YouTube Issuing "Report Cards" On Carriers' Streaming Speeds 110
OakDragon (885217) writes In the shadow of the "Net Neutrality" debate, Google's YouTube has created a service to report on your carrier's usage and speed, summarizing the data in a "Lower/Standard/High Definition" graph. You may see the service offered when a video buffers or stutters. A message could display under the video asking "Experiencing interruptions? Find out why." Find your own provider's grade here.
Good idea, but terrible implementation (Score:3, Insightful)
First, what gives with the goofy webpages that try to scroll like pages of a book? One of the wonderful things about a web page is for it to be long and easy to scroll through, instead of requiring me to scroll in order to get to the next text section. That makes it really awkward to go back and forth.
Second, where can I search for other people's results? I want to switch to RCN in Boston, how does this webpage help me know how they're doing?
Some Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
The vertical scale in the charts has no indices or any indication of what is measured. I see the statement to the right "Daily video activity is averaged
over 30 days.", but it does not say what is really averaged. Is this MB/sec, percentage of available bandwidth, or what?
In any case, the throughput of a broadband connection is not the only issue in moving large amounts of bytes. I am having a problem with software for an HP printer. Today, HP advised me to download the entire software package for that printer, approximately 1.4 GB. However, HP's server could not deliver event 300 KB/sec into my 15 MB/sec broadband connection. There are servers delivering video that cannot keep up with playback speeds.
When I cannot get downloads a MB/sec rates, I generally blame the server at the other end and not my broadband provider. After all, I can immediately try a different download from a different source, and get my full 15 MB/sec.
Great, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a look at them a few days ago, and I had no idea how to interpret the graphs. If I'm tech savvy and I don't know what they mean, God help the average person.
Re:Good idea, but terrible implementation (Score:2, Insightful)
'Designers' have never liked the web and love to break it - this is the result.
...says the dickhead who deliberately abuses this site's "code" post format option that he knows wraps his post in <tt> tags. I want to allow other, responsible posters to post their code snippets using the code format and have those code snippets render in monospace font while de-douchebagging Arker's format abuse.
There is no discriminator function for that.
Re:Good idea, but terrible implementation (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not intended to help you switch. It appears intended to send you running to your ISP to complain...
If you are not going to switch, why should your ISP care if you complain?
Re:Some Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say it's actually a little more complex than that. It depends not just on the source server but on every point between the source server and your machine. In the case of the Netflix/Comcast spat a while ago, for example, the problem wasn't Comcast's network, or Netflix, or the network between them, but Comcast's connection to the network between them -- so it was Comcast's fault, but not in a way that would show up with connections to other servers that took a different path.
And regardless of whether or not *you* blame YouTube when it's slow, many users do, which is why Google is doing this.