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.

Comments

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they'll just throttle VPN traffic too.

Re:Thanks

[Casualposter]

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.

Re:Thanks

[mysidia]

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.

I have a suggestion.... Web browsers should take some measurements and display prominently in a visible status bar or other location.... average TCP throughput --- And Estimated average bandwidth;

Both a "this site" value, a "this browser session" value, and (Optionally) if the user decides to share their numbers, Community average bandwidth for this site, Community average bandwidth for this ISP, and Community average for this site on this ISP.

If Community average for this site on this ISP is more than a standard deviation below Community average for this site,

Then a little warning exclamation point should appear to the right of the browser bar. On mouseover, and for a few seconds after loading the page, a little warning bubble should appear for a few seconds. "Your internet service provider seems to have below average performance in loading this page."

Re:Thanks

[sumdumass]

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.

Re:Thanks

[mysidia]

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.

Could be a different route involved for the VPN

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Could be a different route involved for the VPN

[pla]

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.

Failing to have peerage agreements in place to honor your downstream sales commitments is a form of throttling - Or, I would daresay, a form of outright fraud.

If I offer to sell you "unlimited" beers from my fridge for $50 a month, but I only resupply it at a rate of one six-pack per week, I have intentionally cheated you. That basic relationship doesn't magically change because of some hand-waving technobabble about peerage agreements and network congestion.

(Yes, I know those don't strictly count as technobabble, and what they really mean - But they effectively reduce to Verizon having zero interest in upgrading its infrastructure to support its commitments to their customers as long as the FCC and FTC will allow them to outright lie)

Re:Could be a different route involved for the VPN

[Anonymous Psychopath]

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.

This is exactly what's happening. I do the same thing for a specific server I use. Standard routing via FiOS results in consistent 1mb download speeds. I set up a GRE tunnel to my VPS host and I get consistent 10mb download speeds. The culprit appears to be a shitty peering connection between so-4-1-0-0.LAX01-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.151.246) and 0.ae2.XL3.CHI13.ALTER.NET (140.222.225.187).

Re:Could be a different route involved for the VPN

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

If I offer to sell you "unlimited" beers from my fridge for $50 a month, but I only resupply it at a rate of one six-pack per week, I have intentionally cheated you. That basic relationship doesn't magically change because of some hand-waving technobabble about peerage agreements and network congestion.

This analogy is a little flawed. Let me correct it. Let us say the local municipality has granted pla (258480) a local monopoly in selling beer to its residents. And you sell beer at different service level all unlimited number of trips to the fridge, but at 1 trip/hr, 1trip/6 hours, 1 trip/min, 1 trip/sec etc. And you stock it with brewed-by-your-local-sewage-company beer all the time, and stock Buds, Coors and Coronas one bottle a month. Then your analogy is complete.

What is really insidious is, pla is NOT buying any beer. All the beer companies come stock the fridge for free. Pla's only cost is keeping the beer cool. And it does not cost any more to cool a bottle of Corona than to cool a bottle of brew-from-sewer. Just because pla noticed people are drinking Corona more, pla wants Corona to pay him more money. Remember it is a monopoly. Corona has no other way of selling its beer without going through pla's fridge. Now you get the idea.

Re:Could be a different route involved for the VPN

[itsenrique]

"i guess netflix got so big they think they can extract payment from everyone" Now there's a good one. In reverse shill-logic world perhaps. For those interested in what's really happening I'll point you here ( http://www.extremetech.com/com... ). Headline: Verizon caught throttling Netflix traffic even after its pays for more bandwidth. And that is basically what they are doing, artificially restricting Netflix not going through VPN to (arguably) criminally low speeds by means of not upgrading hardware on purpose to thwart who they view as "competition. Although I'm not sure Verizon will sell you anything remotely useful for $8 a month. I quit Verizon for this reason although I never told the CS rep because they try to make it hard to quit anyway. Verizon seems to be trying to fool everyone with (what seems to most people) lots of mumbo jumbo and outright deception, I for one hope they don't continue to get away with this attempt to make there "competitors" look bad.

Alternative explanation

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Re:Alternative explanation

[amorsen]

Thats how the internet is paid for. The sending provider pays the receiving provider for the bandwidth, and this is the only rational way it can be.

No. That is not how it works. The truth is that the smaller provider pays the larger provider, no matter which direction the traffic flows. Some companies, like Netflix, are nice enough to not use their size as an excuse to charge people -- they offer free peering at internet exchanges. Other companies are maximally greedy.

Re: Alternative explanation

[MrL0G1C]

You obviously missed the article where Netflix supplies a tower-pc sized box with all of netflix on it to ISPs for free:

Netflix Boxes

Re:Alternative explanation

[kqs]

...because Netflix's provider (which is Level3) isnt paying for the bandwidth disparity between Level3 and Verizon on purpose.

The bandwidth disparity argument is bunk. I've love if Netflix or Level 3 would set up some data sinks in their network so I could use my FIOS to send them random data 24/7 and help even the disparity.

Thats how the internet is paid for. The sending provider pays the receiving provider for the bandwidth, and this is the only rational way it can be.

So... you're saying that Verizon should be paying me! I mean, they send me ALL THIS DATA (much of it sourced from Netflix), but I hardly send them anything. This makes me both a selfish person and someone who deserves a large monthly Verizon cheque.

Note that if Verizon doesn't want to pay a few grand for a few more 10GE ports and some short cables, they could pay even less and accept the caching servers that Netflix offers to all large ISPs; those cost just a few rack units and watts of power.

But Verizon would rather limit Netflix so that they can push their own video products.

Re: Alternative explanation

[kqs]

No, Netflix (and Youtube and some others large ones) don't buy CDN hosting; they offer it. They offer free CDN servers which large ISPs can put in their datacenters. Doesn't matter how much Netflix offered to pay, I doubt if any existing CDN could handle Netflix's traffic along with their other customers.

Many ISPs take advantage of this, but Verizon would rather degrade Netflix's products so they can push their own products.

Re:Alternative explanation

[Drakonblayde]

I suspect that whats going on is that Netflix put the majority of their traffic on Level3 and Level3 is trying to charge Verizon an exorbitant rate for enough bandwidth to handle that peer. Verizon said "No" and told Netflix to go with another peer. So Verizon has plenty of bandwidth, Netflix has plenty of bandwidth... it's where those peers are located that's the problem.

Ok, but you're wrong.

Level3 has admitted they have settlement free peering with Verizon. Level3 does not pay Verizon anything. Verizon does not pay Level3 anything.

Netflix pays Level3. This is why Level3 gives a shit about this situation.

What's going on is that Verizon is trying to cut out the middleman. Verizon wants Netflix to pay them to get traffic into their network instead of paying Level3 to deliver traffic into the Verizon network. Why? Because they don't make any money from Level3.

Naturally, Level3 is all in a huff about Verizon trying to fuck with their revenue stream.

Role reversal

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

What the hell kind of dialup did you have?

[Anonymous Coward]

375k!?

No, I get your point... just...