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jig
join:2001-01-05
Hacienda Heights, CA

1 edit

jig

Member

comcast report substantiated, at least a little

as far as I can find, Netflix hasn't commented, even in secret, on whether they think comcast is throttling.

there is a report out there of a comcast subscriber who measured ~256kbps to netflix while using a vanilla setup, and ~3Mbps to netflix over a VPN running over comcast's network to an external peer point.

i don't believe verizon has implemented an on-demand video store that competes with netflix, but comcast has.

edit-->
here's the link to the report:
»forums.comcast.com/t5/Ba ··· /1961139

comcast engineers try to explain it as different paths... which is of course true, but they don't explain why the network wouldn't balance out the usage naturally (using agnostic load balancing), unless they're shunting all netflix traffic to a particular over-burdened or under-provisioned edge node, which effectively throttles the singled-out service.

jlivingood
Premium Member
join:2007-10-28
Philadelphia, PA

1 recommendation

jlivingood

Premium Member

Well, the CDN is choosing the path and that is why using a VPN gives a different route.

your name
@comcast.net

your name

Anon

said by jlivingood:

Well, the CDN is choosing the path and that is why using a VPN gives a different route.

Very good detailed description of what may be going on:
»blog.streamingmedia.com/ ··· ity.html

jig
join:2001-01-05
Hacienda Heights, CA

jig

Member

I don't think that description is accurate, other than to take forever to say something like: "Netflix could ensure better streaming to end users of certain ISPs if Netflix is willing to pay more $$ to those ISPs."

The problem is that there's no mention of the monthly rates the subscribers are already paying their ISP. And, what the VPN side-step shows is that the degradation is manufactured by the ISP and has no relation to any limit on the overall resources of the ISP's network, Netflix, or any of Netflix's non-ISP CDNs. So, the ISP is attempting to extract $$ from an external source and is doing it at the expense of the ISP's paying subscribers. Further, the ISP has no incentive to use the $$ to actually upgrade its network, because it's apparent that there is no need - the capacity is there. With no incentive, they won't upgrade, which is further detriment to their subscribers.

I wonder if Google is accepting offers for communities to pay them to install fiber?