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Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling
MojoKid (1002251) writes The ongoing battle between Netflix and ISPs that can't seem to handle the streaming video service's traffic, boiled over to an infuriating level for Colin Nederkoon, a startup CEO who resides in New York City. Rather than accept excuses and finger pointing from either side, Nederkoon did a little investigating into why he was receiving such slow Netflix streams on his Verizon FiOS connection. What he discovered is that there appears to be a clear culprit. Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he's paying for. On a hunch, he decided to connect to a VPN service, which in theory should actually make things slower since it's adding extra hops. Speeds didn't get slower, they got much faster. After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly jumped to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than when connecting directly with Verizon. Verizon may have a different explanation as to why Nederkoon's Netflix streams suddenly sped up, but in the meantime, it would appear that throttling shenanigans are taking place. It seems that by using a VPN, Verizon simply doesn't know which packets to throttle, hence the gross disparity in speed.
It is also possible the the VPN packets are transiting a different upstream peer from Verizon and bypassing the peering bottleneck at issue. Assuming that Verizon is performing inspection of packets and throttling only Netflix packets is quite a leap.
Routing traffic via the VPN changes the path the traffic flows over, possibly avoiding routes that are saturated and (who knows) pending upgrade.
It's tempting to imagine the internet as a giant blob of fungible bandwidth, but in reality it's just a big mess of cables some of which are higher capacity than others. Assuming malice is fun, but there isn't enough data here to say one way or another.
I have to wonder, what would happen if customers were to start throttling the payment of ISP's?
"You will get your payment when you actually fulfil your end of our contract, but not before."
SO when you pay for that service it says something like "up to 75mbps" which in reality means that the speed test and google's home page could see that much speed and everyone else will look like dial up from the 1990's.
It would be much better if the services had to advertise their average speed across the most popular sites. That way if they throttle Netflix to .375mpbs, they have to inform customers that while they are paying $125/month for "blazing fast speed" they are actually getting blazingly fast dial up speeds.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
You win the most absurd analogy ever award.
Wrong..
It is fraid for any ISP to purposely limit speed and bandwidth below the advertised speed speed while the network can handle it (congestion). No matter how you look at it, the up to speeds will never be availible when they purposely limit it.
This should be dealt with by consumer protection law (paying for services not delivered and possibly bait and switch or a host of others). People need to complain in those terms to thier state utilities commision or consumer protection department and file lawsuits over the said laws. Verizon and other ISPs will stop doing it and possibly be fined in the process.
It will probably end up pissing off ISPs to the point of either finding ways of faking the data, blocking the data, or just as policy telling customers to ignore the speed numbers.
If the data is blocked, the browser should figure out why and explain to the user that there seems to be an issue with their network; in other words "Blocking" should make it even worse for the ISP. a smarter browser UI could be a tremendous help to support technicians, which the ISPs should absolutely love ---- perhaps even tell the user exactly which entity to contact, even display their ISP's support number on the screen, to help accelerate the problem resolution process, and providing access to comments by other users of the same ISP, leading to happier customers, and customers who can share info with each other pertinent to troubleshooting or why this is happening, etc.
A lot of people won't be able to distinguish when something is their ISP's fault and when it might be the end servers fault.
I am suggesting the browser should also take some responsibility to the interpretation of the results here. There should be a highly visible "troubleshooting" button that causes some tests to be run. Explanations should be right there in a natural language that any English speaker could understand.
The browser should not show an alert if there is not enough data to make a conclusion with a fair measure of statistical confidence.
We can definitely make a strong distinguishment between a "web site performance issue" and a client connectivity issue, with data from a sufficient number of users.
The browser would also need to take into account geographic location and client connectivity, however.
e.g. Is the site slow because the visitor is half way around the world from the nearest mirror, or is it slow because they're connecting over congested WiFi or 3G networks, instead of a wired connection?
I realize it's not "easy", but the web browser is the only software component that is in a position to take the kinds of measurements that are required and help alert the user to the problem, tell the user which entity they should contact, and assist with troubleshooting.