[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

[AlecSchueler]

With music it's quite different though, I often have the same albums on rotation and it's great to be able to cache them all locally.

[DontchaKnowit]

Huh. I typically watch the same thing over and over repeatedly for like a year or more.

Very wasteful if I did much streaming.

[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.

[riceart]

> So, for example, one might operate the hospital's apps while sitting in the library at the affiliated university.

Remote Desktop and even PACS are not huge bandwidth consumers in this day and age of 4K streaming. At my large academic institution usually only the radiologists use the PACS client directly on workstations - all the other clinicians are using a “zero footprint” viewer over Citrix like everything else.

[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.

[riceart]

There are very few medical centers where there are 100s of simultaneous clinic visits. During the pandemic a lot of providers did home telehealth. Even 100s of simultaneous telemedicine visits don’t take much bandwidth compared to HD video streaming. Also from a QoS perspective - these are still terminated on the public Internet.

It might have been difficult relative to the infrastructure at some hospitals - but that is to my point that hospitals in general are not very demanding bandwidth wise and I would be a bit surprised they’re more than a rounding error on the Internet2 in general - especially compared to all the academic research involving large models and just video streaming in general that blew up during the pandemic.

I’m curious if the GP was speaking from some firsthand experience or is just making some conjecture.

[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.