Technology

The problem historically isn't that streaming services are paying for fast lanes but that they have to pay not to be throttled below normal traffic. In other words, they have to pay more to be treated like other traffic.

Even crazier is remember that there are actual peering agreements between folks like cogentco, Level 3, comcast, Hurricane Electric, AT&T, etc. What comcast did that caused the spotlight was to bypass their peering agreement with Level 3 and went direct to their end customer (netflix) and told them they'd specifically throttle them if they didn't pay a premium which also undermined Level3's peering agreement with Comcast.

Peering agreements are basically like "I'll route your traffic, if you route my traffic" and that's how the Internet works.

No. It really isn't. If that were the case, the streaming services wouldn't actually be making a lot more money. Netflix market cap has gone up by $120,000,000,000 over the last 5 years, for instance.

Stop making up false excuses for simple greed. Streaming services are just after as much money as they can get from you.

Incorrect, and that was exactly my point

This is like saying that if the fruit at a store is rotten sometimes, it's not the grocer's fault, because the fruit had to come a long way and went bad in transit. The exact job you are paying the ISP for, is to deal with the hops and give you good internet. It's actually a lot easier at the trunk level (because the pipes are bigger and more reliable and there are more of them / more redundancy and predictability and they get more attention.)

I won't say there isn't some isolated exception, but in reality it's a small small small minority of the time. Take an internet connection that's having difficulty getting the advertised speed and run mtr or something, and I can almost guarantee that you'll find that the problem is near one or the other of the ends where there's only one pipe and maybe it's having hardware trouble or individually underprovisioned or something.

Actually Verizon deliberately underprovisioning Netflix is the exception that proves the rule -- that was a case where it actually was an upstream pipe that wasn't big enough to carry all the needed traffic, but it was perfectly visible to them and they could easily have solved it if they wanted to, and chose not to, and the result was visibly different from normal internet performance in almost any other case.

Ehhh, I get what you are saying but I would rephrase the above poster's comment a little then. If a person is paying for 100Mbps and they are able to get/find a source or some combination of sources that are able to supply them 100mbps of data then that's what they should be getting. The easiest example being a torrent for popular Linux distros.

I personally think the solution to that should be some kind of regulatory minimum around the advertisement of speed or contractual service obligation. For example if a person pays for a 100Mbps connection then the ISP should be required to supply that speed at +/- 5% instantaneous and -.5% on average (because if you give them a range you know they will maintain the lowest possible speed to be in compliance).

Don't look too hard at my numbers, I pulled them out of my ass, but hopefully it gets across the idea.

It's so weird that that phrasing is even accepted as the norm. It would be unacceptable if a grocery store charges you for 'up to' 2 liters of soda, and then tells you to go fuck yourself when they give you only 0.5 liter.

I just checked my agreement, and it says something like this:

Stated Speeds not guaranteed and are affected by many factors. In all cases, actual speed will likely be lower than speed indicated during peak hours.

But the marketing says nothing about "up to" like it does with typical cable and DSL services (we use a small, local ISP), and I've honestly never seen my speed go below the advertised limit. Every time I test it (and I've tested during peak hours as well), I get pretty much exactly what's advertised.

That said, the agreement I'm reading is kind of funny:

Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn't seem to care what I do with it.

Yeah because we know how it works behind the curtain.

I didn't go in engineering to fuck people over. I want to be proud of my work, and the salespeople put their dirty shit all over it.

Quality of service, networking term for rate limiting. Essentially whatever the QOS is set to is the maximum speed you will see.

Quality of Service. On the user side, it can be used to ensure high-priority traffic actually gets through first.

In networking, all of the data is bundled into packets. These packets are sort of like a shipping package; They contain a shipping label about where the data packet is going, and how soon it should be delivered. That latter part is QoS. If you have a compatible network, enabling and properly configuring QoS will allow the network to prioritize certain “urgent” data packets over other less urgent packets.

Maybe your large download is a low priority compared to your VoIP traffic. Because the download will still get done eventually if the packets get delayed by a few milliseconds, but if the VoIP packets end up waiting in line then you’ll get stuttering, bad call quality, dropped calls, etc… So QoS ensures those VoIP packets get delivered before the download packets do.

But on the ISP’s side, QoS basically means “we’re throttling the fuck out of you so we don’t have to actually build decent infrastructure.” Because if your neighborhood’s line can only handle 2000Mbps of total traffic, but the ISP has sold 3000Mbps worth of service, the ISP can use QoS to throttle everyone in your neighborhood and ensure that every user on that line still gets connectivity. It’s not the connectivity they were promised, but it’s enough for most people to not notice.

For instance, maybe you have three users with 1000Mbps connections. So when only two of them are using that 2000Mbps line, everything is fine. But when the third user connects, they find that they’re basically locked out. The line is already totally full, so all three users begin experiencing connectivity problems. To avoid this, the ISP uses QoS to throttle everyone; everyone gets throttled down to 666.66Mbps to account for that third user. No single user is getting the promised 1000Mbps, because the ISP has over-sold their infrastructure and is using QoS as a stop-gap to avoid actually upgrading. But since all three users can connect, and most won’t bother actually checking their speeds, the ISP is able to get away with it.

Nah it was very frustrating at the time. However its better since we started the transition to a new provider.

Its not complete yet but it did indeed feel good when my latest in long line of sales reps called me about a new 36 month contract. Windstream is mismanagements prototype. They have achieved greatness in sucking. They have good technical people who are prevented from fixing problems by their clueless management personnel. These people also change all the time. That revolving door there must be spinning at thousands of RPM's.

fast.com is pretty good, too. No nonsense, and run by a company renowned for server throughput optimization, so it should rarely be on their end if it’s a slow result