It’s kind of funny that no one pointed out the obvious fact that the route trace you pasted in shows packet loss. That’s what the asterisk in place of a ping time means. Dropped packets can easily kill throughput.

In any case, I never had any streaming problems with 5Mbps DSL, or my current 30MBps cable, either on my PC or on my Roku.

There’s more than a tad of irrational paranoia being displayed here about nasty, mean, sinister Netflix.

PS. I also never had Netflix throttle my discs, and easily got below $2 per rental in many months.

Just ignore all that stuff at the bottom of my last post. It’s not important. *winks*

“That’s definitely a technical glitch and not Netflix leveling the hammer of streaming-justice against me as retribution for the article… god knows they are above that”

Unless I’m failing to understand your definition of sarcasm, you were at the very least playfully suggesting that Netflix was exacting vengeance against you.

Way to censor your blog, btw. Someone might’ve actually been able to get some use out of that Qwest correlation and my shitty performance even on the 360 which cleared up after an ISP change, and now they’ll miss it because the comments were removed. *claps* bravo at least your theory is left unchallenged.

I’m not sure which part of the article you’re referring to — I made no claim that Netflix is punishing me for the blog/article/etc. If you mean the sentence from Update #2, *you* came to that conclusion. I only reported what I saw.

Guy, Netflix has bigger fish to fry than some no-name blogger in an internet chock full of no-name bloggers. They’re not going to waste their time or energy setting up some kind of punishment system for people who complain about their service. If they gave a damn enough about your article to take any personalized action whatsoever, they’d make sure your service was superior so you’d quit bitching and maybe retract some of your statements.

Really, just… wow.

And I think maybe you should point the finger at your ISP– the same one the other guy had problems with. I had Qwest in Phoenix, and even on my 360 I had major problems with Netflix. I know this doesn’t add up to the cool conspiracy you were hoping for, but life is actually pretty boring. I have Cox now, and I have no problems whatsoever.

Bottom line: You’re paranoid, Qwest sucks, and Netflix is just an entertainment company that doesn’t give a damn about your blog.

The new account had a higher download speed. So one could strongly suggest that it was not my ISP but that it is Netflix that is throttling it’s instant streaming.

Also, the new account had movies available for immediate rental that my years old account displayed a short to long wait for.

For the nay-sayers who blame their ISP’s, I would suggest considering that there may be other overlapping problems in your particular cases in addition to Netflix throttling their streaming. I use Netflix and feel it’s the best out there for what it does (so far), but their business practices and openness do need improvement.

I used firefox to allow me to look at the server the data was being transfered from on the bottom left.
This isn’t a scientific study it is just something I noticed. I was curious if anyone else noticed this as well.

Just because opening additional connections to NETFLIX increases your bandwidth doesn’t mean that its Netflix and not your ISP throttling the connection. Perhaps your ISP is shaping each TCP connection to netflix, and not the aggregate of each outbound connection. That would make more sense to me. I’m sure that Netflix may have problems from time to time, but such a consistent problem sounds like it has nothing to do with them when so many users aren’t having problems.

Also about the XBOX, that is interesting. Have you verified that its getting the video from the same source, taking the same path, or even downloading the video at the same bitrate? It may not even be using port 80 or TCP for that matter and doesn’t fit the (suspected) shaping rules that the ISP has in place. Of course all of that is speculation as I don’t have the time to pull out my network sniffer and play around with Netflix over Live however it seems as though there is the room for many variables which were untouched in your test that make comparing the xbox to pc streaming apples to oranges. (I do know for a fact that the XBOX version is using Silverlight technology and not Windows Media)

We do not have hours of buffering time (usually less than a minute), but the video will often play at a reduced quality despite our fast cable connection speed from a leading provider.

I do believe Netflix is increasingly throttling our connection speed.