ISP Throttling issue and Advice

[SparksIT]

So, I believe that my ISP is throttling my connection, to specific sites through out different parts of the day, most notable to Netflix. It started several months ago, first I just figured general slowness and didn't think much of it. It wasn't to much of an issue, with new seasons of TV shows starting up, but now with the shows I do watch going on a winter break, it is starting to bug me.

Quick synapses, in case some might feel it is a different issue. I have had this service provider and speed for a couple years now, and netflix always seemed to work with out issue. Now, however, it seems that between 5 and 11, I can't seem to get through a single show with out multiple re-buffers. I can normally watch about 10-15 minutes before the quality goes down and then re-buffers, however after 11:00 pm this issue goes away, and I have tested it on multiple nights. It does not matter what level of video quality I set Netflix to, it all has the same result. I have tested it on multiple devices, my computer, LG blu-ray player, and LG TV (all wired), and my ASUS Nexus 7 (wireless), all with the same result. I was willing to just give this to a matter of 5-11pm is your typical peak usage (since I am rarely home between 8 and 5), however, I can head over to my Amazon Prime account, and stream any video from there, at the same quality without issue. Also speed test during this time do show my connection speed.

At some point I will bring my work laptop home, and test it on there. Both using my Internet connection, and then VPN into my work network, and see what happens if I encrypt my network traffic. But in the mean time, I am looking for few things:

1) any program that I can run the will detect whether or not my ISP is throttling to certain sites? I saw Google has a program call M-Lab, not sure if that is what I need?

2) Any advise on how to confront my ISP, it is a local provider, and not a national one, without running and screaming over to the BBB or the FCC. What type of data should I have in order for some sort of mature and responsible conversation?

3) Wasn't the FCC Net Neutrality act supposed to prevent this type of thing?

Thanks

 

[mfenn]

It's not necessarily your ISP that's doing it. It could simply be that the Netflix CDN (content distribution network) endpoint nearest to your location is overloaded.

The fact that you're on a smaller local ISP reinforces this theory for two reasons. First, they likely only have one (or at most a handful) of peering points where they route your traffic to the internet at large. Therefore, all their traffic goes to one (or a small number of places), which means that Netflix's algorithms may always choose the same (overloaded) endpoint for you to get your video from.

Second, having interacted with several small ISPs in my time, they rarely have the staff to implement some sort of content filtering mechanism. Small ISPs are much more likely in my experience to give you a "purer" Internet experience than you'd get from a large one.

Now this is just a hypothesis, but IMHO it's more likely than your ISP doing some sort of content-aware filtering.