With fast lane proposals, additional cost gets pushed back to successful websites. So for example, when Netflix pays a toll to Comcast, that additional cost is distributed among all the users of Netflix even if they're not doing business with Comcast. How does this work to support a market where consumer choice rewards efficient ISPs? It basically makes the market for network connections look more like the healthcare market where a fundamental problem in it's efficiency is how endpoint costs are highly disconnected from how efficient individual players in the market are operating.
I see a future where we are given a list of "premium" supported sites before making ISP decisions. I wonder if well end up with another dimension of price tier where one dimension is speed of service and the other is what major sites support it.
Then maybe they should advertise a different bandwidth?
The reality is these ISPs make money by overselling services to customers and not having to deliver on it. And now they're tacking on fees on the backend as well? Absurd.
Saying that the connection is technically capable of 20Mbit/s is different from guaranteeing 20Mbit/s in any possible usage situation. The problem with my analogy is that people generally have an idea that you can't go faster than maybe 80mph regardless of what car you have, but there is no way to know if the "up to 20Mbit/s" connection means actual usage will show 15, 5, or 1... So yeah, they should somehow be required to tell you, at least at signup, what the typical throughput on your connection will be.
Who would be "forcing" them to do this? In a sane world they'd already be selling these two types of services as two types of service--you either choose the "bursty" option or you choose the (more expensive) "streaming" option. Then they would know how to provision for each type of user, and they could price each option based on the capabilities of their infrastructure.
Of course, what would happen then, if you are correct, is that the absurdly high price of the "streaming" option would drive their customers to alternative providers wherever possible--or they would be forced to actually spend that extra money on infrastructure. So basically they are trying to obfuscate the issue because actually serving their customers' needs is way too much like work.
Will it really? Because every time someone talks about ISP costs, they remark that what's expensive is the last mile. That's the entire reason ISPs claim to be so much more expensive than enterprize providers, so they need higher prices.
Now they claim that the backbone is the expensive part?
The problem with the networks comcast and others currently maintain is they are saturated. And I'm not getting what I pay for as a result. They need a new pricing structure that properly values their product (bandwidth) and charges me for it.
Can anyone explain why the ISPs don't go down this road?
Of course, that's true for a lot of products, but the US ISP market in particular is problematic because there's little or no competition. And the big ISPs like Comcast spend a lot of money buying political support, so there's little effective regulation.
If Comcast doesn't want to or can't provide these speeds for general use, they shouldn't advertise these speeds for general use. Can you explain the problem with that logic?
