Verizon’s Accidental Mea Culpa

Level 3 wrote about Verizon’s accidental admission that it is deliberately constraining capacity from Netflix network providers.

And in fact, Verizon admits as much because they conveniently show one direction across our network with a peak utilization of 34%; almost exactly what I explained in my last blog post. I can confirm once again that all of those thousands of links on the Level 3 network are managed carefully so that the peak utilizations look very similar to those Verizon show for their own network – IN BOTH DIRECTIONS.

That means Verizon is only using 34% of its full capacity, but there is congestion for some reason.

In comparison, other ISPs and content providers only have an average of 44% utilization, with no issues of congestion:

But, here’s the other interesting thing also shown in the Verizon diagram. This congestion only takes place between Verizon and network providers chosen by Netflix. The providers that Netflix does not use do not experience the same problem. Why is that? Could it be that Verizon does not want its customers to actually use the higher-speed services it sells to them? Could it be that Verizon wants to extract a pound of flesh from its competitors, using the monopoly it has over the only connection to its end-users to raise its competitors’ costs?