8 ms·

Google Shames Slow U.S. ISPs With Its New YouTube Video Quality Report

216 points by sunilkumarc 12y ago

yellowbkpk 12y ago
A link to the actual report: http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/
- devindotcom 12y ago
  And a link to the methodology, which explains a bit more about it: http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  "Results from your location are not yet available." from the UK. [Ranty aside:] Also the page is horrible. Got to the bottom, tried to scroll up using scrollbars, bars are gone. Attempted to use PgUp, doesn't work. Can't tell where in the page you are, sometimes it takes a few scroll "clicks" to move the page on, mostly just 1, but you can't tell if it's not moved because you're at the end or because it stalled or something. Used the arrow keys, got to top and hovered over the "your results" and got the message above, tried to copy and paste but it's not accessible. Grrr, shouldn't have to use Inspect Element just to copy error text from a page. Bet they employ a ton of people to focus solely on usability and accessibility of their pages too ...
- Holbein 12y ago
  "Results from your location are not yet available" (I'm in Europe). Could somebody post a link how the results page look like? Thanks!
  - sp332 12y ago
    There's a screenshot in the article. http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2014-05-29_0852.png?w=1006&h=670 http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2014-05-...
- tnuc 12y ago
  Looking at the presentation; http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#how_video_gets_to_you http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#how_video_gets... This confirms that the internet really is a series of tubes.
freeasinfree 12y ago
All I get is "Results from your location are not yet available."
- yonran 12y ago
  Same here. I am in San Francisco (Sonic.net) and I cannot see the graph shown in the article for San Francisco. Is there any way to ask for results for a specific location?
  - bsimpson 12y ago
    http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ is working for me, even though http://g.co/videoqualityreport http://g.co/videoqualityreport was giving me that same error.
    - adamfeldman 12y ago
      This worked for me in Houston! Thanks!
    - freeasinfree 12y ago
      http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ worked for me, thank you.
- davidradcliffe 12y ago
  I got that too. I had to force-refresh the page to get my results. I guess I visited the page several months ago before they had results.
tlogan 12y ago
I'm looking the report here: http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ But I cannot understand the graph (Video consumption and Quality). Can anybody help here?
- devindotcom 12y ago
  The graph shows what I assume is overall volume of bandwidth seen from that provider, and then the proportion of each type of YouTube stream the connection is capable of holding: HD, SD, or sub-SD. Seeing HD (dark blue) take up most of the volume is good, since it means the ISP provides enough bandwidth throughout the day to watch a video in high def.
  - phil21 12y ago
    This is just flawed. It will put your provider that tends to sell 3mbps DSL lines that are rock-solid 24/7 with great peering below that of providers that sell 50Mbps lines that have fairly crappy peering and you only get 4Mbps and 5% packet loss during peak. Or at least it will look that way on these graphs, since very few HD streams will be performed by the first provider's customers. I'd be a heck of a lot more interested in looking at data that shows buffer underruns based on time of day. That will show congested providers vs. providers that simply offer less bandwidth. AKA it will separate the providers that lie, and those that are honest. I don't know much about youtube's architecture, but in general these stats are pretty simple to do via basic math and access logging. You look at the total request time, how many bytes were sent, video bitrate, and then calculate how many seconds of video were actually downloaded vs. how long the request took. If the request took longer than the total seconds of video downloaded, then the user probably experienced buffering. It's a bit rough, but the numbers are incredibly useful in aggregate. I've used this method to identify peering issues (looking at you FT) when more advanced methods are not available.
higherpurpose 12y ago
More companies should be keeping track of this, so in case we don't pass a strong net neutrality law, and ISP's do in fact start slowing everyone down in order to make them pay to get back to normal speeds [1], we can have a swift and strong backlash against them. Let's make it impossible for them to do this without millions of people finding out about it at once. [1] - http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious-graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/ http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious...
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  what happens if the big content providers pay the small (to them) amounts of money being asked? if end users don't see a change in their content's speed - or if it comes FASTER because other data is being penalized, the problem is magnified. average joe says 'hey the internet has gotten much faster since they ended that pesky regulation' - and doesn't see the 30 media startups that couldn't get off the ground, because for them, the money asked to provide faster access is very pricey. a startup average joe hasn't heard of won't have the money to outbid their competitors for the limited 'media bandwidth' the isp is willing to send through. average joe doesn't care about a company he hasn't heard of because he doesn't know what they have to offer. my guess is that's what the ISP's want. they give the users a better experience - prioritizing video packets over email, for example, at no perceived cost to them. in doing so, they set up a huge barrier to entry that takes a long time for average joe to understand. he won't take the time to understand this, because the harm caused is a huge loss on possible new things in exchange for a small benefit to existing things.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rpm4321 12y ago
I know Google is traditionally very stingy when it comes to adding elements to their interfaces, but this seems important enough to dedicate at least a small portion of screen real estate to it on every YouTube video page. It would certainly have more of an impact than a report that 99% of users will never see. It doesn't have to be a big deal - maybe just a "cellphone bars"-like icon, linked to further info and net neutrality content.
- karaziox 12y ago
  They are doing it. If you have a slow connection and the video start to buffer a lot, there is a banner that appear right under the video linking to the video quality report. I saw it yesterday
  - Alupis 12y ago
    Good. We need to Name-n-Shame these ISP's into doing good by their customers. There was an interesting interview with Comcast CEO the other day where he said, "[We] don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated.” But then he attempted to shift the blame to content providers: "Roberts followed up this statement by saying that Comcast is mostly hated because 'it’s the company consumers have to deal with when other companies raise their prices.'" http://bgr.com/2014/05/28/comcast-ceo-roberts-interview/ http://bgr.com/2014/05/28/comcast-ceo-roberts-interview/
    - Touche 12y ago
      What is the customer's recourse though? Get even slower DSL?
      - Alupis 12y ago
        NO, the recourse is to choose independent ISP's. They generally offer better pricing for faster speeds with less BS, ie no monitoring, ad injections, throttling, etc. You will have to look for ones in your area, but they are there. Usually each major city will have a few. Rural areas will tend to have more WISP's (wireless isp's) that are also small and all about their customers. The recourse is to call your Senator and Congressman and demand they force big ISP's to lease fiber/copper to smaller companies, much like phone-line providers are required to lease their copper to other companies. This will help spur competition, which means everyone wins.
goatforce5 12y ago
I imagine ISPs will start using these results in advertising really quickly. "Google rates us as Excellent for video playback. Compare us with your ISP! We're faster than 82% of ISPs in this area." Google/YouTube speed ratings could very quickly end up being analogous to school rankings. You want to be in an area with good schools, and if you don't have good schools you're probably going to start putting pressure on people to improve things.
- dublinben 12y ago
  This would be wonderful, but most American have no meaningful competition for ISPs.
- coldcode 12y ago
  If there was any competition in your area. Soon it will be Comcast or Comcast. Unless you live in a Google place.
  - goatforce5 12y ago
    If it becomes clear that areas served by a single ISP get worse performance than those in areas with choices, than that too is useful to know and promote, right? Or maybe Google just wants to publish charts showing Google Fibre areas are consistently at the top of their lists so that other municipalities will want to make it easy for them to enter their local market (and/or ask their local monopolies why they can't be more like a Google-town).
  - toast0 12y ago
    The (pending) merger of Comcast and Time Warner does not change any areas from a choice of Comcast or Time Warner to no choice, because there are no areas where the two cable providers cover the same addresses.
    - JshWright 12y ago
      And somehow no one seems to think that's a problem in the first place...
chrisBob 12y ago
It is impressive how local the results are. Comcast is rated as HD at my house (Natick MA) but SD at work (Boston MA). I use RCN which performs well in both areas and costs much less.
- carbocation 12y ago
  I'm in Cambridge MA and got no results, so you're right, it must be quite localized. UPDATE: Opening the page in incognito mode, I got results. My privacy settings prevented the tool from working. And those same settings are probably preventing YouTube from working well for me.
lucb1e 12y ago
> Results are not available on your location I suppose having net neutrality as a law helps, then?
nerdtalker 12y ago
I'm sure Google's efforts to shame ISPs with this new report are well-intentioned, but I really miss the old YouTube speedtest which it seemed almost nobody knew about: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed/ http://www.youtube.com/my_speed/ It seemed to show more data – both throughput from your actual cookied sessions and graphs of comparable connections around you. It took months for YouTube/Google to generate these reports when there was existing data out there already. I guess they wanted something that'd be easily digestible for a Netflix-style monthly shame-a-thon.
brokentone 12y ago
For comparison purposes, Netflix has been releasing this data for some time: http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa
berberich 12y ago
Here's the Netflix ISP Speed Index, which is more of an ISP ranking: http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/ http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/
- The_Double 12y ago
  Can anyone explain what these numbers really mean? How can they possiby be so low? The only thing I can imagine is that it measures sum(max(clientSpeed,NetflixSpeed))/n , where NetflixSpeed is only about 4Mbps. That would make this a ranking of what isp has the lowest amount of users with really shitty WiFi, or users watching netflix on slow smartphones. I doubt there are many ISP's with offer a connection of less than 4Mbps between their backbone and Netflix. Either way, it's good to see my ISP ranking the second highest worldwide.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    > Can anyone explain what these numbers really mean? How can they possiby be so low? If you click on any details page (either the global chart or country full results) and scroll to the page bottom you get an explanatory text: > These ratings reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISPs network from Nov. 2012 through Sept. 2013 and average performance during prime time starting in Oct. 2013. The average is well below the peak performance due to many factors including the variety of encodes we use to deliver the TV shows and movies we carry as well as home Wi-Fi and the variety of devices our members use. Those factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs, so these relative rankings are a good indicator of the consistent performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network.
tzs 12y ago
Provo, UT, is interesting. It has both Google Fiber and Comcast. Their performance is essentially the same, with perhaps a very slight edge to Comcast. I tried to compare them in the other Google Fiber cities, but Provo was the only one I saw both Google and Comcast in. (Austin, TX, is interesting, because that is supposedly a Google Fiber city, but Google Fiber does not show up in the report). Comcast has similar performance in all the cities I've lived in as an adult (Los Angeles area, Silicon Valley, Seattle, small towns on the west side of Puget Sound). Certainly not what I expected given all the complaining I see on the net about Comcast and YouTube performance.
- ismavis 12y ago
  Google Fiber deployment in Austin hasn't started.
- magicalist 12y ago
  > Certainly not what I expected given all the complaining I see on the net about Comcast and YouTube performance Comcast gives many things about which to complain, but I've never had an issue with Youtube on them. What I've been shocked by in the past is the disparity between youtube on my comcast connection and youtube on people's TimeWarner connection when I've visited, where it has been completely abysmal in the past. Like, 1990s RealPlayer quality, not only because you have to turn it down to 144p just to play, but also because it still stutters horribly even at that resolution. I feel like most of the "one weird DNS trick to fix youtube" posts have been about timewarner, though I don't know if my memory is accurate there. Notably TimeWarner looks fine on these graphs (at least in a few places where I've had friends complain about it in the past), so maybe they've fixed things.
  - vitd 12y ago
    Oddly my wife used to see this on her laptop in our apartment in Los Angeles. I would play a video, and it would be fine at HD. I'd ping her the link, and she would attempt to play it and it would be stuttery and crappy. I'm not sure what changed, but eventually it just cleared up. We were on the same connection. Very odd.
CoffeeDregs 12y ago
Interesting. Given all of the complaints about the big providers, the chart suggests to me that they're doing an OK job? Perhaps Google is trying to get out in front of the arrival of throttling? Also, as a cynical person, I compared SF to Washington DC expecting to see that DC was perfect and SF was not. Instead they looked quite comparable. In fact, I couldn't really find any major metro in which cable performed poorly (NYC wasn't wonderful).
trustfundbaby 12y ago
The graph in the actually video report is a poor way of representing that information IMO. It took me a second to figure out what the graph represented and then after that I still didn't know why I should care. I guess average speed/bandwith was too esoteric to chart? #sarcasm
listwise 12y ago
Reminds me a little of this service but for payment processor speeds/success: http://gatewayindex.spreedly.com/explore http://gatewayindex.spreedly.com/explore
- contingencies 12y ago
  Very interested but the page never renders...
cddotdotslash 12y ago
And the average user will never see it. If Google really wants to do something effective, add a red warning bar at the top of the page that says "Your ISP is making YouTube slower. Call them at...". I guarantee ISPs will take notice then.
- timothya 12y ago
  If you're watching a video and your connection becomes slow, it prompts you to take a look at the report to understand what's making it slow. It's not a direct phone number, but a reasonable number of average people will hopefully take a look while their video is buffering and start to understand that their ISP may be the reason YouTube seems slow.
tinalumfoil 12y ago
I feel some of these results may be misleading. I watch YouTube mostly through Wifi, where the Wifi is the bottleneck and and not my ISP. The methodology page [1] doesn't seem to take that into account. [1] http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology
- jordanthoms 12y ago
  Well they are showing only ability to maintain a HD stream, not absolute speed. Any decent wifi network should be able to get at least 10mbit, so it won't impact HD streaming.
subdane 12y ago
The visual storytelling of the associated video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH863XXRZEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH863XXRZEQ is fantastic. You can watch the vid w/out sound and still understand the point they're trying to make.
zavi 12y ago
Can't seem to find a single city with both Comcast and Time Warner Cable.
jrockway 12y ago
Something that's interesting about this data is that it measures speed end-to-end. So if you are an ISP that gives out flaky WiFi routers, your score will be lower not because of any limit between YouTube and the ISP or the ISP and the CPE, but because of that "last meter"* between the access point and laptop. * A new term I'm coining for this :)
- fpgeek 12y ago
  Is FiOS still giving out those terrible Actiontec routers? If so, maybe this will get them to fix that. I still remember switching from them to Comcast to what should have been a far better connection (over 2x download and maybe 8x upload) and thinking it was crap... until I turned off the access point in the Actiontec and started using my old AP again.
handelaar 12y ago
I assume Vimeo doesn't have this because it always sucks for everybody on every network.
NicoJuicy 12y ago
Bad publicity on the most popular video website? Nice thinking for countering anti-net neutrality ISP's :)
mmgutz 12y ago
Would a cable company, ISP for most of us, want to offer connections capable of ultra HD quality video streaming? Streaming threatens half of their business.
Vendan 12y ago
Yay, no ISP in my area is HD verified! Wait, booo!
bobcat469 12y ago
Centurylink. I have the highest internet speed you can give me. But, as for YouTube: you bottleneck this site like crazy. "Youtube, you have failed this city." -The Arrow

216 points by sunilkumarc 12y ago

A link to the actual report: http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/

devindotcom 12y ago
And a link to the methodology, which explains a bit more about it: http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
"Results from your location are not yet available." from the UK. [Ranty aside:] Also the page is horrible. Got to the bottom, tried to scroll up using scrollbars, bars are gone. Attempted to use PgUp, doesn't work. Can't tell where in the page you are, sometimes it takes a few scroll "clicks" to move the page on, mostly just 1, but you can't tell if it's not moved because you're at the end or because it stalled or something. Used the arrow keys, got to top and hovered over the "your results" and got the message above, tried to copy and paste but it's not accessible. Grrr, shouldn't have to use Inspect Element just to copy error text from a page. Bet they employ a ton of people to focus solely on usability and accessibility of their pages too ...
Holbein 12y ago
"Results from your location are not yet available" (I'm in Europe). Could somebody post a link how the results page look like? Thanks!
- sp332 12y ago
  There's a screenshot in the article. http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2014-05-29_0852.png?w=1006&h=670 http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2014-05-...
tnuc 12y ago
Looking at the presentation; http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#how_video_gets_to_you http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#how_video_gets... This confirms that the internet really is a series of tubes.

freeasinfree 12y ago

All I get is "Results from your location are not yet available."

yonran 12y ago
Same here. I am in San Francisco (Sonic.net) and I cannot see the graph shown in the article for San Francisco. Is there any way to ask for results for a specific location?
- bsimpson 12y ago
  http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ is working for me, even though http://g.co/videoqualityreport http://g.co/videoqualityreport was giving me that same error.
  - adamfeldman 12y ago
    This worked for me in Houston! Thanks!
  - freeasinfree 12y ago
    http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ worked for me, thank you.
davidradcliffe 12y ago
I got that too. I had to force-refresh the page to get my results. I guess I visited the page several months ago before they had results.

tlogan 12y ago

I'm looking the report here: http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ But I cannot understand the graph (Video consumption and Quality). Can anybody help here?

devindotcom 12y ago
The graph shows what I assume is overall volume of bandwidth seen from that provider, and then the proportion of each type of YouTube stream the connection is capable of holding: HD, SD, or sub-SD. Seeing HD (dark blue) take up most of the volume is good, since it means the ISP provides enough bandwidth throughout the day to watch a video in high def.
- phil21 12y ago
  This is just flawed. It will put your provider that tends to sell 3mbps DSL lines that are rock-solid 24/7 with great peering below that of providers that sell 50Mbps lines that have fairly crappy peering and you only get 4Mbps and 5% packet loss during peak. Or at least it will look that way on these graphs, since very few HD streams will be performed by the first provider's customers. I'd be a heck of a lot more interested in looking at data that shows buffer underruns based on time of day. That will show congested providers vs. providers that simply offer less bandwidth. AKA it will separate the providers that lie, and those that are honest. I don't know much about youtube's architecture, but in general these stats are pretty simple to do via basic math and access logging. You look at the total request time, how many bytes were sent, video bitrate, and then calculate how many seconds of video were actually downloaded vs. how long the request took. If the request took longer than the total seconds of video downloaded, then the user probably experienced buffering. It's a bit rough, but the numbers are incredibly useful in aggregate. I've used this method to identify peering issues (looking at you FT) when more advanced methods are not available.

higherpurpose 12y ago

More companies should be keeping track of this, so in case we don't pass a strong net neutrality law, and ISP's do in fact start slowing everyone down in order to make them pay to get back to normal speeds [1], we can have a swift and strong backlash against them. Let's make it impossible for them to do this without millions of people finding out about it at once. [1] - http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious-graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/ http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious...

MarkPNeyer 12y ago
what happens if the big content providers pay the small (to them) amounts of money being asked? if end users don't see a change in their content's speed - or if it comes FASTER because other data is being penalized, the problem is magnified. average joe says 'hey the internet has gotten much faster since they ended that pesky regulation' - and doesn't see the 30 media startups that couldn't get off the ground, because for them, the money asked to provide faster access is very pricey. a startup average joe hasn't heard of won't have the money to outbid their competitors for the limited 'media bandwidth' the isp is willing to send through. average joe doesn't care about a company he hasn't heard of because he doesn't know what they have to offer. my guess is that's what the ISP's want. they give the users a better experience - prioritizing video packets over email, for example, at no perceived cost to them. in doing so, they set up a huge barrier to entry that takes a long time for average joe to understand. he won't take the time to understand this, because the harm caused is a huge loss on possible new things in exchange for a small benefit to existing things.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rpm4321 12y ago

I know Google is traditionally very stingy when it comes to adding elements to their interfaces, but this seems important enough to dedicate at least a small portion of screen real estate to it on every YouTube video page. It would certainly have more of an impact than a report that 99% of users will never see. It doesn't have to be a big deal - maybe just a "cellphone bars"-like icon, linked to further info and net neutrality content.

karaziox 12y ago
They are doing it. If you have a slow connection and the video start to buffer a lot, there is a banner that appear right under the video linking to the video quality report. I saw it yesterday
- Alupis 12y ago
  Good. We need to Name-n-Shame these ISP's into doing good by their customers. There was an interesting interview with Comcast CEO the other day where he said, "[We] don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated.” But then he attempted to shift the blame to content providers: "Roberts followed up this statement by saying that Comcast is mostly hated because 'it’s the company consumers have to deal with when other companies raise their prices.'" http://bgr.com/2014/05/28/comcast-ceo-roberts-interview/ http://bgr.com/2014/05/28/comcast-ceo-roberts-interview/
  - Touche 12y ago
    What is the customer's recourse though? Get even slower DSL?
    - Alupis 12y ago
      NO, the recourse is to choose independent ISP's. They generally offer better pricing for faster speeds with less BS, ie no monitoring, ad injections, throttling, etc. You will have to look for ones in your area, but they are there. Usually each major city will have a few. Rural areas will tend to have more WISP's (wireless isp's) that are also small and all about their customers. The recourse is to call your Senator and Congressman and demand they force big ISP's to lease fiber/copper to smaller companies, much like phone-line providers are required to lease their copper to other companies. This will help spur competition, which means everyone wins.

goatforce5 12y ago

I imagine ISPs will start using these results in advertising really quickly. "Google rates us as Excellent for video playback. Compare us with your ISP! We're faster than 82% of ISPs in this area." Google/YouTube speed ratings could very quickly end up being analogous to school rankings. You want to be in an area with good schools, and if you don't have good schools you're probably going to start putting pressure on people to improve things.

dublinben 12y ago
This would be wonderful, but most American have no meaningful competition for ISPs.
coldcode 12y ago
If there was any competition in your area. Soon it will be Comcast or Comcast. Unless you live in a Google place.
- goatforce5 12y ago
  If it becomes clear that areas served by a single ISP get worse performance than those in areas with choices, than that too is useful to know and promote, right? Or maybe Google just wants to publish charts showing Google Fibre areas are consistently at the top of their lists so that other municipalities will want to make it easy for them to enter their local market (and/or ask their local monopolies why they can't be more like a Google-town).
- toast0 12y ago
  The (pending) merger of Comcast and Time Warner does not change any areas from a choice of Comcast or Time Warner to no choice, because there are no areas where the two cable providers cover the same addresses.
  - JshWright 12y ago
    And somehow no one seems to think that's a problem in the first place...

chrisBob 12y ago

It is impressive how local the results are. Comcast is rated as HD at my house (Natick MA) but SD at work (Boston MA). I use RCN which performs well in both areas and costs much less.

carbocation 12y ago
I'm in Cambridge MA and got no results, so you're right, it must be quite localized. UPDATE: Opening the page in incognito mode, I got results. My privacy settings prevented the tool from working. And those same settings are probably preventing YouTube from working well for me.

lucb1e 12y ago

> Results are not available on your location I suppose having net neutrality as a law helps, then?

nerdtalker 12y ago

I'm sure Google's efforts to shame ISPs with this new report are well-intentioned, but I really miss the old YouTube speedtest which it seemed almost nobody knew about: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed/ http://www.youtube.com/my_speed/ It seemed to show more data – both throughput from your actual cookied sessions and graphs of comparable connections around you. It took months for YouTube/Google to generate these reports when there was existing data out there already. I guess they wanted something that'd be easily digestible for a Netflix-style monthly shame-a-thon.

brokentone 12y ago

For comparison purposes, Netflix has been releasing this data for some time: http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa

berberich 12y ago

Here's the Netflix ISP Speed Index, which is more of an ISP ranking: http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/ http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/

The_Double 12y ago
Can anyone explain what these numbers really mean? How can they possiby be so low? The only thing I can imagine is that it measures sum(max(clientSpeed,NetflixSpeed))/n , where NetflixSpeed is only about 4Mbps. That would make this a ranking of what isp has the lowest amount of users with really shitty WiFi, or users watching netflix on slow smartphones. I doubt there are many ISP's with offer a connection of less than 4Mbps between their backbone and Netflix. Either way, it's good to see my ISP ranking the second highest worldwide.
- masklinn 12y ago
  > Can anyone explain what these numbers really mean? How can they possiby be so low? If you click on any details page (either the global chart or country full results) and scroll to the page bottom you get an explanatory text: > These ratings reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISPs network from Nov. 2012 through Sept. 2013 and average performance during prime time starting in Oct. 2013. The average is well below the peak performance due to many factors including the variety of encodes we use to deliver the TV shows and movies we carry as well as home Wi-Fi and the variety of devices our members use. Those factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs, so these relative rankings are a good indicator of the consistent performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network.

tzs 12y ago

Provo, UT, is interesting. It has both Google Fiber and Comcast. Their performance is essentially the same, with perhaps a very slight edge to Comcast. I tried to compare them in the other Google Fiber cities, but Provo was the only one I saw both Google and Comcast in. (Austin, TX, is interesting, because that is supposedly a Google Fiber city, but Google Fiber does not show up in the report). Comcast has similar performance in all the cities I've lived in as an adult (Los Angeles area, Silicon Valley, Seattle, small towns on the west side of Puget Sound). Certainly not what I expected given all the complaining I see on the net about Comcast and YouTube performance.

ismavis 12y ago
Google Fiber deployment in Austin hasn't started.
magicalist 12y ago
> Certainly not what I expected given all the complaining I see on the net about Comcast and YouTube performance Comcast gives many things about which to complain, but I've never had an issue with Youtube on them. What I've been shocked by in the past is the disparity between youtube on my comcast connection and youtube on people's TimeWarner connection when I've visited, where it has been completely abysmal in the past. Like, 1990s RealPlayer quality, not only because you have to turn it down to 144p just to play, but also because it still stutters horribly even at that resolution. I feel like most of the "one weird DNS trick to fix youtube" posts have been about timewarner, though I don't know if my memory is accurate there. Notably TimeWarner looks fine on these graphs (at least in a few places where I've had friends complain about it in the past), so maybe they've fixed things.
- vitd 12y ago
  Oddly my wife used to see this on her laptop in our apartment in Los Angeles. I would play a video, and it would be fine at HD. I'd ping her the link, and she would attempt to play it and it would be stuttery and crappy. I'm not sure what changed, but eventually it just cleared up. We were on the same connection. Very odd.

CoffeeDregs 12y ago

Interesting. Given all of the complaints about the big providers, the chart suggests to me that they're doing an OK job? Perhaps Google is trying to get out in front of the arrival of throttling? Also, as a cynical person, I compared SF to Washington DC expecting to see that DC was perfect and SF was not. Instead they looked quite comparable. In fact, I couldn't really find any major metro in which cable performed poorly (NYC wasn't wonderful).

trustfundbaby 12y ago

The graph in the actually video report is a poor way of representing that information IMO. It took me a second to figure out what the graph represented and then after that I still didn't know why I should care. I guess average speed/bandwith was too esoteric to chart? #sarcasm

listwise 12y ago

Reminds me a little of this service but for payment processor speeds/success: http://gatewayindex.spreedly.com/explore http://gatewayindex.spreedly.com/explore

contingencies 12y ago
Very interested but the page never renders...

cddotdotslash 12y ago

And the average user will never see it. If Google really wants to do something effective, add a red warning bar at the top of the page that says "Your ISP is making YouTube slower. Call them at...". I guarantee ISPs will take notice then.

timothya 12y ago
If you're watching a video and your connection becomes slow, it prompts you to take a look at the report to understand what's making it slow. It's not a direct phone number, but a reasonable number of average people will hopefully take a look while their video is buffering and start to understand that their ISP may be the reason YouTube seems slow.

tinalumfoil 12y ago

I feel some of these results may be misleading. I watch YouTube mostly through Wifi, where the Wifi is the bottleneck and and not my ISP. The methodology page [1] doesn't seem to take that into account. [1] http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology

jordanthoms 12y ago
Well they are showing only ability to maintain a HD stream, not absolute speed. Any decent wifi network should be able to get at least 10mbit, so it won't impact HD streaming.

subdane 12y ago

The visual storytelling of the associated video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH863XXRZEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH863XXRZEQ is fantastic. You can watch the vid w/out sound and still understand the point they're trying to make.

zavi 12y ago

Can't seem to find a single city with both Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

jrockway 12y ago

Something that's interesting about this data is that it measures speed end-to-end. So if you are an ISP that gives out flaky WiFi routers, your score will be lower not because of any limit between YouTube and the ISP or the ISP and the CPE, but because of that "last meter"* between the access point and laptop. * A new term I'm coining for this :)

fpgeek 12y ago
Is FiOS still giving out those terrible Actiontec routers? If so, maybe this will get them to fix that. I still remember switching from them to Comcast to what should have been a far better connection (over 2x download and maybe 8x upload) and thinking it was crap... until I turned off the access point in the Actiontec and started using my old AP again.

handelaar 12y ago

I assume Vimeo doesn't have this because it always sucks for everybody on every network.

NicoJuicy 12y ago

Bad publicity on the most popular video website? Nice thinking for countering anti-net neutrality ISP's :)

mmgutz 12y ago

Would a cable company, ISP for most of us, want to offer connections capable of ultra HD quality video streaming? Streaming threatens half of their business.

Vendan 12y ago

Yay, no ISP in my area is HD verified! Wait, booo!

bobcat469 12y ago

Centurylink. I have the highest internet speed you can give me. But, as for YouTube: you bottleneck this site like crazy. "Youtube, you have failed this city." -The Arrow