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Comment by dbuder | Hacker News Reader

How many times do we need to fight the same battle? Where I live Netflix has a fast lane and from 6:30pm to 10:30pm every night my internet is unusable.

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I don’t think Netflix has a fast lane anywhere.

Netflix does offer to give servers to ISPs to put in their datacenters. So if your ISP is seeing congestion on the IX links, it is entirely possible that Netflix still works fine (because the traffic doesn’t leave the ISP and is therefore not hitting the congestion). But that is not a “fast lane”

At that point Netflix should just provide its own VPN / internet access for paying users

Netflix puts servers in datacenters to cache content, so you access it much faster. Not sure what problem Netflix VPN will solve.

You're missing the point. Netflix is fast in these situations because your client can access the server in the ISP's data center and video traffic remains local to the ISP and doesn't traverse the congested link to the IX.

Other companies embed servers with ISPs as well.

Yikes, where do you live and how is that sort of thing justified?

not OP but i could see this being normal traffic shaping

netflix users are going to complain and change providers if their tv show buffers at all, so it makes sense to prioritize that traffic - not for netflix's benefit but to avoid angry customers

Or, alternatively, your local ISP did not invest enough into the infrastructure and created a network that can only serve 10-20% of the population with the promised high speeds (25Mbps). Therefore, when everybody comes from work and try to use the internet at the same time, there is not enough bandwidth for everyone so it just becomes unusable.

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