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Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling
MojoKid (1002251) writes The ongoing battle between Netflix and ISPs that can't seem to handle the streaming video service's traffic, boiled over to an infuriating level for Colin Nederkoon, a startup CEO who resides in New York City. Rather than accept excuses and finger pointing from either side, Nederkoon did a little investigating into why he was receiving such slow Netflix streams on his Verizon FiOS connection. What he discovered is that there appears to be a clear culprit. Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he's paying for. On a hunch, he decided to connect to a VPN service, which in theory should actually make things slower since it's adding extra hops. Speeds didn't get slower, they got much faster. After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly jumped to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than when connecting directly with Verizon. Verizon may have a different explanation as to why Nederkoon's Netflix streams suddenly sped up, but in the meantime, it would appear that throttling shenanigans are taking place. It seems that by using a VPN, Verizon simply doesn't know which packets to throttle, hence the gross disparity in speed.
Thats how the internet is paid for. The sending provider pays the receiving provider for the bandwidth, and this is the only rational way it can be.
No. That is not how it works. The truth is that the smaller provider pays the larger provider, no matter which direction the traffic flows. Some companies, like Netflix, are nice enough to not use their size as an excuse to charge people -- they offer free peering at internet exchanges. Other companies are maximally greedy.
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It is also possible the the VPN packets are transiting a different upstream peer from Verizon and bypassing the peering bottleneck at issue. Assuming that Verizon is performing inspection of packets and throttling only Netflix packets is quite a leap.
This is exactly what's happening. I do the same thing for a specific server I use. Standard routing via FiOS results in consistent 1mb download speeds. I set up a GRE tunnel to my VPS host and I get consistent 10mb download speeds. The culprit appears to be a shitty peering connection between so-4-1-0-0.LAX01-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.151.246) and 0.ae2.XL3.CHI13.ALTER.NET (140.222.225.187).
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
You obviously missed the article where Netflix supplies a tower-pc sized box with all of netflix on it to ISPs for free:
Netflix Boxes
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"i guess netflix got so big they think they can extract payment from everyone" Now there's a good one. In reverse shill-logic world perhaps. For those interested in what's really happening I'll point you here ( http://www.extremetech.com/com... ). Headline: Verizon caught throttling Netflix traffic even after its pays for more bandwidth. And that is basically what they are doing, artificially restricting Netflix not going through VPN to (arguably) criminally low speeds by means of not upgrading hardware on purpose to thwart who they view as "competition. Although I'm not sure Verizon will sell you anything remotely useful for $8 a month. I quit Verizon for this reason although I never told the CS rep because they try to make it hard to quit anyway. Verizon seems to be trying to fool everyone with (what seems to most people) lots of mumbo jumbo and outright deception, I for one hope they don't continue to get away with this attempt to make there "competitors" look bad.