What caused the web slow-down? Not Comcast, TWC, or Verizon

[Commentary] M-Lab data actually show that Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and, to a lesser extent AT&T, had sharp drops in performance in May of 2013 at three monitoring points in New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Then, performance of all four networks all show sudden improvements in March of 2014.

The simultaneous drops and spikes in performance for all four networks suggest these firms could not themselves have been the cause. Such an outcome would have required some sort of amazingly precise coordination among the four firms. Rather, the simultaneous action suggests the cause was some outside entity or event. As it happens, Netflix was moving much of its content away from third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) in the spring of 2013 and onto its own OpenConnect platform, which used Cogent and Level 3 to connect to many broadband providers. The smaller cable firms, Cablevision and Cox, meanwhile, had agreed to connect to Netflix for free and unsurprisingly show no degradation.

[Swanson is president of Entropy Economics]