Verizon appears to be throttling its Netflix data

Net Neutrality has recently become a hot topic in the United States. The idea that internet service providers (ISPs) can prioritize or deprioritize data streams for payment or otherwise doesn’t resonate with a lot of Americans.

Well, Verizon is seemingly about to be on the other end of upset supporters of Net Neutrality as many users (including myself) are reporting a speed cap of 10 Mbps for Netflix' Data on Verizon (some are even reporting this is happening on YouTube data as well).

This speed cap occurs while watching Netflix, or in the more obvious case, while performing a Fast.com speed test. Fast.com is Netflix’s official speed testing tool, which obviously runs on Netflix’s servers.

An easy way to check if Verizon is throttling your Netflix stream is by running a network test with any other app like Speed Test or Open Signal, and then comparing it to what you get on Fast.com’s test.

Speed Test vs Fast.com

Here you can see a couple of speed tests that we ran on a Moto Z on Verizon, which clocked around 35Mbps download speeds on the Ookla Speed Test app. Immediately afterwards, we ran a Fast.com test, which briefly went up to 20Mbps before sinking like a brick down to between 9 and 10 Mbps, with a final result of 9.3 Mbps

The Verge reached out to both Netflix and Verizon. Netflix replied that it is “definitely not capping data on our end and [we] don’t cap data for any mobile networks.” Verizon has yet to explain.

Source 1, 2 | Via