Contrary to popular thought and the overly-simplistic views of popular quality “benchmarks”, the Internet access provider is not the sole (or necessarily even the primary) influencer of subscribers’ Internet quality of experience. The quality of experience of an end-user for a given Internet-delivered application or content is affected by many choices made by many players through the value chain. This is the second in a series of blog posts, that explores those choices based on excerpts from Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight: Exposing the Technical and Commercial Factors Underlying Internet Quality of Experience.

For the first blog post in the series, see:

Tough Choices: To HD or not HD

How do you spend your lunch break?

As I write this, its lunch time at Sandvine and some of my colleagues are foregoing food in favour of increased productivity, some are off at a yoga class, some have gone home to walk their dog(s), while others are eating at their desk and watching YouTube videos. To me, it’s this last group that is most interesting.

Below is a chart showing actual throughput (80th percentile) achieved by YouTube from a number of US Internet service providers (both Cable and DSL) for one week (all days overlaid) as collected in September 2013.

What is instantly noticeable in the chart is the fact that YouTube has two pronounced dips. The first may not surprise some as it occurs during the evening peak period when networks are most congested.  The second dip however is far more interesting as it occurs over the lunch hour.

If we compare YouTube’s performance with Hulu (seen below) during the same time period and for the same set of operators we do not see a similar lunch hour dip. In fact there doesn’t appear to be a dip at all.

So why is YouTube suffering a noticeable drop in quality at two separate times in the day?

Many people immediately point to their ISP whenever their video buffers, or they experience another symptom of poor Internet quality. In this case however, because Hulu, another over-the-top video provider does not experience a noticeable dip in quality, and the data sample comes from multiple networks, we can rule out ISPs being the root cause of YouTube’s quality issue.

Instead, we can conclude that the root cause of the degradation in quality is likely occurring because of an oversubscription in the Google server farm (where YouTube is hosted) which makes YouTube unable to meet high lunch time and evening video demand. This oversubscription would result from a commercial decision by YouTube to regarding how much capital they wanted to invest in server capacity to maintain quality.

So the next time you try to watch a YouTube video and it buffers, don’t automatically blame your ISP. Google may very well have made a commercial decision that limits the ISPs ability to improve quality and caused the tens of thousands of users, like me, who would otherwise like to spend their lunch hour watching videos on YouTube, return to more productive activities. Like writing this blog.

For those interested in examining further, although not as widely publicized as Speedtest, YouTube has a ‘my_speed benchmark’ that unlike Speedtest which seeks to measure ‘absolute capacity’, seeks to measure ‘maximum demand’. You can use these benchmark tools to not only view your historical YouTube performance, but also measure in real-time the performance of a video you are viewing.

In the coming weeks we will continue take a deeper look at other key players in the Internet ecosystem and how the commercial and technical decisions that they make impact overall Internet quality. For those too eager to wait for our next post, you can download the Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight: Exposing the Technical and Commercial Factors Underlying Internet Quality of Experience today.

 

Contrary to popular thought and the overly-simplistic views of popular quality “benchmarks”, the Internet access provider is not the sole (or necessarily even the primary) influencer of subscribers’ Internet quality of experience. The quality of experience of an end-user for a given Internet-delivered application or content is affected by many choices made by many players through the value chain. This is the first of a series of blog posts, that explores those choices based on excerpts from Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight: Exposing the Technical and Commercial Factors Underlying Internet Quality of Experience.

Consumers have a lot of choices to make that directly impact their quality of experience when using the Internet. They can choose the device(s) they use, their ISP and service plan, their home networking setup, and what content provider they get their entertainment content from.

Our Global Internet Phenomena Reports have shown that Netflix is the largest consumer of bandwidth on fixed access networks in North America. However, not all subscribers can access the highest resolution video, which Netflix markets as a Super HD. Why is this? Netflix has made a series of commercial decisions that impacts consumers and their ability to get Super HD content, even when there is no technical limitation.

Below are two of the decisions Netflix has made to limit access to Super HD content:

Your ISP

Have you ever tried to access Super HD content and seen this screen before?

Netflix restricts access to their Super HD content because my ISP has chosen not to put an Open Connect CDN in their network. Netflix has not put this restriction in place because of any bandwidth limitation on my ISP, but because of a commercial decision regarding how Netflix distributes video.

How do I know there is no technical limitation? By simply changing my DNS using a service such as Unblock-US (and in so doing tricking Netflix into believing that I am accessing the service from a Super HD offering ISP), I instantly become capable of accessing Super HD content on several compatible devices in my home.

If you’re interested in seeing the difference Super HD makes, you can give this trick a try and leave a comment below about what you think of the quality.

UPDATE on September 26, 2012: After posting this blog, Netflix has announced that SuperHD content will be available to all customers regardless of whether their ISP has an OpenConnect appliance installed in their network.

Your device of choice limits choice?

Below is the list of devices capable of accessing Super HD content.

 

My work laptop is a 12-month old Dell laptop with above average specifications, running Windows 7. If I try to access Netflix content on this computer at work (for research purposes, I swear), I am not offered the option to view video in Super HD.

If I (or according to Sandvine corporate policy, our IT department) update this laptop to Windows 8, I would suddenly be able to access Super HD content through the Windows 8 app Netflix offers. Aside from the OS upgrade, my computer would have the same technical capabilities; Netflix has just made the choice to not offer an app to Windows 7 users even though Windows 7 and Windows 8 are very similar from a software perspective.

Supporting every video resolution, on every platform would be a technical and financial challenge for many content providers. When it comes to Super HD content however, Netflix is making the decision to restrict its access to consumers on some of the largest ISPs in North America, and those on the most popular operating system in the world.

By doing so, it directly impacts the results of their ISP Speed Index. While the Index appears to measure the “speed” capabilities of ISPs, it actually examines the average video bitrate, which means that ISPs that don’t have access to Super HD content are automatically put at a disadvantage. The Index doesn’t measure ISP “quality” at all, a fact that is not obvious from the Index’s presentation and is poorly understood by Index followers.

In the coming weeks we will take a deeper look at other key players in the Internet ecosystem and how the commercial and technical decisions that they make impact overall Internet quality. For those too eager to wait for our next post, you can download the Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight: Exposing the Technical and Commercial Factors Underlying Internet Quality of Experience today.

 

When I first got my iPhone 5 last October it was my first LTE phone, so the very first application I ran on it was the Speedtest.net.  When looking at some 1H 2013 Phenomena data I noticed I may not be the only one to do this, because on one LTE network in Europe, Speedtest.net was the eighth ranked upstream application on the network accounting for over 2% of traffic at peak period.

Looking at this behavior, I think a lot of consumers may believe that speedtest.net is the one true way to measure the speed of your internet connection, and that is simply not the case.

Below are two tests I ran from my home. My results are pretty consistent, no matter what time of day the tests are run, with one speed test server always under-reporting the other by a large margin.

As you can see, one server gives me 45Mbps of downstream, the other 9Mbps. I currently pay for 35Mbps service, so depending on my world view (and server selection), I may want to head down to my ISP’s head office with either a box of chocolates or pitchfork in my hands in order to praise or complain about getting more or less than what am I paying for.

So what is the cause of this discrepancy? It can be related to server performance: it takes a big machine to drive this amount of bandwidth to all the users testing it, or, it could be the upstream ISP paths. I happen to know (using traceroute) that both Speedtest.net servers I used are in the same building (277 Lancaster W, Kitchener, ON: one via ‘Megawire‘ and one via ‘Netflash‘), and that those servers are connected to me in quite a different fashion.

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On July 1, 2012 television, movie, music businesses, as well as major Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in the US (including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable) started implementing a voluntary Copyright Alert System, often referred to as the “6-strikes rule” to reduce online copyright infringement in the US.  The agreement seeks to create balance between rights to privacy as well as rights to content, an argument which had put the CSPs in the middle.

Previous to this agreement, using the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a content holder would typically go to a CSP and request the identity of a suspected infringer, and then notify them directly.  This had lead to a large number of blanket lawsuits and a large amount of work for the CSP to lookup who had a specific IP address at some time, which is why the Copyright Alert System was created.

So how does the identification of suspected copyright infringement occur? Is your ISP snooping on you? In a nutshell:  the detection is done by a 3^rd party, not by your ISP and it is done off the network.  To answer this question more thoroughly, let’s first look at how that information is collected, by examining how one of the most popular P2P filesharing networks works – BitTorrent.

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