Instead of staking out absolutist positions it would be helpful to come up practical solutions now. Some form of fast lanes is inevitable over time and just maybe it could improve the situation of people like me who would likely remain on the "normal speed" lanes.
I don't understand how in Bolivia I can pay that, and have exactly that with minimal fuss. Meanwhile I hear absolutely insane stuff coming from my friends ISPs in the US. I pay $90/month for a 2MB connection, and get precisely that, either for torrents, Netflix, PS4 online or plain old http downloads.
I can even call tech support here and have a live-person helping me figure out why my internet is not working immediately. No robots, no telephone-software redirects.
You guys don't have that level of quality because Comcast is bribing all of your appointed officials. There is no competition! My father in Boston just got internet and had to sign up with Comcast because there was literally no other choice where he lived. He paid for the service, and guess what 5 hours after the installation technician left the internet didn't work. He called them up, which was a 3 hour hold, and they wanted to charge him $80 for a technician visit. $80 FOR A TECHNICIAN VISIT, they didn't even want to check his internet remotely, like they do here in Bolivia. It's all nickle and diming, and you can't do shit about it.
The FCC is working for Comcast, not for the people. Don't you get that?
Exactly! Anyone who thinks fast lanes are necessary must not have looked at how the internet works in the rest of the world where we don't have such huge problems with net neutrality.
If you don't have a SLA, you're not paying for X/s. The cheap consumer plans only advertise the speed as a potential maximum with no guarantee. Moreover, they explicitly state that overuse will result in slower speeds.
So if you want X/s, then you'll need a stricter contract, and will have to pay a lot more than what you're doing now. Or, the ISP can request that upstream services subsidize the bandwidth for downstream customers and that way you won't have to pay more.
In the backwards-as-fuck US maybe - here they advertise that speed for at least 90% of the time of your monthly contract. Any time under in credited towards you with no fuss. One time I had a week of crap service, and they acknowledged it and gave me two weeks of free internet with no problems. So yes, we do get a SLA.
I think consumers that want that are being stupid, I'd much rather be able to work at higher speeds at night than have a network wide SLA that says we all get 5 M/s. I'd also much rather pay 20-30/mo for my internet than 60. Think about the ridiculous expense if they needed to engineer highways just to avoid the 2 hours of traffic every day. Would you really be rallying for a 12 lane highway that sits essentially empty most of the day? You're basically paying for a massive amount of stuff that goes unused 90+% of the time.
A bare minimum standard is that a line advertised as X meg downstream should be able to reach that speed more often than not.
I don't care what the ISPs think about this. Their sales concerns are their own.
Let's say a consumer pays for a 20MB/S connection with unlimited bandwidth, now the ISP is going to throttle all streaming content on there to say 2MB/S - except (for example for Netflix which has an agreement with the ISP) - so as a consumer you might want to use Amazon Prime or Hulu - but nope -- all of those services are throttled, only Netflix is going to get the full 20MB/S.
Now of course the big companies will pay not to be throttled, but where does this leave, small companies? What if next time your ISP throttle wikileaks, or some indie internet comic, or any other websites which it finds politically disagreeable?
If you want a cheaper slow lane, it sounds like you are expecting the Netflix users to subsidize you.
"I would love to have the people who are willing to pay for 1TB/m subsidize my slower tier."
But we're not talking about consumption, we're talking about the speed at which I can consume. If you pay for 1G/m and I pay for 1TB/m at 100mbps, I expect all content, no matter it's nature, be delivered at the same maximum capacity reaching 100mbps to you and me equally, no matter the content. I already pay more to be able to stream a mass of content but we still should enjoy equality of delivery of the content we choose to engage in, without a middle party deciding which of that is more important for us.
Actually, yes I would (not the OP). Packets go in, packets come out.