Comment Difference is the route, not the protocol (Score 2) 398
The reason the VPN connection went fast isn't that EEEVILLL Verizon was throttling the customer's Netflix connections by doing deep packet routing and didn't do that to the VPN. The pipes Netflix bought to deliver movies to their paying customers who use Verizon weren't big enough to carry all the demand, at least at the peering* point that customer's traffic went through, while the pipes they bought or peering they got for free were big enough to reach the VPN endpoint, and the VPN endpoint had bought enough bandwidth from their ISPs to get from there to their peering point with Verizon, so there was enough bandwidth on the whole route to carry the movie that way.
That's not to say that there aren't ISPs harassing particular content (there was at least one well-publicized case a few years ago of some telco ISP blocking VOIP, and of course most of the cable modem and some DSL providers block home web servers), but this ain't one of them.
(*Peering unfortunately means two different things here - it's giving each other service for free, and it's having BGP-managed interconnections, usually at the big internet exchange locations, to pass traffic, not necessarily for free.)