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Comment by MWil | Hacker News Reader

How can one tell if Netflix is purposely being throttled as opposed to it just being heavy traffic periods?

In my experience all recent Netflix slowness is a product of congestion at peering points between Netflix's ISPs (Cogent, Level 3) and the consumer broadband ISPs (Comcast, Verizon). There's a good article in the WSJ today on the dispute:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

This kind of dispute is not really anything a Network Neutrality regime as currently proposed could fix.

There are a few interesting choices in your comment that make it appear to be an Astroturf:

1. You state that it is "your experience" that "all" recent Netflix slowness is a result of peering contract disputes. Unless you are a network operations engineer at one of these companies how could you have this experience?

2. You link to the WSJ, which is not a credible source when discussing big media companies.

That said, you may well be a real person, in which case I would recommend changing your wording on commonly astroturfed topics.

I'm not familiar with the term astroturf in this context. Explain?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

Basically it's a play on "grass roots" movements. Powerful groups attempt to mimic grass roots, populist movements by hiring a bunch of employees to pose and regular people and write comments on forums, etc. And as you know, astroturf is fake grass.

One definition: "online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem." [1]

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/fe...

It's pretty easy to cast hand-waving aspersions.

How about we stick to facts, instead of bullying ad-hominems, okay?

Some dirty ISPs are refusing to use the CDNs that Netflix makes available to them instead of straightforward packet discrimination. I blame Netflix for not shaming Verizon and such with CDN usage stats.

OK, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty: My company uses Cogent as an ISP, which means we were very interested in figuring out why our VPN performance became junk starting around last October. Some traceroutes and extended pings pointed the finger at the Comcast/Cogent peering point in NYC. A little Googling confirmed that we were obviously collateral damage in Netflix's ISPs ongoing disputes with the home broadband ISPs.

Since then, it's been easy to correlate poor performance on my Netflix streaming with a a 60ms+ drop across a Cogent/Comcast peering point when I ping one of my company's servers from home.

There have been several articles on tech news sites discussing this dispute[1][2]. I linked to the WSJ article because it was fresh this morning and provided a good summary of the state of play.

On the other hand, accusations of actual throttling of Netflix traffic on a broadband provider's own network have been frequent but I haven't seen definitive evidence that it's happening on Comcast or Verizon.

Personally, I'm pretty pissed that Comcast is taking my $70/month and failing to provide within a factor of 50 of advertised rates to one of the internet's most popular services. They seem to be playing chicken with Netflix and their own customers. It would rebound badly on them if they had decent competition, but franchise agreements are what they are.

I don't count "internet points" very often, but it's pretty amusing for someone with a grand total of 137 HN karma to accuse me of being a shill.

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

[2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizo...

Sean isn't a shill. He is a tech lead at one of the major media distribution companies who has a zest for getting at hard data instead of speculating.

I said it once, I will say it again it is Netflix' fault for not shaming bad ISPs. Netflix controls the source code for their media player and they control their servers. With 99% accuracy they should be able to detect which ISPs are screwing them and release this in a report to consumers.

I wasn't accusing Sean of being a shill. I was pointing out the absurdity of his accusation that I might not be a real person, since by the (silly, of course) way that HN keeps track of these things, I've contributed much more here than he has. His comment was condescending and dumb, and he deserved to be called out on it. Think I'm wrong? Argue with me, don't start calling names.

Netflix does publish ISP numbers, and the trend over the past 6 months for Comcast and Verizon has been awful, as is shown in the "not credible" WSJ article I linked.

Do you think public shaming like that is going to work?

In the entire history of HN, nobody has ever made themselves look smarter or their argument more compelling by calling another HN user a shill.

I think you're reading too much into it. On HN, it is extremely common for people to make very authoritative sounding posts, especially counter intuitive ones. This is the case whether the topic is net neutrality, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or the existence of black holes or whatever. You just take it with bags of salt and move on. Also, for many, the Wall Street Journal is not only a credible source but a battle cry. It's just very common on HN, don't think it is automatically astroturfing or pure propaganda (sometimes it is).

For super high bandwidth things (video today) it makes sense to serve as close to the end user as possible. This probably means putting the server in your ISP's network. This probably violates what most people think of as net neutrality. But it makes sense from a technical standpoint. I think net neutrality needs to update it's thinking to accommodate this model. Maybe what should be neutral is the pricing for putting a server inside the ISP's network? How do you treat the ISP's own video service? Force it to be a different company that pays the same as netflix to store a server there?

There may be a technical differences between bad network performance due to some active throttling configuration in the network hardware, and bad network performance because a company doesn't want to make changes to a network interconnect. To the end user sees both cases as "throttling" in terms of poor performance.

Net Neutrality should be about how we come to terms with companies that are pure ISPs trying to deliver data their customers want vs companies that stand to increase profits and hurt competitors through active throttling or, in the peering case, simple inaction.

VPN into an AWS instance. If Netflix is faster, your ISP may be throttling.

First, most Netflix content isn't served from AWS, but from their CDNs running on a variety of ISPs (lately, a lot of Cogent).

Second, the VPN trick doesn't really tell you anything except that the end point of the VPN has a better path to Netflix's CDNs than the route your ISP is using. Your ISP doesn't have to act overloaded routes to the content, which they want Netflix to pay to upgrade.

1) I don't think he meant that it was being served off of AWS, just that was his VPN example. Any in the US should do.

2) VPNs add latency and are still limited by the bandwidth of your connection. Given that Netflix has a decent CDN, in theory your VPN-box shouldn't have all that much better a path to a Netflix server than you do. So, assuming that the paths to netflix are mostly equal, a fast VPN-Netflix experience vs a crappy local connection one would imply the ISP is to blame (for whatever reason malicious or not).

The whole point is that Netflix's CDNs aren't "decent".

That is, they're probably "decent" (quite good, I'd even imagine), but the load is so high so as to cause traffic problems anyway. The question was "how can I tell if it's Netflix or if it's my ISP?" and the answer is, "You can't."

If they're actually overloaded, as opposed to there being peering failures to the consumer ISPs, why would there be a difference between VPN and not-VPN?

To answer both you and your sibling comment - there would be a difference in performance, depending on which CDN is delivered to you. I don't know of a way to request a specific CDN from Netflix, and if the one that's the closest to you is having perf issues, that doesn't mean the one closest to your VPN will have the same perf issues.

I was discussing paths to the CDN, not the performance of the CDN's servers themselves. If the servers are the bottleneck, and not the network, shouldn't performance be roughly the same (or worse over) the VPN verses the local connection?

On that note, can anyone recommend a home router that can easily route all traffic through a proxy server?

This appears to be the only reliable way to stream video during peak hours in my neighborhood, and I'm done with my ISP's suggestion that the problem would go away if only I'd reboot my modem again.

Not to get too in-depth with home network troubleshooting, but are you on a wireless network? Interference may be a cause.

I know it's fun to blame ISPs for all the problems under the sun, but it's actually rarer than one might think that the ISP itself is the cause of a home networking issue.

Wired. Also have tried going direct through the cable modem. ISP's techs can't resolve this after many calls and site visits. (Some techs say this is the expected behavior of the connection.)

While streaming in Firefox, reported speed rate jumps to expected (i.e. non-peak rate) when running through a proxy server outside my ISP's network. Speed drops instantly when the proxy setting is disabled. Flipping the proxy switch on/off literally changes my observed speed by ~10+ Mbps. This experiment has has been confirmed over weeks, different devices, etc.

So...I'm not blaming the ISP, but using a proxy server clearly works for me. So I'm going to do that so I quit wasting time trying to figure out why it doesn't work. I just need to be able to do it at the router level and not the computer level so it works for e.g. the Apple TV.

But, even your "diagnostic technique" is flawed, and doesn't necessarily point at the ISP. If we merely look at what you've said, all we know is that your connection to Netflix's local CDN provider is lower than required for optimal performance.

We can't say the ISP is in any way at fault here.

Try installing DD-WRT onto your router. It has features for things like this.

> We can't say the ISP is in any way at fault here.

FWIW though -- I'm not blaming my ISP, specifically because I don't have enough data and don't care enough about assigning blame to get it. It wouldn't matter anyway, I'm basically stuck with this ISP.

Thanks for the DD-WRT rec, I'll try that out.

There was a good thread back in December. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828699

Thanks, that's perfect.

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