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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

If these streaming providers would actually provide consumers with effective tooling to determine if throttling is taking place, this would get a lot more traction. I fought with CenturyLink for 18 months collecting stats on overall network performance vs. throughput to YouTube because it was clear something was going on. It was a giant pain in the ass trying to come up with figures for YouTube.

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Check out https://fast.com from Netflix. It's a speed test based off of Netflix's servers, so it will tell you your bandwidth to Netflix at any given time.

Then complain to your ISP if that doesn't match your advertised speed.

When the advertised speed is "up to XX Mbps" and you occasionally do get those speeds, then what is the proper complaint? They are providing "up to" the speed purchased. It works very well in the provider's favor.

I guess the best you can do it test it multiple times and then complain that you've never seen over XX Mpbs and then ask when exactly you'll get "up to" the advertised speed.

FWIW, even if you don't complain, it will help Netflix gather data that they can use to complain on your behalf.

> what is the proper complaint

There is no way to complain, but if we had some open, trusted services similar to speedtest.net to publish the effective speed it would allow people to make informed choices when selecting an ISP.

Just ran it and I'm getting 44 Mbps. AFAIK, that's plenty of bandwidth from Netflix's perspective, so would complaining to my ISP make any sense? Should I be getting 300 Mbps with Netflix?

If you pay for 300 you should get close the that. The fact that you don’t means you’re being throttled. If you don’t notice a difference it doesn’t really matter, but that wouldn’t be enough to stream multiple TVs at 4K for example, even though you pay for a service that should support that.

Are you paying for 300 Mbps?

Yes, and we get very close to that with some connections.

I find that fast.com is often inaccurate as in showing impossibly high values. Like, speedtest.net shows 120/10 Mb and fast.com shows 190/77 Mb.

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