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Verizon denies throttling Netflix traffic after net neutrality ruling

Verizon denies throttling Netflix traffic after net neutrality ruling

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Ethernet / Internet (stock)
Ethernet / Internet (stock)

A suggestion by a Texas engineer that Verizon may be throttling some internet services following last month's net neutrality ruling has quickly been denied by the company. In a post earlier today, iScan Online engineer David Raphael noted that he discovered issues with performance on his Verizon FiOS service, both at work and at home. Despite generally fast speeds, Raphael was getting "awful" results playing video content on Netflix, as well as accessing files through Amazon AWS. He also noticed speed differences when running tests between his home and work connection, which were classified as different types of accounts: office and residential.

Not so fast

Raphael got in touch with Verizon's customer support, which is where the story got complicated. A chat representative told him that yes, the company was in fact limiting bandwidth to cloud providers. Verizon now tells The Washington Post that the representative was wrong, and that the company continues to "treat all traffic equally."  Verizon added that "many factors can affect the speed of a customer’s experiences for a specific site."

The kerfuffle comes less than a month after a federal appeals court struck down key parts of the FCC's Open Internet rules, a decision that has a broad and potentially long-lasting effect on net neutrality. Immediately following that decision, Verizon said that it would "not change consumers' ability to access and use the internet as they do now," though critics worry that the company will quickly change its services to charge more for some internet activities than others.