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Comment by thirdsun | Hacker News Reader

In all fairness, that's probably not Netflix' decision, but a requirement of the content publishers and licensing deals.

Concerning the Time Warner issue - I can't say that I ever noticed being the victim of traffic shaping and throttling in similar fashion, but that's just outrageous; How can that be legal?

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ISPs typically don't outright throttle Netflix traffic. Instead, they simply neglect to build out capacity to wherever Netflix traffic comes from. I recall one case where it was just a matter of running some more cables between two pieces of equipment in the same cabinet. And of course they'd be happy to build out that capacity if Netflix will foot the enormously inflated bill.

I don't watch Netflix, but I often have extremely poor speeds for YouTube videos at peak times on my FiOS connection. Of course Verizon says it's Google's fault for not paying for infrastructure upgrades, clearly not Verizon's responsibility to ensure I can actually get the 300Mbps they advertise.

are you suggesting it is Verizon's responsibility to ensure 300Mbps to every destination on the internet? if not, then why some over others?

It is Verizon's responsibility to make a reasonable effort to provide that 300 Mbps to the Internet that the customer paid for, especially as content providers are bending over backwards to give Verizon that capacity for free.

I think it's my ISP's job to provide the advertised bandwidth between me and exchange points which offer access on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms.

My nearest exchange point is probably London Internet Exchange. If an ISP advertises X Mbps, and Netflix can deliver X Mbps of data for me to the exchange point, it's my ISP's job to get that X Mbps of data to me.

No, merely to every destination that can support those speeds. I'm pretty sure YouTube qualifies.

And really, I'd be happy with a mere 10Mbps to YouTube, if for some reason full speed is too hard.

For youtube on FiOS specifically, you can change your dns servers away from verizon's and it'll start going a lot faster. I can't find the link right now, but using their dns servers points you to cdn/caching nodes hosted by verizon, which are generally massively over saturated. If you switch to google's public dns or another public dns service (or run your own resolver if you're a masochist like me) you usually end up hitting edge nodes that aren't completely saturated and you get far far better speeds.

Thanks for the hint, next time I see poor performance I'll give that a try.

Yes, this is exactly what the issue is. (I have worked on these types of deals before).

All of these types of media deals stipulate that the licensee has to implement appropriate technologies (often spelled out on the contract) that support the licensing restrictions of the content (usually something like "commercially reasonable efforts" which gives Netflix some wiggle room over what measure are "reasonable")

Time Warner just needs to stop increasing capacity with whichever peer the Netflix traffic goes through. It's a wonderful way for them to avoid net neutrality under the protection of 'network congestion'.

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