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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Are actual technical people reporting issues with internet bandwidth, or are these unjustified fears by politicians?

depends on the provider. Netflix is pretty good at offering peering or local cache servers that can be installed inside of a providers network.

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.

That's not the impression I get from Wikipedia. Do you have a source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_details_of_Netflix#O...

Netflix is open to any peering, some ISPs are not: https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/29/netflix-and-att-sign-peeri...

Most ISPs have enough capacity to handle this, investments in capacity usually last many many years. I'm seeing like 10% growth of peak traffic consumption on lock down in my country which is nothing. I'd be surprised if anyone on FTTB experiences problems. I'm not talking about monopolies though that neglect and postpone investment into infrastructure upgrades as much as possible, plenty of their consumers probably already live with significant quality problems and routinely experience "slow internet".

Yes, I'm seeing issues and slowdown.

Like what? Is it an issue with specific services/providers? Or total internet bandwidth? Anyone know the bandwidth the submarine cables can handle in their current configuration?

What's the real bottleneck here?

I don't think the backbone of the Internet cares about this. ISPs get a box with all of Netflix's content in it, so you probably never go out to the Internet to watch something on Netflix. (YouTube also does this, though obviously they don't cache every video in every local ISP's cache, and I believe that Apple has a system like this as well.)

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.

> What's the real bottleneck here?

ISPs overselling their last mile bandwidth.

It is usually ISPs oversubscribing their nodes to too many customers. DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 are very fast. The video services that work the best leverage locality so that you aren't steaming westword over the ocean, but from a local cache much closer to you.

As others have noted, the problems are with specific ISPs and their underdimensioned last mile network and/or backhaul.

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.

Same here. I work from home and before this whole thing started, I'd generally get ~250 Mbps down. Over the last few days, since people started WFH and kids were out of school, I'm lucky to get maybe 15 Mbps. At one point yesterday, I was getting 1.2. Also have seen DNS resolution issues off and on for the past couple of days.

None of the residential providers have enough interconnect capacity to actually support what they have been selling if customers start using even 10% peak bandwidth promised by the connections.

Yet another place where the pandemic calls companies on their bullshit.

This used to be far more prominent or maybe I used to pay more attention, but DSL offers around 2000 had the contention ratio, most residential were 50:1 but there were some that were 20:1

Most business were 10:1 but you could pay for up to 1:1

Well - it depends on what they are using it for. For streaming content & downloads the caches should pick up the slack. Video conferencing is much harder.

If under caches you mean caches in the end-AS then the only work that has that ability is Akamai which has a very large number of pops located inside eyeball networks.

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.

I'm pretty sure I remember being shown a Google Cache box in an ISP data center a couple of years ago - and a netflix one as well - and I think an apple one - but not sure. I do remember there being a lot of fuss with iOs updates and they got persuaded to put them in a cache.

Maybe I dreamed it.

Netflix does but it is not that big size wise. It downloads current hot content. With COVID-19 a lot of long tail is now being consumed, not enough to push it onto the cache boxes but enough to strain the interconnects. When Altered Carbon 2 is released, it will be on the Netflix box because a good number of people at the edge would be requesting it. On the other hand some independent flick won't be on it because there are only a few devices requesting it at the same time.

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.

I did an EU project where the tenant was that 90% of content consumed on a mobile network in a day was 1TB total! But yes, the tail is very long.

Waiting for my provider change, and upgrade to 250 Mbps, next week. Right in time for the Disney+ launch over here! If everthing goes well, home office will become a lot more entertaining! Binging the Mandalorian while being mute during conf calls!

My cable gets pretty slow in the afternoon. From usually 80mb/s to around 4. Ping is up from 15 to 80.

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