If you were one of the 60 million households who streamed the Tyson/Paul fight on Netflix I’m sure you were disappointed with the performance problems that the service saw. While you might think that was a Netflix problem, the most likely and tbh most often cause of content provider performance problems tends to be your ISPs network capacity planning and traffic engineering, or in a lot of cases the lack there of. You see Netflix relies on ISP connectivity just like you and I here, but for the opposite reason. They pay for some of that connectivity but they offer a free network connection to any ISP that is willing to setup a link in a common meet me point called an internet exchange, or IX. They also offer hardware caching appliances that can be fitted and placed inside of your very own ISPs network to offload popular streaming content, such as a live fight and prevent the bottlenecks from happening. It’s called Netflix Open Connect. The real problem though is that most ISPs are ran by accountants and financial people. Which unfortunately translates into a lack of budget for capacity planning exercises that are critical to the evolution of the internet.
While I’m not super hip on blamming your ISP for every known issue that happens worldwide on the internet, in this case the stats generally don’t lie when it comes to how bad it really is, and it’s just going to get worse the longer companies view the big FANG platforms as a revenue stream rather then a partner.
If you’re curious though how your ISP (assuming it’s one of the major players) stacks up to the rest during prime time, check out the Netflix ISP Index! You can get some real time stats of your ISP and how they performed over time. Just remember though that Netflix and others tends to get de-prioritized in some fashion from your ISP, and if I were you I’d hit up your provider to make sure they know you want a free and open internet, and to ensure that connectivity to popular platforms like Netflix are included in their annual capacity planning budget. After all you are paying for “free” and “open” internet access by paying them for the service.
