so i'm sure this article will create the typical drum circle of net neutrality wonks, but verizon may be doing it for network traffic management reasons, not to spank netflix and it's subscribers into pony'ing up more money to verizon... before you flame me as some verizon stooge (trust me, i could not be further from that roll), allow me to explain;
i was playing around with the QoS (quality of service settings) of my router, while running a basic sniffer program which displayed how much total bandwidth my router was consuming each second. i would stream various channels off my roku3 and would see large crests and toughs on my data consumption graphic second to second which seemed to imply the stream would gobble up a chunk of video, cache it, then display it on my screen - so the actual download demand was only for maybe a second or two every 10 seconds. i found different streams consumed their precache at different rates, some would briefly peek at 10mbps, some at 30mbps, etc. by lowering my QoS even further and forcing my speed down to 10mbps, I found that the 30mbps precache peaking service would simply adjust by precaching long and more often at 10mbps - but the actual video being displayed did not suffer at all.
it occurs to me that verizon wireless may intentionally be capping the netflix stream, but the total data being transmitted remains the same - so instead of say 30mbps for 2 seconds and 0mbps for 8 seconds (while your screen displays what's in it's cache), verizon network engineers decided it was better for them to cap 10mbps so your netflix stream would be 10mbps for 6 seconds and 0mbps for 4 seconds, so as long as the capped bandwidth was higher than needed to keep the cache full - your actual video being displayed is not effected. it makes sense to me that verizon may have to do this because remember when you are on wireless you are sharing potentially limited capacity to whatever tower(s) you may be handed off at any given time, so your constant demand for netflix download updates at 10mbps, versus more intermittent netflix downloads at 30mbps - may actually allow verizon to improve your viewing experience, since the longer the gap of your pause gap during a stream download, the more likely you MAY get passed to a different cell tower which could disrupt your stream further.
i now return you to the usual politically correct circlejerk i have no doubt is already in progress elsewhere
net neutrality and keeping title ii are hard fought issues from 2015 that should not be rolled back,
but advocates for these rulings should be more careful about exactly where they pick their fights.
what verizon is doing may actually hurt our cause if protesters end up crying wolf over this event.