In a blog post posted to the company's policy website, Verizon today proclaimed that they've had their engineers conduct a thorough review of every part of their network and have concluded that Netflix congestion issues experienced by customers are in no way the fault of Verizon. Companies like Netflix and Level 3 previously suggested that Verizon was letting peering points saturate in order to force companies to pay last-mile ISPs for direct interconnection.
"(Verizon engineers) measured the utilization – or the percentage of total capacity used – at every link in the Verizon network – from the customer to the edge of our network, where we receive Netflix traffic – to determine where, if at all, congestion was occurring," states Verizon's David Young.
"This review confirmed again what I’ve explained before (here and here): there was no congestion anywhere within the Verizon network. There was, however, congestion at the interconnection link to the edge of our network (the border router) used by the transit providers chosen by Netflix to deliver video traffic to Verizon’s network."
Verizon continues to insist that "misleading public accounts" are to blame for the recent dust up, and that Netflix is at fault for using congestion middle-mile links. Granted despite the lengthy post Verizon offers no raw network data to back any of their claims up, leaving us in the same "he said, she said" scenario we inhabited previously. Previous similar Netflix blog posts paint a very different picture.
Verizon proceeds to insist the company is "working aggressively with Netflix to establish new, direct connections from Netflix to Verizon’s network." "This doesn’t “prioritize” Netflix traffic in any way," states the company, "but it ensures that their traffic gets on our network through direct connections—not middleman networks—that are up to the task."
Netflix and Verizon announced they'd
struck an interconnection agreement back in April, though users complain they're still seeing significant congestion issues.