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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

In short: if you're in the US, you're paying your ISP for a certain amount of bandwidth, but your ISP is not giving it to you, because its connections to middlemen like Level 3 are maxed out. Level 3 proposes to split the cost of expanding those connections (as is common), but your ISP refuses unless it gets additional payment from Level 3, Netflix, or someone else. Meanwhile, you don't get the bandwidth you've purchased from your ISP.

That doesn't seem right to me.

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Disclosure: I work at a small ISP. We mostly compete with Frontier DSL and Comcast Business Class.

If you're buying residential it's safe to assume you're purchasing a burst-able speed and downloads/uploads aren't going to sustain that for hours on end.

Much in the same way that a Utility Company probably isn't gathering enough water for everyone to be maxing their pipes 24/7, residential ISP's don't operate under the assumption that every consumer will have maxed their connection at the same time, and they shouldn't have too. Smart traffic shaping and peering arrangements gives ISP's room to compete.

If consumers could afford a dedicated 35x15 connection they'd have a T1. When you're buying copper it's safe to assume it's going to be over saturated.

The real problem is ISP's for the most part don't compete. They zone of sections for eachother and rack in as much dough as they can. Consumers aren't informed about the quality of different types of connections vs others, and buy based off the cheapest Mbps down/up they can get.

in the same way that a Utility Company probably isn't gathering enough water for everyone to be maxing their pipes 24/7, residential ISP's don't operate under the assumption that every consumer will have maxed their connection at the same time

That's not what's happening, though. What's happening is that the ISPs have not provisioned enough capacity to serve the actual aggregate demand at peak times. The hydraulic analogy would be if water pressure dropped every day between 0800 and 0900 because everyone was having their morning shower. That would not be acceptable to customers, and nor is the situation with ISPs.

Exactly. Great analogy!

What's more, the utility company is getting water through a pipe that goes to a middleman near a river, but that pipe doesn't have enough capacity to deliver the water necessary for all utility customers to take their morning shower at the same time. So what does the utility company do? It blames the middleman and the river for "sending too much water"... and demands payment from them!!!

As I see the graph in the post it looks like the customers have full pressure only between 3 and 4AM. In the rest part of the day they are struggling to get their shower.

The congestion in the news is at the interconnection between networks, not the last mile. This is why Netflix's deal with Comcast resulted in immediate relief without a massive rollout to upgrade last mile infrastructure.

Cable providers have a large amount of capacity provisioned to their customers and are paid a fortune by their subscribers and municipalities, using the same network for data and cable services. They just want you to use their services as opposed to a competitor. Not only that they have turned the tables forcing content providers to pay them to deliver bits.

With respect the economics of a small ISP reselling transit aren't comparable to this situation.

Realistically, we're talking about customers who are paying for 10+ Mbps and were getting less than 2 Mbps.

... and almost all the time.

What is cheaper? Actually giving customers the bandwidth they are paying for, or maintaining a political lobby apparatus that allows you to remain a monopoly in your industry? Do the math.

The math has already been done. Lobbying has a 22,000% ROI. No brainer.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forget-s...

For once, I am glad to be living in a densely populated European country. We can easily switch ISP's if one decides to pull these kinds of dirty tricks.

Well, except that the local telco (e.g. BT in the UK) almost certainly has monopoly over the last mile of your connection, regardless of who your ISP is (they rent the last mile from e.g. BT Openreach or maybe TalkTalk) and it's not uncommon for them to refuse to fix congestions at their exchanges (or even admit their presence) for extended periods. So, you know, it's not like it's all utopistic here or something.

The worst bit is that OpenReach are publishing data where they will wire the cabinets, but are hiding information when the cabinets will be wired to your house.

They are actually going to court for this false advertising.

Don't Virgin use their own last mile for fibre?

If by their own you mean one of numerous other cable companies that they purchased then yes. There used to be a plethora of small cable companies in the UK. Now there is only Virgin.

The widespread availability of high quality ADSL does seem to do a good job of keeping them honest though. I've been a pretty satisfied customer of them for many years now.

Virgin offer a "cable" service which is available where they have cable television (not a wide distribution area), and that this is what they refer to as their fibre service.

Virgin also resell the same ADSL that everyone else does (complete with BT line rental).

While it's true that the average population density of the US is low compared to much of the rest of the world, that is due to including the US's vast empty spaces, mainly in the West. The vast majority of US citizens live in densely populated areas - just like the rest of the First World, only with crappier internet.

The population density is still radically different even when you cut the vast empty spaces between cities in the west.

I live in a midwestern suburb. In the land area that my house uses, you'd have 10-20 families in Madrid. Our idea of dense shopping is a two story mall, not stores under every residential area. And don't get me started with mandated parking spots in strip malls that aren't ever half full.

So unless you live in Manhattan or downtown Chicago, you don't see the same levels of population density.

Single fami

Population density is still a red-herring in this discussion though. Internet connections in Manhattan are worse than those in small cities in Romania, yet Manhattan is 3-12 times more dense than Timișoara and Bucharest.

We have choices in most large markets in the US but the one common factor is horrible customer service. You're likely to pay a lot for high performance.

yeah, I too thought the EU was the land of (regulation) milk and honey yet in Germany you have Deutsche Telekom and those that resell Deutsche Telekom with non-performance related value adds.

funny how the blau.de "3.5G" connection is wildly faster and less latent than the cable modem connection. actually it's kinda sad: 5GB for €10/month?

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