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Comment by leobelle | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of complexity involved with network connections. There are many plausible alternative explanations for your and the author's problems. One or two people talking about their experience isn't the kind of data you would need to jump to the conclusion that your ISP is throttling your internet connection.

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They literally stated that during a support call "we throttle cloud services"

Can anyone set up a "speed test" online on AWS or something similar? This way we can experiment with connections.

That guy doesn't probably have any idea about what he's talking about. Call center types wouldn't know this and "throttle cloud services" just translates to "throttle the internet." The cloud is the internet.

Unless they were told to specifically say what they did, which seems unlikely, the chance of a first level technical support person having any clue what sort of QoS policy is implemented on the network is basically zero.

That sort of person would not have access to see such things directly and wouldn't have the skill set to interpret configuration.

if only we had a distributed group of people, all of whom with a vested interest in figuring this out, that could help us with doing speed tests in variety of configurations…

Netflix is already doing this:

http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa

Oh wow. I was being tongue in cheek about us techies, but looks like Netflix beat me to it here. awesome!

A rough look at the data suggests that Verizon DLS used to be around a stable 1.4 Mbps until October 2013 and is on a continuous decline since then with a current low of 1.17 Mbps. That would support the OPs theory, but it's only a single datapoint that may have other underlying causes.

Interestingly, the net neutrality ruling wasn't until last month.

I believe that's a few months after Netflix started heavily using Cogent as a provider, and thus Cogent's peering disputes with Verizon and Comcast began:

http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/having-problems-with-your-netfl...

My company uses Cogent as an ISP, and remote workers have had nothing but trouble trying to use VPN and other connections back home via Comcast or Verizon because the Cogent/Comcast+Verizon peering points are severely overloaded, dropping packets at a 5%+ clip at some times during the day.

It can also be so simple that there is some pipe that is full somewhere along the way that will be upgraded eventually.

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