Thoughts on Internet congestion and the FCC’s broadband report

The Federal Communications Commission recently released its fourth annual Fixed Broadband Report, as well as some underlying data. The Report confirms that Verizon FiOS delivers a world class experience to customers, with unparalleled speed and reliability.

In fact, the Report found that our FiOS platform consistently delivers well over 100% of the upload and download speeds advertised. When congestion does occur on specific interconnection links, it’s the content sender and transit provider, not the Internet service provider (ISP), that determines the specific links and routes that content (such as Netflix videos) takes.

In making decisions on how to send video traffic to consumers, content senders may have 50 or more routes to choose from to get to a given ISP’s network. When appropriately structured, these routes provide plenty of capacity for all the traffic to reach consumers. But when content senders or Internet transit providers choose to concentrate most of the traffic onto a small number of interconnections (for business reasons), consumers can experience some congestion.

The congestion mentioned in the release was the result of some Internet transit providers like Cogent trying to send large volumes of traffic to ISPs through connections that are too small and were not designed to deal with huge amounts of traffic.