Netflix announced Tuesday that it had agreed to pay AT&T for a direct “peering” connection to AT&T’s network. The two companies arranged the deal this past May and have been working since then to connect their respective networks. AT&T had been pressing Netflix to pay for an upgraded connection between their networks since at least March when Netflix asked for a free peering arrangement. “We reached an interconnect agreement with Netflix in May and since then have been working together to provision additional interconnect capacity to improve the viewing experience for our mutual subscribers,” an AT&T spokeswoman said in a statement. “We’re now beginning to turn up the connections, a process that should be complete in the coming days,” Netflix spokeswoman Anne Marie Squeo said. AT&T and other broadband ISPs believe that Netflix should bear the cost for the recent surge in video traffic. Netflix replied that broadband providers should be responsible for making sure that their subscribers get the content they are viewing online in a reliable and consistent manner. Netflix, as well as Google’s YouTube, provides a regularly updated video quality report that ranks the speed of ISPs. AT&T’s services have typically ranked low on Netflix’s list, although Verizon’s services haven’t fared much […]
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