Verizon has admitted it’s deliberately constraining capacity from...
Verizon has admitted it’s deliberately constraining capacity from network providers like Level 3 that chose “to deliver video content requested by Verizon’s own paying broadband consumers,” a Level 3 executive said last week in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1zRazaA). The post…
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by Mark Taylor, vice president-content and media, responded to a Verizon blog post (http://vz.to/1mDnTcythat) that attributed congestion to Netflix’s interconnection with the telco’s border router (CD July 11 p18). Verizon’s post included a diagram of a network that has lots of unused capacity at the busiest time of day, Taylor said. The telco “freely admitted that it has the ability to deliver lots of Netflix streams to broadband customers requesting them, at no extra cost,” he said. But it has shown that it prefers not to deliver these streams, “even though its subscribers have paid it to do so,” he said. The utilization of all of those thousands of links across the Level 3 network is much the same as Verizon’s depiction of its own network, he said. “We have to maintain adequate headroom because that’s what we sell to customers.” The congestion occurs where Level 3 and Verizon networks interconnect, he said. Verizon confirmed that everything between the router in its network and its subscribers is uncongested, so it “in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used,” he said. The congestion can be fixed in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10 Gbps ports on those routers, he said. Verizon has refused to do so, he said. “So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion."