What in god's name is Airtel doing with video streaming?

[mgcarley]

Vebk, I'm getting the same thing unfortunately. I think mgcarley is right on this one. I'm sure you can watch videos on other sites. I don't want to mention them here for a variety of reasons of course.

I've got a 100mbit/s connection sitting in front of me and even that's not getting satisfactory speeds to these sites. Other video sites (even in Europe) are fine, no worries.

it seems to be fine on my connection . i can watch 1080p videos easily on youtube and hd streams of live games too on other web sites .

Youtube etc is not really a problem for most ISPs - I can watch Youtube at 4000p (yes, 4000p) without buffering. But they are asking about streaming from certain other websites and as it turns out, it seems to be a problem at the other end rather than here on the subcontinent (for a change )

 

[vebk]

Hmm.... maybe. I still think it's suspicious that on several unrelated sites (10+ at least) the videos don't even start, because the speed I get is in Bits per seconds, yes - bps... not even Kbps. If the problem is with the sites themselves, then one would assume that others around the world would also be facing problems with these sites. Fact of the matter is when I try to skype with someone in Europe who has a 8 Mbps connection (and I have a 4 Mbps connection) technically we should be able to video chat in HD - but even SD is a stretch with frequent buffering, stuttering and freezing issues.

 

[mgcarley]

Hmm.... maybe. I still think it's suspicious that on several unrelated sites (10+ at least) the videos don't even start, because the speed I get is in Bits per seconds, yes - bps... not even Kbps. If the problem is with the sites themselves, then one would assume that others around the world would also be facing problems with these sites. Fact of the matter is when I try to skype with someone in Europe who has a 8 Mbps connection (and I have a 4 Mbps connection) technically we should be able to video chat in HD - but even SD is a stretch with frequent buffering, stuttering and freezing issues.

Not only are these all rather unrelated issues, but unfortunately some of the assumptions made are a little weird, because this isn't how the internet works - unfortunately there is not equal amounts of capacity between every individual city in every individual country. As nice as that would be.

As such, sites that stream video (and do it well) rely on copious amounts of caching and content delivery networks, having servers in each country to deliver the content from a more localized source - that is, the videos coming from Youtube are most likely being streamed from somewhere in India or, worst case, Singapore or Hong Kong.

Moreover, even if you have a 4mbit/s connection and your European counterpart has an 8mbit/s connection, neither of these connections are symmetrical - you've got just a few kbit/s up and even he is probably topping out at 1mbit/s. Worse still is that neither of you is on a dedicated line and as such that 4mbit/s you're being sold is a "best-case" speed, and you're contending with the other 2 million Airtel Broadband customers all over India for your slice of their bandwidth pie, and whether it's the fault of Airtel or it's traffic shaping or possibly some problem between here and the destination, it really comes down to the luck of the draw as to the conditions of the Internet at any time you're doing any form of P2P, including Skype video.

That being said, throwing more bandwidth at the problem *might* solve some of the issues - if Airtel put everyone on "up to 20mbit/s down, 1mbit/s up according to your line quality", got better caching, allocated more of it's line capacity to it's own network and purchased significantly more peering in London, Marseilles, Amsterdam, San Jose, Singapore, Hong Kong and whereever else (including India), then some of these complaints might go away. The peering would be relatively cheap and the removal of speed caps would be more or less free, but upping it's line capacity from 200 to say 500gbit/s on the cables it has stakes in would be unfortunately quite expensive - and unless they do this, it would almost render the other stuff pointless.

 

[sandeeprao]

Actually, it can make a HUGE difference. Seriously huge.

Out of interest: do sites like Livestation.com and apps like Winamp TV work for you guys?

Just tried and it worked well.

 

[mgcarley]

Just tried and it worked well.

Yeah, Livestation is great because the network it's on sits right next to Airtel at LINX (London internet exchange) and it's also a bit less busy than the others, I guess, because it has similar amounts of actual capacity and works fine. But mainly I reckon it's the network's proximity to an Indian carrier which the other ones do not have.

Winamp TV works kind of like a CDN in that it streams from the closest/best pinging server, though even then, some streams work better than others.

 

[kattuviriyan]

I can watch Youtube at 4000p (yes, 4000p) without buffering.
Off-topic:
Technically it's not 4000p, rather called 4K resolution. 4096*2304 resolution which is ~2304p

 

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[mgcarley]

Off-topic:
Technically it's not 4000p, rather called 4K resolution. 4096*2304 resolution which is ~2304p

You're right. I shall proceed to flagellate myself for making such a simple error.

Nevertheless, I can still watch bitchin' res videos without buffering on hardware that doesn't anywhere near require such resolutions for a great picture.

 

[sandeeprao]

Off-topic:
Technically it's not 4000p, rather called 4K resolution. 4096*2304 resolution which is ~2304p

I am not sure about all these. All I want to say is that I do have issues with Airtel CC, but the services (minus the cost factor what others feel as high) are good.

It has been consistent. I never cross my FUP limit and so not able to comment, but I can say I never felt that it was being throttled (spectific service) with my Airtel connection.

Forgot to mention that the CC part is not up to the mark of my personal expectations!

 

[vebk]

@mgcarley: I still don't agree with you. I just did a little experiment. I tried a video on a spectranet connection. While I was under the impression that it was a 4Mbps line, it could be that it's been upgraded, as it's a home office sort of setup there. It's minimum 4Mbps, possible much more. Anyway, the video started immediately. The full 350MB video was loaded / downloaded before I was even maybe 20% my way into the video. No buffering, no hiccups. I came back home, about 30 minutes later. Tried the same video on my Airtel 4Mbps, and while it started playing after a minute or so, I checked my firewall to see that my speed was not going beyond 100 -150 KB/s. (I didn't want to see the same video twice so didn't run it through to check when it would stop and need to buffer). But I think this showed that the same video on the same site, within roughly the same point of time was loading far far faster on a spectranet connection, than on my Airtel connection. If the problem was with the site, route etc. etc. then the results in the two places should not be that dramatically different. I still think there's something especially wrong with Airtel, whether it's routing, traffic shaping etc. I don't know. I know that a couple of months ago I didn't have to give this topic a second's thought. I would just press play on most sites, and the videos would play immediately and would play through without any need of buffering. Now it's very rare that this happens.

Also, here's a screenshot of how the speed typical moves when I am trying to see a video. First it picks up to the 400 - 600 KB/s range (and gets me excited ride and then it drops to the 20-30 KB/s range (and I am like meh :disillusionment and then it goes to the 0 - 1 KB/s range and chills there for a while angry (), and maybe it will go up again ( and do the same thing) or maybe note and will decide to take a nap in the B/s range. Honest question: Is this normal? It doesn't seem so to me. (I don't you don't get a constant speed while downloading ever, but this kind of fluctuation seems absurd to me!). Here's the screenshot:

 

[mgcarley]

@mgcarley: I still don't agree with you. I just did a little experiment. I tried a video on a spectranet connection. While I was under the impression that it was a 4Mbps line, it could be that it's been upgraded, as it's a home office sort of setup there. It's minimum 4Mbps, possible much more. Anyway, the video started immediately. The full 350MB video was loaded / downloaded before I was even maybe 20% my way into the video. No buffering, no hiccups. I came back home, about 30 minutes later. Tried the same video on my Airtel 4Mbps, and while it started playing after a minute or so, I checked my firewall to see that my speed was not going beyond 100 -150 KB/s. (I didn't want to see the same video twice so didn't run it through to check when it would stop and need to buffer). But I think this showed that the same video on the same site, within roughly the same point of time was loading far far faster on a spectranet connection, than on my Airtel connection. If the problem was with the site, route etc. etc. then the results in the two places should not be that dramatically different. I still think there's something especially wrong with Airtel, whether it's routing, traffic shaping etc. I don't know. I know that a couple of months ago I didn't have to give this topic a second's thought. I would just press play on most sites, and the videos would play immediately and would play through without any need of buffering. Now it's very rare that this happens.

Also, here's a screenshot of how the speed typical moves when I am trying to see a video. First it picks up to the 400 - 600 KB/s range (and gets me excited ride and then it drops to the 20-30 KB/s range (and I am like meh :disillusionment and then it goes to the 0 - 1 KB/s range and chills there for a while angry (), and maybe it will go up again ( and do the same thing) or maybe note and will decide to take a nap in the B/s range. Honest question: Is this normal? It doesn't seem so to me. (I don't you don't get a constant speed while downloading ever, but this kind of fluctuation seems absurd to me!). Here's the screenshot:


I still maintain that it's the site, and the reason for this is thus: the sites in question probably connect better to Tata than Bharti. As I was saying in my previous post(s), it's all about the connectivity.

Bharti connects (basically only) at London. Tata connects globally, like, all over the place. Really. And since Spectranet buys a whole lot more bandwidth from Tata than they do from Bharti, the performance will be much better - as it will be on any ISP buying Tata bandwidth compared to that of an ISP buying Bharti bandwidth - including Airtel itself.

Because of this primary difference, the routing (and efficiency thereof) are going to be very different, which matches my experience of routing via different networks of late.

The perfect example can be seen by those who follow me on Twitter: up until recently I was ranting about Vodafone's shoddy speedtest results? They peer badly, and certain links are overloaded. The solution was pretty easy: we switched our routing to Vodafone from Bharti to Tata and my pings to Vodafone Mumbai went from 40ms to 5ms.

Do I even need to say more?