Engage YouTube, Hulu, NetFlix, etc in your tests.
If you could embed some javascript to test speeds on sites like YouTube, Hulu and NetFlix, you could probably get a better idea of the anti-competitive practices perpetrated by ISPs. When I visit any speed test site, I get well over 10Mbps speeds -- frequently in the range of 15Mbps. However, it's taken me 10 minutes to watch a 51 second video on YouTube that's not even 720i quality. Hulu and NetFlix are all but unusable at times when speedtest.net, performance.toast.net, and your site all report a solid connection. What's more, the video I was watching from YouTube was linked to from the front page of Reddit and its content is almost certainly cached and should play with relative ease.
Jeremy McEntire
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Anonymous
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This could also be determined on how these websites set up their servers.. Reddit has a reputation of taking down websites when something is popular on there. These popular videos might be kept on one of their servers the. That one server be bogged down by massive downloads on one specific download. I've only noticed this because sometimes only specific channels are slow to load for me.
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Jeremy McEntire
commented
Of course, the embedded data would have to be hosted on their domain and be indistinguishable by any traffic shaping algorithm. That is, you can't simply do an include on .01% of page loads to fcc.gov/sneakyTest.js -- that'd initiate a fresh connection to your servers and wouldn't necessarily suffer the same issues that streaming video data from YouTube has. I'd like to see YouTube stream a video to the user and report back the time to complete. Maybe they can replace every 100,000th video with a message from the FCC -- much like you have mandatory emergency network tests on TV.
