kilofoxtrot
Well-known member
I don't think anyone beyond the FCC knows yet.
Everyone likes to bring up Netflix, but their traffic was not throttled in the traffic shaping sense. The Netflix traffic was treated like all peering traffic. The problem was that the peering connection did not have enough bandwidth to some ISPs. There was a lot of finger pointing. Probably some lying. But what most people don't understand is that Verizon may have been telling the truth.
At the time Netflix was using Cogent to deliver their traffic over peering links. Cogent prides itself in their peering. Most (all?) of their peering agreements are settlement free. That means that the traffic they send is about the same amount they receive for that link. When this happens both parties call it even and do not charge for traffic delivery since it would zero out. I think what happened is that when Cogrnt got Netflix as a customer they figured it wouldn't mess with their existing peering agreements. That didn't hold up when Netflix increased resolution and became more popular. Cogent really didn't want to upgrade the peering links because it might mess up the balance and they would have to pay the other network (the ISP) to deliver their packets.
When Netflix fully understood that Cogent could or would no longer properly deliver their traffic they dumped them and went with another national network or setup their own peering agreements.
In anycase all this is a normal and fundamental part of the way the Internet works. No traffic was pulled out and degraded by the ISP and therefore has nothing to do with Net Neutrality.
Then why did Netflix sign a direct deal with Comcast? Cogent didnt have a problem with Netflix.... Comcast did. And when Netflix paid Comcast, Netflix didnt buffer for Comcast customers.
Comcast absolutely throttled Netflix traffic because I used my VPN to get around it.
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