Proving it in a mathematical sense, maybe, but proving it to a reasonable standard is easy:
- Connect to Netflix/AWS/whatever through a VPN. If it’s reliably faster there than it is on the bare connection, that’s extremely suspicious off the bat. (Looking back, this is what the original author actually did. I’m not sure what’s controversial about it.)
- Several people on Hacker News noted that their Netflix speed jumps for a minute or two after browsing to SpeedTest.net. It looks like Verizon is trying to conceal their throttling by disabling it when you try to test speed. One guy claims to have completely fixed his Netflix problems just by setting up a script to ping SpeedTest.net once per minute. That’s easy for anyone to test at home.
