Quote:
Originally Posted by DaveNull
You've got a much less cynical view of ISPs than I do. Look at the difference in transfer rates between Bittorrent, general web traffic and usenet. You can even see differences between websites. YouTube is typically slower to load a 30 second clip than some other random streaming site is because they throttle the hell out of traffic to YouTube. Usenet is consistently the most efficient with my ISP.
They throttle because they can't deliver the bandwidth that they actually promise.
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No offense, but that's completely absurd.
You see differences in websites because the information is coming from different locations, possibly in different countries, on networks with different speeds. Youtube is slow because it's being used by 3 bazillion users at any given moment. Your throughput to Youtube has absolutely nothing to do with your ISP. They have neither the time, nor the manpower to monitor their users' activity and throttle specific websites they don't like. Haven't you ever accessed Youtube from a really high speed enterprise network and compared that to your personal ISP? It's exactly the same.
You're oversimplifying the way bandwidth works. It doesn't work the same for all http transfer. Usenet is of course faster because you're downloading files from server farms that have
insane amounts of bandwidth on the server end, and the system is very efficient. With Usenet, you're only limited by the throughput your ISP can provide. You can't possibly expect for Youtube to have the same kind of throughput as downloading a Usenet file because they are very very different systems that transfer data in completely different ways. When connecting to Youtube, your ISP is providing much more throughput than Youtube is giving. Essentially, you're waiting on Youtube to provide the content. Your ISP isn't throttling it.
And an ISP's "promise" of bandwidth is a tricky thing. Mainly because they have no control over the speed of whatever you may be downloading
from. They can guarantee that if you go to the bandwidth test page link on their website, you will get the speeds that they advertised. But that's because they know exactly what you're accessing at the other end during the "test". In reality, your throughput speed is dependent on both your ISP and the server you're accessing at the other end.