I wouldn't be putting my money towards a business i felt was bending me over to give me a corporate rogering, i suppose it's a question of how far does your principal extend - enough to moan on the internet but carry on using the service anyway or enough to actually vote with your wallet and go somewhere else?
Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
- Thread starter Psycho Sonny
- Start date
I wouldn't be putting my money towards a business i felt was bending me over to give me a corporate rogering, i suppose it's a question of how far does your principal extend - enough to moan on the internet but carry on using the service anyway or enough to actually vote with your wallet and go somewhere else?
Caporegime
The former. Voting with my wallet would be cutting my nose off to spite my face. A major human rights issue this is not.
I'm not the first to moan on the internet and do nothing about it and I sure won't be the last. Everyone does it at some point, even though everyone loves to think of themselves as highlighly principled people of action.
Soldato
There's a layer between complaining on the internet and cancelling your sub. Contacting Netflix to complain/question/ask for change.
Who's done this? Who plans to?
Who's done this? Who plans to?
Caporegime
I've thought about it but probably won't; for the sake of a fiver (or whatever the reduction ratio multiplied by the number of months in force multiplied the monthly cost is) it's not worth the effort.
Would people be fine with paying the same if ISPs started throttling individual bandwidth?
Would people be fine with paying the same if ISPs started throttling individual bandwidth?
He is thinking about the bigger picture. And it's blocky!
was feeling a bit stressed out abouts whats going on here in the uk nand you just made me proper lol cheers mate
Soldato
Government : We all need to sacrifice for the greater good of our country!
OCUKers : the resolution is too low , give me refund.
OCUKers : the resolution is too low , give me refund.
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exactly - is there even a need for this with adaptive streaming?
if my ISP can't cope it throttles me and then my netflix stream would automatically reduce in quality.
for example if i could only get 10MB then i wouldn't be able to watch in 4k anyway.
Soldato
But while your Netflix is being throttled to a lesser image quality, or even before...
The kid next door watching YouTube is also being throttled
Their sister watching a webcast from their teacher on how to do long division is going too blurry to read the text
Her mum is on a business call which is dropping quality.
It's about consumption. Keeping the broadband network saturated as a norm isn't in the design and isn't desirable. We're presently in a time of massively increased demand.
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I get that but surely we should be holding isp and mobile operators to account for lack of provisions for emergency situations.
I mean I'm trying to make calls on my mobile. Only one in twenty are connecting. I'm not exaggerating either.
There will be peaks and troughs. I'm not doing any streaming of anything currently. So I'm not making much use of my 400MB connection.
The issue is as well though that private companies also want to offer the lowest price and so I'd imagine capacity is always "just good enough" for most scenarios.
Soldato
Good comparison - at New Year, call often fail and texts go through hours late. The system's over capacity, we see it every year. But because it's a few hours once a year, the networks don't feel that justifies a capacity increase.
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mobile calls are a joke just now. even if it connects it's breaking up, lag, pausing, then comes back. i can't believe no extra capacity is built in just in case. capitalism for you.
Now Sony is at it.
https://blog.us.playstation.com/2020/03/24/preserving-internet-access-for-the-entire-community/
As if PSN was slow enough already to download from.
https://blog.us.playstation.com/2020/03/24/preserving-internet-access-for-the-entire-community/
As if PSN was slow enough already to download from.
Associate
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Thanks Screech. Would be interested in what you do for a living.
Apologies if this is derailing
I'm a network engineer, spent most of my life working for ISPs and networking vendors (worked for Juniper for a while) I used to do a lot of core network stuff, but then later lots of Broadband work, mostly high scale BNG stuff. I ended up getting poached by the games industry, mostly good timing with a bit of good luck - now I help run a global low-latency eSports network.
Associate
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Nice dude. I'm currently working for a Juniper partner. Got my JNCIP-ENT and JNCIS-SEC so far. Next up is the SP.
Soldato
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Saves on their bandwidth costs obviously. People on lockdown means more traffic so lower the resolution to compensate. Simples.
Yes they are, highly saturated - but it varies depending on where they are.
We maintain thousands of peerings with most ISPs all over the world, and we collect performance telemetry from hundreds of millions of players, playing our game globally. Using data science, we can see exactly when things are good and when they're bad.
Because we mostly measure ping and packet loss, when for example - 50k players on a specific ISP all show a huge ping spike in the monitoring graphs between the hours of 6pm and 9pm, we know that the ISP in question is probably congested.
When congestion occurs inside an ISP, the big fat buffers on internet routers will start to fill up, this will incur additional latency, if congestion increases further - the latency will get worse and packet loss will occur when the buffers and queues fill up and get exhausted. Because our game traffic is very small packet size (65-150 bytes) it's very sensitive to delay and buffering, so we can see the effects of congestion better and earlier than most.
Right now, I can tell you some interesting facts - which we're quite surprised by;
Almost all the UK ISPs are performing very well, with very little in the way of any ping spikes or packet loss at peak time - this tells me they still have capacity and are not congested yet, mostly. From our metrics, the only one which appears to be struggling is EE, all the others are doing very well.
However, that's only the UK - just about everywhere else is carnage;
Almost all ISPs in the EU are struggling, with Germany having a really bad time, Italy is on it's knees from 6-9pm, and almost all the other EU ISPs are struggling, with the exception of Scandinavia.
US is all over the place depending where you look, Spectrum is sucking pretty bad, but again - depends where you look.
You have to understand how the system functions to understand why Netflix are doing what they're doing.
The problem Netflix has; they have so much capacity, they could easily overwhelm most ISPs if all customers started watching their content. If that happened and infrastructure started falling over because of Netflix (which it easily could), providers would probably start de-peering / rate-limiting / disabling Netflix content on their networks, to prioritise normal traffic and remove the congestion. Because remember - the customers of the ISP are not paying their provider anything for Netflix access - they're simply paying Netflix.
By volunteering to turn down the quality, and reduce the bandwidth, Netflix are simply making sure they don't end up 'annoying' ISPs to the point where they become forcibly rate-limited or disabled.. Lets face it - we can all still watch it anyway, they're just being careful - they're not stupid, they have some clever people working there.