Verizon (News - Alert) has quickly and quietly been looking to change at least a portion of its focus away from smartphones and mobile devices and spend a bit more time on the broadband side of the technology sector. That shift to a more Internet-central approach has not been one without a bit of pain. The latest pain for Verizon is the number of Internet ports that have experienced some serious slow down, especially when it comes to people who are trying to stream Netflix on their devices.

Verizon and the company it has partnered with in certain parts of the country are now pointing fingers at one another when it comes to blame. Netflix, which seems to be trying to repair the damage caused by some less than impressive PR moves over the last few years, is apparently pretty blameless in this situation, even if it is at the center of the fight.

The fight between Verizon and Cogent Communications has sprung up because of something called “peering.” Despite Verizon being one of the biggest cellular providers in the country and Cogent being one of the largest broadband providers, the companies are still engaging in the process that is considered rather arcane. The two companies peer to each other and share bandwidth at about 10 different ports in the United States. Cogent believes that Verizon is to blame for Internet slowdowns at those ports because they have allowed them to degrade.

Verizon claims that Cogent is basically overloading those ports because they are streaming content that is coming from Netflix through them at a rate that the bandwidth provider knows the ports can’t handle. Netflix’s popularity has been a bone of contention between ISPs for several years, but Verizon, especially has a problem with the service, because they actually operate a competitor.

Verizon has a 50 percent stake in Redbox and just launched a Redbox streaming video service. Because of this simple fact, the fight between Cogent and Verizon is likely to continue for quite a while.