New Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) ISP speed rankings that show Verizon (NYSE: VZ) FiOS and Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) speeds falling have raised a new round of finger pointing over who is to blame for the apparent drop in quality of service. Net neutrality advocates were quick to associate these new data points to a D.C. court's recent decision that threw out the FCC's open Internet rules.
But Netflix executives told a stock analyst recently that it had no evidence or belief its video was being "throttled" by ISPs, according to a report in re/code.
That revelation follows a dust-up last week when an engineer and blogger claimed to have evidence that FiOS was slowing video coming from Netflix and Amazon Web Services servers. For its part, Verizon denied that it's slowing the traffic. Netflix told shareholders last month that it has a plan should ISPs begin harming consumer access to Netflix traffic. That plan involves encouraging subscribers to complain.
Some of the change in performance could be due to peering issues between ISPs, content providers and their content delivery networks, Richard Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG Research, wrote. "While it's impossible to know if interconnection and peering are the sole culprits in declining broadband performance exhibited by certain ISPs, we believe they are playing a role," he wrote on the BTIG blog.
For more:
- Ars Technica had this report
- re/code had this report
- Read the BTIG blog (reg. req.)
- See the Netflix ISP rankings
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