“Google Inc is rating Internet service providers’ video streaming quality on a new website, the latest development in the fight between broadband providers and content companies over who is to blame for slow streaming speeds,” Marina Lopes reports for Reuters.
“A link to the website appears when videos on Google’s streaming service, YouTube, are slow to buffer,” Lopes reports. “The website quietly launched in May, but recently drew growing publicity.”
“Google rates the Internet service providers based on how quickly billions of hours of YouTube videos watched every month load over 30 days and divides those results by provider and location to determine the quality of performance viewers get 90 percent of the time, the company said,” Lopes reports. “Customers can compare the performance of various Internet service providers in their area through the website.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
an actual good idea if not manipulated.
Agreed. But this is Google we are talking about. This is likely just another ad.
I hope this betters the home internet experience and quality. But, all companies need to get on board and report otherwise it will just be another company complaining. The few big carriers of home internet control my “up and down, up and down” internet.
I switched from ATT DSL (3 down, 0.25 up, from 3rd party ISP) to TWC (16 down, 1 up).
Guess what? The TWC service is no better. In fact, the ATT DSL made the initial connection and began showing sites, videos, etc, much faster than TWC. The streaming speed was much slower, but 50% of the time TWC doesn’t even connect for minutes and I go somewhere else.
So, what do I get from TWC? A lot of marketing hype with poor performance.
TWC is at the bottom of the customer service rating scale with Comcast nearly as low.
I pay an extra $10 for TWC’s ‘Turbo’ service of 30 Mbps down, 2.5 Mbps up. It’s not represented in Google’s charts. But even with the faster service, I still run into bottlenecks and peak traffic times of day. For example, it’s 10:00 AM here and the best down rate I can get is ~22 Mbps.
Amusing: TWC took down their own local speed test. Slimey people.
Many factors can slow YouTube down, not just the speed of your provider. The rate you are quoted applies pretty much only to the provider’s network. After that you’re in the chaotic world of the Internet where things like even DNS can effect your content delivery. For content delivery it is often better (long story short) to use your provider’s DNS servers as that’s how the content delivery system determines your geographical location. I’ve found Apple’s services to be particularly susceptible to this.
FLASH can be an issue with YouTube. If you’re not try using their HTML 5 delivery. Switch back and forth.
Off the bat you might pop out of Time Warner and hit the exact same problem you were having with AT&T, with regard to your geographical location and YouTube.
Have a consultant come in and do live tracking of data coming to you from YouTube.
I use Time Warner’s 100Mb/s service and have no problem with YouTube.
So investigate some more. The ISP won’t put the kind of effort that’s often needed into find such annoying problems.
I just tested the Google test and it rates me for “Standard Definition. 360p” Well this is interesting because I have no problem streaming 4k, 2160p from youtube (which is gorgeous by the way). Not a single dropped frame. So the Google report is not accurate.
It will be interesting to try around 7:00PM tonight, when they say traffic hits the peak for my service provider.
As I was indicating above they they show they have their own content delivery network. I.e. they’ve built their own “fast lane” on the internet, storing Youtube data in numerous geographic locations. They are not clear as to how they ascertain your physical location though.
(My 4k stream ended, i.e. I’ve downloaded the entire movie faster than it can play, incidentally.) (Road to Machu Picchu).
Now I’m streaming an episode of Star Wars Clone Wars from Netflix simultaneously with a 4K from Youtube. All HD. No problem. 4k is freaky stunning. Since my monitor (I’m on iMac, 3.5Ghz i7, 32GM RAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB) isn’t a 4k monitor, it shouldn’t look that much better, should it? But it does.
Now trying 2 4k streams to two different iMacs and it’s fine. So bottom line, there’s more at work than just the provider and Google is wrong about rating my service for 360p only.
I’ve also found some older youtube HD movies can be choppy.
Also, not to be condescending, but what else is going on on your network. Are you the only one? Are there others in the home downloading data, streaming audio and video when you are downloading Youtube? I know it’s a stupid question, but you’d be surprised how often I get complaints and when I open a bedroom door I find a full blown LAN party going on, and they ask, “Does this matter?”
All of this is also a good lesson in why Net Neutrality is far more complex than we are led to believe by many Net Neutrality proponents.
The internet could be speeded up considerably if they banned all the bullshit cookies and tracking that goes on under the radar.
Fur shur! But guess where the money is.
The largest single component of internet traffic the last time I saw a listing is still spam. I am quite sure all the digital stalking is a close #2.
Spam doesn’t actually qualify as the highest source of bandwidth on the Internet, not by a long shot no matter which source of statistics you use. At this point, streaming video is the single biggest source of bandwidth without argument. Netflix is the single largest source of bandwidth of any site on the Internet.
Doing some casual searching, spam is currently still about 70% of all email traffic. Email traffic is about 4% of total Internet bandwidth.
http://securelist.com/analysis/kaspersky-security-bulletin/58274/kaspersky-security-bulletin-spam-evolution-2013/
According to Cisco, the expected percent of email, along with Web and data transfer will be a total of 20% of bandwidth from 2013-2018. File sharing will be about 2%. Their prediction of Internet video percentage is iffy, IMHO. But they predict it will take up 29% of bandwidth, with gaming being the biggest hog at 34%. I dispute their enormous gaming percentage number, but what do I know about gaming? Not much.
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/ip-ngn-ip-next-generation-network/white_paper_c11-481360.html
https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/
you can compare to alternate providers in your area with it also, thanks for link.
The least the article could do is include a link to the website they are referencing! I would like to see how the providers rank.
See above from opsono.
Strangely, I agree with both “botvinnik” and “newly hired NSA intern” on this issue.
All the streaming media providers from Apple, Microsoft, and Google to HULU, and Ustream should form a single consortium to accurately document how good (or, more typically, how bad) ISPs are in each region. (Although a company like HULU, which is partially owned by COMCAST, likely will never join such a group.) They should also explicitly delineate whether the service provider demands in house peering or additional fees for a “fast lane”.
Google doing this with regard to YouTube is OK, if Google is not leveraging the site to get preferential treatment from ISPs (a distinct possibility). Google rarely does anything that is 100% altruistic.
Unfortunately, upon checking the actual tracking site (not the linked article) there appear to be many areas of the U.S. that are not currently tracked. (I didn’t try to spoof any non U.S. areas.) Are there really that many areas of the U.S. that don’t watch enough YouTube videos to track?
There are many areas that don’t have a lot of choices between ISPs. Doesn’t do any good to know how poor your service, provided by the free market, is if it is the only game in town.
You will get information that isn’t always actionable or accurate, and it might lead to false conclusions. But it would be interesting to see. Google says in my region I should be able to do 360p reliably at the most, but I just demonstrated multiple 4K (2160p) streams from Youtube with no problem.
I’d also like to see from Google a list of where they keep CDN nodes. Though your ISP might be just fine, Google may not have put a youtube distribution facility near you.
This is what the ISPs (notably COMCAST) are after NetFLIX to do. Store their content locally. It’s not about “creating a fast lane” as it’s almost always reported in the news. The problem is that COMCAST then wants NetFLIX to pay more to do this. Which is crap.
I have a Comcast Business account in my home (long story) but, it kicks butt. Plus, I call the business customer service if something is wrong and I get quicker services because their business division is separate from the home division. Oh, it costs me a total of $5 buck extra a month. I don’t really have a choice for other providers and Quest Hi-speed isn’t available and the 4G coverage in my little corner is shit.
Your experience in your area might be different.