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Verizon Tells Customer He Needs 75Mbps For Smoother Netflix Video
An anonymous reader writes: Verizon recently told a customer that upgrading his 50Mbps service to 75Mbps would result in smoother streaming of Netflix video. Of course, that's not true — Netflix streams at a rate of about 3.5 Mbps on average for Verizon's fiber service, so there's more than enough headroom either way. But this customer was an analyst for the online video industry, so he did some testing and snapped some screenshots for evidence. He fired up 10 concurrent streams of a Game of Thrones episode and found only 29Mbps of connection being used. This guy was savvy enough to see through Verizon's BS, but I'm sure there are millions of customers who wouldn't bat an eye at the statements they were making. The analyst "believes that the sales pitch he received is not just an isolated incident, since he got the same pitch from three sales reps over the phone and one online."
since they just throttle the connection into tiers so as to maximize profit, isn't it at least possible that the higher tiers also have lower latency or higher prioritization (among the ISP's users, not necessarily of youtube)?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
probably planning for 8K video....obviously
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
The sales rep said it was enough. Clickbait title.
It's almost as if your maximum potential bandwidth to a third party destination isn't just constrained by the network you start in.
Verizon will "fix" this quickly.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
ISPs lie. Who knew?
Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time my ISP (*cough* rogers.com *cough*) lied to me, I'd be a rich man.
I think they deliberately fill their storefronts with toxic twerps who score the highest on sociopathy tests.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
We never heard something dumb from a broadband provider's tech support before?
BTW, Netflix has a bunch of testing videos called "example short". Some come with a resolution and bitrate meter. For 720p you need 4000Mbps. Personally, I have a 18-20Mbps connection at home, and I normally get 720p quality from Netflix, except during the off hours, when I might get 1080p picture.
This tactic has been used in auto sales for years.
Selling customers at closing "undercoating, rustproofing and fabric protection" that are already part of the car, but get people to shell out extra coin for. Extended warranties fall into the same category. Just extra profit if nobody questions it.
I guess all those unemployed car sales-bodies have to take a job somewhere.
He may not be able to see the difference if he doesn't have this.
A salesman who's not telling the truth?
I just snickered and said nothing.
I have been told by the AT&T rep that my 18mpbs was too slow for things like surfing the web (not streaming). When I asked why I was able to do so last week without problems, I was barraged with a wall of tech mumbo-jumbo. At the end of the call she asked if I wanted to upgrade. I said if their service was so reliant on what week it was, I'll look for different options if it didn't resolve.
He fired up 10 concurrent streams of a Game of Thrones episode
I know why he really did this, so he could watch every scene with nudity at once on multiple TVs in his living room.
You'll need more than 10 concurrent streams for that..
I'm sure 'caveat emptor' is at least 2000 years old as a phrase, but the concept pretty much dates back to as long as there was commerce.
-Styopa
Verizon sales droids were also trying to sell upload speeds equal to download speeds just prior to the current "half-fast" campaign. I was contacted and exhorted to improve my streaming video experience by increasing my upload speeds from a couple of Mbps to the same 15 Mbps as my download speed. The fact that streaming media is very asymmetrical was lost on the sales person I was talking to, but apparently not on other people. It was only about two months later that Verizon upgraded my upload speed to match my download speed for FREE! (the exact same month that Verizon increased the cost of my Internet service). I guess they were going to sell it one way or another.
So they're lying, and that's a crime.
I had a very similar incident. I complained to a company that rhymes with "Slime Corner" that my internet service was spotty, "sticking" often such that minutes went by without anything coming through. They then simply recommended that I upgrade to a higher bandwidth.
(And it still does it, by the way. Especially on the weekends. The sole alternative vendor is even slimier, tacking on magic fees from nowhere onto our bill.)
Table-ized A.I.
This is what happens when a major ISP uses Linksys routers to cut operating costs.
I have Netflix and there is no streaming option, only DVD discs.
I saw improvement from 15/2 to 30/5 after I got a few fire tv sticks added on top of my gaming and cell phones.
I don't know if the upload speed was the limit or the download speed but I was getting noticeable latency issues gaming while the fire TV sticks were plugged in and switching to the 30/5 allowed me to game as smoothly with every thing going at the same time as I did before with the gaming PC only (no Netflix/Amazon prime) on 15/2.
I can't imagine how many TVs and gaming PCs combined it would take to overload 50/x but I'm saying it would depend on the gaming and the upload bandwidth not just the download.
I mean seriously why is it none of the reps, the end user, ars tech, anybody considered the issue isn't just the download speed? Even if upload/ack packets aren't that significant bandwidth wise if you can tell the difference in latency after adding more bandwidth something wasn't right in the lower package.
ISPs give us data but it's not all download speed it is:
Download in mbps
Upload in mbps
DNS latency/reliability
point to point latency (the latency from my device to the server at the other end and back)
The $Media companies should be advertising out the wazoo, minimum speeds to view their content. Like 2MBps, or 3.5MBps as in the article. Puts the onus back on the ISP, when they start claiming you need 25MBps to stream Netflix HD, or laughably, 75MBps as in the article. It should be common knowledge, and well spread on the Internet, that you need less than 10MBps downstream to stream HD from pretty much any online video portal. EVERYONE should know this by now. That's what needs to be advertised! You'll have counter from ISP's, but that's easily arguable from the consumer side. Upgrade your peering agreements already!!!
Only caveat here, are those pesky ISP-Media company duopolies that SHOULDN'T EXIST AT ALL!!!! This is why we can't have nice things!
they keep calling my wife offering her "amazing" deals with "special" rates that are $20 to $30 more than our current rate and about $10 more than their advertised rate for the same features/speed/channels/etc.
Each time she asks them to check what we are paying now, and each time they are like, oh, never mind. good bye.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Dan: Plus when I called in...
Dan: They told me if I go from 50 mbps to 75 mbps i will get better netflix streaming. is that true?
Dan: Will it improve?
Robert: Yes it you have more bandwidth you will have smoother video viewing.
Dan: But isn't 50 mbps already enough?
Robert: yes it is enough. 75 will just be smoother.
So, basically Dan baited the rep into talking up the improvements related to Netflix streaming. Note also the rep was actually honest that 50 mbps was enough to stream Netflix just fine. It sort of sounds like this guy was trolling for a story, and got the sales rep to overstate the benefits with a nice leading question. Ok, so Verizon should tell their sales reps to be a bit more honest, but... I'm having a hard time generating any outrage here. Are people equally outraged when salespeople sell 4K TVs to customers who will likely never see the difference between that and a good 1080p screen at their TV size and viewing distance?
Sales rep overstates benefits of top-tier package. News at 11.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It needs a usage cap that allows us to actually do streaming.
I was told by AT&T that my customer needed 2 fiber lines since there were more than 5 computers in an office. These are workers doing email and RDP.
I've found that when I stream Game Of Thrones at 75 Mbps, nobody dies! Ever!
So, when this industry "analyst" is streaming his movies at an inferior ~3 Mbps rate, he is causing unnecessary death and suffering just so he can save a few bucks. : (
He fired up 10 concurrent streams of a Game of Thrones episode and found only 29Mbps of connection being used
Yet 25Mbps is the MINIMUM standard of broadband -- because being able to stream only 8 streams of Game of Thrones at one time is indistinguishable from dial up, from a regulatory perspective.
Large, public companies like Verizon want as much of your money as they can take from you. They give far less than 1 fuck whether you can afford to eat or get that surgery for your mom.
If they could legally compel you to pay more, they would. If they can legally compel their competitors to close shop, they will.
It's fashionable to bash government these days, but government regulation is the only thing keeping markets free.
When these businesses can't compel you, they will lie, manipulate, falsify bills, and violate contracts if they think it will pay off.
No, they won't shoot you or throw you in jail for your political views, but they want you to be their bitch and they want to exploit you.
They are not your friend, and unrestrained capitalism does NOT mean freedom for you. Buyer beware.
Of course the sales guy is going to say that. He earns a gold star for every upsell.
Yea, they will happily sell you more bandwidth than you will likely ever use outside of running a speed test, but they will sell you *anything* to make more cash from you.
It's worse too if you are an established customer with them. All those advertised prices you see? GARBAGE... They DON'T apply to you as an established customer. The ad price for the services I get is $75/month and the actual price I pay is $130! How's that? Well, let's see, there is a bunch of things NOT in the advertised price. Equipment Rental $25 for a DVR set Top box, and I have two, $10 for the router, then there is the regional sports fee (because I pay for ESPN non the less) for $7, add in tax and FCC mandated fees and it's $130 or so. It's a racket, but I'm sure Verizon isn't the only provider that does this kind of thing. TWC does similar stuff too.
Then, you know what happens after your contract term is up, they do away with the service you used to pay for. I had just internet with them for years, starting at 10mbs, that plan went away eventually and I got automatically bumped up. Over time I went from $50/month to nearly double that with not nearly a double in speed. We where at $100/moth for 25/25 by the end of 6 years. However, you call them and they are all about "we don't raise your rates like the other guys!". I told one of their sales people that it as a boldfaced lie to say they don't raise rates, I'd been a customer for YEARS and they surely did raise my rates during that time, multiple times.
But what really frosted me was the "Oh the advertised rates are for NEW customers only!" line. Come on Verizon, I've been your customer for 6 years, never a late bill payment, no changes in my service, not even a technician visit to my home to fix something. You are going to give the guy up the street you don't know is really going to pay you a better deal then me? You people are NUTS..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I've found routinely that video streaming tv shows from a network's website, which ordinarily runs fine will still start to choke if somebody else in my house is watching a moderately long youtube video in HD, for example.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Verizon should be honest and tell me people their torrents and Usenet connections will download much faster. Once you get above a certain point, nothing you really do online is going to be better, unless you're pulling down large files. So, I guess your Steam installs will be faster, and if you're downloading (not streaming) movies from iTunes and/or Amazon that will be faster. But I would think services like Amazon, Google Play and iTunes have perfected the art of starting a video after enough of the download has buffered, that download speeds really aren't an issue.
I only do one thing at a time: watch TV or web shit. But email is always on.
I have a 1.9Mbps down stream from ATT. I works great for Netflix.
> Verizon recently told a customer that upgrading his 50Mbps service to 75Mbps would result in smoother streaming of Netflix video.
Ok, not really. A salescreature working for Verizon said that. Now you could argue rightly that salescreatures are the "face" of the company to customers. If they lie to the customer (and this is without a doubt a really big lie) it reflects badly on the company, just as horrible service reflects badly on Comcast. (In their case they deserve it, but I digress.)
The problem I think is that 10 or 15 megabits per second is "good enough" for the great majority of consumers, and companies become hard pressed to justify faster and faster speeds, just as the CPU mips wars became nonsense after a certain point. There will always be power users, but for most people, the difference between downloading their pr0n in 1/4 or 1/8 of a second makes no difference.
I can imagine that it's especially bad for salescreatures. If the lowest tier provision is 20/5, (20 down five up) or even 15/5, it's hard to upsell, because ma and pa kettle doesn't really need anything more than that. So with quotas to meet, you can understand where salescreatures resort to embellishing the truth. After all, it's what they do.
I have friends and family members that are still stuck on "uverse" or some other crap 1 Mbit/sec DSL, and I recommend (where possible) that they upgrade to the cheapest (lowest tier) fibre (if available) or cable available in their area. The boost from 1 Mb DSL to 10 or 15 or 20 Mbits/sec (whatever is available) will change your life. The boost from 10-20 to 50 or 100 will not, unless you're a power user with truly ridiculous requirements.
That said, I have 25/5, and what I'd really like is 25/25, because I manage websites and upload content, but the local ISP does not have a plan for that. I'd have to pay $75/month for 100 down in order to get 10 up. Not worth it. I'm having trouble coming up with any use case where a single family dwelling could make use of 100 down, other than as bragging rights, and doubling the up speed isn't worth tripling the price.
I've heard-tell of some areas offering 100 down *and* 100 up. I have a hard time envisioning that. I'd like to try it, just for a weekend, to see how that much up speed changes my workflow.
And then I shake my head, and go back to work, because my connection really is good enough.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Customer: "My brand new Chevy only goes 5 mph."
SalesWorm: "Oh, you need to upgrade to a Lamborghini. Our Lamborghini's are really fast."
Table-ized A.I.
I had a similar issue with my ISP, only difference being that my connection was a meager 2mbps and I was having issues streaming non-HD content. Still, bumping to 4mbps didn't resolve the issue because it turned out to be one of those infamous peering bandwidth issues between my ISP and an internet streaming provider.
Every incidence of an internet service provider attempting to upsell customers based in inaccurate technical specifications should be documented and supplied to the appropriate regulatory bodies - FCC for the communications aspect, FTC for false advertising, and BBB for bad faith trade practices.
it was the sales droid who lied - it is him who should be castigated for lieing - presumably to earn a few extra $ commission or bonus. All those who were conned into paying for something that they did not need should be able to seek compensation from the sales droid - the fine NOT to be paid by Verison. The droid's manager and managers all the way up should have to pay in proportion to their take home pay.
Unless there are consequences it will happen again. Not much different from the bankers who caused the rest of us so much pain and, by & large, have escaped personal penalties.
I have a 50Mbps connection as well, and I just did a speed test and averaged 9.76 Mpbs with spikes up to about 11. This is about normal for my 50 Mbps connection.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I have a shitty 3 Mbps pipe via DSL on Verizon, and can't stream anything. If I tunnel out via a virtualhost somewhere on the dirty Internet, I can stream no problem. Fark Verizon.
When I was attempting to have my account information corrected ( a process that took over six months to accomplish ) they kept on trying to sell me more services, one of which was their 75Mbs service. Sigh.
Verizon is just like Comcrap and AT&T - they want to extract the maximum $$ from their customers, and provide them the minimum of services for those $$. They are a bunch of thieves and should be treated as such.
Be warned Fios is taking the TWC cable route when it comes to speed. Right now I have the 75/75 plan and i'm getting between 5 - 25 down and up all the time now and it's been like this for 3 month's. This website "https://downdetector.com/status/verizon-communications/map" is a good indicator Verizon does not give a shit. But works fine with vpn or p2p. Something not right with their routers.
faced with spending more money for internets for 'better' netflix (at least according to verizon), plus of course paying for the netflix itself, too... the customer was then supposed to choose verizon's subscription tv service instead.
1984
It's not they are alone. Most of the large scale US economy is organized this way: media, telecom, Wall Street, big Pharma, agribusiness. It's kind of like a mafia state: everyone has to give some money to the person above them, and all the wealth accumulates at the top.
Welcome to post-capitalist America: no competition, no democracy, no freedom of speech, no financial security.
Why is Snark Required?
To expect the truth from any cable, internet or cell phone provider is a foolish foolish thing. They are more or less marketing companies. Marketing companies get paid to lie. They get paid to deceive to maximize profit. Like that merger between AT&T and Comcast. In what universe would that help the consumer? It's insane that anyone would think that, except the politicians paid by the lobby groups to believe. There's nothing we can do about it really, just grin and bear it as we get screwed equally between the large corporations and the government.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
If Verizon is using Netflix Open Connect, then it doesn't really matter what Netflix streams at as the content would effectively be cached by Verizon.
https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/
Although I think the reality here is that the sales rep is either making the assumption/guess that the customer has a house full of people/devices all smashing the bandwidth and so upgrading could potentially iron out any buffering issues or just doesn't have a clue how bandwidth works and just assumes that Faster speeds = smoother playback. I'd be more concerned (but not surprised) if this came from someone in tech support, but sales? They won't think in terms of 50Mb/s vs 75Mb/s but as Package A and Package B.
Sometimes they lie because they want the commission, sometimes they just don't know any better. I doubt the problem is the sales guy himself, but rather the fact that impeding sales targets and constant staff turnover dictates that they don't receive the training necessary to fully understand the products they sell to make effective recommendations.
I had to emphasize to the sales guy that "all I do is surf the web and e-mail". I knew quite well that their lowest tier would allow me to stream HD just fine. IIRC it was about $30/mo more. Sorry, I don't want to mention the provider. They might actually start throttling us.
Is this going to be the practical bandwidth I can get to Netflix and other popular services 99% of the time, including Saturday night? If so, it's a wonderful service and could be well worth upgrading to 75mbps or even 1gbps. I would love to do a time machine backup of my laptop to a cloud storage provider that wouldn't burn in a house fire.
On the other hand my "30mbps" Comcast connection frequently ends up buffering a single HBO now stream. To be fair, this could well be problem of HBO or network intermediaries rather than Comcast. But in either case "smoother playback" advertising is misleading if this is not the experience I would have in most cases.
They may have a point. I have been involved in development of ABR (adaptive bitrate used in video clients) mechanism, and learned the following: TCP, which is used by Netflix to download video segments, attempts to be fair by nature. I.e.: when two downloads contend, they will act similar in terms of backing off, usually leading to balanced downloads. This, however, assumes both streams have no other throttling mechanisms. Things may turn less fair when one of the downloads has a sensing and throttling mechanism on a higher level, like a netflix (or any other ABR - adaptive bitrate - based video service) client has, while other streams (your 14 year old daughter downloading Ubuntu ISOs from a fast mirro) do not. When an ABR client senses that there is less bandwidth available, it may choose a flavour of a lower bitrate (and less quality) to prevent buffer underruns, in an attempt to guarantee smooth playback. Moving to a lower bitrate flavour, however, in TCP world, means taking less bits, meaning that a competing download gets more headroom, and senses less contention. This means that the competing TCP stream will actually quickly try to consume to newly available headroom until the netflix client again feels pressure and again has to switch down in bitrate. In other words: ABR is not easy to do right, and you can get into situations where you are pushed further and further into a corner by other TCP streams on the same line. A faster ISP connection increases the chance that competing TCP connections hit their own cap and don't push you in the corner further, allowing you to stay at a higher bitrate flavour.
It will solve Verizon's fake Netflix speed problems.
It's not just bandwidth, it's also discard priority according to the service class of each customer.
In case of congestion, you'd better belong to the "gold" class (highest paying customers) rather than the "silver" or "bronze" classes. I don't actually know the number of classes nor their names as defined internally by Verizon, but customers are typically classified in several classes, and their traffic is treated differently. Maximum bandwidth is the first (obvious) difference, but not the only one. In general traffic from higher classes is typically forwarded faster in the routers (i.e., it employs higher-priority queues in the routers, suffering less delay and jitter due to congestion) and in case of congestion, packets from lower classes are typically discarded first.
It is obvious that 50 Mbps is far more than enough bandwidth for Netflix, but in any case there is a small difference between the available service levels (which, by the way, the rep from Verizon probably didn't even know).
I've got a decent speed tier from Comcast. 30mbps down 6 up. But of course Comcast thinks I need their higher tier of 50mbps down 10 up. Of course I went off on the rep. trying to sell me this load of crap. I said, I could have 10 devices running a HD movie and still have bandwidth left. Why are you telling people 30 mbps is too slow for HD movies? Its because poor Comcast is losing TV customers and now realizes that getting broadband customers to pay up that difference with higher tier service is their only hope of maintaining their profits. In most cases its not about the bandwidth that would cause problems for people. Its the rest of the network congestion at the hosting site or somewhere in between that affects playback.
Netflix does not have Game of Thrones for streaming (just checked) and 10 concurrent streams would require at least 3 (4screen) accounts.
So sick of big communication companies Cheating people.. ATT, Comcast, Verizon all are bunch of mafia businesses.
i think more competition is necessary. a smaller local companies which lower prices.
ATT - monopolized in our area robing people like me with 18mbps for $55 so expensive..
people needs to stop using these U-Verse TV and XFinity TV stuff let them crash and burn.
They tried to tell me 2 weeks ago that I needed 50Mbps to do Netflix. I told them they were full of poo.
Being a homeowner, I get a lot of home mortgage junk mail. Yesterday I got a postcard in the mail telling me to "stop paying too much" on my home mortgage. The funny thing was that the percentage rate was a full 1.5% higher than what I already have.
I wonder if they honestly don't know better, or they're hoping that I won't know better.
It also depends on how saturated the existing connection is.
IF in the unlikely scenario the guy is already near tapping out his existing 50mbps connection, then adding another 20mbps could improve netflix streaming. For all we know the guy likes to stream netflix while downloading 10 torrents, Steam updates and large ISO files.
I was told by a Verizon technician that I needed to be within 10 feet of my WiFi router to get Netflix to stream.
-er- If I were within 10 feet of the router, I'd run a CAT5 cable and not worry about it, dude. There's not more than 50 feet distance as it is.
I had to speak to a supervisor and convince them I did zero streaming, only email in order to get a cheaper, slower service that btw works just fine.
Buffer bloat can increase latency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat
However, TFA never mentions latency as an issue. Netflix tries very hard to co-locate to prevent these issues, but Verizon is a company that won't play nice and has been proven to throttle.
The points that you bring up as a) and b) are a realistic explanation of TCP, but many live streams use UDP which is more fault tolerant. Netflix can change its bitrate on the fly, but I would have to fire up Wireshark to see what they are actually doing on various platforms using various technologies.
FYI, for space journeys, the transport layer protocol is tweaked to handle long delays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networking
I actually had someone at AT&T tell me that my problems with dropped packets would go away with a faster connection. I tried explaining when I called to report the problem that it wasn't a problem of the bandwidth - that videos were loading slow - it was that the videos would just stop loading due to dropped packets and downloads would constantly fail. Luckily, I eventually managed to talk to people who knew what they were talking about, and I do have to give them a lot of credit for having some very exceptional staff. But then there are others who only know how to read from a script and won't transfer you to someone who knows better. I get that that probably nets ISPs more money, but I think it needs to stop.
Or it could just be that they blast those postcards out to everyone, and they really have no idea what your mortgage is (or that you even have one). Kind of like how now that it's spring I'm getting all kind of lawncare services junkmail (I live in a condo).