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> hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling That's exactly what the person above you meant about Cloudflare, right?
by Aachen 3y ago
> hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling
That's exactly what the person above you meant about Cloudflare, right? By using the Netflix speedtest as a benchmark, you're promoting good connectivity to another commercial entity (for good or for bad, I don't mean to judge, just stating)
- jeroenhd 3y agoNetflix and Google (YouTube) are commercial entities that ISPs will intentionally throttle. Reduce the bandwidth for all Netflix servers to 5mbps and suddenly you're stuck watching at 480p or 720p, even if the connection can handle multiple 4k streams. This is abused for "unlimited data" subscriptions that aren't unlimited when you actually try to consume more data than a standard subscription would allow you to. Of course that's completely illegal in countries with net neutrality laws, but not every country has those. I can't think of a reason why a shitty ISP would throttle Cloudflare, as Cloudflare mostly hosts small files. As an ISP you want customers to think websites are nice and fast, because if only Netflix is slow, surely the problem lies with Netflix, right? If speedtest.net says you have gigabit, Cloudflare says the same, and fast.com is giving you 5mbps, your ISP is messing with your bandwidth. It could be that Netflix has technical issues, but you'd read about those. That's why these tests are useful, and why we need more like them.
- Aachen 3y ago> Netflix and Google (YouTube) are commercial entities that ISPs will intentionally throttle. In Nederland? I only heard these stories from the USA, and then specifically about monopoly ISPs with Netflix as trial target to see if they can get extra money from them
- jeroenhd 3y agoWe're safe from this nonsense here in the Netherlands ever since KPN tried to blocked Skype on their network and upset legilators, and the EU has had net neutrality law for a while now. However, with most of the internet being developed over in the USA, the internet as a whole gets better with these features. I haven't caught any real ISP here (only train/public WiFi). I don't trust Dutch ISPs to follow the law so I do run these checks every now and then. At least one American mobile carrier overtly advertises "5G" with "unlimited data" followed by "DVD quality (480p) standard" video quality, but not every carrier in every country will be that direct.