Comcast is definitely throttling Netflix, and it’s infuriating
mattvukas.com
mattvukas.com
Over time, this was fixed, only to return later, at which point it was fixed again.
Huge kudos to my provider (Cablecom in Switzerland) for actually fixing this and even in a somewhat timely manner.
But.
As more and more of the internet users traffic gets centralized to a few big services (Netflix, YouTube, to some extent Facebook), the usual unbureaucratic peering agreements start to become less and less feasible as traffic starts to be centralized with a few very major content providers.
Not only that: some players might start to produce so much traffic that it starts to become useful to go as far as to start doing special proxy solutions for specific content providers (another provider here in Switzerland has a special solution in place for youtube after talking with Google).
At which point does all that effort in order to have your end-users be able to access some of these huge content providers stop being worth it in the name of net neutrality?
Providing network neutrality is easy when everything just works, but when you have to make new peering agreements, build new pipes or create special infrastructure just for one content provider that doesn't pay you a cent, then that whole neutrality thing becomes very inconvenient and, I have to say, unfair to the providers.
Yes. I really, really want network neutrality, but I see that aside of all the political and business-model-preservation issues, we are running into technical issues too and those need solving too.
I guess same thing can be provided by Netflix as well.
Wouldn't accepting equipment from one provider compel you to accept from others too in order to stay neutral.
"If your endpoint drives enough traffic, we're open to solutions" doesn't seem silly.
What about ISPs that provide mirrors? An example I've used before was Australian ISPs providing steam, linux, etc mirrors to save their transoceanic costs. Is that still neutral?
They fact that they chose to sell 'unlimited' data and look at network investment as a waste is not unfair to them in any way. It's a self-imposed illusion of a problem.
So charging customers per MB is out and charging content providers per MB is out too.
Providing crappy service or investing significant amounts of money and time is all that's left and considering the local monopolies, crappy service is what we get as that's the least amount of trouble for the providers.
While it seems some management might be required to sufficiently route high traffic partners, does it really require 'building new pipes' or 'special infrastructure' that has a non-trivial cost?
I thought the wonderful aspect of the Internet is such tasks and distribution could be had for very, very cheap.
To fix this, you can try to talk to that any of the 3 parties involved, or you find a new peering agreement (if possible), or you actually start paying for the traffic.
Or you just leave it as-is, hoping that at some point somebody closer to the congestion starts complaining, which eventually is going to happen.
This certainly is the cheapest route and this is what we honestly can expect considering that all we are promised is 'best effort'. Everything beyond that is really cool to have, but also comes with some expense for the providers.
It's my understanding that this is actually pretty common: https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html
An ISP can upgrade their equipment for free to receive YouTube traffic via peering or they can upgrade their equipment and pay for transit to receive the same traffic. Given that the traffic is going to be received anyway, peering is by far the cheapest way to accept it.
And if we imagine a world where there were 100 niche video sites instead of YouTube, the total bandwidth would probably be the same but ISPs would be paying for transit to receive it. Google and Netflix's economies of scale benefit ISPs as well.
The customers (end users) are paying for access to content. Everyone is browsing in YouTube. If the ISP can't afford the connections to provide that, they need to raise their prices.
Comcast does not participate in Netflix's OpenConnect project. If Comcast wanted to, they could receive a 4U server from Netflix (multiple ones, in fact, for each densely populated area they service) completely free of cost. Obvious costs for power and rack space apply, although the appliance itself is free.
This would then allow your Netflix viewing to go to a 4U server at a Comcast datacenter or colocation in the area instead of having the entire South East US try to fit through a small pipe at Marietta, GA.
Comcast's stubbornness to participate in the OpenConnect project is the reason for slowness, not throttling. Of course it's going to be faster over a VPN because whatever endpoint you're connecting to most likely takes a different AS path to Netflix.
Call it congestion if you want but it's intentional congestion caused by intentionally wrong routing.
What you define as a "non optimal route" isn't what BGP defines as a non optimal route. An ISP can't just send all their customer traffic through any foreign network they choose. The peering location happens to be the "best" path available to Netflix and it won't change until Comcast gets off their high horse and installs Netflix's free caching servers on their network.
Something tells me you aren't the operator of a network that has BGP sessions with several other networks.
Otherwise, my traffic goes from my ISP to Time Warner to someone else (AT&T? Level3? I don't recall at the moment) before finally hitting Netflix.
Why would you accept equipment from Netflix but not $STARTUP? Would accepting equipment from Netflix also force you to accept equipment from $OTHERSTARTUP (talking about http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two.... here)? What are the security implications?
It's a win for everyone. ISP has to peer less traffic, customers get a faster experience, and Google/Akamai/Netflix benefit from reduced load.
It's purely speculation on my part, but I believe the only reason we haven't seen OpenConnect adopted at Comcast is because Comcast has everything to lose from making Netflix fast because they're also a cable company. This is where the net neutrality debate comes into play. When Comcast starts preventing the growth of third party services that don't contribute to their bottom line.
A proper conclusive test would ensure connection to the same Netflix IP somehow over a VPN as his home connection.
As I mentioned in another comment, however, the .edu is almost certainly better connected to this facility than Comcast is.
From the Wiki entry the author quotes:
"A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which it is most efficient (involving the lowest long-run average cost) for production to be concentrated in a single firm."
Competition in the ISP market drives costs lower as it forces the companies to become more efficient, and increases the value proposition offered to customers (greater speeds at an equal or lesser price, thanks Google Fiber!). In fact, I think it would be easy to prove comprehensively that ISPs are in no way natural monopolies.
If the author was right, and ISPs were a natural monopoly, then there would be nothing to discuss, the only practical solution would be to install government regulated monopolies in every location across the nation to achieve the absolute lowest cost and consumer price. Google demolished this line of thinking very handily, they showed how instantaneously the government protected telecoms respond to competition in a positive way.
The solution is to make it illegal nationally, via Federal law, for any municipality to ever create or encourage an ISP monopoly; and specifically the exact opposite should occur, competition should be heavily encouraged everywhere. The FCC should be mandated with keeping competition lanes wide open in the ISP market, at all times, across the nation. Standards for how cities and towns handle multiple ISPs for infrastructure should be established. Simply: you shall create no law restricting ISP competition or granting monopoly status, period.
Pretty much no one understands how Google Fiber can be profitable at its prices, so unless they open their books or someone replicates that business model I'm not going to call it a solution.
* You could have gotten a lousy route due to poor traffic management or a network issue by your ISP, the transit providers, or a CDN
* You could have been given an overloaded server or POP by a CDN's DNS
* Your ISP could have a netflix or third party caching appliance, and it could be overloaded
* Your ISP could be under-backhauled, under-peered, or under-transited in any points along your route
* Your ISP's transit provider(s) could be under-peered, under-backhauled, or under-transited if they are not a tier-1 network. See also poor traffic management and network issues.
* Any party along the way to the CDN and to the origin could be under-peered, under-backhauled, or under-transited. See also poor traffic management and network issues.
Using a VPN proves very little. Various BGP and DNS tricks are used in the bullets above, and a VPN can drastically change the parameters of all of them.
sorry, I don't buy any apologizing for comcast/verizon failing to deliver HD video from netflix/youtube yet somehow able to do it under the same network conditions (same time) just this time through an encrypted VPN. if it was an isolated report... maybe. this is far too widespread to be anything but intentional.
Disclaimer: I work for a major CDN. Netflix is trying to ween off of us and our competitors, which has contributed to lesser experience. Their model of co-locating gear for free doesn't make much sense to ISPs in the grand scheme of things.
Basically - Comcast runs all of its ports hot. I would say its safe to say what you're seeing is Comcast sucking at paying for upgrades rather than anything specifically malicious.
(And, even if you can, you can't be sure of the reverse path -- something so many people don't understand when doing traceroutes.)