
Google Shames Slow U.S. ISPs With Its New YouTube Video Quality Report - sunilkumarc
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/29/google-shames-slow-u-s-isps-with-its-new-youtube-video-quality-report/
======
rpm4321
I know Google is traditionally very stingy when it comes to adding elements to
their interfaces, but this seems important enough to dedicate at least a small
portion of screen real estate to it on every YouTube video page. It would
certainly have more of an impact than a report that 99% of users will never
see.

It doesn't have to be a big deal - maybe just a "cellphone bars"-like icon,
linked to further info and net neutrality content.

~~~
karaziox
They are doing it. If you have a slow connection and the video start to buffer
a lot, there is a banner that appear right under the video linking to the
video quality report. I saw it yesterday

~~~
Alupis
Good. We need to Name-n-Shame these ISP's into doing good by their customers.

There was an interesting interview with Comcast CEO the other day where he
said, "[We] don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be
hated.”

But then he attempted to shift the blame to content providers:

"Roberts followed up this statement by saying that Comcast is mostly hated
because 'it’s the company consumers have to deal with when other companies
raise their prices.'"

[http://bgr.com/2014/05/28/comcast-ceo-roberts-
interview/](http://bgr.com/2014/05/28/comcast-ceo-roberts-interview/)

~~~
Touche
What is the customer's recourse though? Get even slower DSL?

~~~
Alupis
NO, the recourse is to choose independent ISP's.

They generally offer better pricing for faster speeds with less BS, ie no
monitoring, ad injections, throttling, etc.

You will have to look for ones in your area, but they are there. Usually each
major city will have a few. Rural areas will tend to have more WISP's
(wireless isp's) that are also small and all about their customers.

The recourse is to call your Senator and Congressman and demand they force big
ISP's to lease fiber/copper to smaller companies, much like phone-line
providers are required to lease their copper to other companies. This will
help spur competition, which means everyone wins.

~~~
momerath
I don't know what you mean by "major city," but I look in Milwaukee every six
months or so. There simply aren't any "independent ISPs" here with remotely
comparable speeds or prices.

~~~
jauer
Hi! I'm one of the four (that I know of) independent ISPs that serve Milwaukee
and the surrounding areas with a combination of WISP, Fiber, and Copper
technologies. We all suck at advertising and rely on referrals.

In the Milwaukee market we all focus on business users (and generally ones
that need symmetric or high-upload service and would be looking at a fiber
build) or MDU applications because... For the past several years we've seen a
consumer preference for absolute lowest cost over quality or available
bandwidth. At the extreme end we still have users on wholesaled ILEC DSL on
provisioned for 768k download that just don't care enough to upgrade or switch
because they like the sub $20 price. It's ILEC controlled so I can't just
upgrade them out of the goodness of my heart either.

The participants list for our little Internet Exchange is somewhat workable as
a directory of area independent ISPs although some of us are datacenter
operators or as far away as Racine or Madison:
[http://www.mkeix.net/](http://www.mkeix.net/)

~~~
maxsilver
This is my experience as well, just across the pond from you (West Michigan).

Home users demand the world for $19.99 a month and no contract. Therefore,
they get terrible Comcast / TWC / ATT (essentially, they get what they asked
for).

There are a _lot_ of people trying to run the "independent ISP" gauntlet, all
over the US. (And I'm biased, as I am one of them). But those consumer prices
usually only work if you offer bad/slow service, have a complete monopoly, or
have government subsidy.

Since most Independents don't have or won't do most of those, they have to
focus on business, as those are (usually) the only people who care enough to
put actual money into service.

~~~
phil21
I haven't been in the access game for a long time, but I honestly don't know
how you could sell to even smart "prosumers" these days.

I would _love_ to get a ~50mbps line to my home, from a reliable local ISP
with clue. I'd pay around $150/mo for such service, and I'm not one of those
guys that runs stuff maxed out 24x7.

There just are no options where I live for that amount of bandwidth other than
Comcast. So instead I have my primary comcast line ($120/mo) which is 150/20,
and a backup DSL line from USWest/Qwest/Centurylink/whatever they are calling
themselves today. I believe that one is 20/2, but it sucks so bad (seriously
no 1500 MTU still? sigh.) I rarely use it even for failover anymore. LTE is
faster.

------
yellowbkpk
A link to the actual report:
[http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/](http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/)

~~~
Holbein
"Results from your location are not yet available" (I'm in Europe).

Could somebody post a link how the results page look like? Thanks!

~~~
sp332
There's a screenshot in the article.
[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2014-05-...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/2014-05-29_0852.png?w=1006&h=670)

------
goatforce5
I imagine ISPs will start using these results in advertising really quickly.
"Google rates us as Excellent for video playback. Compare us with your ISP!
We're faster than 82% of ISPs in this area."

Google/YouTube speed ratings could very quickly end up being analogous to
school rankings. You want to be in an area with good schools, and if you don't
have good schools you're probably going to start putting pressure on people to
improve things.

~~~
coldcode
If there was any competition in your area. Soon it will be Comcast or Comcast.
Unless you live in a Google place.

~~~
toast0
The (pending) merger of Comcast and Time Warner does not change any areas from
a choice of Comcast or Time Warner to no choice, because there are no areas
where the two cable providers cover the same addresses.

~~~
JshWright
And somehow no one seems to think that's a problem in the first place...

~~~
toast0
Lack of competition and transparency in the last mile is the essential
problem, but the Comcast/Time Warner merger doesn't really change the status
quo there (unless someone makes a significant change a condition of the
merger). The blueprint of a solution is the pre-2005 regulation of DSL by
ILECs: make cable providers (or at least comcast), ILECs, and anyone else with
a natural monopoly offer line-sharing on reasonable terms, and watch ISPs
spring up (or re-emerge) with competitive offers and better routing than the
incumbents. Bonus points if wholesale pricing is required to be at least as
low as retail pricing, unlike in the DSL times.

------
tzs
Provo, UT, is interesting. It has both Google Fiber and Comcast. Their
performance is essentially the same, with perhaps a very slight edge to
Comcast. I tried to compare them in the other Google Fiber cities, but Provo
was the only one I saw both Google and Comcast in. (Austin, TX, is
interesting, because that is supposedly a Google Fiber city, but Google Fiber
does not show up in the report).

Comcast has similar performance in all the cities I've lived in as an adult
(Los Angeles area, Silicon Valley, Seattle, small towns on the west side of
Puget Sound). Certainly not what I expected given all the complaining I see on
the net about Comcast and YouTube performance.

~~~
magicalist
> _Certainly not what I expected given all the complaining I see on the net
> about Comcast and YouTube performance_

Comcast gives many things about which to complain, but I've never had an issue
with Youtube on them. What I've been shocked by in the past is the disparity
between youtube on my comcast connection and youtube on people's TimeWarner
connection when I've visited, where it has been completely abysmal in the
past. Like, 1990s RealPlayer quality, not only because you have to turn it
down to 144p just to play, but also because it still stutters horribly even at
that resolution.

I feel like most of the "one weird DNS trick to fix youtube" posts have been
about timewarner, though I don't know if my memory is accurate there.

Notably TimeWarner looks fine on these graphs (at least in a few places where
I've had friends complain about it in the past), so maybe they've fixed
things.

~~~
vitd
Oddly my wife used to see this on her laptop in our apartment in Los Angeles.
I would play a video, and it would be fine at HD. I'd ping her the link, and
she would attempt to play it and it would be stuttery and crappy. I'm not sure
what changed, but eventually it just cleared up. We were on the same
connection. Very odd.

~~~
dpritchett
Were you using the same dns servers?

~~~
vitd
I believe so. She probably wouldn't know how to change her DNS settings, and I
don't think I would have changed either hers or my own from the default. I do
recall turning off my ISP's auto-redirect on bad DNS spam. (It would try to
suggest sites they got money from if I entered a website that didn't exist,
for example.) But beyond that, I don't think we did anything to change DNS.

------
tlogan
I'm looking the report here:
[http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/](http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/)

But I cannot understand the graph (Video consumption and Quality). Can anybody
help here?

~~~
devindotcom
The graph shows what I assume is overall volume of bandwidth seen from that
provider, and then the proportion of each type of YouTube stream the
connection is capable of holding: HD, SD, or sub-SD. Seeing HD (dark blue)
take up most of the volume is good, since it means the ISP provides enough
bandwidth throughout the day to watch a video in high def.

~~~
phil21
This is just flawed. It will put your provider that tends to sell 3mbps DSL
lines that are rock-solid 24/7 with great peering below that of providers that
sell 50Mbps lines that have fairly crappy peering and you only get 4Mbps and
5% packet loss during peak.

Or at least it will look that way on these graphs, since very few HD streams
will be performed by the first provider's customers.

I'd be a heck of a lot more interested in looking at data that shows buffer
underruns based on time of day. That will show congested providers vs.
providers that simply offer less bandwidth. AKA it will separate the providers
that lie, and those that are honest.

I don't know much about youtube's architecture, but in general these stats are
pretty simple to do via basic math and access logging. You look at the total
request time, how many bytes were sent, video bitrate, and then calculate how
many seconds of video were actually downloaded vs. how long the request took.
If the request took longer than the total seconds of video downloaded, then
the user probably experienced buffering. It's a bit rough, but the numbers are
incredibly useful in aggregate. I've used this method to identify peering
issues (looking at you FT) when more advanced methods are not available.

------
berberich
Here's the Netflix ISP Speed Index, which is more of an ISP ranking:
[http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/](http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/)

~~~
The_Double
Can anyone explain what these numbers really mean? How can they possiby be so
low?

The only thing I can imagine is that it measures
sum(max(clientSpeed,NetflixSpeed))/n , where NetflixSpeed is only about 4Mbps.
That would make this a ranking of what isp has the lowest amount of users with
really shitty WiFi, or users watching netflix on slow smartphones. I doubt
there are many ISP's with offer a connection of less than 4Mbps between their
backbone and Netflix.

Either way, it's good to see my ISP ranking the second highest worldwide.

~~~
masklinn
> Can anyone explain what these numbers really mean? How can they possiby be
> so low?

If you click on any details page (either the global chart or country full
results) and scroll to the page bottom you get an explanatory text:

> These ratings reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each
> ISPs network from Nov. 2012 through Sept. 2013 and average performance
> during prime time starting in Oct. 2013. The average is well below the peak
> performance due to many factors including the variety of encodes we use to
> deliver the TV shows and movies we carry as well as home Wi-Fi and the
> variety of devices our members use. Those factors cancel out when comparing
> across ISPs, so these relative rankings are a good indicator of the
> consistent performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP
> network.

------
jrockway
Something that's interesting about this data is that it measures speed end-to-
end. So if you are an ISP that gives out flaky WiFi routers, your score will
be lower not because of any limit between YouTube and the ISP or the ISP and
the CPE, but because of that "last meter"* between the access point and
laptop.

* A new term I'm coining for this :)

~~~
fpgeek
Is FiOS still giving out those terrible Actiontec routers? If so, maybe this
will get them to fix that.

I still remember switching from them to Comcast to what should have been a far
better connection (over 2x download and maybe 8x upload) and thinking it was
crap... until I turned off the access point in the Actiontec and started using
my old AP again.

------
brokentone
For comparison purposes, Netflix has been releasing this data for some time:
[http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa](http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa)

------
chrisBob
It is impressive how local the results are. Comcast is rated as HD at my house
(Natick MA) but SD at work (Boston MA).

I use RCN which performs well in both areas and costs much less.

~~~
carbocation
I'm in Cambridge MA and got no results, so you're right, it must be quite
localized.

 _UPDATE_ : Opening the page in incognito mode, I got results. My privacy
settings prevented the tool from working. And those same settings are probably
preventing YouTube from working well for me.

------
trustfundbaby
The graph in the actually video report is a poor way of representing that
information IMO. It took me a second to figure out what the graph represented
and then after that I still didn't know why I should care.

I guess average speed/bandwith was too esoteric to chart? #sarcasm

------
cddotdotslash
And the average user will never see it. If Google really wants to do something
effective, add a red warning bar at the top of the page that says "Your ISP is
making YouTube slower. Call them at...". I guarantee ISPs will take notice
then.

~~~
timothya
If you're watching a video and your connection becomes slow, it prompts you to
take a look at the report to understand what's making it slow.

It's not a direct phone number, but a reasonable number of average people will
hopefully take a look while their video is buffering and start to understand
that their ISP may be the reason YouTube seems slow.

------
nerdtalker
I'm sure Google's efforts to shame ISPs with this new report are well-
intentioned, but I really miss the old YouTube speedtest which it seemed
almost nobody knew about:
[http://www.youtube.com/my_speed/](http://www.youtube.com/my_speed/)

It seemed to show more data – both throughput from your actual cookied
sessions and graphs of comparable connections around you. It took months for
YouTube/Google to generate these reports when there was existing data out
there already. I guess they wanted something that'd be easily digestible for a
Netflix-style monthly shame-a-thon.

------
higherpurpose
More companies should be keeping track of this, so in case we don't pass a
strong net neutrality law, and ISP's do in fact start slowing everyone down in
order to make them pay to get back to normal speeds [1], we can have a swift
and strong backlash against them. Let's make it impossible for them to do this
without millions of people finding out about it at once.

[1] - [http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-
hilarious...](http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious-
graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/)

~~~
MarkPNeyer
what happens if the big content providers pay the small (to them) amounts of
money being asked?

if end users don't see a change in their content's speed - or if it comes
FASTER because other data is being penalized, the problem is magnified.
average joe says 'hey the internet has gotten much faster since they ended
that pesky regulation' \- and doesn't see the 30 media startups that couldn't
get off the ground, because for them, the money asked to provide faster access
is very pricey.

a startup average joe hasn't heard of won't have the money to outbid their
competitors for the limited 'media bandwidth' the isp is willing to send
through. average joe doesn't care about a company he hasn't heard of because
he doesn't know what they have to offer.

my guess is that's what the ISP's want. they give the users a better
experience - prioritizing video packets over email, for example, at no
perceived cost to them. in doing so, they set up a huge barrier to entry that
takes a long time for average joe to understand. he won't take the time to
understand this, because the harm caused is a huge loss on possible new things
in exchange for a small benefit to existing things.

------
CoffeeDregs
Interesting. Given all of the complaints about the big providers, the chart
suggests to me that they're doing an OK job? Perhaps Google is trying to get
out in front of the arrival of throttling?

Also, as a cynical person, I compared SF to Washington DC expecting to see
that DC was perfect and SF was not. Instead they looked quite comparable. In
fact, I couldn't really find any major metro in which _cable_ performed poorly
(NYC wasn't wonderful).

------
tinalumfoil
I feel some of these results may be misleading. I watch YouTube mostly through
Wifi, where the Wifi is the bottleneck and and not my ISP. The methodology
page [1] doesn't seem to take that into account.

[1]
[http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology](http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#methodology)

~~~
jordanthoms
Well they are showing only ability to maintain a HD stream, not absolute
speed. Any decent wifi network should be able to get at least 10mbit, so it
won't impact HD streaming.

------
NicoJuicy
Bad publicity on the most popular video website? Nice thinking for countering
anti-net neutrality ISP's :)

------
subdane
The visual storytelling of the associated video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH863XXRZEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH863XXRZEQ)
is fantastic. You can watch the vid w/out sound and still understand the point
they're trying to make.

------
lucb1e
> Results are not available on your location

I suppose having net neutrality as a law helps, then?

------
listwise
Reminds me a little of this service but for payment processor speeds/success:
[http://gatewayindex.spreedly.com/explore](http://gatewayindex.spreedly.com/explore)

~~~
contingencies
Very interested but the page never renders...

------
bobcat469
Centurylink. I have the highest internet speed you can give me. But, as for
YouTube: you bottleneck this site like crazy.

"Youtube, you have failed this city." -The Arrow

------
mmgutz
Would a cable company, ISP for most of us, want to offer connections capable
of ultra HD quality video streaming? Streaming threatens half of their
business.

------
zavi
Can't seem to find a single city with both Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

------
Vendan
Yay, no ISP in my area is HD verified! Wait, booo!

------
handelaar
I assume Vimeo doesn't have this because it always sucks for everybody on
every network.

------
freeasinfree
All I get is "Results from your location are not yet available."

~~~
yonran
Same here. I am in San Francisco (Sonic.net) and I cannot see the graph shown
in the article for San Francisco. Is there any way to ask for results for a
specific location?

~~~
bsimpson
[http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/](http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/)
is working for me, even though
[http://g.co/videoqualityreport](http://g.co/videoqualityreport) was giving me
that same error.

~~~
freeasinfree
[http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/](http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/)
worked for me, thank you.

