I can attest to the Netflix slowdown on Verizon. I thought it was a problem with my cable connection, but everything else has been normal.
Verizon has already commented on this one:
From pcmag.com
Verizon, however, denied that this was the case. āMany factors can affect the speed a customer experiences for a specific site, including, that siteās servers, the way the traffic is routed over the Internet, and other considerations,ā the company said. āWe are looking into this specific matter, but the company representative was mistaken. We are going to redouble our representative education efforts on this topic.ā
So, thatās that then.
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Netflix, if nobody else. I am sure they are extremely aware of any dodgy BS on the part of Verizon or anyone else.
On the one hand, Netflix is acting as a bagman for the RIAA and other people that are trying to break the internet to protect their outdated business models. On the other hand, Netflix is being kneecapped by another expiring business that thinks the solution to a problem is to punish the customers and providers.
This all just gets so damn depressing. It has very little to do with markets or any kind of competition and everything to do with abusing powers to expand and protect profit margins.
We donāt have Verizon up here, instead we get Telus and a couple of sheltered cable companies. And they are quite happily pushing for throttling internet connections and bandwidth as well - despite there being no evidence of its necessity.
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Verizonās response is pretending to forget that AWS servers are ubiquitous massive things with immense capacity. It isnāt just a few boxes in the Netflix office backrooms.
Is āAmericaā the answer, or the people who want 'em not to do it?
Some of the people all of the timeā¦
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Iām pretty sure itās not all AWS type services. I note that Vimeo and other less well known video streaming services have no problem on Verizon, itās specifically Netflix and Youtube that seem to suffer.
Iāve had first hand experience with these support teams, (thatās all Iāll admit to) and I can tell you, most of the time, these people do not know what the company is or is not doing at the network level, its not their job to know. In fact, if these reps know that this is going on its because the company went to the trouble of telling them so they can tell the customer.
Of course, the rep could have also talked to someone on the network team and got that form them.
Iām not saying that they are not throttling bandwidth (Every ISP would love to, Iām sure), Iām just saying that it needs to be verified.
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We have always been at war with Eurasia. We are going to redouble our Minitrue efforts on this topic.
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Whatās about TimeWarner? I had Neftlix a few years back, now I subscribed again and the quality is terrible!
The Verizon statement is reminiscent of āNSA speakā IMO. Vās statement does not explicitly answer the question if they are throttling.
āWe treat all traffic equallyā vague
āMany factors can affect speedā shift blame
āRep was mistakenā about what exactly?
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Agreed. It is almost impossible to prove throttling by yourself, but Iād like to think someone more code-y than you or I could write a browser plug-in to do the distributed research for us, rather than all these anecdotes and insulting conjecture about CSRs.
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Verizon must be blocking Google on Coryās machine. This is old (and inaccurate) news.
is more than merely a little different from:
āThere was a Verizon response that this article didnāt mention.ā
You can interpret as generously as you like. I donāt have to. What I read was someone using an article based in suppositions and probably-didās to disprove an article based in āthis just happened to meā. You believe what you want to, I will keep believing my own lying eyes.
Believe it or not, Iām a Network Protocol development guy. Designing some test that would produce a smoking gun in the event of throttling is incredibly difficult to do, because on IP networks there is no difference between throttling and regular congestion.
You can make a strong case when you see what appears to be the same heavy congestion at 5AM that you were getting at 10PM, or if the throttler is a little too even (look, every 8th packet is dropped, for this entire million packet run), but itās very hard to be definitive here, even when you own both ends of the link.
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Suddenly, during the last week of January, we started having problems streaming Netflix over Comcast. Comcast blamed Netflix, Netflix blamed Comcast and our TV manufacturer. We streamed through our PS3 to the same result. The problem isnāt our TV, it is either Comcast or Netflix. The timing is so incredibly suspicious that I have difficulty assigning blame to Netflix. No sooner had the court decision come down dismantling net neutrality and Netlix is suddenly streaming between the lowest possible SD and maxing at 720 (the TV tells us what the resolution is, thereās no guessing about it). The previous week, every last thing we watched, regardless of time of day, was a minimum of 720 with a lot of stuff streaming at 1080 or higher.
The whole thing pissed me off badly enough that I filed a complaint with the FCC. One of the two companies is lying, but one of them has been caught lying about this exact same thing in the recent past.
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Given the poor English skill shown by most online and phone CS people, I am not entirely convinced the rep actually understood what was asked. Not to deny the truth of the throttling but I suspect if the rep had been asked āSo, do you binky the doddlefier when I am online in order to accentuate the positiveā the response might have been the same.
(I use nonsense phrases like that to test to see if I am getting a script-reading drone who learned English about six iterations removed from a native speakerā¦ Itās amazingly effective
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In the case of AWS S3/Cloudfront and Youtube/Google, this is EXCEEDINGLY unlikely. Those services are built for massive scale, and they have absolutely ridonculously massive bandwidth, capacity, monitoring, etc.
While providers love to push this excuse (along with ārouting is hard, yāallā), in these cases, no, itās not. Either they are throttling or they do not want to increase either peering or transit (peering in these two cases) capacity with the affected networks for political reasons. Both Google and Amazon will gladly give your network additional 10G ports. In fact, they will offer to expand peering long before the first 10G links are congested. Verizon either does not want to increase capacity or they are artificially limiting throughput to further some other nefarious goals. Shame on those bloodsuckers.
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This is the sort of thing that treads close to racketeering (RICO) when it interferes with interstate commerce as a result of collusion (conspiracy).
As long as Verizon introduce a way to pay them to gain acccelerated access to certain select partner websites then I donāt see what the problem is. Verizon should be allowed to have people pay to throttle the bandwidth of others - e.g. at the moment weāre complaining that Verizon is throttling NetFlix (apparently) but suppose that Verizon can launch itās own movie service, which they donāt throttle? then they can just turf the competition off their walled garden version of the internet and make more money, or demand a vig from NetFlix - by the same token, NetFllix could pay Verizon to throttle the bandwidth or increase the latency of upstart competitors, thus using their established position in the market to thwart innovation. Itās the American way, right? It works for Apple with their App store - Apple should be allowed to make logical comparisons fail - āifā statements branch the wrong way - one time in a million for Google apps out in the āwildā so that their competitors work seems to be buggy and unreliable. The only thing that matters is making money in the short term (say, the quarter, the financial year) everything else is moot.
A modest enough proposal.
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