OK, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty: My company uses Cogent as an ISP, which means we were very interested in figuring out why our VPN performance became junk starting around last October. Some traceroutes and extended pings pointed the finger at the Comcast/Cogent peering point in NYC. A little Googling confirmed that we were obviously collateral damage in Netflix's ISPs ongoing disputes with the home broadband ISPs.
Since then, it's been easy to correlate poor performance on my Netflix streaming with a a 60ms+ drop across a Cogent/Comcast peering point when I ping one of my company's servers from home.
There have been several articles on tech news sites discussing this dispute[1][2]. I linked to the WSJ article because it was fresh this morning and provided a good summary of the state of play.
On the other hand, accusations of actual throttling of Netflix traffic on a broadband provider's own network have been frequent but I haven't seen definitive evidence that it's happening on Comcast or Verizon.
Personally, I'm pretty pissed that Comcast is taking my $70/month and failing to provide within a factor of 50 of advertised rates to one of the internet's most popular services. They seem to be playing chicken with Netflix and their own customers. It would rebound badly on them if they had decent competition, but franchise agreements are what they are.
I don't count "internet points" very often, but it's pretty amusing for someone with a grand total of 137 HN karma to accuse me of being a shill.
Sean isn't a shill. He is a tech lead at one of the major media distribution companies who has a zest for getting at hard data instead of speculating.
I said it once, I will say it again it is Netflix' fault for not shaming bad ISPs. Netflix controls the source code for their media player and they control their servers. With 99% accuracy they should be able to detect which ISPs are screwing them and release this in a report to consumers.
I wasn't accusing Sean of being a shill. I was pointing out the absurdity of his accusation that I might not be a real person, since by the (silly, of course) way that HN keeps track of these things, I've contributed much more here than he has. His comment was condescending and dumb, and he deserved to be called out on it. Think I'm wrong? Argue with me, don't start calling names.
Netflix does publish ISP numbers, and the trend over the past 6 months for Comcast and Verizon has been awful, as is shown in the "not credible" WSJ article I linked.
Since then, it's been easy to correlate poor performance on my Netflix streaming with a a 60ms+ drop across a Cogent/Comcast peering point when I ping one of my company's servers from home.
There have been several articles on tech news sites discussing this dispute[1][2]. I linked to the WSJ article because it was fresh this morning and provided a good summary of the state of play.
On the other hand, accusations of actual throttling of Netflix traffic on a broadband provider's own network have been frequent but I haven't seen definitive evidence that it's happening on Comcast or Verizon.
Personally, I'm pretty pissed that Comcast is taking my $70/month and failing to provide within a factor of 50 of advertised rates to one of the internet's most popular services. They seem to be playing chicken with Netflix and their own customers. It would rebound badly on them if they had decent competition, but franchise agreements are what they are.
I don't count "internet points" very often, but it's pretty amusing for someone with a grand total of 137 HN karma to accuse me of being a shill.
[1] http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizo...