Is .not Net Neutrality killing Youtube on Comcast?

theant
Here to help

Is .not Net Neutrality killing Youtube on Comcast?

I've had problems with Comcast for some time now. We pay for a 50Mb cable (business) feed that appears to be used very little, less than 8Mb on average. 

 

I can see people come in and begin to work early as 5AM and people continue to arrive but traffic actually goes down starting around 8AM. I do not believe less work is being done (on purpose anyway) rather that Comcast is bottlenecking my bandwidth in the two hops in the local office. I suspect as other small businesses and families (especially in summer) load up the network with entertainment traffic and we are choked off. We have a remedy for this coming but I suspect any other small business paying for "business" access with no alternative feels the pain. It also explains that our folks seem to have their best response early in the morning but after working hours there is no improvement because evening indoors entertainment is in demand.

 

Comcast is an entertainment network for the locals and so I expect any QOS/preferred traffic would be streaming TV/Video, game, and Audio which they sell. I would reason that our larger data file transfer (cloud storage and other networks) and file/record locking seems to fall victim to entertainment traffic preference since that is where they make their money. 

 

My most recent suspicion is that some have a need for Youtube and other media providers for technical training, howto, Manufacturer information, and other needs. I open access (a whole 'nother ball of wax) and get the clickable still images (yimg) to come in slowly but when the actual video is started she spins forever. A test this morning showed the specific user I am working with could finally start the video stream but it was still sluggish at 7AM.

 

So the question is, with Net Neutrality dead, is Comcast throttling Youtube, essentially a competitor?

 

With regard to opening up Youtube it seems there has been a constant "cat and mouse" game for the months since Sep 2017 when I started here over  streaming, still image content moving to "cdn" content delivery networks (Akamai, et.al.) servers and some changing of domains into "streaming video" and "content delivery" groups for content filtering. Don't get me started on Mickysoft update content... 

 

I begin to think it would be handy for us to have a continually updated Youtube and Microsoft Update (and whatever) permit whitelists that we could contribute to and use when opening service to an individual and/or workstation.

 

How much of this is right and wrong? Thanks for any constructive input.

 

theant

4 REPLIES 4
Chris_M
Getting noticed

Did you do regular speed test to confirm that you are getting what your business pay for?

 

My company does use Comcast Business line and we do not have that problem. We have multiple users who train using YouTube and other video services. The only difference is you stated a 50 Mbps downstream bandwidth. We had 100 Mbps downstream bandwidth. Only on a couple occasions during the month we hit the max in downstream but rarely.

 

So no, I don't think Comcast is throttling YouTube but rather there is something wrong with the way the network is set up which reduces available bandwidth.

 

Make sure you're not restricting speeds and that the comcast modem is the lastest firmware or up to date. We power cycle our unit every month and only had to replace it once.

 

Hopefully that'll help you identify the problem.


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CCNP Certified and Meraki Operator

Thanks!

 

Friday means lower user counts and you see we are not using much bandwidth assuming there is not a bottleneck upstream of us. 

 

I did a good deal of improving end user to Gateway design. One no brainer was why use a 100Mb port as a switch uplink when you have Gb ports on the switch for that?  Thu-Fri Traf Analytics.PNG

 

Thu-Fri Client Usage.PNG

Is this the speed test you mean? This is an arbitrary shot and no, I had not done any of these yet. We have done many tests to http://speedtest.xfinity.com/ but I don't have the numbers on top of my head. I will get our speed test "enthusiast" to run a couple. He is at the site of discussion.

 

throughput.PNG

Hey @theant,

 

The throughput test verifies bandwidth between the MX and the Meraki cloud; it might not always give you the results you expect as it depends on various factors and on average I would suggest to take at least 3 and average them. 

 

Aside from that, another few tests you could try is to connect to a VPN service and check if there is any difference in the performance getting to the affected websites. You could also try and connect directly into the ISP modem and bypass the MX, to confirm whether or not there might be issues with the configuration that might be the cause of the problem; the most common cause is normally some wrong order of traffic shaping rules, but it might not be your case.

 

Let us know how you get on  🙂

 

Giacomo

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