Netflix And Comcast Sign Agreement To End Bandwidth Throttling

For those unfamiliar with net neutrality, it’s basically where service providers aren’t allowed to discriminate between bandwidths, meaning that if there is a service that an ISP or telco would like to promote, they cannot do so at the expense of regular bandwidth which could affect the speed and experience of their paying customers. Unfortunately a recent federal court ruling has basically struck down the net neutrality rules placed by the FCC, which meant that as far as Netflix customers are concerned, there have been many complains about a decline in streams. The good news is that could soon come to an end, thanks to Netflix entering into an agreement with Comcast, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

According to the report, Netflix and Comcast have entered into an agreement where Comcast will no longer throttle the bandwidth of Netflix, and will also see Netflix pay Comcast an undisclosed sum of money to have a direct link to the ISP. Apparently Netflix had requested that their servers be placed within Comcast’s data centers itself to take advantage of video caching, while previously Netflix had relied on third parties, such as Cogent, to deliver their data to Comcast in order to stream their videos. It should be noted that this does not mean that customers will have to start paying more for their services. Basically what is happening is that instead of paying Cogent, they are now directly paying Comcast instead.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Netflix