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Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming
rsk writes "For the last few weeks I've been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis."
Oh well.. I tried to go legit, but time to fire up bittorrent again, I guess. They are just shooting themselves in the foot.
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Agreed, I thought the same. The most telling was using low-latency as an indication that he should be seeing high bandwidth. Not necessarily the case.
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I went through all of the motions in TFA (downloading this plugin and then using its option to save the target of this link and got a very high speed download (it read 1.3M/sec), but what surprised me more is that I was actually able to download the .wmv file at all! (note, I don't use NetFlix) Of course it wouldn't play because of the DRM and the fact that my lazy-man's searches for cracking have led to dead-ends.
Oh well, back to TPB!
In his blog lambasting Neftlix, he says:
"Bringing up the Status window I noticed my download performance was a far cry from my 7 mbps speed, but rather a measly 0.48 mbps, about 1/14th the speed of my line"
In the article summary above, he's now saying 48 kbps.
0.48mbps is actually 480kbps, so he's off by a factor of 10, which (while still pretty crappy) makes it sound much worse than it actually is. So which one is it, OP?
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I saw this, and was curious. According to the article, he found another user on the same ISP as him, who complained about the same problem.
My guess would be, the users provider (not Netflix or their streaming provider) has noted substantial traffic on a particular port, from particular IP's, and since that was a substantial load on their network, they've throttled the per-connection rate down.
Since other users have noted that they are not having the same problem, I would conclude that it is the users provider that is the problem.
It's still something to complain about, they just need to direct the complaint to the correct party.
Years ago, when I was a RoadRunner (now BrightHouse) customer, I had speeds in excess of 3Mb/s. At the time, they were using the same Tier1 provider as my office AND had a peering very very close by (same city). They started throttling various things, including port 80. I complained, and they said they could only provide 768Kb/s (again, this is years ago).
One day, I set up a PPP over SSH tunnel between my home computer, and my desktop at work. Transferring large binary files from my office network to my home computer was much closer to the original 3Mb/s speeds. Shutting down the link and acting like a normal user, my speeds were at 768Kb/s. They wouldn't admit to the throtting of port 80 from my office network, but I had conclusively proved it.
I set up my home firewall (Linux PC, my own rules) to route all of my traffic over the PPP over SSH tunnel, so I was happy. It theoretically incurred a little extra network traffic on my office line, but we were billed on 95th percentile (as most Tier 1 providers do), and when I was at home was our slow time, and a T3, so my 3Mb/s peak was nothing in the grand scheme of things. More importantly, most of my large transfers were from home to work and back.
Providers can set up for just about anything they'd like. They shouldn't. They get a lot of people screaming when they do too much, but for the most part it's just something you live with. Maybe they're throttling everything going to/from the Netflix servers. Maybe they're only throttling port 80 traffic. Maybe, maybe, maybe. There are lots of things they could be doing.
All other things being equal, if you scp a file, or request it by HTTP, it should get very close to the same speeds.
As I've found, it's usually the residential/small business providers who do this kind of throttling. I've never seen this kind of thing with Tier 1 providers. Unfortunately, none of us can afford a fast link with a Tier 1 provider at home, so we have to bend to the will of our residential providers. I was lucky once a long time ago, in another city, at another office. I was close enough (1/2 mile) and had a clear line of sight to work. I set up a wireless bridge between the office and my house. I had 11Mb/s (years ago also, and standard for the time) link from the office to my house. They had just a T1 loop to our datacenter. After hours, when no one was working (like, after 5pm) I had my own T1 to use. I could do great transfers to the office, and was pleased with my anonymity. I was rather removed from where the line seemed to terminate (the datacenter). It wasn't completely anonymous though. We had documented internally what IP's were assigned to my house (1 for my NAT), so if there ever was any funny business, it would have landed with me. But, what if a subpoena was served on the provider to find the user of the IP? It could have been at the datacenter. It could have been at the office. It could have been off of that funny little antenna sitting in the window of a coworker (with the best line of sight to my house).
Oh, the good ol' days. I wish I had my own private T1 still. It was so much nicer than any of the residential lines I've had, even though they advertise faster speeds.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I had to scroll up to test a hypothesis. Yep. kdawson again.
Yeah, it is nice. I've had a T1 line at home ever since I got fed up with a previous ISP blocking outgoing port 22 (!), and decided I'd rather pay for business-class service than put up with stuff like that any longer. I'll take my 1.5Mbps that I actually get consistently and with a 99.99% availability SLA and my own /27 over some cable company offering 8Mbps oversubscribed by a factor of fifty with weird blocks and caps and throttling any day.
One of my neighbors is a netflix subscriber. His work is such that he HAS to have access to the internet all the time. So he has both DSL and Cable through a router that allows him to use both. This router allows him to direct traffic through one ISP or the other. When he directs netflix through the cable connection, the video stream stutters and skips. When he directs it through the DSL connection, the problems disappear. This is despite the fact that the cable connection has a nominal bitrate that is much higher.
The conclusion that he came to is that his cable provider is messing with netflix because it is competition for their own on-demand service.
I think something similar may be happening here.
This makes a lot more sense than the notion that netflix would drive away customers by providing a broken service.
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With an average of a 50ms response time, Iâ(TM)m going to go ahead and say my 7 mbps Qwest DSL service is working as advertised,
Most likely his provider blows.
me too. my mac is fast. I can speed test my connection for both burst and sustained transfers. I can watch Hulu and related without gaps. yet Netflix chokes. Not all the time. Just between 6 and 11 at night.
When you trace route the connection you find it makes about 5 hops in comcast network than about 5 to 10 hops in the limelight network. limelight is netflix's stream provider.
There appear to be huge latentcies-- like 500 milliseconds.
When I talk to the netflix techs they say the latencies are the issue. They cause packet resends.
I point out to them that if their streaming protocol were designed properly, given there is ample bandwidth, they should be able to work around the latency. Besides which I'd be even happier if I could switch between streaming (for browsing movies) and pre-loading them for viewing (like apple).
They say that they have no control over the transfer protocol--that's handled by silver light. and they have no control over the ability to buffer or pre-load because that's set by their drm contract's with the movie providers.
Basically if you want to watch a movie at assuredly good resolution and without gaps then maybe it's worth paying apple a couple bucks to pre-download it. Of course, the drawback is you have to know what you want to watch first.
Having done it both ways I find that part of the magic of a good movie is the immersive suspension of disbelief it creates when it is uninterrupted. So these interruptions are more than just annoying. They move the experience to a different part of your brain-- the part that likes TV not the part that suspends reality (like a good book can do).
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>>>Qwest Zone - download videos
I thought internet neutrality made it illegal for ISPs to block other providers (like Netflix) simply to boost their own products?
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