Issues with the streaming service in SA are often due to our familiar Internet woes; but if you’re in the US, you may be victim of a gentleman’s agreement between ISPs to limit the performance of YouTube and other competing streaming services.
Ars Technica dug into the issue of poor streaming performance on certain networks and their discovery was mired in complexity. It turns out that ISPs which have their own video content delivery services are in a constant tug-of-war to ensure that their services are either equally accessed or more popular than services such as Youtube, Netflix, and Hulu.
Ars Technica discovered that in previous years, content providers would liaise with ISPs to determine how much and how often servers and services should be upgraded to be able to deliver video content seamlessly. If the system reached over 50% utilisation, the ISP would upgrade their networks to ensure good performance.
“Typically what happened is when the connections reached about 50 percent utilization, the two parties agreed to upgrade them and they would be upgraded in a timely manner,” Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer told Ars. “Over the past year or so, as we have continued to pick up Netflix traffic, Verizon has continuously slowed down the rate of upgrading those connections, allowing the interconnections to become totally saturated and therefore degrading the quality of throughput.”
Schaeffer said this is true of all the big players to varying degrees, naming Comcast, Time Warner, CenturyLink, and AT&T. Out of those, he said that “AT&T is the best behaved of the bunch.”
Letting ports fill up can be a negotiating tactic. Verizon and Cogent each have to spend about $10,000 for equipment when a port is added, Schaeffer said—pocket change for companies of this size. But instead of the companies sharing equal costs, Verizon wants Cogent to pay because more traffic is flowing from Cogent to Verizon than vice versa.”
Hardware for better services and user experience declined
Google has offered free hardware for a local caching server to these same ISPs to improve local network performance. Some do accept the offer while others decline it, saying that Google should be paying them for having the caching server installed.
Caching servers installed on the local network solve a lot of performance problems and improve the user experience for the ISP, increasing customer satisfaction; but the caching server also brings with it costs that the ISP has to absorb, such as electricity usage, cooling requirements, and data transit.
On the up side, a caching server decreases the amount of traffic the ISP has to field from outside sources, lowering total network utilisation and improving the user experience.
“To us, it’s really a black box that’s run by Netflix,” RCN VP of network services Peter Jacoby told Ars. “We do almost nothing except give it IP addresses. We put them in our data centers and that content gets a lot closer to our customers, so when they request a movie, typically the popular ones I’m told will stream from their closest cache and that eliminates a lot that can go wrong between them and Netflix. To us, its a win, despite the extra costs.”
Free peering in South Africa already a thing
While ISPs in the US are seeking to both improve service to their customer base and keep a stranglehold on services which threaten their offerings, some ISPs in South Africa are already ahead of that curve.
In October 2010, MWEB’s CEO Rudi Jansen announced that MWEB would no longer be paying other SA ISPs and Telkom for local transit traffic, closing off connections to uncooperative networks and internationally routing traffic.
- Telkom and MWEB peering at last?
- MWEB peering link cuts: How it impacts you
- Telkom and MWEB peering; local gaming pings set to improve
- MWEB peering changes make mess of online gaming
Although this didn’t affect the majority of Internet services, local gamers did experience higher ping times and reduced performance between uncooperative networks, in addition to a degradation in VOIP services and access to remote servers.
In the year that followed, free peering exchanges were set up to facilitate the open exchange of network traffic between ISPs.
While peering exchanges such as JINX, CINX, DINX, and NeutrINX have improved network performance locally and improved the amount of routing done internationally, popular services such as YouTube will continue to degrade over time unless the ISPs continue to upgrade their networks to cope with demand.
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It happens when the companies start REALLY pushing profit instead of customer service… Links congest and people suffer, but in the USA if they are all in bed then all the networks are congested. So you have no choice… These are the only options to get connected. Money hungry bastards!