Verizon support rep admits anti-Netflix throttling

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Verizon now hiring 1 position(s) in the customer support department!

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One person is probably not even a blip on their turnover rate.

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That is why it was supposed to look automated. With technology … we can even fire blips!

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This will be the reason I dump Verizon when my contracts up.

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Why not try NOT running a shitty company?
America.

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Seriously? Since when do we actually believe Customer Support reps by and large have any idea what they’re talking about when it comes to technical issues?

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I just took the financial hit. Totally worth it.

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I’m not really convinced that the person operating the web chat actually has any idea at all what Dave is talking about here and is just operating on the “customer is always right” principle.

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Verizon must be blocking Google on Cory’s machine. This is old (and inaccurate) news.

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5 more bucks a month for the honor is a blip on mine, though.

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aside from the… actual first hand evidence of it that Dave’s Blog presented. You did RTFA, right?

the one you link to says this :

First, a statement of the obvious. Customer service reps are pretty much the last people who would know about such a policy, let alone be able to inform customers of it.

Not my experience at all.

Add to this the usual confounding factors—non-native English speakers, a desire to “resolve” the customer’s problem as quickly as possible (even if this means simply agreeing to what they say just to make them go away), and insufficient knowledge to actually go off-script—and the statements that Raphael cites as evidence don’t really stand up.:

Yes, those glad-handling misinformed foreigners, tricky tricky tricky.

Basically that counter ‘evidence’ is supposition. I suppose i could call that actual evidence, but I would hate myself in the morning. Even if I were to take it in as fact, it leaves a conclusion that either Verizon has very very bad customer service, or the bad policies towards traffic which have been documented, or both. I say both.

Glad to hear any actual evidence that they do not do this though, maybe some broad based traffic studies - rather than the accumulated rounding errors that you would like us to assume adds up to a much less likely story of absolute innocence and corporate right-doing.

(was editing when you replied. not ninja edits)

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If you never believe anything a customer service rep says that you don’t agree with, you can’t use the customer service rep’s statement as evidence when he finally says something you do agree with.

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But their court ruling was only a few weeks ago, and their throttling started at least a few years ago, though, hasn’t it? Or are Verizon’s connections just unstable/badly maintained, because they’re the internet company and they don’t have to worry about customers switching where there aren’t other internet providers?

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We’ve noticed Netflix quality problems over our home Verizon fios over the past few weeks, just as described.

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If I don;t believe what a customer service rep says, I solve that problem in any number of usual ways, like finding a new service provider.

I happen to believe what the customer service rep says, even when I disagree, but I’m not an entitled twit who thinks I get to decide what everything should mean to other people.

What you never believe is your business, and your opinion. I do wish you would speak for yourself instead of for me.

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I believe Verizon is throttling Netflix and YouTube, but I don’t believe that this customer service rep has any idea what he is talking about.

It’s almost impossible to prove throttling, it could just be congestion server side or something. However, I have noticed times when my FiOS link is unable to stream YouTube without major stuttering, while my wife’s AT&T cellphone buffers practically the whole thing instantly over 3G. The Netflix problem is especially suspicious, since it happened right about the time Netflix and Verizon had that spat over the content delivery box Netflix wanted to give to Verizon, but was refused because Verizon wants to charge them for the bandwidth. That’s when previously rock solid 1080 streams suddenly started flipping between 720 and 1080 constantly no matter the time of day. It was really obnoxious because my TV needs a second or two to redo the HDMI handshake when it happens, which makes the experience very disruptive.

Plus, this is Verzion, given their past history, I have absolutely no trouble believing that they’re willing to provide shitty service in the hopes of extorting more money from content providers.

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So now, mere giving the accused party’s response is whitewashing?

I didn’t see his message as talking about “absolute innocence and corporate right-doing” so much as “There was a Verizon response that this article didn’t mention.”

Kneecapping AWS generally, rather than doing something more specific to Netflix and similar would be a somewhat unexpected move.

Shaking down competitors to your own crap cable and quasi-cable video services? 100% expected. Rolling the dice and just hitting AWS? Amazon, insane as it would have sounded a few years ago, is verging on being the kleenex of cheap 'n flexible hosting (less so for fixed-load stuff; but for potentially elastic demand, they are a force of nature). Messing with AWS would mean hitting a broad, nearly random, and not necessarily predictable cross section of sites.

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  1. Set up an account on AWS to serve large amounts of data.

  2. Run DSLReports style tests for accessing it from various homes while monitoring AWS’s performance statistics.

Surely someone is already doing this.

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