Netflix speed index shows further decline in Verizon quality Verizon insists it "treats all traffic equally" but new data from Netflix indicates that the network provider's customers have seen a degradation in service quality in the past months. The streaming video company released its monthly ISP speed index for January on Monday, and the results show another significant decline in …
Well... ISPs aren't soup kitchens. I pay the ISP so they will continuously upgrade their network.
An ISP throttling is like a restaurant telling me, "We're sorry, but we are out of food, you'll only get half portions... however you still must pay the full price.".
Erm yes, but it needn't be a bad thing. If, for example, 12mbps is the sweet spot between 1080p YouTube streaming and fast enough buffering, then why not throttle at 12mbps per connection? It'll help everything else to run smoothly. Problem is, some ISPs take the piss; it looks like Verizon is one such ISP.
I don't think Verizon is throttling and it certainly isn't on my connection. They just have poor speeds overall and I've noticed it getting worse of late. No I don't stream much, only the occasional short video attached to a story or news piece. Beyond the slowness it also has terrible jitter making VOIP calls nearly impossible. Verizon's problem is they don't want to upgrade any of the older lines that are still working even if it's only just barely while they take a lackadaisical approach to their FIOS rollout. Eventually they will get FIOS out but until then they are only patching the old system.
In my area, AT&T won't service DSL because the infrastructure is so bad and they aren't going to run line either but I do note they do fine business a few miles away in the newer developments. That leaves Time Warner Cable, my former ISP. Their lines are so heavily laden locally that it approaches or even drops below 150 kbps when the kids in the neighborhood get home and even during the best of times it was never much over 1 Mbps.
Also the difference is that cable companies, unlike restaurants, make around 1500-2000% pure PROFIT on every delivered bit (yes, that's PERCENT) while bandwidth is getting CHEAPER (unlike food prices which are rising) yet their services are GETTING MORE EXPENSIVE EVERY YEAR so the last thing anyone wants to hear is their whining about not having enough money or bandwidth available...
...no, it's just part of the usual scumbag play to please Wall St, interested only in short-term returns so CEOs can get fatter bonuses. Scumbags abound.
Um, NO.
Verizon delivered a total return of 18.6 percent to our shareholders in 2013, while attracting more customers than our competitors and improving our financial performance.
http://bgr.com/2014/01/21/verizon-earnings-q4-2013/
There is no math in which 18.6% = 1500-2000%.
"Re: 1500-2000% pure PROFIT
You are clearly unable to even read - I am talking about DELIVERED BITS, how did that become total profit rate of VZ?
Seriously, I think some people should"
Nobody knows where you're getting that percentage figure from. Care to explain why you think it's real? Or would that be beneath you? Happy to pretend I'm personally too stupid to understand your previous (non-existent) explanation.
> Network ain't gonna resize itself just when you pay.
Then perhaps it is best to not sell based on the maximum possible speed you might get in the middle of the night for 90 seconds and rather sell based on the range of speeds you can expect?
The problem these companies have (and I have no experience with Verizon but I doubt they are any better or worse than most) is that through the sales cycle they are quite happy for you to believe you will get 24Mb/s on your ADSL2 connection when they can't even saturate a link which is only running at 33% of that speed during peak times.
If you want to offer a 10Mb service, then you need to provision to deliver 10Mb. If you only provision for 4Mb on account that historical trends show that you can get away with it, then you better be good at JIT provisioning.
"...then you better be good at JIT provisioning."
Oh dear sweet Jesus make him stop! I haven't laughed so hard when I read they. They (the ISP, and I'm mostly talking about Comcrap here as that's what I have) can barely connect the end points. I would hate to think if they actually tried to start managing them...
There is a change coming. The ISPs and the Government won't be able to stop it.
[I'll get my coat with the Dark Net / Mesh network box in the pocket]
These things aren't going to resize themselves? What, if anything, do you mean with that? Ok let's start off with the 'needs time' thingy. Absolutely wrong. You seem to think that pure monopolistic capitalism is good for ALL! [hint: not] Here in the US, choice, as far as ISP's goes means either the devil you know or that other devil you knew, but ran away, screaming, from because you thought you had a 'choice'. And THAT is assuming there even was that 'choice' in the first place. Now. Let's go with the full "a capital good (needs some time to get bigger)" Hum, gee...sorta like the telephone company needed to charge long-distance fees way, way far past the time that this made any sense (er, have you ever even noticed long distance charges on your smart phone? Thought not). Or making you rent the phone in your house [note to the young 'uns: yes. Not only did they do that, but even after it became painfully clear that this was wrong, they continued to do that anyways, mostly to old people, essentially screwing them out of hundreds if not thousands of dollars just simply because no one had told them that, hey, you can go buy your own phone now] What I am trying to say here is, is that a 'capital good' {I put that in quotation marks because while I am not an economist, I play one on the Intertubes, just like you} like an ISP probably needs competition in order to be any good. On the other hand, it is perfectly obvious that without it, well, then the US will probably remain behind, oh, say, Romania in terms of Internet service. We invented it and we SUCK at it, mostly because people with deep pockets want those pockets to be far, far deeper. I think Google got into the game for this very reason. Simply to say hey LOOK! It Can be done and it is not that much of a problem! So. How does the existing structure respond? Go look at legislation in Kansas banning anything that even looks like what Google is doing in KC from ever happening again. Eh, BTW, don't know if it passed but even if not, that's enough to give pause. And I am not a Google rah/rah boy by any means. It is just that sometimes they do well and it should be acknowledged. ATT gave us the amazing Bell Labs which accidentally discovered background radiation while doing pure research. On the other hand, they sat on the discovery of magnetic tape (in the 1930's) because they feared it could impact their bottom line.
I have to say that when I had Comcast as my ISP, I was constantly having trouble streaming YouTube videos. It was a constant race to see if the playing point would catch up with the buffer and frequently it did.
When I switched to AT&T, YouTube played flawlessly and streaming problems stopped.
All I can say is that I use Comcast and that there is a huge difference in Netflix performance when I turn on my VPN client. All the stutter stops, long waits, etc. all go away. Ya think they are throttling?
And to answer the person who thinks throttling down to 12Mbps is okay...I pay for a 50Mbps connection, I want what I pay for.
That reminds me of a fat comedian who talked about going to an 'all you could eat' Chinese Buffet where the owner started putting tons of MSG in the food. (Enough to kill an Elephant...)
To your point... what you pay is based on their estimates as to what the average user will do online.
So when you have a fringe group going beyond... that screws up the model so they start to limit.
I don't like it, but I do understand it.
You pay your ISP to make the internet come to you. If you want Netflix to come to you, then it's your ISP's job to get your Netflix stream to you (i.e. get their peering, or better still caching, working)
I think the problem is a matter of ignorance by the vast majority of consumers.
How fast is the number in bold at the top, and how much does it cost me - and that's about as far as it goes.
To fix this we need a couple of things. Mandatory service levels and some better benchmarking - Netflix naming and shaming is a start, but I'd suspect Verizon aren't seeing a pile of notice-to-quit letters piling up.
ANY throttling is bad. They're selling you a link that advertises X speed. They should give you X, or at least something near X most of the time. Yet it seems that in many parts of the US, they're getting less than 50%, sometimes 30% most of the time. The FCC should be given the regulatory power to clamp down on these practices, enforce Net Neutrality, outlaw CGNAT and put a mandatory contention limit. That is, no oversubscribing above a certain ratio. ISPs have the money to upgrade their lines and most of the time, it is only a matter of upgrading endpoint equipment. They don't do it because it's more profitable to milk their subscribers without actually doing anything.
See also: IPv6 rollouts. ISPs are happier pimping off uberexpensive IPv4 addys.
The problem isn't the raw performance if the wire, it's the delivered performance and throttling.
Verizon and Comcast talk about the Netflix and the like as being "heavy users" of their network. I would like to point out that's not really the case. *I'm* a heavy user of the network. I happen to be getting data from Netflix. I'm already paying for internet service. And paying quite a lot, compared to other countries and what I'm paying to Netflix.
> From a UK point of view all them speeds are rather slow.
I'm not sure what transfer speed I get, but Netflix is perfectly OK in HD for me. How do you guys see what transfer rate you're getting with netflix?
(Youtube is another matter. It is effectively impossible to watch youtube in HD for me.)
"How do you guys see what transfer rate you're getting with netflix?"
there are several ways to do it, but if you lack specific equipment you could always connect your media player/PC/TV or whatever to a switch and use Wireshark on a PC to capture the traffic. Once you have identified the Netflix connections in the trace capture you can work out lots of things, including your bandwidth usage for that particular stream.
The Verizon spokesperson makes this sound as if a specific user has a one-time problem.
The Baby Bells have a century of experience in making life difficult for any business perceived as a competitor, while denying or explaining away the problems when talking to regulators. Part of that script is describing every example as an isolated incident.
But Netflix has all of the data for all their subscribers, which spans multiple service providers... presumably it's not just statistically valid, it's quantitatively valid.
I'm sure this has NOTHING to do with the fact that (at least here in the States), Verizon has partnered with RedBox for the new RedBox-Instant streaming service thingy. No, that wouldn't have any bearing on rival stream service NetFlix's speed across Verizon's network.
OTOH, RedBox-Instant wants $4 or $5 to stream a standard def movie. I don't consider that to be a bargain when you can rent one of their DVDs for $1.20 and not have to put up with stuttering and buffering...
Your tree rodents must be pretty tough beasties.
I thought we had US imported grey squirrels here but they just munch on nuts. You must have a newer uber hard breed over there that eat plastic and copper. Please feel free to keep them. Our native reds have been turfed out of most of the UK and the relativly new black ones don't chew metal as far as I know.
Besides what kind of mad critter chews on the thing supporting it up in the air ...
I have experience with WOW and was not impressed. Now with their RG that is required, it is even worse.
1) Their RG cannot even handle ARP correctly. I see ARP requests on the WAN side and not only from the RG itself, but other RG's on the same node.
2) They support of VPN is horrible as well. If you manage to get a site-to-site VPN up, it better be over UDP as if it is ESP or GRE it will work and then just stop working.
3) They do not offer a DMZ Plus or bridge mode on their RG either.
4) Their DMZ mode, doesn't forward all traffic to your firewall/router.
They still don't know when they will fix the VPN issue, or the bridge mode issue or even understand the ARP issue. Contacting their supplier (Arris) is no good either. They basically only want to hear from cable companies. It wouldn't be hard to poison the ARP table on the cable companies node and cause a DoS. You could even poison the LAN side of other RG's as well.
I think it's not just the oligopoly issue. It also has to do with the greed (graft?) of municipalities signing exclusive contracts with ISP's to enrich the city coffers and possibly line the politicians pockets. (Yes, I'm weaseling a bit...). This goes back to the early days of cable TV and even telephone companies, power companies, etc. So, you pay the monopoly rates (whatever the company wants to charge), deal with their lousy service and keep your mouth shut as they are the only game in town.
Where I'm located we have two choices... CenturyLink for DSL (formerly Qwest) and Charter for cable. CenturyLink/Qwest has been promising that everyone will have fiber in 2 years for the last 10 years and their DSL speeds suck but they have very good local service (not outsourced). Charter has decent speeds, but are pricier, and have lousy outsourced service.
Agree mark
Where I am (one of the big cities in the US) I have the choice of Comcast (which I have) where I pay $70 a month for 20Mbs, or ATT where I was paying $65 a month for heavily metered 1.2Mbs... yup great choices...
Comcast while fast I find WAY less reliable, and any calls to their technical support are about as helpful as talking to my brick wall as their workers are about as intelligent as a dung beetle(I do feel sorry for insulting the dung beetles), or one of our insanely corrupt politicians.
For the past 3 months I've been having connection issues, but hey since I'm stuck in a contract they can treat me like crap as I have to pay.
There were a few other companies which were great to deal with, but they all went under or were bought out by the 2, and closed up.
@ Kevin 6
Hmm. The US is in a worse state than I thought.
I'm in the UK, and I pay £37.50 ($61.50) for an unlimited 120Mbps (downstream, obviously) connection. If I bust through their fair use transfer cap during peak times (1600-2300) that speed is reduced for 2 hours by 16% (to 100Mbps effectively) as the fair use measure. Hardly a hardship for me.
It's not possible to deliver services like this to rural areas (either in the UK or the US) but if you're in one of the big cities (I'm not - I'm in a town of 100,000 people), it seems like you should be able to get this kind of service for that kind of price.
Except the phone companies have been socialistic since their inception in the US. The profits in the big cities subsidize the rollouts in the rural areas even though the rural areas still feel like they're getting raked over the coals.
I'll admit some of it makes absolutely no sense to me. Where my parents live (rural/suburban) Verizon has rolled out FIOS for internet and phone, but not tv. They promised the tv availability was coming in two years back around 2005. They have Dish and would really like to switch to FIOS for tv as they get frequent thunderstorms that block Dish reception. I told them to take the Comcast deal if they want to replace Dish and suggested he switch the internet at the same time. That way when FIOS does finally roll out their cable subscription he can come back as a "new" customer and get a better deal.
"Except the phone companies have been socialistic since their inception in the US."
Not by its own choice. And until 1984, there was only one. Congress and the FCC mandated various forms of price leveling to provide 'equity' for rural customers. After Ma Bell was broken up, urban and rural customers were not necessarily even served by the same company. So the government stepped in and created a Universal Service Fund to subsidize rural service. The phone companies are good old free market capitalist exploiters to the extent that the government lets them.
The issue of FiOS or cable or wireless broadband providing or not providing different service types is one of non competition. My broadband provider advertises network, TV and phone nationally. But contact them from my home address and phone service is not available. I'm not even supposed to run VoIP (although I do) because the phone company, cable company and wireless providers have carved up the markets among themselves.
The one reason that I don't have Comcast is their contract. You need to buy "Comcast Business" to get unfiltered internet service. It's a 2+ year contract clearly stating that there is no minimum level of performance. They could saturate their network until it's 1.2 KB/sec and I'd still be paying that $150/month for at least two years.
I already made that mistake with Sprint cellular service. I won't do it again with Comcast.
They don't adjust them for the speed of service that is being paid for. Google Fiber doesn't offer anything below 100Mb, so it makes sense it would be at the top - though I'm surprised it doesn't report higher speeds than that.
At the bottom you find DSL providers as there are still some out there selling basic packages with only 1.5Mb for $9.99 for life - and in rural areas that's often the best you can do, slow DSL (or slow cable modem) is your only choice if you live outside of the city limits.
Often in rural areas a number of customers share a single line that's not much faster than what any one line they pay for is, which works fine for web browsing but breaks down when customers try to stream video. That drags down the average significantly compared to providers like Verizon FIOS who only operate in limited markets and don't serve rural areas at all.
"They don't adjust them for the speed of service that is being paid for"
Why would you want them to? You want to know which ISP gets best Netflix performance. Once you know it's Google Fiber, and you can't get it in your area, that's that ruled out, go for the next one that's available / you can afford
Why would you want it adjusted for the speed they market they can provide the service at? That really would be meaningless information, skewing the results based on marketing promises about the speed you *should* expect to see (but don't.)
"Netflix is encouraging it and does at no cost outside your cross connect to them at major peering points."
There is your cost of capacity to those peering points, your port costs and potential impact of Netflix traffic on your other users. But you may also save some money on your transit costs. The problem is shown in the original article-
5 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms 0.xe-3-3-0.BR2.DFW13.ALTER.NET [152.63.100.5]
6 9 ms 10 ms 9 ms 204.255.168.158
7 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms ae-1.r08.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.3.27]
which stops at NTT. NTT is not Netflix or AWS. NTT is another ISP so it's unclear why the original post blames Verizon. But that's the problem with the Internet, there are many parties involved. Peering is usually based on a mutual benefit and settlement free peering on mutual traffic exchanges. If the flows become asymettric the perceived value/benefit can change and a peering relationship change to paid peering or transit. This has always been the problem for content providers and trying to develop shared cost models. Content providers want free delivery, but the delivery costs money, and the money also flows asymettrically. User pays ISP, user pays Netflix, Netflix doesn't pay ISP for delivery so if the ISP needs to upgrade, the costs are borne by the user.
These are basically the same issues that plagued the voice world over 100 years ago and lead to the settlement system with origination and termination payments. They're also the same issues behind the 'peering wars' that have been ongoing for decades, and are still ongoing. See the current/continuing saga of Verizon v Cogent on NANOG at the moment.
For the last several years I have had both Verizon FIOS and Time Warner cable internet feeds. When I bought the Google TV box I found I couldn't stream YouTube from FIOS at 1080p. I had to switch to the 3Mbps service from Time Warner to watch anything above 720p, Verizon throttled the FIOS data rate back to unusable levels.. What was also uncanny was that it seemed the FIOS throttling was based on serious deep packet inspection - whether I was attempting a 1080p stream, or not...
Anyway, I cancelled Verizon FIOS (cancellation in itself has been a 3-month nightmare). They are now trying to charge me for not returning equipment which I carefully consigned through UPS, as directed. I have the receipt from UPS showing Verizon signed for the equipment at their warehouse, but there is nobody to show it to. No retail FIOS offices anymore. No way of dealing with "what it says in our computer", Unbelievable...
I see something here that it would appear many have missed. What is the subscription speed of the viewers? I work for one of the DSL providers listed here, as a tech support monkey, and one of the most common issues I see are people with 512K and 76K connections trying to stream HD videos and complaining about the buffering. When you point out the "minimum recommended" speeds, they then get all huffy. Mind you, these are people for whom 8 and 10M connections are available, they just don't want to pay.
I don't doubt that there are a fair number of people doing exactly what you said. But I'm paying for a FIOS connection, not some 76K connection and I've had some issues recently. Two nights ago in fact the show I was watching magically disappeared two minutes before the end of the episode. "Couldn't be found on Netflix" or something along those lines was the error message. When I went back last night to finish watching it, there was no resume point stored. Whenever I stop a stream there's always a resume point stored. Using the blueray player, not the pc on the wireless from the Verizon router.
I might just have to buy a switch and start wire sharking to see what's up.
A year and a half ago we changed over from Comcast (coax cable virtual monopoly) to Verizon FiOS (Fi bre O ptic S ervice).
Since the change we have noticed a significant decline in the quality of our streaming video from Netflix; much buffering and lower resolution images.
From what we can tell it is a problem with the Verizon FiOS Content Delivery Network
Not Happy.
Seriously considering changing back at the end of our contract.
Disgruntled in Philadelphia, PA
Can any of you tell malice from incompetence? Why assume malevolence when incompetence is the more likely answer.
This saga is non-trivial, and it's got many moving points, namely:
1. Netflix's peering policy ( https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines , min 2Gbit _each way_ at 95th percentile).
2. Netflix's Open Connect program - ISP's dont want to lose rack space + power to these boxes.
3. ISP's want to make the content providers pay for content traversing their network.
What's more than likely happening is that Netflix traffic is taking the congested path (They are a victim of their own success) inside of Verizon's network. I dont think there is malevolence involved here, however at the same time, there's nothing to be gained right now for Verizon. They're not losing customers, and _if_ they do lose customers over this Netflix saga, it's the customers who tend to cost them more in transit bills.
I have my doubts about these figures. On my own line, there is a clear daily variation, and for about 6 hours, every evening, the connection is diabolical. And I can be pretty sure that streaming video just isn't going to work during those times, so I don't try.
I'm not a Netflix customer, but do these averages make these effects less obvious? And if their customers choose to act as I do, will Netflix even notice the low speeds, or will they assume their customers are watching broadcast TV instead?
I'm changing my ISP. There are other problems with the data flows that leave me thinking the ISP network is struggling. It's not really funny that, as soon as I requested the MAC, I was swamped with offers of engineer visits.
I'd already booked the big yellow taxi.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
