Over the last few months, many Netflix users in the US and around the world have noticed a steady decline instreaming video quality. For some subscribers, it’s got to the point where the video is constantly buffering and heavily pixelated. This is particularly irksome, because a high-quality video feed should be possible with just 1 or 2 megabits per second of sustained bandwidth — and almost every Netflix subscriber now has a connection that’s theoretically capable of 10Mbps or more. What’s going on? Why is your Netflix slow and low quality?
The short answer is that Netflix is a victim of its own success. The long answer is that Netflix has outgrown its allotted bandwidth, and thus Netflix traffic is now being throttled by ISPs and core network operators. To explain why Netflix is being throttled, we need to discuss a topic called peering.
No comments:
Post a Comment