Study: Comcast and Verizon connections to Cogent dropped below 0.5Mbps

Strong evidence that ISPs are quite willing go unneutral and let customer service suffer to increase profits. 

This wouldn't be happening in a free market. 

*** 

Study: Comcast and Verizon connections to Cogent dropped below 0.5Mbps
// Ars Technica

Plenty of Comcast and Verizon customers know just how bad Internet service was on major ISPs during the months-long battle over who should pay to deliver Netflix traffic.

But now we have more numbers on the performance declines, thanks to a new report from the Measurement Lab Consortium (M-Lab). M-Lab hosts measuring equipment at Internet exchange points to analyze connections between network operators and has more than five years' worth of measurements. A report released today examines connections between consumer Internet service providers ("Access ISPs" in M-Lab parlance) and backbone operators ("Transit ISPs"), including the ones that sent traffic from Netflix to ISPs while the money fights were still going on.

Netflix eventually agreed to pay Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T for direct connections to their networks, but until that happened there was severe degradation in links carrying traffic from Netflix and many other Web services to consumers. Connections were particularly bad between ISPs and Cogent, one of the backbone operators that Netflix paid to carry its traffic.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs