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Comment by penguindev | Hacker News Reader

hmm. comcast dropped from 2.17 to 1.63 mbps YOY. awesome.

luckily, speedtest.net shows me a lot higher than that... 25mbps, to be precise.

Edit: I see Netflix has tweaked their results to use 'Prime Time' readings only. I guess I should retest this evening as well.

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Remember this is the speed (in theory) that you get from Netflix on that ISP. Netflix is not measuring your total ISP bandwidth. They can only measure how much bandwidth the ISP provides you for Netflix.

I care about my bandwidth to Netflix a lot more than I care about my bandwidth to speedtest.net.

You can test on many different servers, I tested to a server in virginia since I assume it would be a reasonable proxy to ec2 us-east bandwidth.

Netflix hosts their video servers much closer than ec2's us-east...

The list of speedtest.net servers is public and I don't doubt that Comcast uses it to drive traffic shaping decisions. Speed tests are meaningless except to establish an upper bound on last mile speed. They are not representative of bandwidth to real services like Netflix, YouTube, Dropbox, Steam, etc.

I can't argue with that. I just checked actual scp speed to and from ec2 and I'm getting slower downloads then uploads right now. At 7PM my time. 6.3mbps up, 4.5mbps down.

speedtest.net shows those exact speeds now as well. That's nice, 80% of bandwidth going away in a few hours :-)

Doesn't the 20-25Mbps speedtest focus on "speed boost" where Comcast gooses the speeds for initial connections (so web page loads are faster, but sustained downloads are slower)?

I am pretty sure nothing is streamed off of AWS - possibly Cloudfrount , but based on what I know of Netflix use L3 and Akamai heavily.

Please note:

> the average performance is well below the peak performance due to many factors including the variety of encodes Netflix uses to deliver the TV shows and movies as well as the variety of devices members use and home network conditions. These factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs.

Speedtest results are completely irrelevant because Netflix uses Level 3 as CDN and bandwidth between Level 3 and Comcast is always 100% utilized at prime time.

False. Speedtest.net gives results in Mbit/s. 25 Mbit/s ≠ 25 Mb/s. 1 Mbit = 0.125 MB

Netflix's results use Mbps too.

Megabit = Mb. Megabyte = MB.

25 Mbit/s = 25 Mb/s. 25 Mb/s ≠ 25 MB/s.

Generally I see Mbps when referring to megabits per second and MB/s for megabytes per second.

While others have correctly pointed out that 25 Mbits/s does in fact equal 25 Mb/s, (though, I always use Mbits/s, just to eliminate the confusion) - I'd also like to note that bandwidth is always measured in SI Mbits - I.E. 25 Mbits/s of bandwidth is always 25,000,000 bits/second.

Any time you see someone call it out explicitly as 25 Mib/s, double check and see if that's what they actually mean - 90+% of the time it isn't.

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