[avianlyric]

> Said the other way around: fast.com is great to see actual throughput from Netflix as opposed to some fake throughout from a dedicated speed test site for the exact same reason.

Yup. This is pretty much the reason Netflix created fast.com. They wanted a speed test service that couldn’t be gamed by ISPs. Many ISPs will prioritise traffic to know speed test services (like Ookla’s speedtest.net), making their services appear faster than they’re under more normal usage.

By placing fast.com on Netflix IPs, ISPs either have to prioritise all Netflix traffic (which they’re very unlikely to do), or accept that fast.com is going to provide a more realistic measurement of their performance.

[neurostimulant]

Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link, while before it was outright blocked. Hooray for no net neutrality I guess.

Another fun part: when netflix IPs was blocked by this ISP, it's pretty much impossible to use netflix because the only way to get around the block was to use VPN, but netflix itself blocks VPN access.

[patmcc]

Your ISP entirely blocked netflix? That's incredible shitty.

[baby]

Heh, just revert back to pirating. That’s what I do whenever things don’t work.

[BLKNSLVR]

From the above thread it looks as if piracy might actually be a more bandwidth economical option than streaming services. Spread the load of the bandwidth around a bit more. Download any time other than peak streaming hours to then watch, self-contained, during peak streaming hours.

[mr_toad]

Plus you can rewatch without downloading again. And use sneakernets for sharing with your friends.

[froggit]

I've always disliked how wasteful streaming is in respect bandwidth consumption. However, the "efficiency be damned, just make it fasterer" attitude towards bandwidth is, if not the biggest, then definitely among the biggest, drivers behind the ever increasing internet throughput.

Thinking about it, it seems like watching habits could make streaming be more or less "efficient" compared to downloading once and storing it locally (depends on how one chooses to calculate efficiency tbh).

People that have things they regularly re-watch are obviously gonna benefit from having a local copy they can access entirely on their own terms.

It hadn't occurred to me until recently, but the way I watch stuff has me going through a pretty large amount of data yet I'm also excessively unlikely I re-watch nearly anything that I've seen in the previous 2 years. Whether something is streamed or stored local, it has to be downloaded the first time it's watched. If it'll take 2 years before I re-watch something, it's a waste of time and money to keep a backlog of multiple disks worth of video

[dhosek]

Early in the pandemic, I spent a while without wired internet using a wireless hotspot from the library which would not connect to Netflix but any other streaming video service was fine. I forget who the wireless vendor behind the hotspot was—I think it might have been Verizon.

[kerkeslager]

So there's a bit of a weird fact about public libraries, which is that it probably wasn't on the normal internet (Internet1) but was in fact on Internet2 (see [1]).

Internet2 is used by hospitals, among other things, and as such has higher robustness requirements than Internet1. The pandemic created much higher demand for bandwidth from hospitals, forcing Internet2 providers to scramble to keep up in areas. As such, blocking high-bandwidth sites which are clearly lower priority than medical traffic might have actually been a reasonable move.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2

[bluedino]

I've worked at two hospitals. Both of them "had" Internet2. I was excited, as I had not heard about it in ~20 years.

Neither of them actually ran any traffic over it.

[riceart]

Not quite sure I understand - what do hospitals need a ton of bandwidth for? Why would those bandwidth requirements rise significantly during the pandemic. Sure there were a bunch of people on vents in the MICU, but pretty much every elective procedural service plummeted.

[inportb]

Other than telehealth, we also use the bandwidth for remote desktops/apps and lossless high-resolution radiographic images. While one might expect this traffic to occur over local networks, many hospitals have multiple sites and partnerships that are connected over the internet. So, for example, one might operate the hospital's apps while sitting in the library at the affiliated university.

[uni_rule]

I'd imagine telehealth played a fairly large roll. White crispy video calls are not that demanding individually 10s to 100s of them at scale per location (and an exponential increase of calls in general) might be something more of a problem for that sort of infrastructure.

[Spooky23]

Spectrum used to dump all Netflix traffic to a device on their regional network. If you blocked that IP range, the service would perform dramatically better.

[dspillett]

> Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link

They may have an ISP-local netflix cache, from Netflix themselves not some home-grown hack, so they can achieve that with some reliability without it costing as much as it otherwise would for bandwidth peering.

[tiedieconderoga]

Netflix distributes "red boxes" to ISPs which are exactly that: edge content caches.

(PDF): https://openconnect.netflix.com/Open-Connect-Briefing-Paper....

[postdb]

BTW, AT&T has terrible records for dropping customer's traffic and also email without warning or notices to their customers. Why such terrible company is around amazing how corporation don't really survive by merit in our current world.

[solarpunk]

I'm curious where you live and what provider does this weird Netflix reselling practice.

[neurostimulant]

Streaming services do this all the time in Asia. Instead of paying with credit card, you pay via your carrier/ISP, sometimes at discounted pricing. I paid Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and Zoom this way.

[callahad]

Common in America (e.g. https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/netflix-on-us) and the UK (e.g. https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/virgin-media-o2-revamps-top...)

[happymellon]

> Hooray for no net neutrality I guess

Surely it would essentially saturate your fibre if there was net neutrality, unless you don't pay for full fibre speeds?

[tpxl]

Parent was being facetious.

[bee_rider]

What is the internet anyway? Are there truth in advertising issues around selling internet access with excessive filtering?

[pratnala]

Netflix blocks datacenter VPNs but you can use residential VPNs (which tbf are more expensive) to circumvent this.

[noobcoder]

Mine did the same and charged for bundles of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+ Until recently they reverted it after bunch of complains and tonnes of people changing their ISP

[postdb]

hmmm, IMHO, traffic for video and everything else ought to separated into 2 classes. Video obvious takes much much more bandwidth than other stuff. It would be good to allow none video, smaller assets that are needed to to make a website function to have priority over video files.

[anonymousnotme]

It definitely looks like testing sites are prioritized. The fastest download speed that I have gotten is maybe 7 MB (bytes) per second; generally it is 2-5 MB per second. The speed test sites generally get 100 Mb per second dowload. In general the best I seem to get is about half the speed of the speed test sites. To me the real speed of the ISP is how fast one can download something one wants, not the result of a test. I would prefer to see results for downloads/uploads from youtube and various CDN networks and popular sites. I would also like to see ISP have a URL that is inside their network to test upload and download so that one can at least isolate what part of the connection might be lagging. Actually, I just used devtools to snag a 25MB file from fast.com. Curl/wget gives a speed of about 3 or 4 MB per second. That does not really seem to match up with fast.com download speed of 70Mb/second. 70/8 is 8.75, which is about double. Is fast.com accurate? Is my math wrong?

[jackson1442]

I personally like https://speed.cloudflare.com since it just looks like you're doing typical CloudFlare traffic. The results viewer is also quite nice.

[binkHN]

Very cool! I never knew about this! I really appreciate the latency during upload test. I've bookmarked this and will stop using speedtest.net. Thank you!

[is_true]

My ISP (Telecom) gives me a speed of 250Mbps using fast.com and 40Mbps using Cloudflare's tool.

[kortilla]

Your isp likely has a Netflix oca or is directly peered with Netflix directly. It’s standard for any decent sized ISP since it’s either the largest or 2nd largest by volume peer (youtube being in the other).

[egberts1]

MB = megabyte

Mb = megabits

1 byte = 8-bit

[gnicholas]

For years, AT&T sales reps would refer to MB when they meant Mb. Soon after I started service with them, I called to ask about the promised speed, and the tech insisted they sold Mb/s. He conferenced in a salesperson and was embarrassed to discover that the salesperson talked exclusively in terms of MB/s.

[NoZebra120vClip]

Did they just spell it with the abbreviations? Or did they pronounce 'megabytes' deliberately?

[gnicholas]

They literally said it out loud. I had spent the last 7 years on a fast university network, and had never paid for internet before that. I honestly believed that they were going to deliver the speeds they claimed.

[NoZebra120vClip]

I wouldn't have believed "megabytes" was an Internet speed, because it never is. It's literally impossible for that to be a signaling rate on any known Layer 2 technology. ISPs use Gibibytes or Tebibytes (which they misname as Gigabytes/Terabytes) for transfer caps, but that's apples and oranges.

[anonymousnotme]

I was trying to ask if there was something more that the speed test do other than multiple or divide by 8. Is some other overhead that they add in? If not, then their math or testing seem to be off or curl/wget seem to be different than they get via the browser's javascript engine. To me it seems that the speed test number is inflated or higher than what one will even for the same URL off of netflix or cloudflares URLs used in their speed tests.

[kijiki]

Couldn't ISPs just sniff the SNI hostname to differentiate fast.com vs actual Netflix video streaming?

[wtallis]

The fast.com page kicks off requests to nflxvideo.net domains for the actual speed measurement. And it wouldn't surprise me if actual Netflix video streaming made occasional connections to fast.com purely to make it harder for ISPs to cheat.

[cesarb]

You can think of the requests to fast.com as just loading the speed test control scripts and user interface. The actual speed test loads files from the same servers (with the same SNI hostname) used by actual Netflix video streaming. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the fast.com speed test loads real streaming video segments from these servers, the only difference being that it doesn't have the decryption key for these videos.

[bmicraft]

It would also not surprise me if dns requests for fast.com temporarily elevated bandwidth limits for netflix

[bradknowles]

It does. You're loading segments of real movies on Netflix that are not encumbered by copyright.

But they're intentionally otherwise indistinguishable from any other real movie on Netflix.

[therein]

That's surely how I would have done it.

[catminou]

Yes a few ISPs actually do this (not just for Netflix, but for other sites in general).

[sharkski]

In the case of Ookla's speedtest, many ISPs host speed test servers to eliminate any variability of the wider internet. That's why it may seem they are prioritizing it. It's not a useless tool either as lets you narrow issues down to either your network or ISP.