Good. The thing is that network "fast lanes" work by slowing down all other lanes.
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It’s responsible for the last few years of streaming price hikes. ISPs throttle streaming services, then customers complain. Streaming services pay for “fast lanes,” then pass the cost on to customers.
Fuck Ajit Pai and his orange overlord.
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.
Netflix and im sure the other services also have "netflix in a box" media servers that they drop in these peering exchanges and CDN edge datacenters in order to get their media as close to the customers as possible.
The basically bend over backwards to cause ISPs the least amount of traffic, and its still not enough.
I was trying to find the old Level 3 blog post but didn't because I believe they basically said that Comcast needed to upgrade its infrastructure and never did. Netflix was the cashcow they saw to essentially make them pay for it. As a Comcast customer, I see it as charging the customer twice -- first for the Internet service for the content and again because Netflix is going to pass that extra cost onto you (and everyone else who isn't a Comcast customer).
You're right on about CDNs and edge / egress/ingress PoPs. It also keeps it cheaper for the likes of Netflix/Amazon/etc. in the long run with the benefits of adding more availability.
Do you have a link to an article or a Wikipedia page that I could read more on this?
I found this wikipedia article about backbones and peering but it really isn't that great but in the results it also came up with this pretty good presentation from Carnegi Mellon. I was only going to browser a few of the slides but the information isn't really all that much and the illustrations are good. I think Prof. Nace did an excellent job here. Much better than I would have.
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.
They’ve been cracking down on password sharing to increase subscriber count, and began selling ads which are based on the number of active subscribers. The streaming traffic went up so much during the pandemic that ISPs “generously” relaxed data limits and streaming services still needed to throttle bandwidth by reducing quality. They’ve been making profits as well as ISPs.
"Fast lanes" have always been bullshit.
If you're paying for 100mbps, and the person you're talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you're not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off. This reality where you can pay extra money to make sure the poors don't get in the way of your packets has never been the one we live in.
Of course, there are definitely people who are getting ripped off, but "fast lanes" are just an additional avenue by which to rip them off a little more; not a single provider who's currently failing to provide the speed they advertise is planning to suddenly spend money fixing that and offering a new tier on their suddenly-properly-provisioned internet, if only net neutrality would go away.
As Bill Burr said, I don't know all the ins and outs, but I know you're not trying to make less money.
If you're paying for 100mbps, and the person you're talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you're not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off.
That's only really true of you're relatively close to each other on the same ISP. The father apart and the more hops you need to make the less likely it becomes, through no fault of your ISP.
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.
Very rarely your are paying for 100Mbps. You are paying for "up to" 100Mbps.
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:
Random stupid stuff in my agreement
Pinging or other network probing is prohibited.
Yet when I call support, they ask me to do a ping test. I know what they're intending to say (it's talking about hacking, such as nmap-ing some remote service), but the wording is awkward.
And this:
You may not use {service} to advertise, solicit, transmit, store, post, display, or otherwise make available obscene or indecent images or other materials.
So I guess they don't like porn. It goes on to talk about stuff involving minors, but this wording seemed broad.
You may not use the Service to transmit, post... language that encourages bodily harm, destruction of property or harasses another.
I guess I can't troll.
You may not advertise, transmit, ... any software product, product, or service that is designed to... spam, initiation of pinging, flooding, mail bombing, denial of service attacks, and piracy of software.
So I can't recommend lemmy I guess, since people here like piracy. Oh, and I also can't tell people how to check their network connection by using ping
...
Blah, blah, blah, I've probably violated a half-dozen of those provisions. I'm guessing most of them won't stand up in court, and they'd have a hard time proving anything since everything should be TLS encrypted.
Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn't seem to care what I do with it.
We just dropped our ISP(Windstream) for never once giving us the bandwidth we are paying for. Their excuse was overhead. However I was on a call with their engineering dept and one of their guys read out the QOS and it was for less than what we are paying. When I brought that up they abruptly cut off everyone but the sales guy who continued to try to blow sunshine up my ass despite knowing it was all bullshit.
Oh yeah sales people always think bringing an engineer onto a call is a great idea until they try it a few times. We’re a blunt people who want a fair exchange
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.
Exactly, the reasons I’m an engineer are very tied to the reasons I helped a coworker with her kid’s math homework the other day. I just want to help, to understand things, and to help people understand things
QOS?
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.
Did it at least feel good?
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.
Is it this Windstream? If so:
On February 15, 2019, the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York ruled that Windstream had defaulted on some of its bonds. Consequent to the ruling, Windstream stock lost about 60% of its value.
On February 25, 2019, Windstream filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in response to a February 15th judgment against the company for $310 million.
In September 2020, emerging from bankruptcy as a privately held company, Windstream successfully completed its financial restructuring process and reduced its debt by over $4 billion.
...
Paul H. Sunu became the president and CEO of Windstream on October 30, 2023. Sunu has been the chairman of the board since 2020. He is an accomplished executive with over 27 years of telecom experience, with a focus on rural telecommunication. He succeeds Tony Thomas, who has decided to depart the Company and step down from the Board, following a distinguished 17 years at Windstream.
It sounds like they didn't just suck at providing services... At least the old CEO that ran it into the ground is gone, so that's nice.
That is interesting. That Windstream came to town about 15 years ago, buying the local phone company and almost instantly made the service worse. I did not know they went bankrupt, but it doesn't surprise me.
Gotta love how ISPs were told they can't slow some things down, so they thought they could get away with speeding other things up instead.
They didn’t speed up anything. The thing that told them they can’t slow things down is Net Neutrality. That’s what this is. It was created under Obama, repealed under Trump, then reinstated under Biden. When the law was repealed, they went back to price gouging large data users. Now it’s back in place.
I wonder if this would affect speed tests. I know using Ookla's speed test is inaccurate because ISPs change speeds when connected to certain servers.
I never use Ookla for this reason. I use the Google speed test here in the states.
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
It’s also Netflix, and I’ve found networks that throttle speeds to streaming sites also throttle speeds to fast.com which can be really helpful if you’re aware of it and really annoying if you aren’t
Fucking yes. This is genuinely a HUGE win.
Thanks Biden!
That's hopefully a final middle finger to the reese-cup-shitpai.