Mental health will be negatively impacted by a lower quality stream? Get a grip.
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Apple TV+ Streaming Quality Lowered in Europe to Reduce Network Strain
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It's little impacts to quality of life that really ad up. Little things add little bits of stress that eventually lead to a mental health blowup.
It's easy for you to say now, wait till you're in an Italy-style lockdown for two weeks.
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This is an example of the new daytime reality for many families in Europe these days when everyone are recommended to work from home, and all schools and kindergartens are closed:
2 adults working from from home
2 school children doing online school assignments and streaming entertainment in between
1 toddler streaming entertainment on an iPad
All of this going on the same connection. Now also imagine this happening in every house and apartment in the neighbourhood, and realize they all share the same ISP router; a router that typically is dimensioned based on an average load per household, and not for close to max load in all households. This means even those who are paying for 75/10 connection are only getting a fraction of that, and it still has to be split between 5 household members who are more active online than ever before.
It's obvious that streaming bitrates going down across the board helps those who are trying to get some actual (school) work done.
2 adults working from from home
2 school children doing online school assignments and streaming entertainment in between
1 toddler streaming entertainment on an iPad
All of this going on the same connection. Now also imagine this happening in every house and apartment in the neighbourhood, and realize they all share the same ISP router; a router that typically is dimensioned based on an average load per household, and not for close to max load in all households. This means even those who are paying for 75/10 connection are only getting a fraction of that, and it still has to be split between 5 household members who are more active online than ever before.
It's obvious that streaming bitrates going down across the board helps those who are trying to get some actual (school) work done.
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If someone commits suicide or kills/get kill because the quality of their streaming service was 480p instead of 1080p maybe its a reasonable outcome. There are many ways of entertainment, if you need help coping with quarantine, there are mental health professionals you can contact thanks to the network not being down because your neighbor's 24/7 4K streaming.
Not really. They can't treat Amazon video different from Netflix. They can treat video different from voice and downloads.
BEREC
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As I quoted above, science says stressors adds up. It's not a sum of badness, but an individual response.
Same reason why Apple trumpets that relaxing for 60 seconds improves your life.
Thanks for the personal attacks, "mate".
FWIW I used to manage a technical division of an ISP working across Europe. But I guess you know better what makes life hard on an ISPs network.
Neither:
First: I would not criticise the Politicians, I would criticise the ISPs that allow it go wrong. It's their job to do this right. And most are more than up to the challenge.
If it really becomes a problem I would not even object to an ISP turning off streaming if that were a real problem -it won't be-.
Second: they preempt a non-existent problem.
It's the story of the powder that repels pink elephants. Any politician will have to spread it even if they *know* there's no pink elephant problem.
- if they spread it, and there are no pink elephants: "see, I was right, it worked"
- if they spread it, and there as unlikely as it be, somebody would spot a pink elephant: "see I was right, need to spread more powder"
Politicians always have a much, much easier job if they act.
And the gullible follow their reasoning without any questioning, esp. when they can scare us.
I'm NOT saying the virus in itself is not scary, far from it. I'm questioning the ethics and motivation of our "dear" politicians - And those on the EU level ... they're written off on the local level, tainted and end of career anyway - sending them off to the EU is a way to delay them retiring and getting them out of the way on a national level in the EU - a pity IMHO.
I'm NOT complaining about the quality of the streaming, I'm complaining about the politicians meddling in things they should stay out of: it's the ISPs business, let them do what they need.
I guess we'll never be mates.
If anybody needs solutions if their VPN to the office is slow:
1. Many VPN software implementations are slow even if there is ample available bandwidth between the client and the central server.
Mostly this is a problem in the VPN software (speaking on a unix level, -mac forum-): the main problem is that too much of the VPN is not in the kernel and hence the code switches too much in and out of kernel mode to deliver packets. This works good enough at low bandwidths and few packets, but becomes a problem all too soon when doing lots of data or lots of packets.
While most that are at home will not have the ability to switch to a different protocol, the solution is in using a natively supported protocol that's embedded in the kernel (e.g. IPSec or so). But if the IT dept. only now has to start finding a better solution this crisis will be long over before they can roll that out to all employees who're not allowed to come to the office anyway.
2. Bandwidth at the office is a typical bottleneck: bandwidth inside a building is much more ample and much more easy to upgrade than the total bandwidth that the firewall supports over a VPN. It's too late now to do much upgrades there, and it's even questionable in many cases that the linespeed many offices have to their ISP can be handled by their hardware&software they use to terminate their VPN connections on.
Again: too late to do anything.
3. Bandwidth at interconnections between ISP networks can be less than what the changed traffic pattern requires.
ISP networks don't care about borders between countries all that much, they have more and more easily managed bandwidth within an ISP, the connection to the competition however is one where "who's the bigger one", commercial interests etc. com into play. This can be either on a peer level, or on a supplier/customer level. And typically there's a lot of commercial interest at play here.
This can typically be solved relatively easy between ISP of the same size, but it can be a tough thing for a small player to get a better connection to a large player without the larger one demanding a truckload of money form the smaller one. [If a politician could do something useful: this is the point to watch and apply pressure on the large ones: the internet will work better -not just now, always- for everyone if this is made easier on the small players]
Streaming flows: will typically not flow over these links at all.
4. Bandwidth within the network of an ISP: I really, really doubt any of those that have infrastructure struggle with any of this - el cheapo resellers might be another thing, but nothing is ever going to work properly there anyway.
5. Bandwidth between consumers and the ISP: this is a tricky one: essentially you get what you pay for. Consumers nowadays typically get asymmetrical bandwidth (they "consume" content, don't have much upstream need or bandwidth). VPNs tend to use bandwidth much more both ways ... so the limit on upstream will hurt performance on the smaller options much more readily.
But what your neighbour does will have next to no measurable impact at all.
So very few things can be fixed by individual users at all.
It should be considered for a "next time" ...
What users can do:
Change your workflow to minimise bandwidth to the office, esp. in upload.
E.g.: file sharing is typically slow down to hard to use over a VPN. If you use e.g. word or so to edit something, you'll have regular saves, backup copies etc. that all get written to the remote fileserver all too often. Single thread things lock up waiting for the server to reply it's saved ...
Solution: grab the file(s) you need, copy them local. Edit them locally. When done: overwrite them on the server.
+ will be faster
- danger to forget to upload
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I can't really find it in me to feel sympathy for someone who develops "mental health" issues because their stream is 480p.
I can however find it in me to feel sympathy for someone who gets in trouble at work for not being able to do their job because the network is unstable.
It guess it must be an American thing to get so worked up because there are bureaucrats/politicians involved in fixing a bad situation. Why does it matter so much if the ISPs throttle streaming instead of the service providers? I don't get it.
As for claiming it's a non-existent problem. That's wrong. Here's an article about how one of the largest ISPs in Norway are struggling: https://www.nrk.no/vestland/nett-trobbel-for-telenor-kunder-1.14950830 (in Norwegian)
I can however find it in me to feel sympathy for someone who gets in trouble at work for not being able to do their job because the network is unstable.
It guess it must be an American thing to get so worked up because there are bureaucrats/politicians involved in fixing a bad situation. Why does it matter so much if the ISPs throttle streaming instead of the service providers? I don't get it.
As for claiming it's a non-existent problem. That's wrong. Here's an article about how one of the largest ISPs in Norway are struggling: https://www.nrk.no/vestland/nett-trobbel-for-telenor-kunder-1.14950830 (in Norwegian)
Really? I thought they were mostly failed or disgraced local politicians who are exiled to Brussels to get them out of the way?
The EU no doubt feels it has to be seen to be doing something and this is a quick virtue signalling empty gesture.
This is a solved problem, it's the same technology that companies use to block Netflix at work while allowing conferencing.
There's multiple ways: The easiest is to look at whose infrastructure it's going to. There's peering and edge caching used exclusively by providers like Netflix, which purposely segregates the traffic. Likewise, conferencing services publish lists of their infrastructure ports and IP addresses so companies can allow them through firewalls. (https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/ar...rk-Firewall-or-Proxy-Server-Settings-for-Zoom)
Second, videoconference streams are far lower bandwidth than the 10 Mbps+ streams video services use. Video conference streams are typically 240-360p. Desktop solutions don't use HD normally, and even then they don't require the visual quality of a film.
Third, deep packet inspection is useful. Videoconferences are almost always streamed over HTTPS. I know several services don't encrypt streamed video and transport over plain HTTP because the video is already encrypted by DRM.
Analyzing traffic patterns will give signs. Streamed video services quickly dump a lot of content in the front to establish a buffer. Usually several minutes will be buffered. Interactive conferencing cannot have such a huge latency-inducing buffer, so they never have a huge burst.
And finally, all video conference software I've seen marks packets with specific QoS priority, while streaming services do not.
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I notice difference here in BC, Canada. Speedtest on my gigibit Fibre is usually around 940Mbps up and down, but last couple days I notice maybe 500-600Mbps down, 700-800Mbps up. Reason I discovered this is I was testing a customer's Telus gigabit PureFibre yesterday and was wondering why they are only getting around 500Mbps. This is evidence of more traffic on the Internet because of current situation. Don't really notice with Shaw here yet because they cannot reach these speeds greater than where I currently can tell difference from the norm.
BTW, Telus has Netflix caching hardware in several sites here directly at their office and I presume most other ISPs in North America have these. Most other CDNs used by other streaming services also would have a similar setup but not directly inside ISP, but close by, and at one time years ago AppleTV was best for Netflix because of the CDN it used. So the bottleneck on streaming media is the local infrastructure from CDN to home, not the backbones - at least in North America. Not sure if EU allows this type of box but I would imagine, considering EU, they would have some anti-competitive reason to disallow this because would give Netflix an advantage. Maybe someone in the know from EU can clarify this.
Also I will point out that streaming services like Netflix 1080p are bursty, meaning once you start watching a 90 minute movie, it is downloaded and cached within minutes on your device and there is no continous bandwidth usage for the 90 minute duration - same goes for YouTube. Now with 4K, the bandwidth is much higher and most people don't have this bandwidth so it could bag the Internet more. However, I believe that it would make pretty much zero difference to the rest of the Internet if I watched a SD, 1080P, or even 4K Netflix stream off Telus cache on my Gigabit PureFibre.
The real bandwidth hog is game streaming... Stadia and GeForce Now are actually bad for the Internet and those services should be cut back because the content is dynamic vs a static movie and is impossible to optimize like streaming video via CDN. Fortunately now they are not so popular and were just starting to take off before this crisis, but one person at home game streaming on GFN or Stadia is probably equivalent to dozens or maybe even hundreds of video streamers watching a couple shows per day.
BTW, Telus has Netflix caching hardware in several sites here directly at their office and I presume most other ISPs in North America have these. Most other CDNs used by other streaming services also would have a similar setup but not directly inside ISP, but close by, and at one time years ago AppleTV was best for Netflix because of the CDN it used. So the bottleneck on streaming media is the local infrastructure from CDN to home, not the backbones - at least in North America. Not sure if EU allows this type of box but I would imagine, considering EU, they would have some anti-competitive reason to disallow this because would give Netflix an advantage. Maybe someone in the know from EU can clarify this.
Also I will point out that streaming services like Netflix 1080p are bursty, meaning once you start watching a 90 minute movie, it is downloaded and cached within minutes on your device and there is no continous bandwidth usage for the 90 minute duration - same goes for YouTube. Now with 4K, the bandwidth is much higher and most people don't have this bandwidth so it could bag the Internet more. However, I believe that it would make pretty much zero difference to the rest of the Internet if I watched a SD, 1080P, or even 4K Netflix stream off Telus cache on my Gigabit PureFibre.
The real bandwidth hog is game streaming... Stadia and GeForce Now are actually bad for the Internet and those services should be cut back because the content is dynamic vs a static movie and is impossible to optimize like streaming video via CDN. Fortunately now they are not so popular and were just starting to take off before this crisis, but one person at home game streaming on GFN or Stadia is probably equivalent to dozens or maybe even hundreds of video streamers watching a couple shows per day.
An ordinary video game is easily 100 GB today. Plus maybe 5 GB of updates per month. For a lot of players, streaming games creates less traffic than running them locally.
Every Call of Duty Install Size Compared, From 2003 to Modern Warfare - IGN
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is massive, so we took a look back at the size of every single major Call of Duty.
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare's Season 2 Patch Was Huge And Prompted An Apology
With a download size ranging from 50 to almost 100 GB, the size of Modern Warfare Season 2 has fans annoyed on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
gonna leave this here...
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Seems to me they just want to pretend they are one of the “big players” and lowering quality actually helps anyone, but all they did was irritate the few customers actually still watching TV+ shows.
Completely wrong. I gave you the link above. The EU regulation allows control by general application classes. You are intentionally ignoring that fact.
Not only that, the actual regulation specifically allows significant throttling and traffic management in emergencies
Regulation 2015/2120/EU
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An ordinary video game is easily 100 GB today. Plus maybe 5 GB of updates per month. For a lot of players, streaming games creates less traffic than running them locally.
Every Call of Duty Install Size Compared, From 2003 to Modern Warfare - IGN
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is massive, so we took a look back at the size of every single major Call of Duty.www.ign.com
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare's Season 2 Patch Was Huge And Prompted An Apology
With a download size ranging from 50 to almost 100 GB, the size of Modern Warfare Season 2 has fans annoyed on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.www.gamespot.com
100GB download at 24Mbps is 9 hours. That is one time download and play... I am talking continuous required bandwidth to play this game which is different than downloading something and consuming at a slower rate later eg. movie or game download. 5GB updates is insignificant.
"Nvidia advises users that they need a 10 Mbps connection for bare minimum quality on GeForce Now. ... Nvidia also recommends different broadband speeds for better tiers of gaming: 20 Mbps for 720p at 60 fps, and 50 Mbps for 1080p at 60 fps "
If you want comparable quality 60fps then that is about 4-5 hours of gameplay and burn your 100GB. Many play more than that everyday.
That's not how net neutrality works in the EU.
They're not blocking anything, not slowing down anything, not altering anything if they make a win-win or a commercial deal with a streaming provider or a CDN to allow them to set up a server that caches/proxies things on their network.