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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

Is this for the entirety of Europe? Because I imagine we're not having any issues with this in Finland.

It's a made up problem. In Germany, journalists asked the network providers and they said everything is fine.

Such a ridiculous and pointless thing to do by the EU. Especially since all the apps drop the quality automatically anyway if the connection is slow.

I think the point is to protect things like remote desktop, zoom, etc from being pushed out by netflix traffic.

Isn't that mostly a QoS issue?

The Internet doesn't have QoS.

Last mile networks do.

Yeah, but nobody trusts ISPs to prioritize traffic; that's what the decade of net neutrality discussion has been about. If they start prioritizing Zoom over Netflix now, it just opens the door to continuing that prioritization (for pay) after the crisis.

I'm not sure if I buy the argument that doing something weird during a state of emergency is a valid cause to keep doing it outside of it.

@Hamuko you don't need to buy it, the ISP owners will quickly buy that argument for you :)

And the EU can then take action against the ISPs. The EU hasn't been particularly hands off.

Try tunneling things thru VOIP packets and see if you notice a difference

in these times where a significant amount of business is done from home it becomes a national issue pretty quickly.

Sounds like an ISP issue.

Here in Berlin my DSL connection has been awful since the social distancing began. And many of my friends have complained of similar problems. Frequent disconnections, broken up zoom calls. Though ironically the streaming has been fine from both Netflix & Amazon.

I've had disconnected Zoom calls here (Netherlands) as well, but it seems that's just Zoom not being able to handle the traffic because Google Hangouts and MS Teams are both fine. And Netflix and Disney+ are also working fine.

Didn't MS Teams already go down once due to the additional traffic in Europe?

It could be that they don't have local edge servers in the Netherlands, we are using Zoom very heavily here in the UK and its working well with our colleagues here and in the US but some European countries including Netherlands are breaking up or disconnecting. I think Zoom are using AWS.

If streaming works, but zoom doesn't, maybe the issue is with the zoom servers?

I’ve had other disconnections and sporadic complete DSL outages during the day. It might be there’s more traffic during the day when people are performing work duties from home.

Netflix might also be good enough at queuing up downloaded portions of the film ahead of time that the brief outages don’t affect the viewing experience.

Rather the differences between protocols employed. Streaming video can be sent in chunks where latency doesn't matter that much (within certain tolerances, of course.) Realtime voice and video doesn't have that.

I think Zoom has been having some issues. In Ireland, I haven't seen any actual Zoom breakages, but the maximum resolution I'm now seeing is 640x360. A week ago if someone had a decent webcam it would do 1080p.

What ISP? Maybe they have bad peering because they use peering as a revenue source (cough Telekom).

It wouldn't surprise me if there is a problem, on Netflix's side.

As in this puts too much stress and thus too high of a cost on their end.

It's not an invented problem. In Spain, ISPs like Telefonica and Vodafone are posting tweets are telling newspapers that people need to use the Internet with responsibility [0]. They also passed a law yesterday that allows ISPs to close connections if they know they're being used to spam the network.

Maybe in Germany is different because people are more used to work from home or just being at home while watching Netflix but Spanish people like to go out a lot and now the network needs to serve all these people as well.

[0]: https://www.xatakamovil.com/movil-y-sociedad/operadores-se-u...

"the internet" from a dedicated fiber line is not the same as "the internet" from a oversubscribed 3G cell tower in the same country.

Running better/more aggressive last mile QoS in the affected regions would make more sense to me, though I can see the advantage of netflix throttling "voluntarily" because this approach may avoid net neutrality violations.

They're talking about a 50% increase in voice and 25% in data on mobile networks. The problem is not the wired home connections. In fact, they even suggest that you use your landline for talking instead of the mobile networks.

Would any ISP actually openly say that it's "not fine"? Are these publicly owned companies? Wouldn't be risky to your business if you admitted things are not fine or that they are on the edge of capacity?

German ISPs to public: "Everything is fine!"

German ISPs to EU representative: "Could you please ask Netflix to turn down the traffic so we don't look too bad?"

Not too hard to imagine, is it?

More like German ISPs to EU Representative: oh noes we got caught overselling remember when I gave you all that money now please ask Netflix to slow down

it is a no cost request for a government official to make and gives them a ready out should things go wrong, in that they can point and say "if only they had done what I asked"

No issues in the Netherlands either, we have a lot of cable (250 or 500mbit) and fiber (similar speeds) connections so I guess they're used to this amount of traffic.

I guess this kind of thing is more for rural DSL lines in other countries? Or maybe central London :-), they still have a lot of homes only connected by ancient copper telephone cables.

There are definitely somes issues here. Upload and download speed have gone down since last week, and everyone in the (virtual) office has problems with MS and AWS from time to time. And schools have hardly started...

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