This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
We just dropped our ISP(Windstream) for never once giving us the bandwidth we are paying for. Their excuse was overhead. However I was on a call with their engineering dept and one of their guys read out the QOS and it was for less than what we are paying. When I brought that up they abruptly cut off everyone but the sales guy who continued to try to blow sunshine up my ass despite knowing it was all bullshit.
"Fast lanes" have always been bullshit.
If you're paying for 100mbps, and the person you're talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you're not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off. This reality where you can pay extra money to make sure the poors don't get in the way of your packets has never been the one we live in.
Of course, there are definitely people who are getting ripped off, but "fast lanes" are just an additional avenue by which to rip them off a little more; not a single provider who's currently failing to provide the speed they advertise is planning to suddenly spend money fixing that and offering a new tier on their suddenly-properly-provisioned internet, if only net neutrality would go away.
As Bill Burr said, I don't know all the ins and outs, but I know you're not trying to make less money.
Very rarely your are paying for 100Mbps. You are paying for "up to" 100Mbps.
If you're paying for 100mbps, and the person you're talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you're not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off.
That's only really true of you're relatively close to each other on the same ISP. The father apart and the more hops you need to make the less likely it becomes, through no fault of your ISP.
Incorrect, and that was exactly my point
This is like saying that if the fruit at a store is rotten sometimes, it's not the grocer's fault, because the fruit had to come a long way and went bad in transit. The exact job you are paying the ISP for, is to deal with the hops and give you good internet. It's actually a lot easier at the trunk level (because the pipes are bigger and more reliable and there are more of them / more redundancy and predictability and they get more attention.)
I won't say there isn't some isolated exception, but in reality it's a small small small minority of the time. Take an internet connection that's having difficulty getting the advertised speed and run mtr or something, and I can almost guarantee that you'll find that the problem is near one or the other of the ends where there's only one pipe and maybe it's having hardware trouble or individually underprovisioned or something.
Actually Verizon deliberately underprovisioning Netflix is the exception that proves the rule -- that was a case where it actually was an upstream pipe that wasn't big enough to carry all the needed traffic, but it was perfectly visible to them and they could easily have solved it if they wanted to, and chose not to, and the result was visibly different from normal internet performance in almost any other case.
Ehhh, I get what you are saying but I would rephrase the above poster's comment a little then. If a person is paying for 100Mbps and they are able to get/find a source or some combination of sources that are able to supply them 100mbps of data then that's what they should be getting. The easiest example being a torrent for popular Linux distros.
I personally think the solution to that should be some kind of regulatory minimum around the advertisement of speed or contractual service obligation. For example if a person pays for a 100Mbps connection then the ISP should be required to supply that speed at +/- 5% instantaneous and -.5% on average (because if you give them a range you know they will maintain the lowest possible speed to be in compliance).
Don't look too hard at my numbers, I pulled them out of my ass, but hopefully it gets across the idea.
Keep in mind that because few residential users max out capacity simultaneously the ISPs "overbook" capacity, and usually this works out because they have solid stats on average use and usually few people need the max capacity simultaneously.
Of course some ISPs are greedier than others and do it to the extreme where the uplink/downlink is regularly maxed out without giving anything near the promised bandwidth to a significant fraction of customers. The latter part should be disincentivized.
Force the ISPs to keep stats on peak load and how frequently their customers are unable to get advertised bandwidth, and if it's above some threshold it should be considered comparable to excess downtime, and then they should be forced to pay back the affected customers. The only way they can avoid losing money is by either changing their plans to make a realistic offer or by building out capacity.
