Yes, but the problem is on the ISP side. For example, lets assume a building with 10 apartments has guaranteed 100Mbit connection to the building.
If ISP was honest, they would sell 10Mbit connection to each apartment. What they do (at least here) is sell 100Mbit to each apartment and hope their usage isn't all at the same time since it can't support it.
I ended up paying more for a 200mbit connection straight to my apartment because of this. I was on a 500mbit connection before when working from home, then lockdowns started and everyone started to work from home and during work hours, if I would get 10-20mbit I would be happy. They sold me 500 but never had that capacity, so they 'blame' netflix and not them selling only what they can (like gyms, they sell over capacity and if for some reason all show up, they are screwed)
Yeah the real problem is that ISPs aren't offering partially dedicated connections like 10mbit/s "guaranteed" * and up to 100mbit/s. ISPs are basically lying to you and they blame the users that actually use what they are owed.
I disagree with this. You're touching on two separate issues.
The first is that many US broadband connections are on traditional cable systems (or HFC). And these are a shard bus design, meaning you and your neighbours are competing for bandwidth. This is a common cause of degredated connections.
Compare this to fiber The fiber connection isn't shared at all... until you reach some junction, exchange or node. There are various flavors of fiber (eg FTTH/FTTP, FTTN, FTTC).
This brings us to the second issue: bandwidth beyond the last mile is also oversubscribed and it makes zero sense to do it otherwise. Residential customers in particular just don't use that much bandwidth and they don't use it consistently. I mean a gigabit connection is enough for 30+ 4K streams at once at pretty much max quality. But being able to burst bandwidth for fast downloads is really nice.
They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to."
The amount of capacity required to guarantee speeds would be massive. And how far does that extend? Does the ISP have to maintain that capacity just within their network? Or would every peering connection also have to be able to handle 100% of subscriber bandwidth?
The whole idea quickly falls apart as soon as you look at it a little deeper.
> They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to."
No, the "up to" is written in such tiny print that it's practically invisible. It's not what people think they are buying.
The ethical thing to do would be to sell it as "X, bursts up to Y", with legislation ensuring that X is displayed at least as prominently as Y.
isp contracts usually include something called an Service Level Agreement (SLA) that gives room for this sort of service degredation.
maybe there should be some discussion over statistical properties of that degredation and minimum service levels, because ppl tend to watch tv at roughly the same time.
Instead of regulating the statistical properties of the degradation, what if we just required ISPs to refund customers for times when they tried to use the bandwidth they were sold but couldn’t? Maybe the refunds could be 1.2 times the original price of that bandwidth. So if there’s an outage, you don’t pay for that time. That might line up the incentives better.
cable customers routinely see service degredation (reduced bandwitdh, packet loss) at peak usage hours, because the lastmile topology is a shared resource (ring/bus) with an oversubscription ratio >20. (tbf docsis 3.1 did get it somewhat under control)
most (non gamer/tec) customers don't bother/notice unless it's so bad that their voip or netflix craps out. isp support will shift the blame to wifi (also shared resource) and noones the wiser.
That's an absurd proposition. If you can't guarantee to not oversubscribe at least 10mbit/s on a 100mbit/s plan what's the point of advertising it as such?
Oversubscription should be regulated and totally transparent to the customer. Something on the monthly statement like:
"You pay for symmetric gigabit internet access. You share this line with 4 customers, and load balancing means your service performance will be equally distributed among the users of the line at any given time. The internet egress point where you leave Honest Joe's network is a 25gbps connection and is shared by 382 other gigabit residential customers. The average load at egress is 14.5gps down, 5 gbps up."
Allowing customers to pay a premium for dedicated access is a net good as well, because that can finance infrastructure improvements.
It's greed and lack of transparency that causes shitty service. It's repeatedly merged isps that are so big that they can afford to not give a shit about the last mile.
The sick joke is the unused fiber capacity. Many of the large isps have residential fiber presence, but don't want to invest in towns under 100k people, so they leave the fiber to rot. A lot of ambitious small isps funded and deployed fiber throughout all sorts of places in small town America but didn't stipulate the use of the fiber when they sold out.
In theory they can, obviously. In practice if you pool 100's of users, the "regression towards the mean" kicks in with a vengeance and it almost never happens.
How do we know this? Well in other jurisdictions like Australia say (which is where I live), ISP's are required to guarantee a minimum peak period bandwidth. If their customers don't get it, they can complain to the government and _the government_ will prosecute the ISP.
The ISP's squealed like stuck pigs when this rule was implemented. What actually happened when it was introduced was nothing, apart from a few prosecutions when the ISP's lied. When I say "nothing" I don't mean absolutely nothing as every ISP had to label their wares with the real bandwidth and cap they would give you. For example, if you had a nominal 100Mbps internet link (which is the number they always quoted before the rule) an expensive ISP might say it was 95Mbps guaranteed. The cheap ISP, surprise surprise, might say they only guarantee 85Mbps on that same link. But no prices changed, and mostly no speeds changed. "Mostly" because a few liars had to stop lying and once the truth was visible the were driven out of the market.
Economic textbooks tell you a well informed market functions better than when there is an information imbalance between buyer and seller. All Australia did is correct that imbalance in the internet market, so it functioned a little better at matching buyer to seller.
But Australia went much further than that. There are no ISP monopolies in Australia, so there _always_ many alternatives for every retail purchaser. I won't going into how they achieved that, but I will tell you one consequence you might not expect. It means there is no need for net neutrality in Australia either. An ISP might advertise Netflix gets preferential treatment, perhaps Netflix traffic doesn't contribute to caps. That's all fair, but if an ISP penalised a customers Netflix viewing because Netflix didn't pay them a bribe - well churning to a new ISP is just a few clicks on a new ISP's web page. You don't have to ring up Comcast and plead your case - being able to change ISP's without contacting the old one is the law.
Australia solved it's internet delivery problems, including thorny problems like net neturality using the most basic of capitalist tools - putting systems and laws in place to ensure there is a highly functional market. It is remarkable how well capitalism works. It's amazing to many of us that the USA seems to prefer crony capitalism instead.
That's the joke. People and corporations streaming HD video use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth which require more hardware capacity and peering deals. I think it's not crazy to ask that they pay a fair price for it. As someone who doesn't stream HD video I would like to have cheaper connections available if I don't want to pay for the bandwidth usage of other customers.
Ballpark FMV for 1Mbps for a month is currently around $0.08/Mbps in the US at scale in carrier neutral datacenter.
If you watched a Netflix HD stream all month long, it would cost maybe $1.
But of course it doesn't actually cost Verizon or ATT or Cox that - Netflix almost assuredly *pays them* to carry that stream.
Blaming the users is a ridiculously bad take - the issue is that the ISP didn't invest in fixing their last mile, or is needlessly congested at their head end, and they could fix it for trivial amounts of money.
There are. There are 5Mbps/10Mbps connections, that while being unusable for streaming HD are FAR cheaper and usable for other services.
The consumer is paying the price of what they can get out of the connection. Conversely I pay extra (higher bandwidth pipe) so I can stream more HD videos, and even extra so I can do so without a overages fee per GB after a TB.
The consumer in this case just paid to have a bigger pipe (more HD videos) and a use more data (unlimited bandwidth fee extra).
Over $100 a month extra to stream more HD videos, and to not get double the bill just for going over on bandwidth.
>I would like to have cheaper connections available if I don't want to pay for the bandwidth usage of other customers.
The anti net neutrality argument is all about taking that freedom away from you. ISPs don't want to change their business model. They want to offer up to X mbit/s but they don't even want to guarantee 5 mbit/s. If there was net neutrality ISPs would be forced to offer plans that are only partially oversubscribed not 100% oversubscribed.
If you wanted a 5mbit/s plan the ISP would still oversubscribe and you would get screwed over by them.
