It seems that you're also taking another route. If the problem was
upstream from your local area, your company might have a better
connection to the Netflix backbone, etc. But it is suspicious...
Traceroutes both ways might be informative.
On 07/22/2014 07:09 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote:
Every night when I put my daughter to bed, I read her a book, or we
play flashlight shadow puppets, or we watch videos such as The Duck
Song, or Blackbeard, Bluebeard, Redbeard. We watch netflix, youtube, etc.
Recently I noticed, that all our video streams get interrupted
annoyingly frequently. Buffering every 1-15 minutes, it's
infuriating. Sometimes I can dumb down the connection, switching to
CC instead of HD. Sometimes it helps. Not always.
So I VPN'd into work (We have a non-split-tunnel VPN available), and
then we can watch it, no problem. It's the same content, being
delivered over the same network, only it's encrypted and hidden from
FiOS's routers. There's no other explanation, simply, caught red handed.
When ISP's do something like this to Netflix, Youtube, etc, the end
user perceives Netflix, Youtube, etc as being slow. "It's not my
internet connection; my internet connection works fine for other
things. This is just Youtube being overloaded or whatever. Well,
that's what you get when you try to watch something for free. Sigh."
So I got to thinking, could encryption be used to circumvent greedy
ISP's systematically? If everything were encrypted and
unidentifiable, then the only thing they could do would be to throttle
*all* the traffic, not just the big content distributors that they
want to shake down. Then, the slow service would be recognizable to
end users for what it is - a crippled internet connection, and not a
deficiency of Netflix, Youtube, etc.
Even if everything were tunneled over https, there are two obvious
counters that the ISP's could take: They could inspect the DNS
traffic and/or SSL subject name to find the name of the server.
And/or they could try to create a list of all of Netflix's and
Youtube's IP addresses, and throttle traffic based on these factors.
Recently I noticed, that a lot of time when I go to download some file
from some website, the content is actually redirected to come from
s3.amazon.com.
My point is to say:
#1 the hostname doesn't need to be recognizable as "*.youtube.com" or
"*.netflix.com" ... These guys could randomize all new DNS names all
the time, so the exposed servername doesn't cause a problem.
And
#2 Content distribution networks don't necessarily have to have small
recognizable IP ranges. Especially with the expansion of IPv6.
Especially if large content distribution networks aggregate all sorts
of traffic - netflix, youtube, and everyone else -
If the content is distributed by a content distribution network, and
LOTS of services use those networks, then the SSL cert could be
"*.akamai.com" (or whatever) and if the ISP's want to throttle it,
their only choice is to throttle *all* of the content indiscriminantly.
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