Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

An excellent test. If a VPN makes something faster, despite the fact that it adds overhead to the process, that seems like proof that it's being throttled.

View on HN

Not necessarily. It might just be bypassing the congested route that everyone else on your ISP is using. Comcast and Verizon have had disagreements peering with Cogent, one of Netflix's ISPs:

http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about...

It's not throttling, but rather the peering points along the "best" route between Cogent and Comcast/Verizon are overloaded, resulting in lousy connections between them. Look at this traceroute hop from Comcast to Cogent I just recorded:

   7  he-0-10-0-1-pe03.111eighthave.ny.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.83.94)  21.377 ms  20.379 ms  19.387 ms
   8  be7922.ccr21.jfk10.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.13.161)  67.126 ms  67.747 ms  69.083 ms

40 ms to go one short hop in, I believe, the same data center.

Disagreements with Cogent? Well, I never....

I feel it's unfortunate there's likely a lot of people newer to or unfamiliar with the bandwidth market that will not fully grok this comment.

This popped up on NANOG today; apparently FIOS-Cogent and FIOS-Level3 are both hosed. http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2014-February/06411...

It's not being throttled. There is a peering dispute between netflix's CDNs and the ISPs. Netflix's CDN's don't want to pay for delivery to the ISP. Normally CDNs peer with each other for free if the balance in each direction is equal. The problem is that any CDN that delivers netflix is hugely unequal since it's a huge one way stream.

The ISPs could just eat the cost, and let it be delivered for free. Or Netflix's CDNs could just pay the peering fee. Or Netflix could use different CDNs.

The reason the VPN works is because it sends the data over a different CDN that isn't saturated because of the dispute.

At least that is how I understand it, but I'm not an expert (or even a novice).

Umm wait, isn't such a dispute exactly what we call net-neutrality? Consumers pay ISPs for internet access, and now ISPs also want money from websites that provide a service to the consumers. But filtering those websites until they pay the ISP to be let through is the opposite of net neutrality. If what you're saying is true and ISPs are asking Netflix (or subsidiaries) to pay them to be let through unthrottled, then this is indeed the net neutrality problem as the OP reports.

That isn't at all what he said, though.

Then I misunderstood. What did I get wrong?

Edit: Wait I think I understand. I messed up peering and ISPs, right? Because the CDN connects to the internet via peering, and they're charging money (which does make sense to me), not the ISPs.

Not related at all. This is about how the low levels of the internet share connectivity.

Net neutrality is about stopping the ISP from artificially decreasing available bandwidth. These kinds of things adjust the real bandwidth available.

Um, no. I (the consumer) pay for my bandwidth. End of story. Anything else is a violation of the pipes that run the internet.

Oh, and the even more galling part... when watching Hulu on regular Comcast (without the VPN), the shows average around 500-900kbps. When it flips over to displaying the commercials, it jumps to 8Mbps or more!

The ads are probably served from a different service / CDN / network.

This is actually not malicious at all. An individual ad gets served to many more people than any given show, and as a result they'll get cached closer to the destination. Still pretty obnoxious though :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com