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Comment by johnpowell | Hacker News Reader

I'm somewhat shocked that residential connections have enough bandwidth to upload a streaming video as a proxy. But maybe people using a VPN for Disney+ are just glad it works at all.

I have Comcast and my upload on a good day is 500KB/s and that cripples everything else on the network.

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This article is probably wrong. You can buy IP address blocks or parts of IP address ranges assigned to other people. There is a market in residential IP address blocks, particularly for VPNs, scraping services, DOS.

These will be servers running in a data centre that have been assigned an IP address that used to be owned by comcast and is still marked as residential. And the VPN provider will have paid a premium for it.

For disney, it'll be whack a mole with these ranges, and I'm sure the VPN are doing clever things to make the ranges look innocent.

I'd guess they only proxy the main domains (which have the session cookies and probably the geoblocking criteria), but let the video serving domains (which at least in netflix are separate and "stupid") go through their normal network.

This makes sense. Thanks.

Why is your uplink so bad? Do you have a low tier plan? If not, why haven't you had Comcast fix it?

I have Comcast Business. I pay them 100 dollars a month. Even if I paid them way more they just don't offer much more upload where I live. They will give me tons of download but all their plans have anemic upload. My only other option is Centurylink and they will give me a symmetric line. But that tops out at 12Mbp/s. At least with Comcast I get a reasonable download. I live in a major metropolitan area. Five miles from where a NBA team plays home games.

I was going to say more or less this. The maximum anyone can get in my major US city for any money (other than a few areas that are trialing fiber) is 20 Mbits/sec. You literally can't pay for more.

You should try rural USA. I’m currently sitting in an area 1 hour from $65/gigabit but the best they can get here is 1.5 down .3 up.

Do you have a decent wireless signal? I get much better than that on my hotspots.

I can’t let the in-laws stream Netflix off my phone when I’m in town.

It was 3G in the area, they ran fiber last year and now their DSL can get up to a whole 10Mbps if they decide to pay $100/mo. There is no good solution yet.

Yeah, was wondering the same..

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