<story><title>Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-19/wireless-carrier-throttling-of-online-video-is-pervasive-study</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerkstate</author><text>In those days it was typical for the costs of peering to be borne by the sender, relative to the traffic ratio. This changed when Netflix and Youtube decided to use their PR and lobbying strength to bring the negotiation to the court of public opinion - and normal people started referring to typical peering cost-sharing agreements using emotionally loaded words like &amp;quot;ransom&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>Yup, and in Comcast&amp;#x27;s case, when Netflix finally paid Comcast&amp;#x27;s ransom, the problem was suddenly fixed a few minutes later, because Comcast literally just had to reconfigure the router and plug in a second cable.</text></item><item><author>briffle</author><text>Not to mention, they can now go and ask that provider to pay them for the right to &amp;#x27;upgrade&amp;#x27; their connection, to enable their customers to get what they are paying the ISP for.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>This is your ISP being sneaky, but probably not in the way you think.  This is what Netflix has been complaining about for years.&lt;p&gt;Your ISP is purposely providing a too-small link to your video provider.  So when a lot of people are using that provider, it gets slow.  When you switch to another provider, or a VPN, you get to use a fast connection to that other VPN that isn&amp;#x27;t overloaded, and then a fast connection back to your video provider.&lt;p&gt;This way your ISP can claim they are not throttling traffic because they aren&amp;#x27;t inspecting the packets for traffic shaping, they are just using physically poor connectivity to certain providers for traffic shaping.</text></item><item><author>ben7799</author><text>I keep thinking I see this on my wired (Comcast) connection too.&lt;p&gt;Stuff just behaves too strangely for it to be anything else.&lt;p&gt;One video provider will get slow.  Switch to the mobile connection and it&amp;#x27;s fine.  Switch to another site on the wired connection, that&amp;#x27;s fine too.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ve made it perfectly clear they&amp;#x27;re unhappy I won&amp;#x27;t pay them an extra $100+&amp;#x2F;month for 900 channels of crap over and over.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FireBeyond</author><text>Okay, let&amp;#x27;s go the other route then. BackBlaze, CrashPlan. These are companies where Comcast&amp;#x2F;other ISP customers are sending THEM huge amounts of data and getting nearly nothing in return.&lt;p&gt;So these ISPs should be bearing the costs of peering to backup providers, correct, by your logic? Or would that be the backup providers holding ISPs to &amp;quot;ransom&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;Apropos of anything else, ISPs (generally) provide massively asymmetric pipes. You can&amp;#x27;t provide an asymmetric pipe and then complain that data use on that pipe is, well, asymmetric.</text></comment>
<story><title>Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-19/wireless-carrier-throttling-of-online-video-is-pervasive-study</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerkstate</author><text>In those days it was typical for the costs of peering to be borne by the sender, relative to the traffic ratio. This changed when Netflix and Youtube decided to use their PR and lobbying strength to bring the negotiation to the court of public opinion - and normal people started referring to typical peering cost-sharing agreements using emotionally loaded words like &amp;quot;ransom&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>Yup, and in Comcast&amp;#x27;s case, when Netflix finally paid Comcast&amp;#x27;s ransom, the problem was suddenly fixed a few minutes later, because Comcast literally just had to reconfigure the router and plug in a second cable.</text></item><item><author>briffle</author><text>Not to mention, they can now go and ask that provider to pay them for the right to &amp;#x27;upgrade&amp;#x27; their connection, to enable their customers to get what they are paying the ISP for.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>This is your ISP being sneaky, but probably not in the way you think.  This is what Netflix has been complaining about for years.&lt;p&gt;Your ISP is purposely providing a too-small link to your video provider.  So when a lot of people are using that provider, it gets slow.  When you switch to another provider, or a VPN, you get to use a fast connection to that other VPN that isn&amp;#x27;t overloaded, and then a fast connection back to your video provider.&lt;p&gt;This way your ISP can claim they are not throttling traffic because they aren&amp;#x27;t inspecting the packets for traffic shaping, they are just using physically poor connectivity to certain providers for traffic shaping.</text></item><item><author>ben7799</author><text>I keep thinking I see this on my wired (Comcast) connection too.&lt;p&gt;Stuff just behaves too strangely for it to be anything else.&lt;p&gt;One video provider will get slow.  Switch to the mobile connection and it&amp;#x27;s fine.  Switch to another site on the wired connection, that&amp;#x27;s fine too.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ve made it perfectly clear they&amp;#x27;re unhappy I won&amp;#x27;t pay them an extra $100+&amp;#x2F;month for 900 channels of crap over and over.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>The ratio requirements are a red herring.  If your ISP says you get a certain bandwidth, it is on them to provide the appropriate pipes to get to where &lt;i&gt;their customers&lt;/i&gt; want to go.  How can the ISP on the other side of Comcast be responsible for maintaining ratios if Comcast&amp;#x27;s customers are the ones that are requesting the data?</text></comment>