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Google Video Quality Report
- eb0la 13y agoTelcos will have to invest in capacity where Google wants in order to get a good rating. Since Google is a de-facto monopoly, I think we'll see an Antitrust case soon.
- ddorian43 13y agoHow is youtube a monopoly? There are many free-to-upload/host videosistes.
- dredmorbius 13y agoMonopoly is defined by market share or market power. In the strict sense, it means "single provider", but a sufficiently large company can exercise an effective monopoly. Having a monopoly is not of itself illegal. Using it in certain ways is. Google are effectively a monopoly in search space. They're a massive presence in online advertising and video, as well as email.
- atonse 13y agoIf you look at the actual requirements they're talking about, they aren't that crazy. Even for HD video, they're talking > 2.5Mbps. So for really good quality, it's probably 5-6Mbps. I have 85Mbps FiOS at home, and I still sometimes have issues streaming Youtube videos. If my ISP can't even guarantee 10% of what I'm paying for over a fiber optic line, then yes, they need to be called out and publicly shamed.
- ihsw 13y agoWhat about if youtube.com's CDNs are overloaded and slow? Will you blame your ISP? This is the problem with such ratings systems -- they're inherently one-sided.
- atonse 13y agoI actually have much more faith in Google's capacity and CDN than I do in Verizon's history of sleaze. After all, Google doesn't have a conflict of interest, Verizon does. The better Netflix and YouTube get, the closer I am to canceling my Verizon TV service.
- enneff 13y agoWhy would this be the case? It is only in Google's best interests to provide the best streaming service possible. It's not like they have any shortage of servers, bandwidth, or funds with which to do so.
- sneak 13y ago5mbps per user, times tens or hundreds of thousands of users in a metro area. Video is the thing that will finally get us faster IP networks, as it slowly replaces TV as the modern opiate of the masses. Even BitTorrent wasn't enough.
- atonse 13y ago$60-80 a month for each one of those users (our bill is about $120 counting TV as well). Not counting the fact that local governments subsidize the last mile. Also that routers and networking equipment keeps getting cheaper and faster. It'll take a lot before I start to feel sorry for my ISP. The thing is, I get amazing speeds from other sites and very good speeds from my EC2 boxes. Downloading MS/Ubuntu ISOs are just beautiful. But those just aren't mainstream uses so I'm sure Verizon doesn't throttle those servers.
- johnpowell 13y agoFor the record I hate Centurylink. But I have 12 Mbps DSL with them and have never had a problem with youtube.
- mbreese 13y agoGoogle isn't close to a monopoly in the legal sense - especially in the online video delivery market. This will shine a light on ISP data handling and throttling.
- humanrebar 13y agoI don't know how this could be antitrust. On the contrary, it seems like it would be protected as free speech.
- earlz 13y agoGood. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewhere between 2MB/s and 8MB/s.
- kyle_t 13y ago^this. Same with Netflix though for me. Where are you based? I'm in Austin, Tx. Any of the speed tests online will report 30mbps/5mbps, but I'm unable to stream HD on Youtube or Netflix during peak times.
- earlz 13y agoI'm in Cleveland, OH. Like I said, never have problems with other services like Netflix or even streaming videos by vimeo or skydrive, just Youtube. It's so frustrating I've considered setting up a network-wide VPN for my home network to get around it
- fsckin 13y agoSame for me on Time Warner in Austin. I can't wait for Google Fiber to roll into town.
- jerf 13y agoAt peak times it isn't out of the question that the video service itself is a bit under the weather. I've had some troubles with Amazon at peak time, and it's always been with fresh content, such as yesterday's television show that just became available on Amazon four hours ago. It wasn't obviously my network, as switching over to Netflix worked just fine at full quality. (That's not a proof it's not still somehow network related, but it strongly suggests it wasn't my ISP.)
- math0ne 13y agoI'd be happy if my TWC in Austin would just stay up. I've had many techs out and the service goes down daily for sometimes hours at a time. ugh...
- flurpitude 13y agoGood step but in the absence of true competition between ISPs this does little for the end user. I can discover that my connection is bad, and then what?
- illumen 13y agoIf you have the largest online advertising and marketing company in the world telling everyone that an ISP sucks... well, then guess what the ISP will do? Either nothing, or lose customers.
- mbreese 13y agoIn the absense of meaningful competition, they'll likely just laugh. Still, it's good to have someone call them out.
- dredmorbius 13y agoWhich suggests that it would be in Google's interest to start fostering some competition. Hrm.... They've been playing with that in the fiber-to-home space. But running cable is expensive. I'm familiar with some wireless Internet providers in a few markets. The cool thing is that they can poach high-value, high-concentration subscribers first. Since the model is based on transmitters, typically rooftop installations, and the like, if they can hop onto a building, run Cat-6 throughout, and plug it in, they've got the whole building, plus can run local connections throughout the neighborhood, and beam line-of-site to other tall points. It's a pretty cool gig. Thinking maybe you set that up in a few major markets as a competition play.
- ddorian43 13y agoAt least you will know whos fault it is and direct your hate when the posibility arises, (new videosite or new isp).
- _greim_ 13y agoThen you go out and vote. The absence of true competition is because the average Joe isn't quite clued into the underlying problem of why things are slow. I suspect this is Google's way of raising awareness.
- adrianscott 13y agowell played, Google.
- nether 13y agoRegarding the graphics shown, so it's a series of youtubes...
- mogelbumm 13y agoQuite often videos are buffering on my 80 Mbit connection at home - however when I switch to tethering with my phones connection, there is no problem. I always had the impression that providers try to cache or throttle Youtube video downloads. So I really appreciate that Google is doing something about it. On a sidenote, the biggest german provider was trying to get money from services like Youtube for delivering their content. This rating turns it upside down :-)
- TillE 13y agoWell, I'm on a resold Telekom VDSL connection, and so far all I see is "Results from your location are not yet available." I've had major problems with YouTube videos in the past (despite having a very reliable 50Mbit down), but recently it's been fine.
- SethMurphy 13y agoThis part was particularly interesting "We often deploy servers within your ISP's network, vastly reducing the distance the video has to travel and minimizing the chance for congestion."
- JTon 13y agoGoogle Cache Servers. It also saves the ISP money by keeping popular traffic within it's own network/reducing carrier interconnect bandwidth.
- ddorian43 13y agoHow will they technically do it?
- atonse 13y agoIt's likely they'll just start doing analytics on the streaming speeds as we go about streaming youtube videos. They'll extract the ISP from our IP. That's how I'm guessing Netflix does it: http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa
- anandg 13y agoGoogle Fibre will soon top the list. Well played Google .. very well played.
- johndl 13y agoI'm unfamiliar with ISP scale networks - where is the actual bottleneck for them? One of the large ISPs in the UK is Virgin, and they have their own fibre network. They also throttle Youtube. Is there only so much data that can go down a fibre line? Is it the routers (I'm not sure if calling them routers is correct?) that lie between the main backbone and the network connecting a street/apartment? Is it the hardware in a handful of large data-centers?
- tonfa 13y agoUsually it's the peering between google/youtube and the ISP that is the bottleneck, internal ISP network and google CDN are usually fine there's just an unwillingness to upgrade the connection between them (usually because parties can't agree on terms, some ISP would like to be paid when peering).
- dudus 13y agoTraffic inside your network come free of cost of course except for your own bandwidth constraints, but once you need to communicate with other networks that's where you start to pay. Google offers free interconnections, but sometimes you can't just connect directly to Google and have to go through backbones that are owned by private companies. So ISPs need to create as many interconnections as possible with other networks to decrease their costs, invest in their own infrastructure and pay for everything their network can't reach directly.
- sneak 13y agoIn other words, Google thinks a PR campaign and angry customers is cheaper for the same bandwidth to edge networks than just paying the owners of those networks.
- ajross 13y agoUnder the net neutrality paradigm, the entities "paying" for the last-network bandwidth are the ISP customers, not the content providers. The content they choose to receive has traditionally been expected to be treated "neutrally" without requiring payment by the provider. This argument has been had, and in virtually all cases our community has agreed (contra the positions of many regulators it seems) that it's a good thing. Have you flipped on net neutrality or are you just confused because Google is the party harmed in this case?
- jerven 13y agoYes, because the customers of the networks have already paid for the bandwidth! I buy internet access and that includes access to youtube!
- szager 13y agoYou might, for just a brief moment, consider a less cynical, equally plausible explanation.
- jeffzoom 13y agoBrighthouse (TWC subsidiary) throttles quite a few services these days, Youtube being the biggest one. The throttling is so intense 24 hours a day that Google's streaming algorithm (download a little, play a little, repeat) can't continue downloading after the first initial burst. I can easily break it by VPNing into Work or School. They very recently started throttling Netflix. I have a 90mbps down connection, and I can hit those speeds even at peak times. ISPs are trying to strangle companies like Netflix into paying them for use of their network...you know...because Netflix doesn't already pay for an internet connection...they get free internet...because they're Netflix. This is like the Mob walking into your laundromat and saying: Mobster: "We own this whole block, and we want you to pay protection". Laundromat Owner: "But we already pay rent, and protection!" Mobster: "No, Clothing Protection. You're making a lot of money off dirty clothes, dirty clothes that get cleaned in our building. We want a cut. It would be a shame if someone left a sharpie in every washing machine wouldn't it? Then no one would come to your laundromat." Netflix: "What if we don't let anyone in who has a sharpie?" Google: "What if I just tell everyone the Mob ruined their clothes?"
- snorkel 13y agoGoogle is smart to Name and Shame the bad ISPs. I just think they should build this into the Youtube player, whenever the buffering spinner lags for more than 5 seconds have a a little message fade in that explains what the hold up is.
- skore 13y agoInteresting. Couldn't they just run a tracert and, through broad data comparisons, prove quite elegantly what the holdups in the chain are?
- tomphoolery 13y agoSo basically...it's a series of tubes.
- sergiotapia 13y agoI'm not totally buying this - why is it when I have this extension[1] enabled, YouTube FLIES and works just as I remember it to work back in 2007? [1] - https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter
- noxa 13y agoI haven't used this extension but my guess is that it's defeating the host redirection that ISPs do to point you at their extremely shitty and underprovisioned edge caches. Most ISPs run them to cache popular youtube content and save on out of network bandwidth, however as with most things they are terrible at it and extremely cheap. The solution I've been most happy with is to run all traffic over VPN to an endpoint not under Comcast - keeps everything nice and speedy, albeit with slightly more latency.
- cjoh 13y agoIs it me, or is this website subtly paying homage to Sen. Ted Stevens' famous "Series of Tubes" anti-net-neutrality speech.
- justinbischoff 13y agoYeah, I immediately thought series of tubes.
- meandthebean 13y agoMaybe they used that imagery because a series of tubes is an apt metaphor for internet bandwidth.
- wmf 13y agoPeople talked about Internet "pipes" for many years, but somehow Stevens was a moron for saying "tubes".
- nsxwolf 13y agoHe wasn't a moron for saying "tubes". We was a moron for the extended, stammering, rambling and incomprehensible context he used that word in.
- tene 13y agoThe rest all seems reasonable to me, but you think he's a moron for stammering? I have a noticeable problem with stammering myself, and so do a few of the cleverest people I know. Stammering is an involuntary speech disorder, not a sign of low intelligence. That's simply not accurate.
- cjoh 13y agoStevens' whole quote: "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially... They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material." This doesn't strike me as someone who knows what they're talking about.
- Geee 13y agoGoogle, would you please stop making these pretty advertisements and actually fix the problems? Thanks, Internet.
- Geee 13y agoWow, angry googlers strike again ;)
- packetslave 13y agoor maybe you just have no clue about what "the problems" actually are, and who needs to fix them.
- chaz 13y agoWorth mentioning that Netflix has a similar effort: http://blog.netflix.com/2014/01/new-isp-performance-data-for-december.html http://blog.netflix.com/2014/01/new-isp-performance-data-for... http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/ http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/
- mark_l_watson 13y ago+1 that was useful! Took 20 seconds to see how my local ISP does relative to other providers.
- dudus 13y agoGreat, but I can't see my country (Brazil) in there, even though Netflix operates here.
- fuqua 13y agoI can't get it to work in Washington, DC. I smell a conspiracy...
- squigs25 13y agoI get great streaming from netflix, and I find youtube frequently has trouble. Maybe my ISP (Verizon FIOS) is throttling youtube and not netflix, but that would be strange.
- hackmiester 13y agoI'm a netadm for my network (a /16) and "Results for [my] location are not currently available". Any idea how I can alleviate this? I'm curious how we're doing.
- __david__ 13y agoI find it amusing that their big support button[1] ends up at an error page[2], given the bad reputation of Google's consumer customer support. [1] Rightmost, here: http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#a_faster_web http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#a_faster_web [2] https://support.google.com/youtube/checklist/3480866?p=video_checklist&rd=1 https://support.google.com/youtube/checklist/3480866?p=video...
- knodi 13y agoWho can one test throttling by an ISP because I think Comcast is throttling youtube for the last 3 months. Its been very slow for me but my other downloads are 7MBs.
- m_eiman 13y agoGoogle, please don't break my Back button. I actually try to use it once in a while…
- Fogest 13y agoThere is nothing to go back on...
- nraynaud 13y agoInterestingly, one of the early Nest investors is the CEO of an ISP who is in a battle with youtube over network traffic.
- jschmitz28 13y agoI was really hoping this was going to address the seeking problem. It seems like whenever I want to seek, even backwards to already buffered content, there's a 50/50 chance the video player will stop working entirely and force me to do a refresh and lose my entire video buffer.
- kd0amg 13y agoThe past few times I've had this happen, refreshing the page just dropped me right where I'd left off before trying to seek backwards.
- baby 13y agoI didn't this happened elsewhere. Here in France it's a huge problem, providers even talk about youtube in their ads to get people's attention. Free is the most famous case in France because they constantly refuse to do their jobs thinking that it's google's job to do (I don't know who's right but I left them because of their problem with youtube). Few months ago (or was it a year?) they upgraded their modem to block Google advertisement by default. A pretty bold move.
- tnorthcutt 13y agoAnybody else see "Results from your location are not yet available." when you hover over "Your Results"?
- monkeyspaw 13y agoYes. Am in San Diego on Cox Cable.
- WayneS 13y agoSame here: Centurylink DSL in Indiana
- zevyoura 13y agoI have this as well, and I'm in Los Angeles, which seems like one of the earlier markets they'd nail down. Can someone who does have results for their area post a screenshot of what it looks like?
- lkbm 13y agoSame in Austin, TX, where Google Fiber is coming next.
- TinyTimZamboni 13y agoSame in downtown SF -_-
- Fogest 13y agoI see it, however when I was on YouTube while uploading a video and trying to watch a video at the same time I had a little blue message pop up below my video letting me know I can find out more about why load times are slow. I clicked it and it brought me to the page rating my ISP. It's funny an ISP that uses the same lines as my ISP got an HD-Verified status, and then mine is only SD. Hmmm, throttling much.
- huytoan_pc 13y agoAnybody knows why recently Youtube re-buffers every video when I hit replay? It might make sense for long videos but for relative short videos (music videos and the like), it's really frustrating.
- gman99 13y agoIt's because Youtube uses DASH[1] by default now. It's also the reason why it never buffers more than a few seconds of video anymore. I installed YoutubeCenter[2] and disabled DASH from the options and it seems to work well every since. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_over_HTTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove... [2] https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter
- Aloisius 13y agoDoes DASH actually require you not to utilize the browser cache for some reason? It seems to me that all you have to do is keep the request URLs around that you previously requested and perhaps the byte range that you fetched if you abort and the browser should be able to pull it straight from the cache. No? Of course you'd get the same quality as the previous play, but with a little work you could splice in some higher quality segments if you wanted.
- canistr 13y agoWhat does the Y axis mean on these graphs?
- bhartzer 13y agoThere are still a lot of people in rural America that don't have internet speeds above 2MB/s, and that should be our top priority.
- MartinCron 13y agoI agree, let's move them to the city where the bandwidth is better.
- elwell 13y agoKansas City has Google Fiber. That's a start.
- cydonian_monk 13y agoCurious. For me the 30-240 seconds long ads YouTube shows are always 1080p (or at very least high quality) and never choppy, yet streaming YouTube content videos at the same resolution often results in terrible buffering issues. Are the crappy ISP (ComCast) cahce servers only caching the non-ad videos? Does YouTube serve these through an AdSense / non-YouTube source that bypasses the cache? There are times it seems the only part of YouTube that works are the ads.
- bumbledraven 13y agoThe ads are cached because the same ones are shown to so many people. Most videos are served to any particular neighborhood much less frequently than ads, and so are usually not in the edge cache.
- cydonian_monk 13y agoYes, which in my case is an indication of the system working properly. Leads me to wonder if the issues I have with Comcast + YouTube are on the Comcast side, the Google side, or are just the nature of the streaming-video beast.
- 10feet 13y agoHow many ads do you think there are, and how many videos? 100 different ads, and about a billion videos people are interested in watching.
- cheerio 13y agoI've noticed a trick when watching long HD youtube videos that I need to pause and re-wind several times. If I'm signed in to my web browser the video quality is demoted to lower quality after a while of watching, pausing and re-winding. To avoid this degradation of quality, I use a browser in incognito mode, and the quality stays HD. Does anyone who why this occurs?
- mcgwiz 13y agoNot that I have the time to do this, but it would be ideal if something like this existed for multiple services and was run by a third-party. Kind of like http://speakeasy.net/speedtest http://speakeasy.net/speedtest that speaks the APIs of various streaming video publishers. If it's crowd-sourced and non-profit, then it could be more credible and less subject to allegations of impartiality by the ISPs themselves.
- jmharvey 13y agoIt seems like only a matter of time before Google starts informing people where, along the pipe between the Youtube servers and their computer, their traffic is being throttled.
- bane 13y agoProbably very relevant for this discussion: http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/time-warner-cable-sucks-for-youtube-twitchtv/ http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/time-warner-cable-sucks-for-yo... I have FiOS and have the same problem and following these instructions transformed my youtube experience.
- Pxtl 13y agoThat's confusing. It listed the 9 ISP's in my area... and the local power company. The power company's graph looked completely different from the ISP graphs, of course.
- omgitstom 13y agoIt is sad that this has to exist. Net neutrality is pretty much in the trash if companies like Google and Netflix have to issue reports like this.
- geekam 13y agoI can't even work on my regular job or projects without seeing at least 4% packet loss, intermittently spread out across the day. Not only that, I clearly see pings taking too long even with wired connection. Comcast has told me they cannot do anything about it. They say that the 2 MacBooks and a couple of iPads is a lot of traffic for the router+modem they have given me. Not only this, I know that the moment I start Youtube or Amazon instant (I do not have Netflix), the packet loss starts to go up or at least the ping return times sometimes go up to 4000ms. This also happens when I RDP into my Windows PC at work when I telework. I have tried resetting the router, use it with other channels, use it with and without all possibilities of encryption (WPA, WPA2 etc.) and I really cannot think of doing anything anymore. The Comcast representation said they will reimburse $30 bucks if I got my own router because the issue is not their fault. I am not sure how to approach this issue anymore. My apartment building does not have Verizon FiOS or any other service. I have given up all hope. Sometimes I feel like adding unlimited LTE/4G on my iPhone from T-mobile and use that as the main Internet hub.
- fpgeek 13y agoI'd absolutely try as much of your own equipment as possible. Comcast may well be up to other tricks, but they also have no incentive to give you anything other than a "good enough for most people" modem/router. It can be surprising how much of a difference better networking gear can make. I've seen a VoIP router throttle a 50 Mbps to 5 Mbps for no apparent reason (over-aggressive QoS logic?). I've also seen issues with modems that don't have the latest-and-greatest DOCSIS support (you'd think Comcast would notice that sort of thing when you complained, but...). I'd also avoid combined modem/wireless router boxes (which it sounds like you have) like the plague. The bundled wireless is usually much worse than what you can get separately. Plus wireless technology tends to move faster than modem technology anyway.
- lowlevel 13y agoI also experience 'buffering' or pausing/hanging videos almost any time I try to watch a youtube video. The video ads of course work perfectly fine, so I don't think I'm buying this 'it's your ISP' argument. For what it's worth, I'm sitting on 100M up/down fibre...
- sumedh 13y agoThat is because the ads are cached since a lot of people are going to watch that ad.
- pooky666 13y agoIm liking the series of tubes
- JohnTHaller 13y agoNow that it's fully legal for ISPs to throttle Netflix, Google, et al (thanks, Verizon) and extort money from them in return for giving customers the bandwidth they pay for, I think it's time for all the major players to track performance on the networks and call out the throttlers with a message right over the video stream on their website and in-app (Android, iOS, Xbox, etc). SO, when you use TWC and are getting only 60k as are all your neighbors, Google can pop a warning up on your screen that your connection is slow and the support number for your provider. This will result in lots of angry customers calling their providers about the issue, and get them to be angry at the right people.
- zackmorris 13y agoAlso net neutrality was a key barrier to ad hoc and distributed/self organizing networks. Once people perceive that they are not guaranteed to get what they paid for, there will be a race to the bottom to find alternatives. The ISPs killed the goose that laid the golden egg and don't even know it yet.
- guelo 13y agoThis doesn't ring true. Mesh-type networks fail for many reasons. Mainly, nobody seems to have found a good use for them, especially with everybody walking around with 4G hotspots nowadays. Seems very doubtful that the FCC would have gotten involved regulating some fledgling community network. Can you provide any evidence that an adhoc network was ever regulated under network neutrality rules?
- dangrossman 13y agoI don't think that's what he's saying. He's saying that ad hoc networks never took off because normal ISPs were good enough. Normal ISPs were good enough because of net neutrality. Now that net neutrality no longer forces ISPs to provide equal service levels for all data someone may want to access, there's an opening for ad hoc networks to fill.
- _mulder_ 13y ago
- sifarat 13y agoha! they need not worry about my ISP. Because youtube is totally blocked for more than year now. hehe.
- nForce 13y agoFor Google to build their own fibre optic networks, that will be able to accommodate a lot of the USA and Europe, what's the costs/difficulties? I am aware they were trialling some sort of netwrok locally to CA, how difficult/expensive is it to roll this out worldwide?
- sentenza 13y agoYES! Deutsche Telekom needs a public shaming. They are the former state monopolist in Germany and use their large customer base als bargaining chip, refusing to peer at internet exchanges and so on. Needless to say that YouTube loading speeds have been sub-par with that ISP.
- weazl 13y ago> We pick the shortest, most direct route. Eh, no. I'm sure they try but more often than not my YouTube is streaming from Amsterdam according to http://redirector.c.youtube.com/report_mapping http://redirector.c.youtube.com/report_mapping, I live in Stockholm and have a 250 MBit connection. So instead of blazing fast speeds I get buffering like I'm on a modem. I've found no way of reporting this issue, my ISP did not know either. I worked around the issue myself with hundreds of lines like this "74.125.163.38 r1---sn-5hn7ym76.googlevideo.com r1.sn-5hn7ym76.googlevideo.com" in my router hosts file. This finally made videos buffer pretty much instantly.
- Grue3 13y agoYoutube videos are terribly slow for everyone, regardless of ISP. Every other video service works much more reliably than Youtube. It's your goddamn fault, Google. Fix it.