5 ms·

How can one tell if Netflix is purposely being throttled as opposed to it just being heavy traffic periods?

by MWil 13y ago

twoodfin 13y ago
In my experience all recent Netflix slowness is a product of congestion at peering points between Netflix's ISPs (Cogent, Level 3) and the consumer broadband ISPs (Comcast, Verizon). There's a good article in the WSJ today on the dispute: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC0QqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304899704579391223249896550.html&ei=MekEU4fvHoWQ1AGWyIDgBg&usg=AFQjCNHyOtOjhwqssjZ8zKDLuKKnWuwy3w&sig2=BDZmNqfIIuvTgeaa3j0ICw&bvm=bv.61535280,d.dmQ https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... This kind of dispute is not really anything a Network Neutrality regime as currently proposed could fix.
- seanmcq 13y ago
  There are a few interesting choices in your comment that make it appear to be an Astroturf: 1. You state that it is "your experience" that "all" recent Netflix slowness is a result of peering contract disputes. Unless you are a network operations engineer at one of these companies how could you have this experience? 2. You link to the WSJ, which is not a credible source when discussing big media companies. That said, you may well be a real person, in which case I would recommend changing your wording on commonly astroturfed topics.
  - samelawrence 13y ago
    I'm not familiar with the term astroturf in this context. Explain?
    - positr0n 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing Basically it's a play on "grass roots" movements. Powerful groups attempt to mimic grass roots, populist movements by hiring a bunch of employees to pose and regular people and write comments on forums, etc. And as you know, astroturf is fake grass.
    - lukateake 13y ago
      One definition: "online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem." [1] [1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/feb/23/need-to-protect-internet-from-astroturfing http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/fe...
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's pretty easy to cast hand-waving aspersions.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    How about we stick to facts, instead of bullying ad-hominems, okay?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - crb002 13y ago
    Some dirty ISPs are refusing to use the CDNs that Netflix makes available to them instead of straightforward packet discrimination. I blame Netflix for not shaming Verizon and such with CDN usage stats.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    OK, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty: My company uses Cogent as an ISP, which means we were very interested in figuring out why our VPN performance became junk starting around last October. Some traceroutes and extended pings pointed the finger at the Comcast/Cogent peering point in NYC. A little Googling confirmed that we were obviously collateral damage in Netflix's ISPs ongoing disputes with the home broadband ISPs. Since then, it's been easy to correlate poor performance on my Netflix streaming with a a 60ms+ drop across a Cogent/Comcast peering point when I ping one of my company's servers from home. There have been several articles on tech news sites discussing this dispute[1][2]. I linked to the WSJ article because it was fresh this morning and provided a good summary of the state of play. On the other hand, accusations of actual throttling of Netflix traffic on a broadband provider's own network have been frequent but I haven't seen definitive evidence that it's happening on Comcast or Verizon. Personally, I'm pretty pissed that Comcast is taking my $70/month and failing to provide within a factor of 50 of advertised rates to one of the internet's most popular services. They seem to be playing chicken with Netflix and their own customers. It would rebound badly on them if they had decent competition, but franchise agreements are what they are. I don't count "internet points" very often, but it's pretty amusing for someone with a grand total of 137 HN karma to accuse me of being a shill. [1] http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about-netflix-is-cogents-fault/ http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about... [2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizon-bandwidth-provider-blame-each-other-for-slow-netflix-streaming/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizo...
    - crb002 13y ago
      Sean isn't a shill. He is a tech lead at one of the major media distribution companies who has a zest for getting at hard data instead of speculating. I said it once, I will say it again it is Netflix' fault for not shaming bad ISPs. Netflix controls the source code for their media player and they control their servers. With 99% accuracy they should be able to detect which ISPs are screwing them and release this in a report to consumers.
      - twoodfin 13y ago
        I wasn't accusing Sean of being a shill. I was pointing out the absurdity of his accusation that I might not be a real person, since by the (silly, of course) way that HN keeps track of these things, I've contributed much more here than he has. His comment was condescending and dumb, and he deserved to be called out on it. Think I'm wrong? Argue with me, don't start calling names. Netflix does publish ISP numbers, and the trend over the past 6 months for Comcast and Verizon has been awful, as is shown in the "not credible" WSJ article I linked.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    In the entire history of HN, nobody has ever made themselves look smarter or their argument more compelling by calling another HN user a shill.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    I think you're reading too much into it. On HN, it is extremely common for people to make very authoritative sounding posts, especially counter intuitive ones. This is the case whether the topic is net neutrality, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or the existence of black holes or whatever. You just take it with bags of salt and move on. Also, for many, the Wall Street Journal is not only a credible source but a battle cry. It's just very common on HN, don't think it is automatically astroturfing or pure propaganda (sometimes it is).
- pwarner 13y ago
  For super high bandwidth things (video today) it makes sense to serve as close to the end user as possible. This probably means putting the server in your ISP's network. This probably violates what most people think of as net neutrality. But it makes sense from a technical standpoint. I think net neutrality needs to update it's thinking to accommodate this model. Maybe what should be neutral is the pricing for putting a server inside the ISP's network? How do you treat the ISP's own video service? Force it to be a different company that pays the same as netflix to store a server there?
- digikata 13y ago
  There may be a technical differences between bad network performance due to some active throttling configuration in the network hardware, and bad network performance because a company doesn't want to make changes to a network interconnect. To the end user sees both cases as "throttling" in terms of poor performance. Net Neutrality should be about how we come to terms with companies that are pure ISPs trying to deliver data their customers want vs companies that stand to increase profits and hurt competitors through active throttling or, in the peering case, simple inaction.
nostromo 13y ago
VPN into an AWS instance. If Netflix is faster, your ISP may be throttling.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  First, most Netflix content isn't served from AWS, but from their CDNs running on a variety of ISPs (lately, a lot of Cogent). Second, the VPN trick doesn't really tell you anything except that the end point of the VPN has a better path to Netflix's CDNs than the route your ISP is using. Your ISP doesn't have to act overloaded routes to the content, which they want Netflix to pay to upgrade.
  - jimktrains2 13y ago
    1) I don't think he meant that it was being served off of AWS, just that was his VPN example. Any in the US should do. 2) VPNs add latency and are still limited by the bandwidth of your connection. Given that Netflix has a decent CDN, in theory your VPN-box shouldn't have all that much better a path to a Netflix server than you do. So, assuming that the paths to netflix are mostly equal, a fast VPN-Netflix experience vs a crappy local connection one would imply the ISP is to blame (for whatever reason malicious or not).
    - diminoten 13y ago
      The whole point is that Netflix's CDNs aren't "decent". That is, they're probably "decent" (quite good, I'd even imagine), but the load is so high so as to cause traffic problems anyway. The question was "how can I tell if it's Netflix or if it's my ISP?" and the answer is, "You can't."
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        If they're actually overloaded, as opposed to there being peering failures to the consumer ISPs, why would there be a difference between VPN and not-VPN?

How can one tell if Netflix is purposely being throttled as opposed to it just being heavy traffic periods?

by MWil 13y ago

How can one tell if Netflix is purposely being throttled as opposed to it just being heavy traffic periods?

In my experience all recent Netflix slowness is a product of congestion at peering points between Netflix's ISPs (Cogent, Level 3) and the consumer broadband ISPs (Comcast, Verizon). There's a good article in the WSJ today on the dispute: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC0QqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304899704579391223249896550.html&ei=MekEU4fvHoWQ1AGWyIDgBg&usg=AFQjCNHyOtOjhwqssjZ8zKDLuKKnWuwy3w&sig2=BDZmNqfIIuvTgeaa3j0ICw&bvm=bv.61535280,d.dmQ https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... This kind of dispute is not really anything a Network Neutrality regime as currently proposed could fix.

seanmcq 13y ago
There are a few interesting choices in your comment that make it appear to be an Astroturf: 1. You state that it is "your experience" that "all" recent Netflix slowness is a result of peering contract disputes. Unless you are a network operations engineer at one of these companies how could you have this experience? 2. You link to the WSJ, which is not a credible source when discussing big media companies. That said, you may well be a real person, in which case I would recommend changing your wording on commonly astroturfed topics.
- samelawrence 13y ago
  I'm not familiar with the term astroturf in this context. Explain?
  - positr0n 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing Basically it's a play on "grass roots" movements. Powerful groups attempt to mimic grass roots, populist movements by hiring a bunch of employees to pose and regular people and write comments on forums, etc. And as you know, astroturf is fake grass.
  - lukateake 13y ago
    One definition: "online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem." [1] [1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/feb/23/need-to-protect-internet-from-astroturfing http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/fe...
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's pretty easy to cast hand-waving aspersions.
- diminoten 13y ago
  How about we stick to facts, instead of bullying ad-hominems, okay?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- crb002 13y ago
  Some dirty ISPs are refusing to use the CDNs that Netflix makes available to them instead of straightforward packet discrimination. I blame Netflix for not shaming Verizon and such with CDN usage stats.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  OK, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty: My company uses Cogent as an ISP, which means we were very interested in figuring out why our VPN performance became junk starting around last October. Some traceroutes and extended pings pointed the finger at the Comcast/Cogent peering point in NYC. A little Googling confirmed that we were obviously collateral damage in Netflix's ISPs ongoing disputes with the home broadband ISPs. Since then, it's been easy to correlate poor performance on my Netflix streaming with a a 60ms+ drop across a Cogent/Comcast peering point when I ping one of my company's servers from home. There have been several articles on tech news sites discussing this dispute[1][2]. I linked to the WSJ article because it was fresh this morning and provided a good summary of the state of play. On the other hand, accusations of actual throttling of Netflix traffic on a broadband provider's own network have been frequent but I haven't seen definitive evidence that it's happening on Comcast or Verizon. Personally, I'm pretty pissed that Comcast is taking my $70/month and failing to provide within a factor of 50 of advertised rates to one of the internet's most popular services. They seem to be playing chicken with Netflix and their own customers. It would rebound badly on them if they had decent competition, but franchise agreements are what they are. I don't count "internet points" very often, but it's pretty amusing for someone with a grand total of 137 HN karma to accuse me of being a shill. [1] http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about-netflix-is-cogents-fault/ http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about... [2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizon-bandwidth-provider-blame-each-other-for-slow-netflix-streaming/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizo...
  - crb002 13y ago
    Sean isn't a shill. He is a tech lead at one of the major media distribution companies who has a zest for getting at hard data instead of speculating. I said it once, I will say it again it is Netflix' fault for not shaming bad ISPs. Netflix controls the source code for their media player and they control their servers. With 99% accuracy they should be able to detect which ISPs are screwing them and release this in a report to consumers.
    - twoodfin 13y ago
      I wasn't accusing Sean of being a shill. I was pointing out the absurdity of his accusation that I might not be a real person, since by the (silly, of course) way that HN keeps track of these things, I've contributed much more here than he has. His comment was condescending and dumb, and he deserved to be called out on it. Think I'm wrong? Argue with me, don't start calling names. Netflix does publish ISP numbers, and the trend over the past 6 months for Comcast and Verizon has been awful, as is shown in the "not credible" WSJ article I linked.
- tptacek 13y ago
  In the entire history of HN, nobody has ever made themselves look smarter or their argument more compelling by calling another HN user a shill.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  I think you're reading too much into it. On HN, it is extremely common for people to make very authoritative sounding posts, especially counter intuitive ones. This is the case whether the topic is net neutrality, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or the existence of black holes or whatever. You just take it with bags of salt and move on. Also, for many, the Wall Street Journal is not only a credible source but a battle cry. It's just very common on HN, don't think it is automatically astroturfing or pure propaganda (sometimes it is).
pwarner 13y ago
For super high bandwidth things (video today) it makes sense to serve as close to the end user as possible. This probably means putting the server in your ISP's network. This probably violates what most people think of as net neutrality. But it makes sense from a technical standpoint. I think net neutrality needs to update it's thinking to accommodate this model. Maybe what should be neutral is the pricing for putting a server inside the ISP's network? How do you treat the ISP's own video service? Force it to be a different company that pays the same as netflix to store a server there?
digikata 13y ago
There may be a technical differences between bad network performance due to some active throttling configuration in the network hardware, and bad network performance because a company doesn't want to make changes to a network interconnect. To the end user sees both cases as "throttling" in terms of poor performance. Net Neutrality should be about how we come to terms with companies that are pure ISPs trying to deliver data their customers want vs companies that stand to increase profits and hurt competitors through active throttling or, in the peering case, simple inaction.

nostromo 13y ago

VPN into an AWS instance. If Netflix is faster, your ISP may be throttling.

twoodfin 13y ago
First, most Netflix content isn't served from AWS, but from their CDNs running on a variety of ISPs (lately, a lot of Cogent). Second, the VPN trick doesn't really tell you anything except that the end point of the VPN has a better path to Netflix's CDNs than the route your ISP is using. Your ISP doesn't have to act overloaded routes to the content, which they want Netflix to pay to upgrade.
- jimktrains2 13y ago
  1) I don't think he meant that it was being served off of AWS, just that was his VPN example. Any in the US should do. 2) VPNs add latency and are still limited by the bandwidth of your connection. Given that Netflix has a decent CDN, in theory your VPN-box shouldn't have all that much better a path to a Netflix server than you do. So, assuming that the paths to netflix are mostly equal, a fast VPN-Netflix experience vs a crappy local connection one would imply the ISP is to blame (for whatever reason malicious or not).
  - diminoten 13y ago
    The whole point is that Netflix's CDNs aren't "decent". That is, they're probably "decent" (quite good, I'd even imagine), but the load is so high so as to cause traffic problems anyway. The question was "how can I tell if it's Netflix or if it's my ISP?" and the answer is, "You can't."
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      If they're actually overloaded, as opposed to there being peering failures to the consumer ISPs, why would there be a difference between VPN and not-VPN?