[geeks] Network software pointer

[David Eisner]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at gmail.com> wrote:
> My main goal is to understand 'What' is happening, 'Why' it's happening and
> 'How' to fix it are most likely outside my realm of influence on the provider
> of the stream.
>
> Lionel


For what it's worth, I found myself in a similar situation recently.
About a month ago I moved and switched ISPs in the process (Comcast to
Verizon FiOS). In the new location I noticed the streaming quality of
Netflix, both on my TiVo and on a PC, was poor.  Amazon Instant Video
on the PC was also lackluster, but I hadn't used it much at the old
place so it wasn't a good comparison. I used Wireshark while watching
Netflix on the TiVo and didn't notice anything unusual.  By the way,
it didn't take long for Wireshark to exhaust it's memory and crash if
the capture was too large. This was on the Windows side of my laptop
-- I didn't try it with Ubuntu -- perhaps I would have had better luck
running it on Linux.

I'm paying for 25 Mbps up/down, and when I used various online
bandwidth testers (speedtest.net, etc.) I did measure bandwidth that
good or higher. But the (excellent) support person at Netflix
confirmed that I was getting only 720p -- with the occasional burst to
1080 -- while I was streaming and on the phone with him.

At this point I thought perhaps Verizon was traffic shaping to favor
the bandwidth testing sites.  So I used iperf with a VPS I have, fully
expecting not great numbers -- but no, I got 26 Mbps downstream and
upstream, consistently, between my PC and my server, even when
measured over a 10  minute period.

Eventually the problem resolved itself on its own. I'm not sure what
happened. My hunch is that the interconnect between Netflix's content
distribution network and Verizon's backbone was at fault -- either a
temporary problem, or perhaps not enough capacity. Just a guess,
though.

Good luck.

-David