said by maartena:Unfortunately, AT&T's DNS server is located in "Wichita, Kansas", which pretty much stands for "I don't know where you are, so I will pick the exact middle of the U.S." - Now if you are in California, you could be sent to a Netflix datacenter in say..... Columbus, Ohio (I have no idea if there actually is a datacenter there, just as an example), which means your data stream has to cross almost the entire country.
Netflix does have a datacenter somewhere in California, so you should use that one. To get around this, you can change the DNS servers of the machine that plays Netflix to a DNS server that either IS local, or does round-robin DNS selection and automatically determines which DNS server is best, and which is local.
False. The DNS IPs that AT&T assigns (in my area) are 68.94.156.1 and 151.164.8.201. So, let's do a traceroute to 68.94.156.1.
traceroute to 68.94.156.1 (68.94.156.1), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets
1 10.65.44.1 (10.65.44.1) 0.747 ms 0.253 ms 0.378 ms
2 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 1.699 ms 1.455 ms 1.368 ms
3 adsl-99-41-243-254.dsl.emhril.sbcglobal.net (99.41.243.254) 8.621 ms 7.898 ms 8.319 ms
4 dist1-vlan60.emhril.ameritech.net (68.22.72.130) 8.513 ms 7.950 ms 8.823 ms
5 dnsr1.sbcglobal.net (68.94.156.1) 8.939 ms 8.506 ms 8.539 ms
Looks like it's going to a server in Elmhurst, IL - which is the local AT&T DSL hub.
Let's also traceroute netflix.vo.llnwd.net - which is one of Netflix's CDN hostnames.
traceroute to netflix.vo.llnwd.net (208.111.168.7), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets
1 10.65.44.1 (10.65.44.1) 1.322 ms 0.251 ms 0.234 ms
2 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 1.483 ms 1.557 ms 1.519 ms
3 adsl-99-41-243-254.dsl.emhril.sbcglobal.net (99.41.243.254) 8.706 ms 7.903 ms 8.454 ms
4 dist1-vlan60.emhril.ameritech.net (68.22.72.130) 22.350 ms 8.684 ms 8.316 ms
5 151.164.101.214 (151.164.101.214) 8.640 ms 8.377 ms 8.149 ms
6 151.164.99.169 (151.164.99.169) 52.948 ms 46.506 ms 47.816 ms
7 ppp-151-164-46-42.eulstx.swbell.net (151.164.46.42) 160.888 ms 77.231 ms 43.790 ms
8 limelight.tengigabitethernet8-4.ar2.chi2.gblx.net (206.165.73.150) 41.212 ms 44.764 ms 50.929 ms
9 cdn-208-111-168-7.ord.llnw.net (208.111.168.7) 43.024 ms 44.110 ms^C
So it appears it is indeed connecting to a server in Chicago. Try to traceroute to netflix.vo.llnwd.net and see where it connects you.
FWIW, I'm on DSL. 6mbit. Netflix HD seems to stream fine, even on this connection.