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Is Verizon Already Slowing Netflix Down?
hondo77 points out a blog post by Dave Raphael, who noticed some odd discrepancies between two different Verizon broadband connections he has access to. His personal residential plan and his company's business plan both went through the same Verizon routers, but his residential plan is getting unusably slow speeds to places like AWS. He suggests that Verizon is already waging a war on high-bandwidth services like Netflix after the recent court decision against net neutrality. His discussion with a Verizon service representative seems to confirm this, though it's uncertain whether such an employee would have access to that information.
http://bgr.com/2014/02/05/veri...
“We treat all traffic equally, and that has not changed,” a Verizon spokesperson told BGR in an emailed statement. “Many factors can affect the speed a customer’s experiences for a specific site, including, that site’s servers, the way the traffic is routed over the Internet, and other considerations. We are looking into this specific matter, but the company representative was mistaken. We’re going to redouble our representative education efforts on this topic.”
It is still unclear exactly what was causing the issues that Raphael described, but it’s apparently not any form of bandwidth prioritization. Instead, the issue may relate to congestion specific to the Amazon servers or connections that Raphael was testing, but nothing has been confirmed by Amazon.
Net Neutrality states that all data must be treated equally. That means if I purchase a 20Mb connection, I should be able to allocate that 20Mb connection to any service I want without the ISP throttling it down. If Netflix lets me stream at 20Mb, but for some reason I can only get 10Mb because it is throttled by Verizon, well then that breaks Net Neutrality. Obviously there is a lot of things to take in, like router, modem, and infrastructure, but if there is obvious evidence showing my connections to a particular service is treated differently, it would be illegal under Net Neutrality.
if you search on the internet, netflix is pushing it's own CDN with the condition that they don't pay the regular CDN fees. most of the big ISP's haven't signed on which is why netflix is slow on their networks. the pipes to the CDN provider are probably maxed out like the issue with Cogent a few years ago
business scuffle with two companies trying to lower their costs of business. not like netflix is the angel here either.
This is the second time you've posted about this here as if you have some sort of inside information.
It's not a rumor, and it's not newsworthy. Netflix announced this shit a year ago when they started touting "Super HD". https://signup.netflix.com/ope...
Netflix gave ISPs 3 options:
A: Peer with us at favorable rates and we'll allow your users to access our higher quality streams and help make sure shit is routing efficiently.
B: Drop our content boxes directly on your network and we'll allow your users to access our higher quality streams and pay you fair rates.
C: Don't peer with us at lower rates or let us store content on your network, and we'll name and shame you as not fully supporting Netflix.
Once all the major ISPs agreed with A or B, Netflix opened up "Super HD" to (almost) everyone. They now have a lot of those distributed content boxes and favorable agreements, and are effectively a CDN.
Because it would be illegal
Why?
What was the rule or regulation or law from Net Neutrality that made what Verizon is doing illegal?
I want someone to be specific because my point is this Verizon action has NOTHING to do with Net Neutrality, and would not be stopped by any Net Neutrality rules that the FCC put forth before they were told to stop.
So I repeat; HOW WOULD VERSION NOT BE ABLE TO DO WHAT THEY ARE DOING?
There is no current authority by the FCC (which they recently admitted) that allows them to enforce net neutrality. Even before that admission, what they had in place would not have worked as net neutrality, and was certainly never legally challenged and upheld in any court to cement it. Until ISPs are classified as common carriers, the FCC will not have the authority to enforce any level of net neutrality - which a former FCC chairman has recently stated. I have not said, and do not believe, that we have ever had any level of net neutrality. I am advocating FOR true net neutrality. That doesn't mean that what Verizon is supposedly doing doesn't violate the spirit of what people want net neutrality protection against, however.
Our cable (and hence cable modem) went out for a day recently (we use Cox). My wife set up a mobile hotspot from her T-Mobile phone in a spot in which she had LTE service and went about her life as normal, meaning streaming Netflix in the background while she works. It turns out that at LTE speeds, Netflix feeds you rather high reception, and you can go through a 2.5 GB limit in less than two movies. So, she was throttled for the rest of the month to 2G speeds.
Supposedly they do not throttle on the unlimited plan. They are very clear on the 2.5 GB plan that they will throttle after the cap (but will not charge extra) and they did in fact throttle (and I was fine with that--that was all we paid for, and in the typical month is faaaar more than enough). On the unlimited plan, I question how much Netflix streaming they would really tolerate.