Netflix urged by EU to slow streaming to save internet
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Short term, ISPs can't increase bandwidth availability, and Netflix can reduce bandwidth consumption.
And I'm not sure it's a nonissue. The videos in my online classes are pausing every few seconds lately. And watching those in a lower quality isn't an option because the writing needs to be readable.
On the other hand, Zoom works better than EdX, so it may be the EdX servers that are overwhelmed.
https://berec.europa.eu/eng/netneutrality/
>ISPs are prohibited from blocking or slowing down of Internet traffic, except where necessary. The exceptions are limited to: traffic management to comply with a legal order, to ensure network integrity and security, and to manage congestion, provided that equivalent categories of traffic are treated equally.
I wonder if anyone here knows if the EdX servers are overwhelmed.
It's probably a formal agreement with Netflix, but I'm speculating.
I'm sure that will help bandwidth.
But it also makes sense for the CEO to make the political gesture and appease the EU commissioner.
Deprioritizing Netflix would also solve that, but given that this is illegal in several countries, providers there are likely lacking the infrastructure or know how to implement such a policy on short notice, even if these laws were temporarily suspended.
In other words, this would only help if a lot of people on your segment are watching Netflix, and if a lot of people on your segment are watching Netflix, then Netflix has a whole bunch of data on exactly how full that segment is and will adjust accordingly.
It's already in their interest to not have users watching their video "Buffering...". I'm sure that makes users disconnect. If users disconnect they won't generate revenue.
In other words, in cases of congestion on the Internet, doesn't Netflix and similar services already "slow down streaming"?
Compared to say, just capping the quality a certain amount below the current maximum for a while. For example turning off the 4K stream for the next 2 weeks. I guess people can live with HD for a while.
Basic congestion control uses packet drops as a signal of congestion and slows down. You get packet drops if a queue was filled somewhere, which would be the bottleneck between two stations. That's business as usual.
The best queue to fill is as close as possible to a station, i.e. in the user modem or first hop, if not the application itself. If we begin to get congestion between ISP networks it won't be as pretty but it won't "break the Internet" and it's literally their job to upgrade the connectivity between networks before that happens. Plenty of bandwidth means you don't need QoS.
That being said, there are modern congestion control algorithms that try to be more clever. Your web browser may already be using one of them.
Bufferbloat gets in the way of that. As does packet loss due to non-congestion reasons, e.g. noisy or unstable connections at the physical layer.
If the EU really wanted to save the Internet they should have done something about that, only it's 20 years too late.
It does not in the case of Netflix. Netflix monitors the performance of entire network segments, and if a segment is starting to get overloaded, it may kick down other streams on the same segment. Netflix uses the info from every one of its clients as a sort of continuous end user test so they get a really good read on every segment's network congestion in near real time.
I guess I'm the oposite. For me personally this "adaptive" thing without any user control is more likely to make me go away. For example I've stopped paying for amazon's anime strike after trial period because it kept playing in like 480p without way to enforce better quality.
If it's buffering, fine, I can either try to find out what is wrong with the network or just let it buffer the whole thing.
It would also be a big waste of bandwidth every time a user does not finish the entire video and the cache would just be eventually discarded.
https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis... https://stats.ams-ix.net/index.html https://portal.linx.net/lans_flows
We should urge leaders (public and private) to do a better job and hold them accountable for bad policy.
https://muninetworks.org/communitymap
These folks in the northern rural parts of England do it stupid cheap:
Contacting your local community representation/government about this can be done from the comfort of your home during self-isolation.
There's a company already doing gigabit over wifi to homes but you run into line of sight issues -- if figure with all the dark fiber we would just patch into that
Like any bootstrapped venture, make it a side gig until you reach a comfortably sustainable run rate and subscriber base. You’re not going to get rich as a private ISP, but it can be a comfortable small biz.
I bet I would need to get some serious networking skills also, no?
The only thing that DTAG has to do is allow local loop access for unbundling - and this is why the biggest freedom of choice within the Internet market in Germany you see is that you can choose from 10 different ADSL ISPs. However, since they all use the same shitty old copper it's effectively zero choice.
If you're talking about fast and reliable why are you looking at mobile internet then? Fiber beats a shared medium on a fundamental basis.
Streaming video content has been ubiquitous for years now. A lot of households probably have 3-4 devices streaming HD content for hours during "prime-time." So ISPs should have kept up.
One major problem is that people have no idea where their bandwidth goes, the tools and bill don't help them.
Meanwhile it's pretty obvious when someone is tapping your water/electricity and, importantly, you have an incentive to investigate. This doesn't exist with bandwidth.
If your smart toaster is saturating your bandwidth, 99.9% of people will never know. They'll just think their internet is slow for some reason and that's all they can perceive. We have so little insight into our connection that we have all sorts of superstitions when the internet is bad, like restarting the router. I think everyone is being let down and the system seems to exist to let bad actors take advantage of everyone else.
You get 10TB of bandwidth for a dollar. Once average usage per subscriber goes over that, then we can talk.
A $50 router will tell you where your bandwidth is going, with graphs, so that's not an issue.
Not that your smart toaster is going to be a problem. Now your gaming console...
Yes, some European countries are lagging behind (hello Germany) but that's a political problem.
The important change was actually always-on Network access, but that's often muddled up with the step to 512kbps or more commonly 1MBps DSL service labelled "broadband" - because for most users both happened together.
There wasn't then and isn't now a practical need for "10G at home in western cities for everyone". Getting to 10Mbps allowed almost all the applications you'd actually want, and 100Mbps makes that practical if several people in a household are doing different things - maybe you're in a a video conference while the kids watch movies. But continued exponential growth needs a compelling application, and no practical application was found.
Fibre (often muddled together with these higher bandwidth offerings) makes sense for new builds because it's cheaper to produce and has good reliability. But ripping out working copper networks to add fibre is like demolishing an otherwise perfectly good bridge to put in a nicer bridge. It's not impossible but it is a waste of resources.
In fixed broadband the same is still happening albeit more slowly, we have streaming tv, then hd/4k streaming movies, then games ala ps live/Stadia, enormous gb console/pc game downloads .. new apps are continuously enabled by improving bw & latency.
I think you have to consider the quite limited multi tasking for bandwidth consumption. Worst case scenario I'm downloading some big file and streaming video at the same time, but that happens very early. Most realistically I'm only using one service at a time.
We also have to consider the asymmetrical nature of service consumption. Netflix et. al aren't event close to saturating a 100 mbit/s connection with video, nor are most places I download stuff so fast that I'm saturating my wifi-link.
This will probably age bad, but I think "100 Mbit/s low-latency bandwidth per person ought to be enough for anyone".
It may make perfectly good sense to pull out copper and push in fiber.
It costs money to run and maintain a copper network. Fiber networks are less costly to operate and maintain.
In a rational world copper would be replaced immediately with fiber when total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the asset is less for fiber than copper.
This is why WISP are deploying micro POPs and cellular carriers are deploying small cells.
This is a huge difference compared to fiber where the same infrastructure will scale from 100M to 100G.
Forklift upgrades and truck rolls are expensive. Copper and radio aren’t like fiber where swapping a $9 optic for a $19 optic makes you go from 1G to 10G. All this makes a massive difference in TCO in fiber’s favor over the lifetime of the assets.
Providing fixed line service over copper or radio is silly in the long term as each upgrade requires you to build out fiber closer and closer to the end user bit by bit. Better to do it at once and reap the benefits, both in terms of service and costs.
Not deploying faster signaling in copper networks is also a misstatement. Cable networks are busy splitting nodes, deploying more fiber and upgrading to faster versions of DOCSIS all the time.
Most telcos have already transitioned to fiber and are not building out copper anymore. Here the US is an outlier, as the telcos here are just milking the existing copper assets for revenues until they exit the business.
If the situation continues, I would expect the load on conferencing demand to be at least 10x of what it is now when an average 4-10 person business starts doing WFH.
They want to abuse the situation by inventing a problem and getting support from politicians with no knowledge and plenty to lose during a humanitarian disaster - all of it to be able to introduce "HD packages" and similar later, so you get to pay more while they get to invest less. This is a great first towards selling "services" (by holding them hostage) and not being a "pipe" (which is their job).
Think of the children.
"Netflix said it already adjusts the quality of streams to available network capacity, and uses a special delivery network that keeps its library closer to users as a way of consuming less bandwidth.
"The Commission said that while there has been a sharp increase in internet usage, no outages or adverse affects have so far been reported."
So I'm not sure what the problem here is.
Meanwhile here in the US, my company has been holding large video conferencing sessions (80+ people) for the first time ever, on Google Hangouts Meet. They've been flawless. Sure, that can change, but I have a hard time believing we aren't already near peak "at home" usage.
What's the real bottleneck here?
If there is any slowdown, it is likely due to limitations in the last mile. Netflix isn't sending 4k video streams from California to everyone else in the world individually, assuming everything is working.
ISPs overselling their last mile bandwidth.
A modern submarine cable, like Google's new Dunant transantlantic cable, has 250 Tbps of bandwidth. For reference, the largest Internet Exchange in Europe, DE-CIX, just reported a new traffic record of 9 Tbps.
So, no, anything using fiber isn'ta bottleneck. You can fit all of DE-CIX traffic on a single strand of fiber with off the shelf gear.
Most business were 10:1 but you could pay for up to 1:1
Cloud Flare does not. Cloud Front does not. Fastly does not. Google does not. Level3 does not. Even Limelight/Edgecast which used to have a decent footprint inside Verizon does not.
That in turn means that all of the content cached by those networks still relies on the eyeball networks having interconnect capacity.
Maybe I dreamed it.
Google used to have some search appliances, which they gave to ISPs. It is not the same thing.
Apple used to use Akamai for distribution of content because of racks that Akamai had in lots of edge networks. I do not know if they are still using it but I expect they do. Akamai has an enormous foot print.
But most providers don't take Netflix up on that offer and rather focus on hoping that crappy peering is forcing Netflix into paying them for connectivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_details_of_Netflix#O...
I am sure 'this' time it will work.
One positive outcome we can all agree on though: the end of BT OpenReach’s passive aggressive “monopoly“ couldn’t come soon enough though. The amount of makework that goes on in UK broadband caused by OpenReach’s emplacement at the heart of it all is ridiculous.
Kelly Communications (a major broadband hookup contractor for OpenReach and Virgin): your days are numbered.
Any mention of Netflix is a deflection.
I don't know enough about the tech to know for sure that this is possible, but it seems likely since it is the same wire and they offer different levels of TV and internet service.
If I'm right and it is possible, why is it that only streaming providers are being asked to sacrifice the quality of their service?
Why can't ISPs throttle them??
The daily briefing at ec.europa.eu was edited after Netflix caved, but yesterday it was evident from it that the person responsible had no clue about how any of it works, was deeply confused by the difference between "the Internet" and mobile networks.
Part of the text freaking urged people to "use Wi-Fi" to relieve Internet congestion. Because as everybody knows, Wi-Fi uses magic and bypasses the Internet.
So we got our 25% reduction in Netflix quality on broadband connections because some moron was told by telcos that mobile networks are strained. While the actually competent people at IXes all over EU are saying there's nothing to worry about, they know how to do their job.
EU in a nutshell for you.
Just like the electricity utility companies cannot provide everyone at the same time with the maximum power they are allowed to use.
We also know from poorer countries that ISPs can provide better connections.
With an electricity utility, they may be able to turn on their coal generators to meet peak loads - it's a higher cost, but it's something they have available to use when needed. If engineered correctly, it also provides power consistently across all customers. Sure your house never uses enough to matter, but if all of a sudden an auto manufacturer wanted to turn on a whole new production line, they would have planned for that and gotten specific lines run to power it.
There is no equivalent for an ISP. Yes, they could guarantee that each customer gets x mbit/s and provision enough capacity (both to your house, to your neighborhood, to your central office, and finally to their peering connections) to cover all of that, but your internet would cost $300/m whether you use it or not and you'd be complaining about that too.
In the US? The fact that everybody doesn't hate their guts. A future government could easily screw them over in the future, because the voters don't like those companies.
In other countries? Competition. You offer a better service than other ISPs. This also gives everyone better internet and internet services can offer more things. Much poorer countries than the US and Germany have much better internet for a lower cost. As long as there's a big disparity there customers aren't going to be happy.
Each measure could be based off of what the ISP has factored in for the "average" usage at a given time. It would be a purely synthetic number, but it would give people a better idea of exactly what they use, when, and how that compares.
You’d have to ask your neighbor about their usage to get comparative metrics, tho.
Apparently in March 2019 I used a total of 106GB of download 25GB of upload, and this month so far is way below those numbers. This is biased by me working from home, so hour-long video conference calls aren't a new thing for me.
The ISP's policy (for which they charge significantly more than a typical ISP in my country) is to "never be the bottleneck". If things are too slow it is never (intentionally) their fault. So that's one reason they provide these charts - you can see latency info in them, drop rates, everything.
I am fine with throttling these services, hospitals and research should be given top priority, followed by all remote workers (or general traffic if that's hard to distinguish). These massive leisure services should be at the very bottom of priority.
I think traffic from research and hospitals is comparably low for that matter.
Speaking of which... quite a few conferencing solutions are down right now in central Europe.
Sure, I agree. And if the hospital data is critical, you can already pay an ISP to get guaranteed bandwidth over a VPN between your hospitals. It will cost you dearly but if the best-effort nature of the Internet won't do it for you, you pay.
> Speaking of which... quite a few conferencing solutions are down right now in central Europe.
Isn't that because the backends of those services are overloaded, not because of congestion between networks? That happened to Microsoft Teams, I'm sure it happened to more of them.
I can certainly agree emergency communications warrant better QoS guarantees than a netflix stream; it's probably not a big deal if your stream drops more packets than usual, but it matters a lot for real-time communication.
if we're talking about throttling connections, OP of this thread has a good point. if you want to keep people cooped up in their houses indefinitely, you gotta throw them a bone of some sort. throttling their netflix stream is going to piss people off, and at the margins, people might just say fuck it and go outside.
What we have here is a critical vulnerability in that too much is dependent upon one backbone.
That doesn't its not clear that its necessary at this point. But it if is? Clinging to net neutrality is silly.
Now EU politicians are shift-blaming after they blew their budget and have nothing to show.
What ever gave you the idea that there is a dearth of fiber in Europe or that there are only DCs in Ireland or the Netherlands?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
I was way off with CloudFlare. Netflix might be better by using Akamai and others.
For instance, they peer with us, a nobody (Warsaw Hackerspace, AS204880) over EPIX in Warsaw, announcing most of their prefixes to us there. In addition, they have a GGC node in EPIX.
The GFE is our frontend proxy that terminates TCP & SSL and does not cache content.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Athens, Greece
Barcelona, Spain
Belgrade, Serbia
Berlin, Germany
Brussels, Belgium
Bucharest, Romania
Budapest, Hungary
Chișinău, Moldova
Copenhagen, Denmark
Cork, Ireland
Dublin, Ireland
Düsseldorf, Germany
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Frankfurt, Germany
Geneva, Switzerland
Gothenburg, Sweden
Hamburg, Germany
Helsinki, Finland
Istanbul, Turkey
Kyiv, Ukraine
Lisbon, Portugal
London, United Kingdom
Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
Madrid, Spain
Manchester, United Kingdom
Marseille, France
Milan, Italy
Moscow, Russia
Munich, Germany
Nicosia, Cyprus
Oslo, Norway
Paris, France
Prague, Czech Republic
Reykjavík, Iceland
Riga, Latvia
Rome, Italy
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Sofia, Bulgaria
Stockholm, Sweden
Tallinn, Estonia
Thessaloniki, Greece
Vienna, Austria
Vilnius, Lithuania
Warsaw, Poland
Zagreb, Croatia
Zürich, Switzerland
Amsterdam, Netherlands (3) Budapest, Hungary Dublin, Ireland Frankfurt, Germany (3) Groningen, Netherlands Hamburg, Germany (2) Hamina, Finland London, England (3) Madrid, Spain (2) Marseille, France Milan, Italy Munich, Germany Paris, France (2) Prague, Czech Republic Sofia, Bulgaria St. Ghislain, Belgium Stockholm, Sweden (2) Warsaw, Poland Zurich, Switzerland (2)
Still, Google/Amazon/etc don't have the same level of distribution as you or Akamai. And they are fine. Blame should be in international fiber.