Verizon Blames Netflix For Internet Congestion

Here's the thing though, ISPs have long advertised the rates and service they provide but it's only now that people are actually using it they realize that they can't/don't want to support it. You can't advertise 10Mbps and then not deliver on it. I don't care how many people are watching Netflix, if they're all using their 10Mbps then you should deliver because that's the service you sold them.

If you can't keep up with the demand, then maybe they shouldn't have sold more capacity than they were willing to upgrade their infrastructure to support.

You are getting the speed though. One vendor you are not getting it to. And at least 2 or 3 studies have said that the vendor isn't routing data the best way so they are also at fault. I'm not saying the big ISP's shouldn't share some of the blame. I'm saying that the peering agreements were setup more under the idea that traffic would be going both ways. You have maybe 9 tier 1 back bone providers in the US. One of them pushes over 30% of the traffic in prime time and isn't taking near that much in return. In a sense they are abusing the system.

Netflix has been trying to push the blame on everyone else. They are part of the problem.


This is where the term "peering" really comes into play. Cox and Verizon having an interconnect is mutually beneficial to both companies so as long as traffic back and forth isn't grossly lopsided, both ISPs maintain the link. Netflix isn't an ISP, they're solely a content provider.

Yea and netflix via their backbone provider is providing grossly lopsided traffic.
 
Here's the thing though, ISPs have long advertised the rates and service they provide but it's only now that people are actually using it they realize that they can't/don't want to support it. You can't advertise 10Mbps and then not deliver on it.
That has always been the case, residential ISP connections have always been sold as "up to" and the entire Internet runs on best-effort. Otherwise, you'll be paying a lot more for a lot slower connection, and even then an ISP can't guarantee the remote server you connecting to is fast enough to saturate your connection.

I don't care how many people are watching Netflix, if they're all using their 10Mbps then you should deliver because that's the service you sold them.

If you can't keep up with the demand, then maybe they shouldn't have sold more capacity than they were willing to upgrade their infrastructure to support.
Well, Verizon's argument and the point swatbat was making is that Verizon is not over capacity, at least to the LA region that it used in its diagram, it has enough to cover the peak usage of its users if Netflix was willing to use additional transit providers.
 
I like the shipping company analogy. As a customer, I am paying the shipping company to deliver my package. If a few million people order stuff at the same time, it's understandable that there may be some delays. However, it would be completely ludicrous for the shipping company to blame Amazon or whoever for sending out too many packages.

Good analogy, especially considering most roads are paid for with PUBLIC money. So an unintentional point you're making is that the infrastructure used by PRIVATE companies to delivery customer product/content is used to reduce costs to the end-user. A cost that is communal helps reduce the private costs of that product.

The problem with the current situation is that no one wants to admit that the path of delivery should be a communal one rather than a private toll road.
 
DSL? Maybe you missed the Verizon FIOS in the chart, it's there as well.

Also even more fascinating is Comcast's chart, magically slower then magically faster within two months of the FCC's hiring of that top Telco Lobbyist.

You're right, I missed it. Thanks for pointing that out.
 
This is where the term "peering" really comes into play. Cox and Verizon having an interconnect is mutually beneficial to both companies so as long as traffic back and forth isn't grossly lopsided, both ISPs maintain the link. Netflix isn't an ISP, they're solely a content provider.

But I'm paying for my connection. I've got a cap on how much bandwidth I can get, so the ISP needs to upgrade their shit, or drop my price to compensate for the increase that Netflix will have to pass on to pay the ISP for a peering agreement.

I didn't pay for a 25mb internal connection. This isn't an issue for my parent's municipal fiber, and they pay less for internet than I do, while getting a bigger pipe.
 
Can someone please explain where the peering/transit money goes with these peering deals?

From what I understood, ISPs pay tier 1 providers for transit to the rest of the internet, because that costs money.

When netflix pays verizon for transit/peering, what is it paying verizon for exactly? transit not to the rest of the net but... its own network?

I might be able to understand a cost to add the routers and buildings needed to increase capacity, perhaps even a small cost for power and maintenance.. but where are the costs after that is paid for?

What are netflix margins after their expenses?
What are verizons margins on fios service?
 
This is where the term "peering" really comes into play. Cox and Verizon having an interconnect is mutually beneficial to both companies so as long as traffic back and forth isn't grossly lopsided, both ISPs maintain the link. Netflix isn't an ISP, they're solely a content provider.

If Verizon can't do its job it shouldn't be in the ISP business, simple as that, they are a failure propped up by billions of pocketed subsidies.
 
That coincides with Comcast and Netflix making a direct peering agreement.

Indeed, their internet got congested the moment the FCC changed the rules, and fixed the moment Netflix paid the toll, welcome to ISP triple dip heaven, paid by tax subsidies to provide the service, paid by customers to do so, paid by Netflix to provide the service for that specific company.
 
Indeed, their internet got congested the moment the FCC changed the rules, and fixed the moment Netflix paid the toll, welcome to ISP triple dip heaven, paid by tax subsidies to provide the service, paid by customers to do so, paid by Netflix to provide the service for that specific company.
Some say that the Internet got congested when Netflix switched from using CDNs like Akamai and Limelight and setup their own using their own selected transit providers.

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/06/netflix-isp-newdata.html
 
Some say that the Internet got congested when Netflix switched from using CDNs like Akamai and Limelight and setup their own using their own selected transit providers.

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/06/netflix-isp-newdata.html

And that magically throttles other services as well, especially ones that compete with Telco's services? And it makes competing ISPs such as Google fiber and Cox perform better at the same time? That makes using VPNs speed up Netflix? One hell of a bridge to sell right there.

I call BS on that for another more obvious reason: These backbone provides are the top of the food chain, they carry ISP's own data, their job is to make ISPs connect and share between eachother. Level 3, for example, is over 10-20 times more capable in capacity than Verizon and AT&T.

Got a call from Comcast last week asking me if my internet service runs ok and if I wanted to upgrade to a higher tier and switch from Netflix to their service otherwise, apparently they pre-emptively know of my concerns, and the solution is doubling my payment.

It's like someone throwing a brick through your window then knocking to ask if you need a carpenter.
 
Another neat graph about Verizon FIOS:

netflix-verizon-fios-speed-640x337.png


Ooo better, better, better, than bam nose dive! All aboard the crappy ISP service rollercoaster!
 
To be fair, that y-axis is a bit misleading.

That is a prime example of the bullshit people try to pull with statistics/graphs. I feel like nobody ever does statistics right, everything is extrapolated/blown out of proportion like crazy.
 
Some say that the Internet got congested when Netflix switched from using CDNs like Akamai and Limelight and setup their own using their own selected transit providers.

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/06/netflix-isp-newdata.html

Dan Rayburn is tainted. He is fully bought into the current status quo where anyone who wants the privilege of connecting to large ISPs should be paying for it. He LIKES that model and argues for it.

He does not think it is the responsibility of the ISP to build excess capacity at the interconnects, just for the sake of a desire to make sure their paying customers do not get degraded service. He thinks that model is pie in the sky garbage. He expects anyone sending large chunks of traffic to a large ISP to pay them directly, because he has a hard on for rent seeking behavior.


Paying for transit is not a big deal with the larger tier 1 providers because that is an open and competitive market, who cares if they charge to deliver bits. Over time the cost of that delivery will go lower and lower because it costs less and less.

I do not believe for a second that those kinds of ever decreasing rates will hold with these monopoly/duopoly ISPs. I could be wrong, but I am going off of experience with ever increasing bills for tv and internet service. Nickle and dime fees for things like dvr boxes or "renting" a cable modem.

Just because the "starter rates" for services like netflix may be low or lower now, the principle that they should be paid at all is established, and later on, when 4k streams are the norm, and higher framerate and color depth video streams are the norm, and EVERYONE is using far more bandwidth each month and data is more critical than ever, I bet good money those bit rates will either increase, or go down at a FAR slower rate than the larger tier 1 transit providers. Because where the f*ck else is netflix going to go to reach verizon or comcast customers? dsl?

It's a shit incentive to rely on companies who have a fiduciary RESPONSIBILITY to their shareholders to extract the most value they can from their services on all ends to drive costs down when the home broadband market is not competitive. IF we had a competitive home broadband market, it would be less of an issue.

If verizon/comcast/whoever wanted to go crazy and charge more/ or ANYTHING for sending video traffic to their network, another company delivering broadband could just say, we have allowed netflix to connect for free and have BETTER connectivity to the services you WANT !!!

That choice, would impel those large public ISPs to get off their ass and pay for more capacity on their own because they would NEED to to stay competitive. But since that competitive pressure is not there, I say f*Ck them.

Dan Rayburn does not care about the consequences of the power of these ISPs, because all he does is run cover for them and make excuses for them.

If we must suffer through these garbage pay for play fees to last mile ISPs, then I want sunlight on ALL of the details of the deals. The rates should be completely transparent for all to see, from now to the end of time. No hiding, no trying to keep the market as opaque as possible.
 
netfliximprovement_zps95672709.jpg


Too obvious when your 75mbps service can't keep up with a competing 15mpbs one Verizon, do a better job at BSing next time.

Looks like ATT, Verizon and Comcast allowed their network to degrade so they could double dip and get paid on both ends. While Cox and Cablevision are upgrading their networks to handle the load.
 
Looks like ATT, Verizon and Comcast allowed their network to degrade so they could double dip and get paid on both ends. While Cox and Cablevision are upgrading their networks to handle the load.

Yep, another reason why instead of letting Comcast buy Cox they should break Comcast/Verizon into six dozen ISPs and then have line sharing agreements.
 
Yep, another reason why instead of letting Comcast buy Cox they should break Comcast/Verizon into six dozen ISPs and then have line sharing agreements.

That's my nightmare. Cox is expensive no doubt, but when Cox upgraded their network to DOCSIS 3, my internet tier went from 22/6 to 50/10 with no increase in cost. None.
 
Why can't Netflix being thought of as a Verizon customer as well? One that has maxed out their provisioned "upload" and refuses to pay for a faster connection.

Example
Every customer pays verizon to ship them 25mbit of data a second.

If they cant provide that limited amount of data for all of paid verizon's customers that paid, it is verizon's fault, not the manufacturer of the needs-to-be-shipped data.

If verizon cant supply that amount, institute data caps into the contract and let the market decide.



Netflix should really offer up a speedtest functionality, right alongside verizon's cancel service number, right alongside verizon's competitor's sign up number.
 
I have a feeling Verizon is actually more to blame here. I've never had good experiences with them.

I used to hear all the time about how great FiOS was, so when I moved to an area with FiOS service, I thought it would be great.

It wasn't. Despite higher up/down rates being quoted, everything runs at about the same speed or slower. I actually MISS AT&T, as crazy as that sounds. Verizon milks us for every dollar they can get. Here are just some of the things they do:

1. Charge an $11 rental fee for a single set-top box that doesn't even allow me to fast-forward programs or record movies. I can't watch it on any other TVs, and it's the most bare-bones cable box I've seen since the 1990s. AT&T would give you the first box free (with those features), and you only had to pay extra rental fees if you wanted the service on two TVs.

2. Customer service is terrible. They're rude to you when you call. They just tell you that their service is the best, and that if you're not satisfied you can leave. They aren't remotely accommodating or apologetic about anything they do. At least AT&T was polite and had service reps that would work with you.

3. Constant rate hikes. They've increased their prices twice since I subscribed 2 years ago, to the point that I've had to downgrade my service in order to keep affording it and stay close to the same rate. If it goes up any more, I'll have to go back to DSL whether I like it or not.

4. Poor quality of service. The cable box constantly forces me to press a button on the remote in order to keep watching movies, or else it turns itself off after a couple hours. Internet is fast about half the time, slower than DSL the rest of the time. Have to reload webpages regularly because the first few attempts to load a site fail.

With all this in mind, I'm inclined to trust Netflix over Verizon here. They are rude and greedy even compared to their peers. I feel like they're pushing Netflix out because they want people to use Redbox, plain and simple. They have plenty of bandwidth for their own services that I don't even want, which they practically force on me with aggressive bundling practices. There's really no excuse for any of this, IMO.

If they were giving me a good rate on Internet, I might think they had a point. But as much money as they take from me every month, they should be able to upgrade their network enough for Netflix.
 
Dan Rayburn is tainted. He is fully bought into the current status quo where anyone who wants the privilege of connecting to large ISPs should be paying for it. He LIKES that model and argues for it.

He's probably one of these guys...

http://techreport.com/news/26770/friday-night-topic-the-corrupted-web

Shilling has become so bad, I wouldn't be surprised the telcos do a metric ton of it, articles, bbs posts or otherwise. The example Bluray article he provided as an example was shocking, pages and pages of deleted posts because of outright shilling.
 
More amusing news about Verizon today, their performance dropped another 17 percent, it's magic:

http://arstechnica.com/business/201...izon-fios-dropped-another-17-percent-in-june/

Their fancy FIOS service now is about HALF as fast as Cox and Cablevision's offerings, that's right, half as fast, crazy.

Netflix's latest ISP speed rankings, released today, show that the average prime time streaming speed on Verizon FiOS dropped from 1.9Mbps in May to 1.58Mbps in June, a decline of 17 percent. Verizon DSL dropped from 1.05Mbps to 0.91Mbps, a decrease of 13 percent.

Thanks a bunch FCC, love the pro-telco regulation, maybe - after Cox - Comcast can merge with the FCC and get it over with.
 
The icing on the cake, Verizon completely exposed:

http://arstechnica.com/information-...ustomer-mad-that-netflix-works-better-on-vpn/

Colin Nederkoorn, co-founder and CEO of e-mail software maker Customer.io, ran a Netflix test video and found that it "streams at 375 kbps (or 0.375 mbps – 0.5% of the speed I pay for) at the fastest. I was shocked."
...
As you can see in the video, Nederkoorn connected to VyprVPN and got a 3Mbps stream, which is what Netflix recommends for standard definition video. This is "about 10x the speed I was getting connecting directly via Verizon," he wrote. The video also started up faster on the VPN than it did without.

Through a VPN, Verizon's FIOS speeds shoot up by ten fold!

Straight up fraud.
 
The icing on the cake, Verizon completely exposed:

Through a VPN, Verizon's FIOS speeds shoot up by ten fold!

Straight up fraud.
This proves nothing except that Verizon has at least 3 Mbit/s of spare download bandwidth.

Verizon has always said it had enough total capacity from a large region to the Internet to handle Netflix. The dispute has always been what happens after Netflix's transit providers reach the limits of pre-existing agreements.
 
Why can't Netflix being thought of as a Verizon customer as well? One that has maxed out their provisioned "upload" and refuses to pay for a faster connection.

If you host a server and demand is saturating your pipe, you pay to upgrade that pipe. I know peering is completely different, but you get my point.

Maybe Netflix should have monthly data caps? :D
IF Verizon or Comcast wants to look at it that way, I want my cable bill to drop 50% tomorrow and forever. I'm paying for a full fetch. I'm paying for 'shipping'. Imagine Netflix shipping me a toaster and I pay USP ground shpping for $6 and then UPS picking it up from Netflix and refusing to deliver unless Netflix pays them $6 too. It would be fair if I paid then $3 and Netflix $3.

But that's not what is happening here.
 
This proves nothing except that Verizon has at least 3 Mbit/s of spare download bandwidth.

Verizon has always said it had enough total capacity from a large region to the Internet to handle Netflix. The dispute has always been what happens after Netflix's transit providers reach the limits of pre-existing agreements.

So when someone adds an extra hop on Verizon's network to go to the same place, the speed magically goes up ten-fold? Nice try.
 
So when someone adds an extra hop on Verizon's network to go to the same place, the speed magically goes up ten-fold? Nice try.
It's exactly what you would expect to happen when Netflix's transit providers that it uses to connect to Verizon are full while the transit providers used by the VPN to connect to Verizon are not.
 
It's exactly what you would expect to happen when Netflix's transit providers that it uses to connect to Verizon are full while the transit providers used by the VPN to connect to Verizon are not.
And in addition to that, should Netflix use the same transit provider as the VPN that those Verizon Netflix users who are able to get that route will also have the boosted performance even without the VPN tunneling, or at least until the connection reaches full utilization.

Whether Verizon has enough spare capacity through all transit providers and CDNs that connect to it to handle all Netflix traffic, we'll never know since Netflix has entered into a direct peering agreement.
 
It's exactly what you would expect to happen when Netflix's transit providers that it uses to connect to Verizon are full while the transit providers used by the VPN to connect to Verizon are not.

So basically if Verizon doesn't know it's connecting to the same exact backbone due to a VPN then it'll all good, congestion magically fixed. So the bottleneck is indeed a matter of money. Thanks for explaining the obvious.
 
So basically if Verizon doesn't know it's connecting to the same exact backbone due to a VPN then it'll all good, congestion magically fixed. So the bottleneck is indeed a matter of money. Thanks for explaining the obvious.
It's always been a matter of money, why else did Netflix shift away from paying CDNs like Akamai and Limelight that generally ensure that they had agreements in place guaranteeing the bandwidth they need, to setting up their own CDN using transit providers like Cogent and L3 that did not have the necessary agreements in place to ensure no congestion.
 
Can't wait for full-time uncompressed 4K streaming!! Oo....then I sure hope all the blu-ray doomsayers are wrong!
 
Well as of recently my SuperHD streaming has been working great. So despite their bickering at least something works. I wish I could test 4K but I don't have a 4K screen at the moment..

Still Its laughable to see Verizon blaming Netflix. I really just want all this bickering to be over. The FCC has already shown us how little it cares for our opinions and by having a former cable lobbyist as their current head. It seems like we are screwed for now.

We will never have 4k streaming if ISPs are allowed a "Wild West" type situation where they have total unchecked freedom to dominate their consumers. But such an imbalance can't survive for long. It will require the people currently on the sidelines who don't feel this impacts them getting involved with the rest of us.

What's funny though is my friend in Australia was telling me about how he has a 800k/300k connection he pays something like $130 US for each month with around 40GB cap. He doesn't live in an under populated party of the country but the ISP's there have a total choke hold on the industry without any Government interference. Now while I know it could get worse I seriously doubt that will happen here. But still if he exceeds his cap its basically $2 per GB... which is god damn highway robbery.

Its sad that by the time this is all sorted out and the industry realizes that the Internet is not a luxury but a part of life that I'll be too old to really give a shit. I was there for the birth of the public internet but I'll probably be dead before I see it truly reach its potential..
 
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