VPNs Seem to Help Many Broadband Users' YouTube, Netflix Issues We've talked a lot in recent weeks about how countless broadband users have struggled to see good YouTube or Netflix streams despite being on very fast connections. We've also talked about how despite the claims that ISPs are intentionally throttling these streams, nobody has access to the full data in order to be able to indisputably prove it. All we know is that YouTube and Netflix performance is getting progressively worse at larger ISPs, who in turn are blaming Netflix and YouTube (again, with nobody having data to prove it). That said, Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica has an interesting piece exploring how, whatever the cause of the problems, using a VPN appears to be helping fix it for a growing number of broadband users. Brodkin chats with Sandvine, who explains what's happening: quote: ...a VPN may route your traffic away from congested servers and links that would normally serve up video to your home. Netflix and YouTube store video caches in many locations, and data can take multiple paths to its final destination. "Imagine you're in the US and that you are on a carrier that existed in multiple states and time zones, you can VPN to the West Coast from the East Coast and end up getting the idle servers that are there, just sitting and waiting for people to get out of school and off work and so on," Bowman said. The article proceeds to note that use of a VPN could be a double-edged sword for performance: quote: Using a VPN takes your traffic away from the shortest path by distance, but may be faster in cases when the path would otherwise be congested. Networks generally aren't intelligent enough to automatically route around congestion."A network is based around packet switching, and every packet is treated independently," Bowman said. "At each location it's got a set of ways to get to its next location. It doesn't know that two hops down it gets busy." It's worth noting that Sandvine has The article proceeds to note that use of a VPN could be a double-edged sword for performance:It's worth noting that Sandvine has historically blamed content companies and exonerated ISPs for all problems, though it's also worth remembering who their biggest clients are. VPNs may help users dodge congested peering points, though it remains unclear where in the bit transfer chain the breakdown is occurring. Data vaguely hints that ISPs could be letting peering points saturated to get a leg up in business (and policy rhetoric), though again -- you'd need to get raw data from the ISPs themselves to truly see where the breakdowns are occurring, and that's not happening anytime soon.







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altview

@ioflood.com 3 recommendations altview Anon The win-win conundrum There are some that believe if you install a server in the same building that peering is done between carriers that you get peering. Folks... peering is far from free and the receiver of traffic is the one with all the cost burden... This is why peering value has some measure of traffic costs.



There are others that understand peering is an long standing industry practice with transparent processes and policies. If you meet the mutual value criteria, then peering happens. If you don't meet the criteria you have many other options to delivery your service.



There are also very select few peers that once peering is established they "forget" that they agreed to a mutual value policy and abuse the relationship. The abuse is in the form of charging a special price to hook up servers directly to their peers and specifically oversell their peers' networks. They can do this at low cost as they don't carry the cost of actually delivering the traffic. They install a toll-both on your highway but don't fund any of the road upgrades.



This is really not new and something that has caused isolated flair ups between some providers (some more than others).



What is interesting however is the ISPs that people are blaming are the ones on the receiving end of this abuse vs the ones playing traffic games as part of business negotiations.



Next time someone offers you a win-win solution to your problem... ask yourself if they created the problem in the first place