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Verizon Accused of Intentionally Slowing Netflix Video Streaming
colinneagle writes "A recent GigaOm report discusses Verizon's 'peering' practices, which involves the exchange of traffic between two bandwidth providers. When peering with bandwidth provider Cogent starts to reach capacity, Verizon reportedly isn't adding any ports to meet the demand, Cogent CEO Dave Schaffer told GigaOm. 'They are allowing the peer connections to degrade,' Schaffer said. 'Today some of the ports are at 100 percent capacity.' Why would Verizon intentionally disrupt Netflix video streaming for its customers? One possible reason is that Verizon owns a 50% stake in Redbox, the video rental service that contributed to the demise of Blockbuster (and more recently, a direct competitor to Netflix in online streaming). If anything threatens the future of Redbox, whose business model requires customers to visit its vending machines to rent and return DVDs, it's Netflix's instant streaming service, which delivers the same content directly to their screens."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
um that is the entire point of the internet.
I pay an ISP, you pay an ISP, Company A, B and C all pay different ISP's.
It is the 5 different ISP's job to share the data load between them. Once you start having ISP's charge different rates to other ISP's the entire network collapses into AOLhell. Once ISP's stop working together to connect each other entire value of all ISP's fails. ISP's solely exist to connect tiny communities to larger ones.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Silly pleb, laws don't apply to corporations
Yep. I'm a Comcast customer in a metropolitan area of Northern California.
I used a *nix tool to get the actual URL that the Youtube player uses to download the video that's being streamed to it and used wget to fetch the video file. On my wired home connection, the first fifteen or twenty seconds of the video transferred at ~2MBps, the remainder transferred at ~100KBps. When fetching the resource at that very same URL from a machine at a university in Alabama, the *entire* video transferred at a constant 14MBps.
tl;dr: A Youtube video that comes out of their datacenter in LA transfers far faster in rural Alabama than in metropolitan California... all because Comcast wants to deprioritize Youtube's bits.
Right on Man - you VP really straightened things out for you. To obad Netflix would think of a way to help out those poor ISPs.
There is a good chance it's more complicated than just this. Remember this is Cogent we are taking about here and they are famous for trying to get downstream isps to pay the entire cost of peering upgrades and have also been known to actively cut back on peering points with other providers.
They are also famous for causing most of the IPv6 routing problems that affect day to day useage.