Business relationships between major broadband providers and Internet backbone providers appear to be the cause of major drags on performance from early 2013 to early this year, according to a new study from a think tank advocating for strong net neutrality rules.

Five major U.S. broadband providers, including Comcast, AT&T and Verizon Communications, saw major performance degradation during those months, according to the study published Tuesday by the New America Foundation’s Measurement Lab Consortium [M-Lab].

Broadband providers questioned the study, saying it wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact cause of congestion.

For some customers of major broadband providers, download speeds were less than 0.5 Mbps for months at a time, said M-Lab, which used network diagnostic tools installed on Internet backbone providers’ networks.

M-Lab found frequent traffic congestion problems when specific broadband providers were connected with specific backbone providers, the study said. “From this we conclude that ISP interconnection has a substantial impact on consumer Internet performance — sometimes a severely negative impact — and that business relationships between [broadband and backbone providers], and not major technical problems, are at the root of the problems we observed,” the study said.

The study resurrects a contentious debate about whether proposed net neutrality rules at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission should apply to backbone interconnection deals. That debate, dating back to Netflix complaints about Comcast in 2010, has flared up during the past year as the FCC debates new net neutrality rules.

The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute has advocated for strong net neutrality regulations. The foundation gets funding from several sources, including net neutrality supporters Netflix and Google.

Broadband providers disputed the conclusions of the study, however. While the study points to backbone business relationships as the cause of traffic degradation, it isn’t able to pinpoint which business relationships were the problem, said David Young, vice president of public policy at Verizon.

Other studies have pointed to Netflix business deals as the cause of traffic degradation, broadband providers said. “This is a problem that’s been discussed pretty extensively and documented pretty extensively,” Young said.

AT&T didn’t mention Netflix by name, but said commercially negotiated traffic peering agreements on the Internet need to be balanced.

“When one side of a commercial peering arrangement sends significantly more traffic than it receives, the allocation of infrastructure costs described above gets skewed,” Bob Quinn, AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory policy, said in a statement. “If the sending party refuses to take steps to bring balance back into the arrangement, congestion can result.”

Source from : (itnews.com)