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Ask Slashdot: How Can I Prove My ISP Slows Certain Traffic?
Long-time Slashdot reader GerryGilmore is "a basically pretty knowledgeable Linux guy totally comfortable with the command line." But unfortunately, he lives in north Georgia, "where we have a monopoly ISP provider...whose service overall could charitably be described as iffy."
Sometimes, I have noticed that certain services like Netflix and/or HBONow will be ridiculously slow, but -- when I run an internet speed test from my Linux laptop -- the basic throughput is what it's supposed to be for my DSL service. That is, about 3Mbps due to my distance from the nearest CO. Other basic web browsing seems to be fine... I don't know enough about network tracing to be able to identify where/why such severe slowdowns in certain circumstances are occurring.
Slashdot reader darkharlequin has also noticed a speed decrease on Comcast "that magickally resolves when I run internet speed tests." But if the original submitter's ultimate goal is delivering evidence to his local legislators so they can pressure on his ISP -- what evidence is there? Leave your best answers in the comments. How can he prove his ISP is slowing certain traffic?
Slashdot reader darkharlequin has also noticed a speed decrease on Comcast "that magickally resolves when I run internet speed tests." But if the original submitter's ultimate goal is delivering evidence to his local legislators so they can pressure on his ISP -- what evidence is there? Leave your best answers in the comments. How can he prove his ISP is slowing certain traffic?
They might not be slowing down specific traffic but instead just have a poor connection to those popular services and it gets saturated.
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Traffic slowed by your ISP, and traffic slowed further down the chain - for instance by poor peering - are indistinguishable. With some help from hops further along like Netflix (or within the ISP) you may be able to pinpoint the exact problem. However, given that so many providers are capable of routing Netflix at acceptable speeds it also doesn't matter, it's obviously your ISP's responsibility.
Until the government ensures a quality service on ISPs to make them similar to land-line phones (common-carrier), it doesn't really matter if you complain about small things you find. I have had VOIP blocked by the ISP due to their competing service, and have had speed issues that looked better with the speed test, but it really can't get resolved until the government cares about the Internet as critical infrastructure which can easily damage the economy.
wireline might be a problem. Before the ISP side of the network.
Streaming services will often consider a users connection and change their streaming service to what they think will offer the best experience.
Long term support any innovative new community broadband network and see how the different networks do networking?
Freedom of choice.
Support a better new network.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Find a free vpn service, like vpngate, and run your connection over to a site (other than netflix, due to geoblocking) that normally runs slow for you. If your speed sees an increase, then yes they are throttling traffic to certain websites. If your speed is the same or less then no your connection to the outside world is just shitty. That is the #1 benefit to vpns for the consumer imho. Unless it is a specific service they are degrading they can't tell who your vpn connects to, and either they throttle all vpns, which commercial users would frown upon, or they throttle none of them beyond regular bandwidth limits and you can find out if that is where the problem lies.
https://fast.com
This site uses the same servers as the Netflix streaming service so it should be a clear indicator. You should note though that 3Mbps isnâ(TM)t very fast when it comes to playing streaming video. An HD stream from Netflix can easily hit 7 or 8 Mbps.
I doubt you will be able to prove them slowing certain sites from your end. You could graph the arrival times of all packets to see any obvious correlation, but since you don't know what the sender wants to send and whether any pipes are congested, that won't tell you much.
Besides, 3Mbps is not much for video. It is the minimum for HBO go and twice the minimum for Netflix. So I would not rule out the possibility that your line is simply not up to the task.
Video is very susceptible to jitter and you run the line to the max. You might want to check for buffer bloat and ask your isp to lower that.
1. Get job working for ISP
2. Slow certain traffic
3. Film yourself
4. Post video to youtube
Profit
Many ISPs large and small explicitly add rules prioritizing speed test servers over normal traffic. To this day it baffles me why ISPs are getting away not only with blatant violation of NN by prioritizing specific destinations over others but with what is essentially intentionally misleading their customers with bogus results as a consequence of prioritizing speed tests. The trick to obtain meaningful results is in finding much less known speed test servers or just downloading large files from a sampling of random sites. This will win you a better baseline to reason about the speeds you are actually getting.
It's otherwise really hard to tell on an individual destination basis for sure WTF is going on ... where the bottleneck really lies. You can trace paths and grab routes from looking glasses and shit yet as an end user this shit is rarely worth doing or conclusive. Smaller ISPs ... especially WISPs have bandwidth management boxes some of the layer 7 variety that execute all manner of wizardry the end user has little to no hope of deciphering.
I'm on several industry mailing lists where ISPs often bitch about what is a very common luser complaint about how ISP is preventing them from access something or is responsible for slowing down their access to something. To be fair MOST of the time a user arriving at such conclusions is in fact both clueless and WRONG yet when ISPs pull shit like this it's really hard to sympathize with the ISP.
The marketing of speeds is especially is difficult because they don't guarantee any particular speed to any particular destination, they often don't disclose details about bandwidth management or the fact they are prioritizing speed test servers. Often times the concept that speeds are not guaranteed for every site is not communicated in any marketing materials and is hard for end users especially ones who have no technical knowledge of the workings of Internets.
Gary don't need his eyes to see
Gary and his eyes have parted company
its not that hard
but you have to have at least two connections to compare the traffic
a study that was funded by a USA national science award does exactly this :
simply download a app and run it
http://bit.ly/2IAdbmD
you can thank me on twitter if you like http://twitter.com/johnjonesname
Streaming is a complex game and it can get disrupted in many ways. Packet loss, jitter, reordering, buffer-bloat, brief interruptions on traffic spikes, etc. all things that are no so bad with TCP can really, really mess up streaming. My guess would be that the streaming services all use a very similar set of parameters for their protocols that in general work reasonably, but with your connection does not work well at all. The solution to that would ordinarily be to just download the files and then play locally.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Netflix has servers in strategic positions within most ISPs, or in some cases just outside. Please see:
https://media.netflix.com/en/c...
In addition, Netflix automatically adjusts the video resolution depending upon the bandwidth of the connection.
Many devices allow you to check your connection speed within the Netflix app. (I would presume HBONow offers a similar utility.) The Netflix Page explaining how to do this is here: https://help.netflix.com/en/no.... On the same Netflix page are their internet download speed recommendations for playing TV shows and movies: 0.5 Megabits per second - Required broadband connection speed 1.5 Megabits per second - Recommended broadband connection speed 3.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for SD quality 5.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for HD quality 25 Megabits per second - Recommended for Ultra HD quality Remember that these figures are per stream, so concurrent streaming to multiple devices is bandwidth additive.
Use the traffic monitor to test and measure various service speeds overtime without VPN and then do the same with a VPN place. Admittedly, a VPN should be slower; however, if your speeds for various services are consistently faster with the VPN ( that is when your ISP cannot recognize the specific services/protocols in use), there’s a good chance your ISP is indeed throttling certain services.
I'm not an expert on these things, but maybe do it from the outside? Set up an internet facing server on your network and then push and pull data using a known honest provider.
Test your activities through a VPN, for instance, streaming from Netflix, or downloading from torrents.
If traffic shaping is in place on your ISP's end, it will stand out immediately. In the UK on VirginMedia i tend to get no more than 4MB/s on a torrent, despite having a 200mib/s connection. When i torrent through a VPN hosted in the same country, the download speeds will increase tenfold even with the same peers in the swarm.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
[($)]
to prove it you would basically need inside information from the ISP. The reality is their is no easy way to tell whether they are intentionally slowing down your traffic or if it is simply a matter of them having insufficient peering bandwidth, network capacity or hell even backhaul from your local endpoints. There are all sorts of apps that try to make educated guesses but for the most part they are crap as all they can really do is guess.
How do you know its the ISP and not the content provider? In times of high demand, I would not be surprised if throttling occurs. I also would not be surprise if by the nature of high demand that a ISP's average speed declines. I have seen quality decline in the evenings occasionally with Amazon content streaming and a few times with Netflix. Those times the problems were with bandwidth issues with high demand and not my ISP. As confirmed by both Amazon and Netflix. Even increased traffic around you at night using wireless networking can seriously degrade speeds. Not so much a issue with 5 Ghz wifi, but 2.4 ghz is notorious for throttling speed with many access points near.
Has darkharlequin done something to displease the editors?
Just run the speed test against another node in another country or state. That would indicate if the ISP is slowing down explicit traffic or not. Even better to run a bandwidth test with a less common service than Speedtest. Like http://www.bredbandskollen.se/ (You can switch from Swedish to English on that page). Just be aware that the further away the server is the more likely you'd get bad figures since you have to share the channel with others.
Also try to locate the speed test servers on the same net as the service you like to access, that can also give you a good indication if it's throttling or just shitty network.
On YouTube you also can right-click on the video and select "Stats for nerds" to see the connection speed as well as dropped frames.
Tools like traceroute (in Windows tracert) and ping are your friends. hrping is an alternative to ping.
Also see more test variants here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/...
If you can - also look at if there are ping responses from the net using wireshark. Look for source quench messages. However those are usually presented to the streaming service and not to the client unless you do an upload of data.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
A good way to find where a connection is being slowed is to use MTR, or on Windows WinMTR. It's a combination of ping and traceroute that can show where the network becomes slow, or error rates become high between you are the server you are using.
For many years I've tested my connection on comcast.
If it's a popular or well publicized test site, comcast gives back great numbers.
On the other hand, if you use any of the various ways to obfuscate the address, or just use one comcast doesn't have on it's script yet, then you'll see MUCH lower speeds.
Yes, there are ways to verify that the obfuscation isn't causing the slowdown.
Short version, comcast slows you down unless they know they're being tested, then they give you a higher bandwidth. I've tested them for close to 10 years now, and it's always the same.
where the people live and breath this stuff 24/7/365. http://www.dslreports.com/forums/
Read somewhere. maybe here on /., about a guy who tested just this by faking the headers on traffic from his own servers to look like netflix (?) traffic.
Other/normal traffic would go through full blast, traffic with the faked headers significantly slowed dow.
I wouldn't even think you'd be able to stream Netflix or HBO through a measly 3Mbps connection.
The least I've ever had on cable was 20Mbps and I could watch Netflix in 480p, but it wasn't pretty sometimes - it would drop the quality pretty low and only clear up occasionally.
If my math is right, that's like a 2GB movie that's 90 minutes long. I suppose you might expect a decent quality 480p stream, assuming they are using really good codecs. You wouldn't want your network connection doing anything else, that's for sure.
Web surfing history is collected and served up for sale to anyone who wants to buy.
Test data on flow is still interesting though, and there might be a big picture too. Like the whole internet is kinda busted.
Are you comparing speedtest in a laptop/PC with a smart TV?
I recently discovered that streaming Netflix over WiFi in my LG smart tv was terrible, despite having a decent router and WiFi signal strength. I switched to Ethernet (using home plugs) and streaming TV works flawlessly now.
This will sound odd, but try a VPN over the same connection.
I found my ISP was slowing down all traffic, apart from to speedtest.net and other speed testing sites.
However, they were not slowing down VPN traffic.
After running all my traffic for a month over a VPN, my speeds were 10x faster and not slowing down at peak times.
Then I received a call from my ISP kindly asking me to leave. I'm now with a decent ISP.
If you're a Windows user, sometimes the system will switch back to the default ISP's DNS for certain programs (Edge browser *cough cough*) and not just p2p/torrent stuff because, and like we Linux users keep trying to say, they are evil, assuming that all the ads and tracking doesn't give you away or if Micro$oft itself made a deal to throttle on behalf of the ad related conpitition. How else can Cortana give Micro$oft their untainted data fix if your lying to her or get you to use Bing instead of Google? Skype instead of literally anything else? Payed subscriptions instead of free and open source cross platform tools? I even have people telling me their Windows system is warning them that Firefox is an insecure web browser because they clearly want them to use IE or Edge. Classic web browser war bs, but they go much further than that now and you don't get a much of a choice these days. I guess I'm saying it could actually be your Windows 10 system being a dick instead of the ISP. Linux users will not wave it in your face like you think if you switched unless you picked pure Ubuntu (they're partners of sorts). Using WSL isn't going to help. Also, using ping isn't going to help either because it only rates the response time and not the amount of data transferred which is what the ISP is going to look at. It might not hurt to check anyway because maybe it's the just servers acting up.
Once you have wireshark running, Open the application that you believe they are throttling. It should run at 'normal' speed after the first 1/2 second. During the first 1/2 second, you'll see a bitrate that seems way too high for your connection, and that you'll never see outside of the first 1/2 second of any transmission. Once you've passed the 1 second mark, this is your normal speed. At this point, you have two options. 1) repeatedly perform a traceroute to the service that you're streaming, or 2) watch the TTL of the packets from the service. If #1, then the times should match what wireshark is showing for packet delay. if #2, then TTL shouldn't change once the stream starts. Once you notice the throttling, with wireshark still running, hit speedtest.net and start it and immediatly close it (because you don't actually need the speed test, you just need your ISP to detect that you've run a speed test) and if your stream transfer rate increases, well, there's your evidence. In all likelyhood, they've hired somone away from AT&T because this is exactly how AT&T in Gwinnet Co. GA operated in 2000-2004
It tests using Netflix so you can compare to other speed testers.
https://fast.com/
If you have an Android or iOS device, then download the Wehe app and run it while you're connected to your home WiFi. It was developed by university researchers to detect slowdowns of certain streaming services.
My ISPs dirty little secret is that it routes all http(s) traffic through a proxy cache server, so most popular websites run load great but everything else is often slow.
You are welcome.
Comcast recently released gigabit speeds in my city. As technicians we were given a modded raspberry pi to use as a speed tester since the company sponsored Ookla speedtest app would max out between 400-500mbps. No matter what speed a browser/app speed test would return, our speed tester would always return 985mbps.
I went out on a call to fix someone's speed issues and did what i could do but no matter what we just could not get any of his devices/pcs to return a good speed regardless of how fast my company modded tester claimed his connection was. I got a call a few days later from a supervisor "coaching" me about the lack of a 4th upstream QAM in his area and that he wouldn't be able to get gig speeds until we worked that into our plant.
My reply to this is still: If then, it is an impossible feat of radio physics for this persons cable plant to support gigabit speeds, how could the Comcast speed tester be reporting 985mbps? The company lies about its internet speeds but all of my customers know that and still subscribe to them.
He says he get a standard 3 Mpbs from his ISP. This is about the speed required for a non-buffering stream from Netflix. So any small dip in speed or the use of a second application at the same time as Netflix would result in buffering. Doesn't mean the ISP is not throttling but it could just be that the standard speed is not up to the job.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
I can't use SFTP to access my Godaddy account over Roger's infrastructure in Canada. I have ISP accounts with Carrytel and Tecksavvy both using Rogers cable infrastructure and my traffic is blocked. However when I use Bell everything works fine. Godaddy support was good, Tecksavvy is always amazing but we couldn't resolve it and rogers was completely unhelpful.
Has anyone else experienced this and been able to resolve it?
It's done the best work of all the (reputable) providers in implementing Netflix compatability.
Last night netflix movies would simply get to 20% (of the way to starting the movie) and stop, meaning the movie never actually started. In every case it got to 15% or up to 23% and...no further. I tried several times on each of several movies.
Switched to amazon prime and no delay, fast response, worked fine right away.
I was asking myself how I could check on comcast (the only ISP available here).
It's a TV, so no obvious way to run a speed test on it.
Please note, the OP asks for the ways that can be accepted as a legal means. I would set up some host on the internet with public IP, and set the pack of speedtests (for instance using iperf) using different TCP/UDP ports. If the tests will show some significant differences on the ports used by P2P, than for ports 80/443 for example, this could be accepted as a proof, I suppose.
1. Use pchar to establish the bandwidth and packet loss ICMP sees between endpoints.
2. Craft packets that contain magic numbers or magic strings, I'm pretty sure that's hping, and see if there are behaviours that only occur with given sequences regardless of endpoints.
3. Traverse the same segment of net using an encrypted tunnel, as encryption is slow. If this causes a massive acceleration, then it cannot be explained by a change in path, only by a change in visibility.
4. Use a proxy that is on the other side, so you traverse the same path but alter the visible destination endpoint. This will detect the most common form of hostile traffic shaping.
If you detect an obvious, reproducible, pattern then you have shown hostile traffic shaping and the form it has taken.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't think it is a violation. There is a legitimate need for the ISP to be able to identify actual capacity problems in the network they control. Having a way to test for that is a requirement to troubleshooting performance issues. Any service department worth its salt is going to establish a way to do this.
https://ooni.torproject.org/
HTH
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've read most of the threads; some good knowledge out there. As said dozens of times, very difficult to pinpoint troubles. I mean, consider the architectures: Last Mile terminates inside a carrier's pop. From there on out, its kind of a crap-shoot. Even peering links get saturated (drops occur), even go down, in which case re-routes come into play. The internet's advertised functionality is a survivable cloud, where re-routes fix saturated or downed links. In principle. Working for tw telecom for a few years in their noc as a repair tech, outages and the like impact traffic in crazy ways. Without direct knowledge of what links are running at capacity, or what outages are going on it is just so hard to really maintain path integrity. And that's for enterprise customers, who pay through the nose for SLA. Residential broadband is at the bottom of the priority list, virtually always Best Effort. Which means exactly what it says. Factor in the corollary effects of *cough* net neutrality --it is my hope Ajit Pai can never take a cup of coffee in public again without risk of a beating-- we are indeed in a brave new world of throughputs and L2/L3traffic classifications. It is easy to rail at the ISP, but unless as a user you contract for SLA, and in specific SLA to that which is important to you, the Interweb will ALWAYS be a crap-shoot. The miracle is that it works as well as it does.
--I do what I can, I work in the dark.
I would love to see a standalone application that runs through enough encryption that the ISP can't selectively speed-up or slow down, that uniformly randomly tracks speed to at least one main (not advertiser/spam) site from my computer through my ISP and makes the results public. I would love to see a non-profit make this happen.
Every single customer of every single ISP would want this software. It would allow hundreds of millions of people to keep someone who has a monopoly over them honest. It would "the next killer windows program".
I think there are hundreds of millions of customers in the US who would like to see this. I think it would put teeth and a few hundred million customers behind "net neutrality" support, and make it happen. It might lead to internet access as a public utility, instead of toll roads and monopolies on driveway - which is what we have now.
Netflix is Amazon, which is insanely huge architecture and throughput. I can't imagine Netflix being the slow one. I can't not imagine your ISP being the slow one. They do this crap all the time. It is crap like this that drives cord-cutting. If AT&T/Verizon/Sprint weren't so miserly in their approach to cell phones, they could stunningly vastly improve their income by making an equivalent service to compete in the land of monopolies. If half of all ISP's are effectively a monopoly, and if the telecom just went "same price for same alleged service" then majority of all ISP customers would move, because ISP's don't make their on-paper commits in real life and lots of people are angry about it. Telecoms can't find the will to do that. Truth, however, would be transformative. If the ISP was measured/shown to be the ass every time they cheat, and they can't not cheat, then you would see what happens.
Your ISP probably doesn't slow down anything. It's just that they didn't partner with the content delivery networks of some popular services. There are often disagreements on who is going to pay... As a result, all Netflix or whatever traffic goes through small pipes that are not designed to handle such heavy loads.
If you notice that speeds vary during the day, with prime time being the slowest, than that's must be what happens. The mitigation is to force the data to take a different path, one that is not saturated. The obvious way is to use a well connected VPN, but sometimes, just using DNS tricks in order to use a different server than the "closest" one can do the trick.
you simply download a app and run it
http://bit.ly/2IAdbmD [bit.ly]
Oh wow, I'll just startd downloa...oh, wait, I'll first have to trash all my Linux installs here and then somehow install Android or iOS..
you can thank me on twitter if you like http://twitter.com/johnjonesname [twitter.com]
Naah, think I'll pass...
the basic throughput is what it's supposed to be for my DSL service. That is, about 3Mbps due to my distance from the nearest CO.
From Netflix: https://help.netflix.com/en/no...
Below are the internet download speed recommendations per stream for playing TV shows and movies through Netflix.
0.5 Megabits per second - Required broadband connection speed
1.5 Megabits per second - Recommended broadband connection speed
3.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for SD quality
5.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for HD quality
25 Megabits per second - Recommended for Ultra HD quality
If you are trying to watch HD on your connection you are screwed
One thing that I've questioned producers of these tools, many times, is why they rely on basic protocol measurements without the ability for the client to specify a specific site or port number, which would be a more accurate measurement. The too Wehe (currently beta) is going in the right direction -- some folks don't realize how shady ISPs are and that your results from popular traffic measurement tools can be easily padded. So when you're talking to tech support, they try to play you on your ignorance. Sick of it.
Comcast deep inspects all traffic when not using VPN. You can use it to your advantage...I did!
Whenever Comcast is slow, I simply turn off VPN and then search for Verizon FIOS (the other ISP available in my area) several times a day , use FIOS speed tests and search "compare comcast fios", "switch comcast to fios" etc ... until Comcast's automatic deep inspection took notice ...and voila... usually within a day or so the speed issue is resolved and I also start getting deals from Comcast in mail.
If the speed does not get better I fully intend to use all that research to really switch - they cannot ignore it.
Just say the Russians did it. I mean, hey, they're responsible for everything we do now, right? They got the laundry detergent that gives you Redder Reds! It only costs you three rolls of toilet paper and one bar of soap. Buy now, while there's still some on the shelf.
Try measuring the actual download speed of the movie being watched, while at the same time, run your regular speed checker. The two should at least add up. Then see what the speed checker says when you stop downloading the movie.
My favorite is when my allegedly >100MB line is so slow loading web content (not streaming, just web content) that when I go to SpeedTest.net it immediately says "dude you're great at more than 100MB!" but the test results come back before the logo for the page downloads... Essentially I am getting canned results before a 64k graphic can download. Should be called SpeedFraud.net.
Every ISP I've used for the past twenty years have been doing this kind of game. Just like how the airlines oversell capacity. Totally unethical? Absolutely. Illegal? Not really.
Net neutrality is all we got to keep these companies honest, and even that isn't enough anymore.
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
Please reboot your computer and your router and your modem and close and re-open your garage door three times. Then try again.
Please hold at the end of this call if you'd like to take a quick survey to let us know how we've done.
Come at it from the perspective of "how is my ISP throttling certain service providers", and you are yourself biased. You've already decided what the problem is and you are determined to prove that predetermined conclusion.
This is not scientific. It is not sound troubleshooting. And even if you obtain evidence, anyone who knows your bias can undermine your result.
First you acquire evidence, then you reach a conclusion. Not the other way around.
For example, how does the OP know that Facebook and Netflix are not themselves actually slow? Yeah, I know, it does seem a bit unlikely, but really, have you ruled that out? Until you rule that out and gather strong evidence, you are acting 'truthy'. Don't be truthy.
...you can change the quality of the stream... i fall else fails, you can take the quality down a few notches and get uninterrupted stream.
https://iperf.fr/
There's another wrinkle. Netflix will send an ISP a box which the ISP locates on premises. The box is a Netflix server that all of the ISP's customers end up using instead of the "real" Netflix. The Netflix box acts as a caching server, downloading requested content once and then serving it to the "local" network. The trick is your ISP has to agree to host the Netflix box. I'm not even sure why a competent ISP would have to get a Netflix box you would think they are already caching content.
....let me say that I very much appreciate the feedback from the /. community. As usual, a varied mix of great input, doom-mongering and nonsense. What I love about /. !!
Having worked in the industry in Australia, I've got a fair idea what the cause is.
I know Australia and the US are a little different, but the general theory remains the same - what you're probably looking at is QoS. They're not slowing the netflix traffic per se, they're just prioritising other traffic such as the speed tests.
Most streaming suppliers will have a big juicy link from their datacentres to prominent peering points. You can pretty much guarantee that it's your ISP and their choice of backhaul or their choice of backhaul supplier who are at fault if you're seeing traffic prioritisation affect your streaming.
Comcast deliberately and specifically used to slow down Netflix traffic. Prior to Netflix paying them for peering.
I had Comcast's 25mbps speed package, but couldn't stream Super or 3D content. Bandwith was too slow. Dropped my service down to 3mbps. Netflix and Comcast signed peering agreement. Suddenly, the very next day my 3mbps connection was fast enough to stream 3D content from Netflix.
Ya....don't give me the congestion BS. The telcos very knowingly throttle certain content.
Greedy bastitches.
https://www.measurementlab.net... has some good tests. Sadly, some of old Net Neutrality tests have died there - but some of their stuff remains and is good. Back when this fight started, Google backed some groups working to make speed tests that detect if specific slowing was going on - all those tests are at this site - even though the public servers behind them are offline now. Cheers.
You can install an SD-WAN box (www.inspeednetworks.com) that will give you visibility and manage your traffic to reduce any buffer bloat etc.
If your ISP is named COMCAST....then that's your problem right there.
Comcast has more lobbyists and lawyers than you. You'll never win. Ever.
Unless you just want to prove the point for argument's sake.
Then I bid you godspeed, sir.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.