dedicated speed test site for the

> Said the other way around: fast.com is great to see actual throughput from Netflix as opposed to some fake throughout from a dedicated speed test site for the exact same reason. Yup. This is pretty much the reason Netflix created fast.com. They wanted a speed test service that couldn’t be gamed by ISPs. Many ISPs will prioritise traffic to know speed test services (like Ookla’s speedtest.net), making their services appear faster than they’re under more normal usage. By placing fast.com on Netflix IPs, ISPs either have to prioritise all Netflix traffic (which they’re very unlikely to do), or accept that fast.com is going to provide a more realistic measurement of their performance.

neurostimulant 4y ago
Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link, while before it was outright blocked. Hooray for no net neutrality I guess. Another fun part: when netflix IPs was blocked by this ISP, it's pretty much impossible to use netflix because the only way to get around the block was to use VPN, but netflix itself blocks VPN access.
- solarpunk 4y ago
  I'm curious where you live and what provider does this weird Netflix reselling practice.
  - neurostimulant 4y ago
    Streaming services do this all the time in Asia. Instead of paying with credit card, you pay via your carrier/ISP, sometimes at discounted pricing. I paid Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and Zoom this way.
  - callahad 4y ago
    Common in America (e.g. https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/netflix-on-us https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/netflix-on-us) and the UK (e.g. https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/virgin-media-o2-revamps-top-bundles-to-include-netflix/ https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/virgin-media-o2-revamps-top...)
- happymellon 4y ago
  > Hooray for no net neutrality I guess Surely it would essentially saturate your fibre if there was net neutrality, unless you don't pay for full fibre speeds?
  - tpxl 4y ago
    Parent was being facetious.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  What is the internet anyway? Are there truth in advertising issues around selling internet access with excessive filtering?
- patmcc 4y ago
  Your ISP entirely blocked netflix? That's incredible shitty.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    Early in the pandemic, I spent a while without wired internet using a wireless hotspot from the library which would not connect to Netflix but any other streaming video service was fine. I forget who the wireless vendor behind the hotspot was—I think it might have been Verizon.
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
      So there's a bit of a weird fact about public libraries, which is that it probably wasn't on the normal internet (Internet1) but was in fact on Internet2 (see [1]). Internet2 is used by hospitals, among other things, and as such has higher robustness requirements than Internet1. The pandemic created much higher demand for bandwidth from hospitals, forcing Internet2 providers to scramble to keep up in areas. As such, blocking high-bandwidth sites which are clearly lower priority than medical traffic might have actually been a reasonable move. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - riceart 4y ago
        Not quite sure I understand - what do hospitals need a ton of bandwidth for? Why would those bandwidth requirements rise significantly during the pandemic. Sure there were a bunch of people on vents in the MICU, but pretty much every elective procedural service plummeted.
        uni_rule 4y ago
        I'd imagine telehealth played a fairly large roll. White crispy video calls are not that demanding individually 10s to 100s of them at scale per location (and an exponential increase of calls in general) might be something more of a problem for that sort of infrastructure.
- dspillett 4y ago
  > Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link They may have an ISP-local netflix cache, from Netflix themselves not some home-grown hack, so they can achieve that with some reliability without it costing as much as it otherwise would for bandwidth peering.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tiedieconderoga 4y ago
    Netflix distributes "red boxes" to ISPs which are exactly that: edge content caches. (PDF): https://openconnect.netflix.com/Open-Connect-Briefing-Paper.pdf https://openconnect.netflix.com/Open-Connect-Briefing-Paper....
- noobcoder 4y ago
  Mine did the same and charged for bundles of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+ Until recently they reverted it after bunch of complains and tonnes of people changing their ISP
- pratnala 4y ago
  Netflix blocks datacenter VPNs but you can use residential VPNs (which tbf are more expensive) to circumvent this.
- postdb 4y ago
  hmmm, IMHO, traffic for video and everything else ought to separated into 2 classes. Video obvious takes much much more bandwidth than other stuff. It would be good to allow none video, smaller assets that are needed to to make a website function to have priority over video files.
- postdb 4y ago
  BTW, AT&T has terrible records for dropping customer's traffic and also email without warning or notices to their customers. Why such terrible company is around amazing how corporation don't really survive by merit in our current world.
kijiki 4y ago
Couldn't ISPs just sniff the SNI hostname to differentiate fast.com vs actual Netflix video streaming?
- wtallis 4y ago
  The fast.com page kicks off requests to nflxvideo.net domains for the actual speed measurement. And it wouldn't surprise me if actual Netflix video streaming made occasional connections to fast.com purely to make it harder for ISPs to cheat.
- cesarb 4y ago
  You can think of the requests to fast.com as just loading the speed test control scripts and user interface. The actual speed test loads files from the same servers (with the same SNI hostname) used by actual Netflix video streaming. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the fast.com speed test loads real streaming video segments from these servers, the only difference being that it doesn't have the decryption key for these videos.
  - therein 4y ago
    That's surely how I would have done it.
  - bmicraft 4y ago
    It would also not surprise me if dns requests for fast.com temporarily elevated bandwidth limits for netflix
  - bradknowles 4y ago
    It does. You're loading segments of real movies on Netflix that are not encumbered by copyright. But they're intentionally otherwise indistinguishable from any other real movie on Netflix.
- catminou 4y ago
  Yes a few ISPs actually do this (not just for Netflix, but for other sites in general).
sharkski 4y ago
In the case of Ookla's speedtest, many ISPs host speed test servers to eliminate any variability of the wider internet. That's why it may seem they are prioritizing it. It's not a useless tool either as lets you narrow issues down to either your network or ISP.
anonymousnotme 4y ago
It definitely looks like testing sites are prioritized. The fastest download speed that I have gotten is maybe 7 MB (bytes) per second; generally it is 2-5 MB per second. The speed test sites generally get 100 Mb per second dowload. In general the best I seem to get is about half the speed of the speed test sites. To me the real speed of the ISP is how fast one can download something one wants, not the result of a test. I would prefer to see results for downloads/uploads from youtube and various CDN networks and popular sites. I would also like to see ISP have a URL that is inside their network to test upload and download so that one can at least isolate what part of the connection might be lagging. Actually, I just used devtools to snag a 25MB file from fast.com. Curl/wget gives a speed of about 3 or 4 MB per second. That does not really seem to match up with fast.com download speed of 70Mb/second. 70/8 is 8.75, which is about double. Is fast.com accurate? Is my math wrong?
- jackson1442 4y ago
  I personally like https://speed.cloudflare.com https://speed.cloudflare.com since it just looks like you're doing typical CloudFlare traffic. The results viewer is also quite nice.
  - is_true 4y ago
    My ISP (Telecom) gives me a speed of 250Mbps using fast.com and 40Mbps using Cloudflare's tool.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      Your isp likely has a Netflix oca or is directly peered with Netflix directly. It’s standard for any decent sized ISP since it’s either the largest or 2nd largest by volume peer (youtube being in the other).
  - binkHN 4y ago
    Very cool! I never knew about this! I really appreciate the latency during upload test. I've bookmarked this and will stop using speedtest.net. Thank you!

neurostimulant 4y ago

Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link, while before it was outright blocked. Hooray for no net neutrality I guess. Another fun part: when netflix IPs was blocked by this ISP, it's pretty much impossible to use netflix because the only way to get around the block was to use VPN, but netflix itself blocks VPN access.

solarpunk 4y ago
I'm curious where you live and what provider does this weird Netflix reselling practice.
- neurostimulant 4y ago
  Streaming services do this all the time in Asia. Instead of paying with credit card, you pay via your carrier/ISP, sometimes at discounted pricing. I paid Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and Zoom this way.
- callahad 4y ago
  Common in America (e.g. https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/netflix-on-us https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/netflix-on-us) and the UK (e.g. https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/virgin-media-o2-revamps-top-bundles-to-include-netflix/ https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/virgin-media-o2-revamps-top...)
happymellon 4y ago
> Hooray for no net neutrality I guess Surely it would essentially saturate your fibre if there was net neutrality, unless you don't pay for full fibre speeds?
- tpxl 4y ago
  Parent was being facetious.
bee_rider 4y ago
What is the internet anyway? Are there truth in advertising issues around selling internet access with excessive filtering?
patmcc 4y ago
Your ISP entirely blocked netflix? That's incredible shitty.
- dhosek 4y ago
  Early in the pandemic, I spent a while without wired internet using a wireless hotspot from the library which would not connect to Netflix but any other streaming video service was fine. I forget who the wireless vendor behind the hotspot was—I think it might have been Verizon.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    So there's a bit of a weird fact about public libraries, which is that it probably wasn't on the normal internet (Internet1) but was in fact on Internet2 (see [1]). Internet2 is used by hospitals, among other things, and as such has higher robustness requirements than Internet1. The pandemic created much higher demand for bandwidth from hospitals, forcing Internet2 providers to scramble to keep up in areas. As such, blocking high-bandwidth sites which are clearly lower priority than medical traffic might have actually been a reasonable move. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - riceart 4y ago
      Not quite sure I understand - what do hospitals need a ton of bandwidth for? Why would those bandwidth requirements rise significantly during the pandemic. Sure there were a bunch of people on vents in the MICU, but pretty much every elective procedural service plummeted.
      - uni_rule 4y ago
        I'd imagine telehealth played a fairly large roll. White crispy video calls are not that demanding individually 10s to 100s of them at scale per location (and an exponential increase of calls in general) might be something more of a problem for that sort of infrastructure.
dspillett 4y ago
> Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link They may have an ISP-local netflix cache, from Netflix themselves not some home-grown hack, so they can achieve that with some reliability without it costing as much as it otherwise would for bandwidth peering.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tiedieconderoga 4y ago
  Netflix distributes "red boxes" to ISPs which are exactly that: edge content caches. (PDF): https://openconnect.netflix.com/Open-Connect-Briefing-Paper.pdf https://openconnect.netflix.com/Open-Connect-Briefing-Paper....
noobcoder 4y ago
Mine did the same and charged for bundles of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+ Until recently they reverted it after bunch of complains and tonnes of people changing their ISP
pratnala 4y ago
Netflix blocks datacenter VPNs but you can use residential VPNs (which tbf are more expensive) to circumvent this.
postdb 4y ago
hmmm, IMHO, traffic for video and everything else ought to separated into 2 classes. Video obvious takes much much more bandwidth than other stuff. It would be good to allow none video, smaller assets that are needed to to make a website function to have priority over video files.
postdb 4y ago
BTW, AT&T has terrible records for dropping customer's traffic and also email without warning or notices to their customers. Why such terrible company is around amazing how corporation don't really survive by merit in our current world.

kijiki 4y ago

Couldn't ISPs just sniff the SNI hostname to differentiate fast.com vs actual Netflix video streaming?

wtallis 4y ago
The fast.com page kicks off requests to nflxvideo.net domains for the actual speed measurement. And it wouldn't surprise me if actual Netflix video streaming made occasional connections to fast.com purely to make it harder for ISPs to cheat.
cesarb 4y ago
You can think of the requests to fast.com as just loading the speed test control scripts and user interface. The actual speed test loads files from the same servers (with the same SNI hostname) used by actual Netflix video streaming. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the fast.com speed test loads real streaming video segments from these servers, the only difference being that it doesn't have the decryption key for these videos.
- therein 4y ago
  That's surely how I would have done it.
- bmicraft 4y ago
  It would also not surprise me if dns requests for fast.com temporarily elevated bandwidth limits for netflix
- bradknowles 4y ago
  It does. You're loading segments of real movies on Netflix that are not encumbered by copyright. But they're intentionally otherwise indistinguishable from any other real movie on Netflix.
catminou 4y ago
Yes a few ISPs actually do this (not just for Netflix, but for other sites in general).

sharkski 4y ago

In the case of Ookla's speedtest, many ISPs host speed test servers to eliminate any variability of the wider internet. That's why it may seem they are prioritizing it. It's not a useless tool either as lets you narrow issues down to either your network or ISP.

anonymousnotme 4y ago

It definitely looks like testing sites are prioritized. The fastest download speed that I have gotten is maybe 7 MB (bytes) per second; generally it is 2-5 MB per second. The speed test sites generally get 100 Mb per second dowload. In general the best I seem to get is about half the speed of the speed test sites. To me the real speed of the ISP is how fast one can download something one wants, not the result of a test. I would prefer to see results for downloads/uploads from youtube and various CDN networks and popular sites. I would also like to see ISP have a URL that is inside their network to test upload and download so that one can at least isolate what part of the connection might be lagging. Actually, I just used devtools to snag a 25MB file from fast.com. Curl/wget gives a speed of about 3 or 4 MB per second. That does not really seem to match up with fast.com download speed of 70Mb/second. 70/8 is 8.75, which is about double. Is fast.com accurate? Is my math wrong?

jackson1442 4y ago
I personally like https://speed.cloudflare.com https://speed.cloudflare.com since it just looks like you're doing typical CloudFlare traffic. The results viewer is also quite nice.
- is_true 4y ago
  My ISP (Telecom) gives me a speed of 250Mbps using fast.com and 40Mbps using Cloudflare's tool.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Your isp likely has a Netflix oca or is directly peered with Netflix directly. It’s standard for any decent sized ISP since it’s either the largest or 2nd largest by volume peer (youtube being in the other).
- binkHN 4y ago
  Very cool! I never knew about this! I really appreciate the latency during upload test. I've bookmarked this and will stop using speedtest.net. Thank you!