Verizon Throttling: Yes They Do

VPN
1

They throttle. I work from home, I work in tech, I play video games, I like watching/streaming movies and shows. Of course I’m going to be blowing through gigs of Fios usage a month.

The truth is they throttled not only Netflix and YouTube, but the kicker: NordVPN and potentially other VPN sites. (Side bar: I have my ethernet cable plugged in and get about 900 up/down). The speed tests do not show the throttling obviously since it’s site and IP specific, I can trick it by unplugging and plugging in my PC. However, what’s the point of paying 90$ a month if sites struggle that have heavy Ad/Video Load.

Before I resorted to downloading a VPN here’s my slightly abridged customer experience story:

Apartment for 2.5 years, working from home, last 3 months have been terrible.

Customer Service Agent 1(IM Messaging) - attempting to sell another service for 25$ a month to help “resolve the issue” …

Customer Sales Rep 1 - attempting to calm me down and sends me to a customer service rep where I was on hold for 45 minutes.

Customer Service Agent 2 (Call) - has me share my phone camera to show the issues (easiest was vieo streaming, as I was not about to try my failing Zoom calling), proceeds to have me reset the router, restart my computer and he reset the modem remotely. All of which took 15-20 minutes. He says he cannot fix the issue and sends me a router (2 day wait on that).

Router comes, I set it up (plug in cables, wait for it to be powered, copy down the new details). Launch up my computer try Youtube / Netflix / Video Calling … still garbage quality and impossibly slow. How lovely. At this point ( at a loss) I try loading up Nord VPN’s web site… I couldn’t. It took hotspotting to my phone to download the VPN. Going back to ethernet and connected to the nearest access point - everything was golden again and ran smoothly. Deny throttling more as a company and I’ll just keep laughing.

TLDR; Verizon throttles their paying and loyal customers. Verizon also prevents their customers from fixing the throttling via VPNs in some cases.

This post is not to sell anyone off of Verizon, when it works: it’s great, but I’m one irritated customer. I have been with Verizon Mobile as a phone plan for 10+ years and a Fios for 2+ years. I am also not attempting to sell anyone Nord/Netflix/Youtube, just referencing my personal experience.

2

If you work in tech you should know the difference between a malfunction and intentional thottling. Do you really think think they throttle your Gig connection is throttled to a degree to make your connection competely unuseable? You need to continue troubleshooting and the problem will be fixed- sooner or later.

3

Sounds more like Verizon’s shitty DNS, but nice story.

4

VPN’s and public VPN’s like nord, you shouldn’t ever expect to get anywhere close to your max bandwith. They just don’t have the bandiwth on their side or the capability. You’re a drop in the bucket on shared servers used by all their customers spread all over the world.

Is there a chance you just have a bad router or bad ethernet cable? Those could be issues as well.

5

I’ve had FiOS for nearly 10 years, they don’t throttle any downloads like that…

You should disable iPV6 and check your computer/router settings. It’s likely something on your end.

Typically I get 300 mbps down, with a VPN it’s slightly less around 200 mbps, still plenty fast.

6

Try turning off IPv6 on your router.

7

If Verizon throttled, you’d be hearing more about that from people all over. The last time I heard of Verizon intentionally throttling traffic, it was on their mobile network for video (4G Home/5G Low band mobile, for example), which they make clear in their plans. It’s crappy, but is what it is. On wireline, the last time I heard about throttling was because of someone torrenting and getting too many DMCA notices, which causes Verizon to throttle the connection to 128kbps for a month or two as punishment.

The IPv6 problems others point out is due to an issue with the Nokia/Alcatel ONTs mangling IPv6 packets. DOCSIS modems have the same issue if the cable provider is using buggy firmware - I saw it first hand on Time Warner Cable with the SB6141. It looked like throttling to the average person, but Wireshark showed a different story. I got TWC to fix it with a friendly call to their engineering department. If you have Intel Ethernet and you’re seeing problems on Ethernet, or are using a switch/router with Intel Ethernet and offload enabled, you need to disable IPv6 TCP and UDP Checksum offloading to solve for the problem. See this: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19174/disabling-tcp-ipv6-checksum-offload-capability-with-intel-1-10-gbe-controllers.html

The rest of it, is likely the fact that Verizon’s network is a Tier 1 network. They engage in settlement free peering with other Tier 1s, and Tier 2 / Tier 3 networks must pay Verizon to get connectivity to them. Otherwise, traffic must exchange at a public Internet Exchange. CDNs often pay to get connectivity to Verizon, but also, CDNs are paid by their customers to allocate a specific amount of capacity towards a service. There’s a lot of business and money changing hands to get data to you. It’s possible that due to the sheer number of customers Verizon has, there isn’t enough capacity available somewhere else on the Internet. Your VPN provider might just have a better/cleaner path to/from Verizon and whatever service you’re using. My employer for example, has a private backbone and a dedicated AS - which means they can also negotiate their own transit and peering. The routing on their network can often times be cleaner / faster than a public provider’s to SPECIFIC SERVICES, but crap to others. Might not hurt to play around with this too: https://bgp.he.net/AS701

Also consider that Verizon recently announced upgrades to get their network to use 400+Gbps backbone circuits, up from 10Gbps/40Gbps/100Gbps bundles. That should probably indicate that congestion is a real deal if they have to bump links to 4x the capacity just to keep things moving along.

8

I haven’t had throttle. And i game, and work from home

9

I don’t buy this. So many more ppl would notice.

10

I’ve never seen throttling. You have an IPV6 issue, not a throttling one.

11

Alex Nguyen took this before the FCC. It became the longest running consumer complaint in FCC history. The Obama FCC failed to vote on it, handing it to the next administration.

Full Disclosure: I submitted comment and testimony in support of Alex, and against Verizon, in that case.

With Chairman Pai recusing, the Enforcement Bureau dismissed it without a ruling. The vote would have been a 2-2 tie. The IG investigated the dismissal, but the acting officer had already resigned.

Fast forward to today. The Biden FCC had the longest term in US history without an appointed chair. And now has another 2-2 tie, with the longest opening for a seat in the FCC.

The Senate won’t vote on the nominee, and Biden won’t replace her. Some feel this is intentional to gridlock campaign promises to implement Net Neutrality, without actually having to deliver.

Bottom line, don’t expect change any time soon. Cat and mouse will each fight for cheese.

12

I too work from home, download and play Xbox games. I also downloaded a lot of torrents and stream Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and HBO Max movies.

I have yet to be throttled.

13

What makes you think this is intentional throttling vs peering congestion?

14

Verizon Throttling: no they don’t

15

So i’ve had Verizon fios for 6 weeks. for one month now i can barely load youtube at 140p. I pay for 1 gig. Ive tried reformatting my computer in case of malware(literally couldnt think of anything else to do). I’ve allowed their techs to troubleshoot 3 times. I changed my ethernet cable. I tried wifi on my desktop. I finally decided to use windscribe to hide my location and IMMEDIATELY I can stream anything at 1080p. Netflix, youtube, while watching twitch and discord streams and playing online games. so i’ve just submitted a complaint to the FCC and opened a ticket with verizon’s main office so i can speak with risk management.

16

Verizon does suck, I agree. Their customer service is trash and their knowledge is below par. They’ve also tried selling me stuff when I’ve been troubleshooting with them. However, a VPN will give more latency. You’d have to find a way to show they’re throttling without them stating it’s simply random latency. Maybe a third party website. Their website for speed tests is trash and grossly inaccurate in order to lie to customers. Don’t get me started on how trash their wifi is on their routers either.

17

The VPN fixed the problem entirely, thanks for your input though.

Edit: Just a side note, I work in the Software Side of Tech so I do not always keep up to date with all the changes going on with hardware and internet things.

18

I just made a video of this happening to me right now. I have a fios gigabit connection. I’m literaly getting 0.01 mbps upload speed while I was remote streaming on plex during a watch party. I start troubleshooting and notice with my VPN on, i have normal upload speeds. With the VPN off, my upload speeds range from 0.01 to 0.03 mbps. It’s wild.

19

I am still getting about 900 up/down. I would believe the bad ethernet bad router if I wasn’t able to get normal download speeds for games and other various things. Since everything else behaves as normal is why my initial thought was throttling, but reading comments I may be wrong either way. The issue is resolved now and I’m able to use everything on PC as normal (granted with the help of a vpn), and still get similar speeds. I’ll probably drop the VPN every once in a while to see if I’m able to get streaming/video calling back to normal. My PC and my work laptop are my only two devices that were seeing this specific issue… yeah.

20

Haven’t tried this yet. Will look into this over the weekend. Thanks!