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> I already knew from previous experience that for some reason, AT&T traffic to fast.com is throttled. Why AT&T wants bandwidth to appear lower than reality is

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• paulddraper 3y ago
  Indeed that's the point of fast.com.... To measure the speed from Netflix servers
• avianlyric 3y ago
  > Said the other way around: fast.com is great to see actual throughput from Netflix as opposed to some fake throughout from a dedicated speed test site for the exact same reason. Yup. This is pretty much the reason Netflix created fast.com. They wanted a speed test service that couldn’t be gamed by ISPs. Many ISPs will prioritise traffic to know speed test services (like Ookla’s speedtest.net), making their services appear faster than they’re under more normal usage. By placing fast.com on Netflix IPs, ISPs either have to prioritise all Netflix traffic (which they’re very unlikely to do), or accept that fast.com is going to provide a more realistic measurement of their performance.
  • neurostimulant 3y ago
    Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link, while before it was outright blocked. Hooray for no net neutrality I guess. Another fun part: when netflix IPs was blocked by this ISP, it's pretty much impossible to use netflix because the only way to get around the block was to use VPN, but netflix itself blocks VPN access.
    • solarpunk 3y ago
      I'm curious where you live and what provider does this weird Netflix reselling practice.
      • neurostimulant 3y ago
        Streaming services do this all the time in Asia. Instead of paying with credit card, you pay via your carrier/ISP, sometimes at discounted pricing. I paid Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and Zoom this way.
      • callahad 3y ago
        Common in America (e.g. https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/netflix-on-us https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/netflix-on-us) and the UK (e.g. https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/virgin-media-o2-revamps-top-bundles-to-include-netflix/ https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/virgin-media-o2-revamps-top...)
    • happymellon 3y ago
      > Hooray for no net neutrality I guess Surely it would essentially saturate your fibre if there was net neutrality, unless you don't pay for full fibre speeds?
      • tpxl 3y ago
        Parent was being facetious.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      What is the internet anyway? Are there truth in advertising issues around selling internet access with excessive filtering?
    • patmcc 3y ago
      Your ISP entirely blocked netflix? That's incredible shitty.
      • 3y ago
  • kijiki 3y ago
    Couldn't ISPs just sniff the SNI hostname to differentiate fast.com vs actual Netflix video streaming?
    • wtallis 3y ago
      The fast.com page kicks off requests to nflxvideo.net domains for the actual speed measurement. And it wouldn't surprise me if actual Netflix video streaming made occasional connections to fast.com purely to make it harder for ISPs to cheat.
    • cesarb 3y ago
      You can think of the requests to fast.com as just loading the speed test control scripts and user interface. The actual speed test loads files from the same servers (with the same SNI hostname) used by actual Netflix video streaming. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the fast.com speed test loads real streaming video segments from these servers, the only difference being that it doesn't have the decryption key for these videos.
      • therein 3y ago
        That's surely how I would have done it.
      • bmicraft 3y ago
        It would also not surprise me if dns requests for fast.com temporarily elevated bandwidth limits for netflix
      • bradknowles 3y ago
        It does. You're loading segments of real movies on Netflix that are not encumbered by copyright. But they're intentionally otherwise indistinguishable from any other real movie on Netflix.
    • catminou 3y ago
      Yes a few ISPs actually do this (not just for Netflix, but for other sites in general).
  • sharkski 3y ago
    In the case of Ookla's speedtest, many ISPs host speed test servers to eliminate any variability of the wider internet. That's why it may seem they are prioritizing it. It's not a useless tool either as lets you narrow issues down to either your network or ISP.
  • anonymousnotme 3y ago
    It definitely looks like testing sites are prioritized. The fastest download speed that I have gotten is maybe 7 MB (bytes) per second; generally it is 2-5 MB per second. The speed test sites generally get 100 Mb per second dowload. In general the best I seem to get is about half the speed of the speed test sites. To me the real speed of the ISP is how fast one can download something one wants, not the result of a test. I would prefer to see results for downloads/uploads from youtube and various CDN networks and popular sites. I would also like to see ISP have a URL that is inside their network to test upload and download so that one can at least isolate what part of the connection might be lagging. Actually, I just used devtools to snag a 25MB file from fast.com. Curl/wget gives a speed of about 3 or 4 MB per second. That does not really seem to match up with fast.com download speed of 70Mb/second. 70/8 is 8.75, which is about double. Is fast.com accurate? Is my math wrong?
    • jackson1442 3y ago
      I personally like https://speed.cloudflare.com https://speed.cloudflare.com since it just looks like you're doing typical CloudFlare traffic. The results viewer is also quite nice.
      • is_true 3y ago
        My ISP (Telecom) gives me a speed of 250Mbps using fast.com and 40Mbps using Cloudflare's tool.
        • kortilla 3y ago
          Your isp likely has a Netflix oca or is directly peered with Netflix directly. It’s standard for any decent sized ISP since it’s either the largest or 2nd largest by volume peer (youtube being in the other).
      • binkHN 3y ago
        Very cool! I never knew about this! I really appreciate the latency during upload test. I've bookmarked this and will stop using speedtest.net. Thank you!
• bscphil 3y ago
  > Since fast.com is a Netflix ip, and the isp can’t distinguish whether it’s video that is being transferred or a file to measure throughout, It is really trivial to do basic traffic snooping and see what people are looking at. I'm surprised it isn't more common. I figured it would be harder, or perform worse, but I easily wrote a little piece of software that filters the TLS ClientHello for arbitrary domains. Maybe 10 years ago hardware wouldn't have been able to do this, but I bet it's no big deal now. So your filter chain just looks like <Netflix IP range> -> <has fast.com ClientHello> -> unthrottle. You don't need to do packet inspection on every packet, just ones that you might be interested in (e.g. Netflix IPs). It's crazy to me that the many people who care about privacy and censorship in tech haven't pushed ECH (encrypted ClientHello) harder. It's such a gaping hole in web privacy that you can still passively snoop domain names sent in cleartext. It makes DoH/DoT almost pointless.
  • xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    This isn't applicable to fast.com as it simply makes requests to Netflix's CDN from the frontend. Indistinguishable from regular Netflix traffic.
    • bscphil 3y ago
      Good point, although you could still do logic like only activating the throttle after the customer visits netflix.com. You can't distinguish the CDN traffic, but you can still tell what website is being viewed. Incidentally, my speeds on fast.com are always terrible (about 1/8 of what I get elsewhere), despite the fact that I'm fairly confident it is not being throttled. That's because the speed I see is >100 Mbps, which is like 4 Netflix UHD streams. Wouldn't be much point in throttling to that speed, you'd want 10 Mbps max, and less on wireless.
      • the456gamer 3y ago
        then you might miss embedded clients, right?
  • hedora 3y ago
• eurleif 3y ago
  I recently discovered that T-Mobile does this too, but they actually let you disable it on their site. Ostensibly, it's a feature for your benefit (somehow), and they're doing you a favor by enabling it by default. In reality, of course, it's for their own benefit, and they're banking on people not realizing it can be disabled. I suppose giving you the option lets them advertise things like "no throttling" and "4K streaming supported" while still reaping the benefits of throttling/lower-bitrate streaming.
  • tyingq 3y ago
    >it's a feature for your benefit (somehow) They don't count the "shaped/throttled" sites against your data plan limits, so I can see some people liking it.
    • eurleif 3y ago
      They do this even with an unlimited plan.
  • gr4yb34rd 3y ago
    T-Mobile gives me full speed when I set my APN to B2B/IPV4.
  • tzs 3y ago
    > Ostensibly, it's a feature for your benefit (somehow), and they're doing you a favor by enabling it by default. Some throttling by default for video actually is sort of for your benefit, at least indirectly, although I don't know if carriers are throttling more than that amount. A surprisingly large number of people nowadays watch movies on their phones or small tablets. On screens that size at the distances they typically hold them from their eyes 4K and usually 1080p won't offer any visible improvement over 720p. On some devices even 720p probably won't offer an improvement over 480p. It is to everyone's benefit if other people on the network don't stream at a higher resolution than is necessary to reach the limit of what is visible. Since most people aren't going to change any settings from the default, defaulting to low speed streams maximizes benefits.
• canadianfella 3y ago
  [dead]
• londons_explore 3y ago
  On my ISP (Three UK), a DNS lookup to fast.com gives you faster internet for the next minute or so. Therefore, I have a background bash loop just looking up fast.com every 30 seconds all day long.
  • thejsa 3y ago
    Out of interest, which Three plan (& APN) are you on? I’m working on using a Smarty (Three UK-owned budget label MVNO, for those unaware) SIM card in a 5G modem as a backup line, and haven’t been super impressed with speeds — so curious about trying your tip.
• kloch 3y ago
  > Since fast.com is a Netflix ip Technically the website fast.com resolves to an Akamai IP, but the speed test it loads uses a Netflix owned IP.