"They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers," Mark Taylor, vice president of Content and Media at Level 3, said in the blog post. "They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content."
Level 3 explained in the blog post that it has interconnection arrangements with 51 providers throughout the world, but has only seen persistent congestion on 12 of those connections. It is currently working with six providers to get enough capacity to alleviate the issue. But it said the other six providers, which Level 3 claims are broadband providers which have near monopolies in their markets, have refused to upgrade their networks. And this they claim is what is causing issues for customers.
The company said that most network interconnections operate at around 36 percent capacity, which allows for an easy flow of traffic between the networks. But on the six networks it claims are problematic, it said congestion has been around 90 percent for more than a year. At this level of congestion, the connection is saturated and packets are dropped often for several hours a day.
