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YouTube Issuing "Report Cards" On Carriers' Streaming Speeds
OakDragon (885217) writes In the shadow of the "Net Neutrality" debate, Google's YouTube has created a service to report on your carrier's usage and speed, summarizing the data in a "Lower/Standard/High Definition" graph. You may see the service offered when a video buffers or stutters. A message could display under the video asking "Experiencing interruptions? Find out why." Find your own provider's grade here.
How long until Comcast sends YouTube a bill for carrying the HD content?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 29, 2014 @10:04PM from the how-do-you-stack-up? dept.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
First, what gives with the goofy webpages that try to scroll like pages of a book? One of the wonderful things about a web page is for it to be long and easy to scroll through, instead of requiring me to scroll in order to get to the next text section. That makes it really awkward to go back and forth.
Second, where can I search for other people's results? I want to switch to RCN in Boston, how does this webpage help me know how they're doing?
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Duh, that's how the internet works.
Don't you listen to politicians?
But I already know they're crap. I've seen their advertising, and that alone makes me want to beat up their executives.
And every one of those problems is on Google's end, not the ISP's end.
And as long as I'm pipe dreaming here, can we please shoot the UXtard responsible for turning the YouTube comments from a useless searchable-by-date because it was at least paginated stream of crap into a useless unsearchable because it's an infinite-scrolling stream of crap that requires multiple mouse clicks to expand every comment longer than three lines?
That's why they call it youTUBE, duh.
If you can interpret the graph of "Video consumptiion AND streaming quality" you're doing better than me, https://www.google.com/get/vid...
work in progress
Yes, the Internet IS a series of tubes. But the information is still carried by the little trucks that drive through these tubes!
of the two major providers in my area, Time Warner is actually better (for youtube video quality) which i found rather shocking. That having been said, they do suck on a number of other levels.
1. things like recursing your own DNS with unbound or other software will get you added to their redirector for "unwanted/malicious traffic." basically, you're robbing them of SRVFAIL ad revenue and they dont like it. Encrypting lots of traffic or using encrypted IRC also seems to trigger this shit, which is easily circumvented by not using their DNS.
2. signup isn't mandatory if you handle your own DNS, but again if you dont then expect to never get to the internet. Signing up means downloading their software, creating an email address, agreeing (again) to the ToS despite signing it on installation. you also get to opt into their advertising.
3. two words: bulk mail. You'll get at least 3 or 4 letters a month reminding you to upgrade to the bundle or a higher data rate. higher data rates arent required when you null-route advertising servers and use noscript/adblock.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm not saying I think they know it now, or are intentionally moving in this direction, but consider the market forces involved: Is this, Netflix's similar effort, and ISP throttling, ultimately just foreplay to getting in bed together? They have the potential to really harm each other, and that has to get through to them eventually.
Seems to me, barring common carrier or another path to true net neutrality, both sides have more to gain by colluding than by fighting. If big content and big ISPs work together, they could create a barrier to independent ISPs and content.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Trying to click "your results" just gives me a popup saying "Results from your location are not available".
It doesn't tell me what my "location" is, and it doesn't give me any option to change the location (since the "change location" link is on the results page that it refuses to show me)
If the location auto detect fails, it should give the user an option to manually set the location (or browse other locations), instead of just refusing to give any results whatsoever.
They are essentially combining people who pay for minimal service with those who pay for top service. That doesn't work. I have no problem getting HD quality content at any time of the day from my ADSL provider. That same provider is ranked poor simply because the company offers a less service at a much lesser price (significantly less than competing cable internet providers).
What I'm getting at is that it's not the ISP which is providing poor service in the case of 1.5mbps ADSL. If you notice in my case the ISP is exceeding the quality of service being sold to 1.5mbps subscribers of the ISP. Of course these people can't stream HD content, but that isn't because of the ISPs poor service. It's because of the customer selecting a lower tier option.
I would never subscribe to Comcast because Comcast plays all sorts of tricks on its subscribers and overall provides lousy service. It might be "faster" than my 10mbps ADSL service, but I can't get that 10mbps during prime time, if I want to download torrents (hell they were disconnecting people even), etc.
ADSL service isn't of good quality everywhere, but that isn't a failing of the provider in most cases. It's a problem line quality. I have no issue with this as the difference is one type of service provider lies outright and the other is just providing the service for which the line is capable of (ie they aren't oversubscribing it).
The vertical scale in the charts has no indices or any indication of what is measured. I see the statement to the right "Daily video activity is averaged
over 30 days.", but it does not say what is really averaged. Is this MB/sec, percentage of available bandwidth, or what?
In any case, the throughput of a broadband connection is not the only issue in moving large amounts of bytes. I am having a problem with software for an HP printer. Today, HP advised me to download the entire software package for that printer, approximately 1.4 GB. However, HP's server could not deliver event 300 KB/sec into my 15 MB/sec broadband connection. There are servers delivering video that cannot keep up with playback speeds.
When I cannot get downloads a MB/sec rates, I generally blame the server at the other end and not my broadband provider. After all, I can immediately try a different download from a different source, and get my full 15 MB/sec.
Have a look again, clearly the information is contained in tiny balls that bounce around the tubes.
I could not load the page linked to - probably because their bandwidth is swamped due to the publicity!
like user feedback... display test results from users of the listed ISP's in the area...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I had a look at them a few days ago, and I had no idea how to interpret the graphs. If I'm tech savvy and I don't know what they mean, God help the average person.
The results aggregate data for all users of each provider. In Australia at least, many providers offer different types of access (e.g. cable, DSL, 4G wireless), making some of the results less than meaningful.
How does one stream nitrates? Try again in your native language and I will translate.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Are the tubes made of Glass or Copper ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
The Tubes are made of people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Yeah, don't think so.
(If I mentions TOECDN I'm going to get modded down, so I will not mentions TOECDN).
This is all nice and all (transferring some data from A to B without stuttering), but what about my flying car?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The tubes are corporations?
Just another day in Paradise
The "information superhighway" analogy isn't perfect, but I think it is close enough to correct to be a useful analogy while being familiar enough for laymen to understand.
You can think of the Internet like our system of roads. There are major interstate highways; these are the backbone of the Internet, with many lanes of bandwidth. Smaller highways connect to the major interstates; these are run by your ISPs. Even smaller roads lead from those smaller highways to your home. When you send an email or type the address of a website into your browser, that message is broken into small pieces (say small enough to fit in a motorcyclist's pocket) that are carried along the roads, highways, and interstates to the destination of the email or the computer that hosts that website. If one of those small pieces gets lost, the destination computer sends a message back asking the sending computer to send another copy of that piece.
At the interchanges between the interstate and the smaller highways and the smaller highways and roads, there are stop lights, yield signs, signs describing how to get to certain destinations, and other traffic control mechanisms. As a road becomes saturated with messages on motorcycles, the "highway patrol" will tell messengers to wait their turn before proceeding onto the road, or to take a detour to another less congested road. By detouring messages to different roads, messages can still get through even if one road is busy, damaged, or blocked by censorship.
The principle of "network neutrality" or "net neutrality" is that all the motorcycle messengers on a road are treated the same. But some ISPs have noticed a lot of messengers wearing the Netflix logo on their jackets traveling their highways, and so want to restrict how many Netflix messengers travel on their highways for free at the same time. [While I use Netflix in this explanation, this could also affect other companies that send lots of messengers along the Internet.] Their plan for "fast lanes" is to set up a toll booth on their highways, and if too many Netflix messengers want to go through at once they'll have those messengers wait in line. Alternately, Netflix could pay them to set up an "EZ-Pass" lane to the highway; if Netflix is willing to pay a higher toll, the ISP will let those messengers pass through the tolls more quickly. Opponents of the "fast lane" plan worry that if an ISP has many EZ-Pass lanes for various companies, it will result in messengers whose companies DON'T have EZ-Pass (like small start-ups that can't affect the EZ-Pass) being stuck at the tolls for a long time while their competitors' messengers fly through unslowed.
Another possible solution to the problem of congestion on the Internet would be for companies to make the interstates, highways, and roads broader so they can carry more traffic. In the real world, we can't always expand roads with more lanes because of existing buildings lining them or other constraints. In the Internet, those land-availability constraints don't really apply (though there are a few other constraints.) However, one constraint that exists both for real-world roads and for Internet roads is that expanding roads with more lanes costs money.
If people can't get their YouTube through Comcast, then Comcast is going to lose a lot of customers.
To whom? Among the two wired broadband ISPs serving Fort Wayne, Indiana, Comcast was graded HD and Frontier was SD.
By calling it an update. Previously, all I got was "check back soon"; now I get "Comcast rules, Frontier drools".
Your other option is the "Change Location" button. There's moving, and then there's moving United.
They make tons of money on their television services and paid video-on-demand services. Every second that you're watching Hulu, YouTube, or Netflix is a second that you're not watching their paid services.
I watch YouTube because none of the major channels happen to show the subject matter in which I'm interested. So how should the fans of a particular web show go about getting that show added to "their paid services"?
As I understand it, each of these stories comes out when Google expands the set of locations that don't return "check back soon".
On QWERTY, "n" and "b" keys are adjacent. The word is "bitrate". Google already knows the bitrate of the video that a user is attempting to stream.
If a user's Internet service can't maintain a given bitrate, how can Google tell whether this is caused by ISP malfeasance or simply by the user choosing to subscribe to a less expensive tier of home Internet service? As it is, it appears to punish ISPs for offering less expensive tiers with slower speeds, such as the low-speed tier that Comcast offers to families with children that receive assistance under the National School Lunch Program.
Until I can make Soylent Green from them, they aren't people!
It doesn't take in to account the net speeds that people have. So you might well have a provider who has no problem doing HD video from Youtube all day every day, on lines that can handle it. However they sell slower lines and some customers have that, so that skews things.
Like say a phone company offers ADSL and IDSL for customers who are way out in the boonies, but VDSL for people in the city. Well those slow connections will bring down their stats, even if their network is quite fast and makes them look bad, despite them actually being the only option for some people.
A somewhat similar deal with cable companies can be people using old hardware. DOCSIS 2 cable modems only use one channel per segment, and those can get saturated these days. Well cable providers tend to be DOCSIS 3 to deal with that... but not everyone has a new modem. The cable company can recommend they get one, but if it is your equipment they can't make you (I guess other than cutting you off but they don't wanna do that).
the internet is a series of tubes after all. And data packets are gumballs.
This Sig does not Exist.
The Tubes are made of people.
So then . . . the tubes are blood veins . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky