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Comment by jetpacktuxedo | Hacker News Reader

No, you can't pay your ISP to get "faster internet", only to get more bandwidth between your wall and whatever backhaul provider owns the physical fiber lines. There is no way to make the internet "faster" other than reducing the number of hops you have to make to get to the destination, or by increasing the speed of packets on the networks, which should already be roughly speed of light. Therefore if they are proposing "fast lanes" it isn't about speeding you up, but rather about slowing everyone else down.

Net Neutrality doesn't prevent ISPs from selling more bandwidth to netflix, it only prevents ISPs from treating the traffic differently due to the identity of either the sender or the receiver. This means that Comcast can't slow your traffic down just because you are sending data to and receiving data from netflix instead of using Hulu (which they partially own).

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The article states, "All internet service offered in Washington would have to be free from blocking or throttling of legal online content. Nor could it be subject to a system of premium-priced “fast lanes” that offer better bandwidth to content providers that pay extra for the privilege."

So, the law does prevent ISPs from offering "faster" internet, however you define it. I still don't see the distinction between allowing consumers to pay for faster internet, but prohibiting content providers from doing the same thing. I pay more for 250 mbps. Why can't Comcast offer Netflix additional speed for more money, which would be illegal under this law? As I understand it, slowing down your competitors is already illegal under the FTC rules.

I think that "fast lanes" are about (say) Netflix paying for more downstream bandwidth.

That is not entirely correct. One can sort packets by their type and make sure those that require expedient delivery (VOIP calls, streamed video, gaming calls) get out first. Smart profiling at this level would certainly speed up the overall experience; some consumer-grade routers have settings exactly for this kind of thing. It's not much different that different kind of mail handled by postal services. And while postal services probably cannot easily speed up the average delivery time for all their mail, they can certainly deliver certain mail much faster than the rest of it. For a price.

I agree with you for the most part, but it's a bit disingenuous to interpret "Faster Internet" as just referring to latency, people are almost always talking about bandwidth + latency when using that term (really just how long files/webpages take to download on average - which equates to that).

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