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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Netflix will always be much, much faster because there is a peering box inside your ISPs network. So when you are watching a movie it's only pulling the data from somewhere geographically pretty close to you.

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Google has peering boxes too.

But at Netflix' scale? I mean Netflix has a relatively fixed offering, something that will fit in a unit in a datacenter with content updates at most once a week, whereas Youtube gets 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.

Generally you are going to connect to Netflix or Google and then it is up to them how they serve their traffic. Presumably only a small percentage of YouTube videos gets a lot of the traffic. They could even control that by which videos gets suggested. Which would be my personal theory why Google search results have arguably been getting worse. Because they seemingly have a lot of incentive, both in terms of load and ads, to serve the same things to many people.

Sure, but if you don't share the taste for mass pop culture (which, as a HNer, are unlikely to), then you'll never hit the peerbox cache.

Netflix small fixed library is significantly better for cache hits.

It generally doesn't matter that much. If you miss the cache you are going to hit Google's network, which will serve from their own data center over their own networks. That mostly isn't paid for by the ISP, but Google's customers. The problem with wireless is that the wireless part isn't Google's network nor "fixed" infrastructure. So it becomes costly for the ISP.

Wireless towers are fixed to the ground just like the fiber they rely on for internet connectivity.

Google and Netflix peering boxes mean that ISPs with peering boxes at the same peering point can download as much as they want, within reason, for free from that peering box.

You might be confusing CDNs with peering boxes. As might I.

It's also testing network speed and will adjust quality on the fly to the user.

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