When Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the ISP’s network, video performance improved immediately. Verizon subscribers aren’t so lucky. Although Netflix and Verizon confirmed on April 28 that they had struck a paid peering deal, performance continued to drop in May and could remain poor for months while the companies upgrade infrastructure. “Verizon FiOS is down two slots and now ranks behind DSL providers Frontier and Windstream,” Netflix wrote today after releasing its monthly speed index. In the US, Netflix performance on Verizon FiOS dropped from 1.99Mbps in April to 1.90Mbps in May, and performance on Verizon DSL dropped from 1.08Mbps to 1.05Mbps. This is the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISP’s network. The drops are small, but they show that the paid peering deal didn’t make any immediate impact.