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Verizon: Us throttling AWS and Netflix? Not likely

Telco denies throttling claims after excitable blog post

Verizon has strenuously denied claims that it is throttling IP addresses associated with Amazon Web Services.

The telco was forced to issue a statement on Wednesday after a blog post gained attention which claimed that Verizon was throttling bandwidth to sites associated with AWS IPs.

The blog post in question was published on Wednesday morning and was headlined: "Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory To Wage War Against Netflix" – a pugnacious lead, and one that touched on the sensitive issue of the US's broadband oligopoly.

According to the post, when the user contacted a Verizon customer support representative they were told that Verizon was selectively throttling traffic to cloud IPs. The author, director of engineering for security firm iScan David Raphael, included traceroute data to back up his case.

El Reg contacted Verizon for a statement and got this (fairly swift) response:

"We treat all traffic equally, and that has not changed. Many factors can affect the speed a customer’s experience for a specific site, including, that site's servers, the way the traffic is routed over the Internet, and other considerations. We are looking into this specific matter, but the company representative was mistaken. We're going to redouble our representative education efforts on this topic."

In all likelihood, the problems the user reported may stem from peering congestion or perhaps a peering dispute.

Though large telcos in the US do a variety of grubby things that irritate their customers, in this case it appears that the internet's commentariat jumped a bit too quickly for nearby pitchforks.

Netflix had not responded to questions at the time of writing, but nor should it have to – Netflix uses its own CDN to distribute content so is unlikely to be affected by any AWS blips on the user-end. ®

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