Boo! If you think mergers and acquisitions are scary, than two huge companies have a special Halloween morning treat for you: CenturyLink and Level 3 announced this morning that the former is acquiring the latter for $34 billion. [More]
peering
CenturyLink Snapping Up Level 3 For $34 Billion To Make Internet Service Voltron
By 10.31.16 — Updated: 11.1.16
Charter/Time Warner Cable Merger Plan Great For Everyone, According To Charter
By 11.3.15
A couple of weeks ago, the FCC collected everyone’s comments about why Charter should or should not be allowed to go through with buying Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in one massive merger. The next step in the process is for Charter to get to respond as to why they think the yea-sayers are right and the nay-sayers are wrong, and they submitted that response this week. [More]
Netflix Is Totally In Favor Of Charter’s Plan To Buy TWC Because It Will Save Them Some Money
By 7.15.15
Netflix is almost 37% of all prime-time internet traffic. ISPs have been known to degrade that traffic until Netflix pays for peering. Netflix really hates having to make (and pay for) those agreements. And so Charter has quickly learned that the quickest way to Netflix’s heart is to promise not to do that. [More]
What Will Comcast Do With The $45B It Couldn’t Spend Buying Time Warner Cable?
By 4.24.15
Comcast’s dream of achieving full coast-to-coast cable dominance this year came to an official end this morning when they had to admit the Time Warner Cable merger was just not going to happen. But Comcast is a huge business, with impatient shareholders. They need to continue proving growth, which means buying other businesses to make theirs bigger. TWC might not be on the table anymore, but something, somewhere has to be. [More]
4 Things We Still Don’t Know About Net Neutrality
By 2.27.15
The FCC voted yesterday to reclassify broadband and protect the open internet. In other words, at long last, we have a net neutrality rule. And that’s great! But there is still a lot we don’t know, and there are a lot of questions left unanswered. Here are the major things we don’t know, and parts we’re waiting to better understand. [More]
What You Need To Know About Tomorrow’s Votes On Net Neutrality And Municipal Broadband
By 2.25.15
On Thursday morning, the Federal Communications Commission will sit down to discuss and vote on two big issues — net neutrality and municipal broadband — that the cable and telecom industries have campaigned heavily to defeat and obscure. Because of these industry-backed efforts and the legalese involved, many consumers are having difficulty separating myth from reality. In an effort to cut through that haze, we’ve attempted to answer the most pressing questions about these two topics before tomorrow’s vote. [More]
Verizon: We Can Basically Charge Netflix For Peering Forever And There’s Nothing The FCC Can Do To Stop It
By 12.18.14
The FCC is facing a lot of opposition this year, but Verizon in particular just really seems to thrive on challenging the agency. The latest move from the telco giant is a message to the FCC that even if they use Title II to regulate net neutrality, there is nothing the commission can do to prevent interconnection fee spats like the one Verizon and Netflix had this year. [More]
Study Finds Internet Congestion Really Is About Business, Not Technology
By 10.30.14
Various enormous corporations have this year been at each other’s throats over how well or how poorly internet traffic travels through their systems. A new report indicates that some of the mud-slinging this year is true: interconnection, or peering, between ISPs is why end-users are getting terrible internet traffic. But, they say, it’s business, and not technology, that’s making your Netflix buffer. [More]
Verizon, Netflix Stepping Up Battle To Blame Each Other For Poor Streaming Service
By 7.11.14
The heat of high summer is a great time to stay inside and marathon a million hours of TV. But for some Netflix customers who use Verizon as their ISP, the summer streaming season is a slow and choppy dud. Even though the two companies came to a paid peering arrangement earlier this year, service is still going from bad to worse. Netflix blames Verizon, Verizon blames Netflix, and while service is still cooling down, their very public fight is heating up. [More]
Netflix Also Talking Deals With AT&T, Verizon
By 2.25.14
Following Sunday’s announcement that Netflix had agreed to start paying Comcast for a better, more direct connection to the cable company’s broadband network, both AT&T and Verizon said they are working on a similar deal with the streaming video service. [More]
Netflix Agrees To Pay Comcast To End Slowdown
By 2.23.14
For the last several months, Comcast Internet customers have complained about a drop in quality of the Netflix streams being delivered to their homes, and Netflix’s own data showed a massive decline in connection speeds starting in October. But today, the two companies announced they have reached a “mutually beneficial” agreement that will hopefully turn that trend around. [More]
Why Even A Net Neutrality Rewrite Wouldn’t Alleviate Slow Netflix Service
By 2.19.14
While today’s announcement from FCC Chair Tom Wheeler that the commission would take another stab at writing net neutrality rules — thus preventing ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable from blocking or throttling access to certain sites for its customers — the re-establishment of the Open Internet guidelines still wouldn’t do much to end some of the current Netflix-related hiccups customers are seeing. [More]
Is Verizon Deliberately Slowing Down Netflix Streaming To Customers?
By 6.18.13
One of the companies that provides bandwidth to Netflix claims that Verizon is allowing a traffic jam of data to build up at its connection points to the huge telecom company, resulting in a degraded connection for customers. [More]
