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Comment by foota | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this would work since you can't effectively measure bandwidth available without stressing the system?

You can't do it properly from an endpoint, but the ISPs are already monitoring it internally. They know when and where they have serious congestion.

This is precisely why ISP's should have to operate more transparently as a common carrier and not as a private business milking a cash cow.

If an electric utility company did the same, with 'up-to 240volts' - they'd get their ass sued out of existence. Why can't the gov't establish standards for such things, like a minimum speed (from the IPS's own servers of course, you cannot expect that they control it all).

They would just game it then and underinvest on peering (similar to what happened in the netflix/Comcast scenario). What good is 1gbit guaranteed to your ISP if the entire ISP only has 10mbps to the rest of the world?

Presumably peering congestion would be one of the regulated metrics, just like voltage would be for an electric utility.

Better than having 10mbps to your ISP and your ISP having 10mbps to the rest of the world, if you're paying for 100

Why not? If the ISP provides a server you can download a file from, you can see your speed, the ISP can see the speed. Yes there might be issues with your PC and such, but this can be easily tested.

That would be stressing the system. My point is as a consumer, you can't continuously measure your maximum bandwidth without using it all.

Well you always have Layer 1/2 data. DSL modems, cable, LTE ... will show diagnostic information on which you can estimate some bandwidth, more or less.

That doesn't help you figure out if there's congestion two hops away in the ISPs network due to them oversubscribing their backhaul links.

True. That's what speedtests are for. Ideally you have your own server, so that you can factor out at least one third party.

You are correct in theory.

However, the present system is so bad that it routinely fails at (eg) streaming Netflix even though this uses less than your advertised bandwidth (by a wide margin).

So at present, it would just be a matter of automatic documentation of failures -- and the situation would be much improved if we were up against the limit you propose.

Fair point.

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