3 ms·
Do you use the Internet for work? Perhaps you can negotiate a business connection. Consumer Internet contracts have no Service Level Agreement (SLA) and so, yo
by NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Do you use the Internet for work? Perhaps you can negotiate a business connection.
Consumer Internet contracts have no Service Level Agreement (SLA) and so, you can call Support all you want, but it's not their problem what sort of speeds you get to third-party sites, not even across their own backbone. The advertised speeds are signaling rates and not download/upload speeds. If your modem is displaying the correct lights on the front panel, then your connection is trained up at the correct signaling rate according to your chosen connectivity package, and your ISP won't care about YouTube.
If you obtain a business service, then you can negotiate a particular SLA in your contract, which won't necessarily make them care about YouTube, but you may be able to specify a minimum bitrate and uptime.
speedtest.net and the like, by default, will make use of a co-located server as close as possible to you, in terms of network topology, and so the speed results you obtain will be under ideal conditions, and indicate the maximum possible performance.
- tomcam 3y agoIt’s $2500 a month here and that just makes me angry. I would probably do it if it weren’t for the fact that it worked fine a couple of years ago. Interestingly, the sales people for Comcast do say I should actually get those download speeds. They did not used to make claims that way. Comcast is happy to downgrade my performance. Thanks for that last paragraph. I didn’t realize that’s how the speed tests work, but of course you can see the negotiation process as they happen.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoThe other thing to know is that content distribution networks (CDNs) are rather complex nowadays, so it's not merely a question of "my connection to example.com is laggy" but more like "how is data from example.com getting from their servers through caches/load balancers/round-robin/co-locations?" When I took a course five years ago, our instructor said a few words on "Net Neutrality" and he explained that many companies who distribute content, like Netflix, positioned their servers, or at least caches, right where the ISPs are. Now, YouTube might only use Google's data centers for distribution; I don't know. There is also the question of whether Comcast perceives on-demand video as a competition for their own Cable TV services, and whether they're actively throttling video traffic that isn't their own content. Hopefully that would be a well-known fact.
- tomcam 3y agoDamn this is complex. Didn’t think about that.