Another fun part: when netflix IPs was blocked by this ISP, it's pretty much impossible to use netflix because the only way to get around the block was to use VPN, but netflix itself blocks VPN access.
Thinking about it, it seems like watching habits could make streaming be more or less "efficient" compared to downloading once and storing it locally (depends on how one chooses to calculate efficiency tbh).
People that have things they regularly re-watch are obviously gonna benefit from having a local copy they can access entirely on their own terms.
It hadn't occurred to me until recently, but the way I watch stuff has me going through a pretty large amount of data yet I'm also excessively unlikely I re-watch nearly anything that I've seen in the previous 2 years. Whether something is streamed or stored local, it has to be downloaded the first time it's watched. If it'll take 2 years before I re-watch something, it's a waste of time and money to keep a backlog of multiple disks worth of video
Very wasteful if I did much streaming.
Internet2 is used by hospitals, among other things, and as such has higher robustness requirements than Internet1. The pandemic created much higher demand for bandwidth from hospitals, forcing Internet2 providers to scramble to keep up in areas. As such, blocking high-bandwidth sites which are clearly lower priority than medical traffic might have actually been a reasonable move.
Neither of them actually ran any traffic over it.
Remote Desktop and even PACS are not huge bandwidth consumers in this day and age of 4K streaming. At my large academic institution usually only the radiologists use the PACS client directly on workstations - all the other clinicians are using a “zero footprint” viewer over Citrix like everything else.
It might have been difficult relative to the infrastructure at some hospitals - but that is to my point that hospitals in general are not very demanding bandwidth wise and I would be a bit surprised they’re more than a rounding error on the Internet2 in general - especially compared to all the academic research involving large models and just video streaming in general that blew up during the pandemic.
I’m curious if the GP was speaking from some firsthand experience or is just making some conjecture.
They may have an ISP-local netflix cache, from Netflix themselves not some home-grown hack, so they can achieve that with some reliability without it costing as much as it otherwise would for bandwidth peering.
(PDF): https://openconnect.netflix.com/Open-Connect-Briefing-Paper....
Surely it would essentially saturate your fibre if there was net neutrality, unless you don't pay for full fibre speeds?