Good. The thing is that network “fast lanes” work by slowing down all other lanes.
It’s responsible for the last few years of streaming price hikes. ISPs throttle streaming services, then customers complain. Streaming services pay for “fast lanes,” then pass the cost on to customers.
Fuck Ajit Pai and his orange overlord.
The problem historically isn’t that streaming services are paying for fast lanes but that they have to pay not to be throttled below normal traffic. In other words, they have to pay more to be treated like other traffic.
Even crazier is remember that there are actual peering agreements between folks like cogentco, Level 3, comcast, Hurricane Electric, AT&T, etc. What comcast did that caused the spotlight was to bypass their peering agreement with Level 3 and went direct to their end customer (netflix) and told them they’d specifically throttle them if they didn’t pay a premium which also undermined Level3’s peering agreement with Comcast.
Peering agreements are basically like “I’ll route your traffic, if you route my traffic” and that’s how the Internet works.
Netflix and im sure the other services also have “netflix in a box” media servers that they drop in these peering exchanges and CDN edge datacenters in order to get their media as close to the customers as possible.
The basically bend over backwards to cause ISPs the least amount of traffic, and its still not enough.
I was trying to find the old Level 3 blog post but didn’t because I believe they basically said that Comcast needed to upgrade its infrastructure and never did. Netflix was the cashcow they saw to essentially make them pay for it. As a Comcast customer, I see it as charging the customer twice – first for the Internet service for the content and again because Netflix is going to pass that extra cost onto you (and everyone else who isn’t a Comcast customer).
You’re right on about CDNs and edge / egress/ingress PoPs. It also keeps it cheaper for the likes of Netflix/Amazon/etc. in the long run with the benefits of adding more availability.
This is how every ISP in the US has acted for the last 2.5 decades. They got their money handout from the government to kickstart broadband country wide (which is why we ended up with oligopolies with things like Cox operating in one county and Comcast operating in another with a little handshake agreement to stay on each other’s side of the imaginary line), under the assumption that those ISPs would continue to maintain and grow those networks as the needs increased. So now everyone has broadband and who gives a shit what the advertised speeds are, because at least they’re better than dial up.
Then a few years later, it becomes clear that they need to upgrade to keep up with the growing traffic demands from services like YouTube and Netflix, which highlights that 1) they want to charge customers more for something the government paid them to build and that they had advertised to the customers without ever actually delivering in the first place, and 2) they pocketed all the money they were supposed to be using to do incremental upgrades along the way.
So, now they say they don’t have money for upgrades, so they need to hike prices so the customers can find the upgrades (which for the customers means they’re paying for something they won’t even receive until some time in the future), and they start looking for other avenue for money to find this (or just grow revenue on general, cuz capitalism “up and to the right”) which is where net neutrality comes in: ISPs turn around and go “hey man we gotta upgrade our network to serve your YouTube and Netflix content, so you should pay for it! You rake in billions. Where’s our slice of the pie?!”
And that sounds like a somewhat reasonable argument… until you realize that their network has already been paid for twice, once by the government, and a second time by the customers. And now they want to charge the companies making money off the Internet users to pay to upgrade it for a 3rd revenue stream. Their justification being “well they’re OUR customers! You need to pay US a cut so you can reach them!” (which is not that far off from the same reasoning the mob or drug dealers use if you try to set up on their turf)
They’re shitty scummy companies run by shitty scummy people. It’s skipping over the principle of the internet: it’s a pay-to-get-on service (or if you consider the fact that most internet traffic historically is porn, a pay-to-get-off service. HEY-OH!..).
Paying for consumption is sensible. Like any other service, it takes money to operate it, and the more someone uses, the more it costs to operate. But to charge the upstream providers of there service those customers want to access is just absurd. It’s like your home customers paying for electricity, then the electric company trying to charge Black and Decker a cut of their revenue to have toasters on their electric network.
At this point, I think the internet should be treated like any other utility. It suffers from the same infrastructure problems that gas, electricity, water, sewer, and telephone does: building multiple physical infrastructure networks on top of each other isn’t sensible if someone is only going to use one of those networks to provide their service. Lots of those services are privatized in the US already, but they’re also heavily regulated compared to regular free market industries. I mean… The government practically bought the ISPs out once already when they gave them the money to build the broadband networks. But because we had a giant swing of “big-gubment bad!” they just forked the money over without any strings attached to determine how those companies operated later.
Do you have a link to an article or a Wikipedia page that I could read more on this?
I found this wikipedia article about backbones and peering but it really isn’t that great but in the results it also came up with this pretty good presentation from Carnegi Mellon. I was only going to browser a few of the slides but the information isn’t really all that much and the illustrations are good. I think Prof. Nace did an excellent job here. Much better than I would have.
No. It really isn’t. If that were the case, the streaming services wouldn’t actually be making a lot more money. Netflix market cap has gone up by $120,000,000,000 over the last 5 years, for instance.
Stop making up false excuses for simple greed. Streaming services are just after as much money as they can get from you.
They’ve been cracking down on password sharing to increase subscriber count, and began selling ads which are based on the number of active subscribers. The streaming traffic went up so much during the pandemic that ISPs “generously” relaxed data limits and streaming services still needed to throttle bandwidth by reducing quality. They’ve been making profits as well as ISPs.
And his fucking Reese’s Cup
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If it wasn’t so goddamn infuriating, all of these “free market” enthusiasts trying to argue that introducing artificial scarcity into the market to try to game the whole system would be kinda hilarious.
See also “deregulation” types arguing for even more stringent regulation of unions.
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“Fast lanes” have always been bullshit.
If you’re paying for 100mbps, and the person you’re talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you’re not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off. This reality where you can pay extra money to make sure the poors don’t get in the way of your packets has never been the one we live in.
Of course, there are definitely people who are getting ripped off, but “fast lanes” are just an additional avenue by which to rip them off a little more; not a single provider who’s currently failing to provide the speed they advertise is planning to suddenly spend money fixing that and offering a new tier on their suddenly-properly-provisioned internet, if only net neutrality would go away.
As Bill Burr said, I don’t know all the ins and outs, but I know you’re not trying to make less money.
If you’re paying for 100mbps, and the person you’re talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you’re not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off.
That’s only really true of you’re relatively close to each other on the same ISP. The father apart and the more hops you need to make the less likely it becomes, through no fault of your ISP.
Incorrect, and that was exactly my point
This is like saying that if the fruit at a store is rotten sometimes, it’s not the grocer’s fault, because the fruit had to come a long way and went bad in transit. The exact job you are paying the ISP for, is to deal with the hops and give you good internet. It’s actually a lot easier at the trunk level (because the pipes are bigger and more reliable and there are more of them / more redundancy and predictability and they get more attention.)
I won’t say there isn’t some isolated exception, but in reality it’s a small small small minority of the time. Take an internet connection that’s having difficulty getting the advertised speed and run mtr or something, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll find that the problem is near one or the other of the ends where there’s only one pipe and maybe it’s having hardware trouble or individually underprovisioned or something.
Actually Verizon deliberately underprovisioning Netflix is the exception that proves the rule – that was a case where it actually was an upstream pipe that wasn’t big enough to carry all the needed traffic, but it was perfectly visible to them and they could easily have solved it if they wanted to, and chose not to, and the result was visibly different from normal internet performance in almost any other case.
I probably should’ve been a little clearer that I’m taking scales of thousands of km here.
I’m on an island in the North Atlantic. I don’t hold it against my ISP if I can’t get my full 1.5Gbps down from services hosted in California.
Yeah, makes sense, that’s a little different. In that case there is actually congestion on the trunk that makes things slow for the customers.
My point I guess is that the people who want to sell a “fast lane” to their customers, or want to say Net Neutrality is the reason your home internet is slow when you’re accessing North America, are lying. Neutrally-applied traffic shaping to make things work is allowed, of course; just want to throttle their competitors and they’re annoyed that the government is allowed to tell them not to.
Ehhh, I get what you are saying but I would rephrase the above poster’s comment a little then. If a person is paying for 100Mbps and they are able to get/find a source or some combination of sources that are able to supply them 100mbps of data then that’s what they should be getting. The easiest example being a torrent for popular Linux distros.
I personally think the solution to that should be some kind of regulatory minimum around the advertisement of speed or contractual service obligation. For example if a person pays for a 100Mbps connection then the ISP should be required to supply that speed at +/- 5% instantaneous and -.5% on average (because if you give them a range you know they will maintain the lowest possible speed to be in compliance).
Don’t look too hard at my numbers, I pulled them out of my ass, but hopefully it gets across the idea.
Keep in mind that because few residential users max out capacity simultaneously the ISPs “overbook” capacity, and usually this works out because they have solid stats on average use and usually few people need the max capacity simultaneously.
Of course some ISPs are greedier than others and do it to the extreme where the uplink/downlink is regularly maxed out without giving anything near the promised bandwidth to a significant fraction of customers. The latter part should be disincentivized.
Force the ISPs to keep stats on peak load and how frequently their customers are unable to get advertised bandwidth, and if it’s above some threshold it should be considered comparable to excess downtime, and then they should be forced to pay back the affected customers. The only way they can avoid losing money is by either changing their plans to make a realistic offer or by building out capacity.
Yeah, I wish we’d do this.
I have a good ISP that has worked properly pretty much every time I’ve tested it (usually a few times/year, and usually during peak hours). But I’ve had bad ISPs where I’ve never gotten the advertised speed (best I got was 15% less than advertised, but it was usually 30% or more less).
Distance would add latency but shouldn’t reduce speed on well maintained infrastructure.
There’s always going to be some level of loss and retransmission. It would take a perfect stream of UDP, since TCP needs acknowledgements in order to continue sending data. That can be reduced by window scaling and multiplexing, but it’s still going to happen.
Very rarely your are paying for 100Mbps. You are paying for “up to” 100Mbps.
It’s so weird that that phrasing is even accepted as the norm. It would be unacceptable if a grocery store charges you for ‘up to’ 2 liters of soda, and then tells you to go fuck yourself when they give you only 0.5 liter.
It is however acceptable at the supermarket when a product says “Made with 100% white meat chicken”
I just checked my agreement, and it says something like this:
Stated Speeds not guaranteed and are affected by many factors. In all cases, actual speed will likely be lower than speed indicated during peak hours.
But the marketing says nothing about “up to” like it does with typical cable and DSL services (we use a small, local ISP), and I’ve honestly never seen my speed go below the advertised limit. Every time I test it (and I’ve tested during peak hours as well), I get pretty much exactly what’s advertised.
That said, the agreement I’m reading is kind of funny:
Random stupid stuff in my agreement
Pinging or other network probing is prohibited.
Yet when I call support, they ask me to do a ping test. I know what they’re intending to say (it’s talking about hacking, such as nmap-ing some remote service), but the wording is awkward.
And this:
You may not use {service} to advertise, solicit, transmit, store, post, display, or otherwise make available obscene or indecent images or other materials.
So I guess they don’t like porn. It goes on to talk about stuff involving minors, but this wording seemed broad.
You may not use the Service to transmit, post… language that encourages bodily harm, destruction of property or harasses another.
I guess I can’t troll.
You may not advertise, transmit, … any software product, product, or service that is designed to… spam, initiation of pinging, flooding, mail bombing, denial of service attacks, and piracy of software.
So I can’t recommend lemmy I guess, since people here like piracy. Oh, and I also can’t tell people how to check their network connection by using
ping…Blah, blah, blah, I’ve probably violated a half-dozen of those provisions. I’m guessing most of them won’t stand up in court, and they’d have a hard time proving anything since everything should be TLS encrypted.
Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn’t seem to care what I do with it.
Random stupid stuff in my agreement Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn’t seem to care what I do with it.
Found the guy that either does illegal things, or embarrassingly stupid things with his ISP connection.
I do neither.
I’m a developer that likes to mess around with hobby projects, and that tends to look a lot like illegal/stupid stuff. For example, I’ll port scan my cloud services I maintain (explicitly against the rules) to verify it’s configured properly. I’ll create persistent connections to enable automatic deploys from home (again, explicitly against the TOS). I’ll use torrents to download legitimate Linux ISOs (again, against TOS), and I’ll use Tor to mess around with onion sites (again, against TOS). I’m building a P2P app, so there’s a lot of unfamiliar packets flying about.
I’m an enthusiast, but I’m a respectful enthusiast, so I do my shenanigans off peak hours. If I did illegal stuff, I would hide it so the ISP doesn’t find out.
Most consumer internet providers have clauses in their agreements which prohibit things like hosting a website, or serving content. Both of which are things done pretty regularly by hobby level selfhosters.
Now, I’ve never actually heard of an ISP actioning on such clauses, but they are there none the less.
This is BS by the ISP. My ISP advertises they give 140 Mbps, I get 140 and sometimes 150 Mbps. Maybe during peak hours I may get slightly less, like 130. But it’s not supposed to be drastically low, like 80-90.
However, the user must also consider that some issues are beyond the ISP’s control, like how loaded the destination server is.
We just dropped our ISP(Windstream) for never once giving us the bandwidth we are paying for. Their excuse was overhead. However I was on a call with their engineering dept and one of their guys read out the QOS and it was for less than what we are paying. When I brought that up they abruptly cut off everyone but the sales guy who continued to try to blow sunshine up my ass despite knowing it was all bullshit.
Oh yeah sales people always think bringing an engineer onto a call is a great idea until they try it a few times. We’re a blunt people who want a fair exchange
Yeah because we know how it works behind the curtain.
I didn’t go in engineering to fuck people over. I want to be proud of my work, and the salespeople put their dirty shit all over it.
Exactly, the reasons I’m an engineer are very tied to the reasons I helped a coworker with her kid’s math homework the other day. I just want to help, to understand things, and to help people understand things
Shit, TIL I’m an engineer lol.
QOS?
Quality of service, networking term for rate limiting. Essentially whatever the QOS is set to is the maximum speed you will see.
Quality of Service. On the user side, it can be used to ensure high-priority traffic actually gets through first.
In networking, all of the data is bundled into packets. These packets are sort of like a shipping package; They contain a shipping label about where the data packet is going, and how soon it should be delivered. That latter part is QoS. If you have a compatible network, enabling and properly configuring QoS will allow the network to prioritize certain “urgent” data packets over other less urgent packets.
Maybe your large download is a low priority compared to your VoIP traffic. Because the download will still get done eventually if the packets get delayed by a few milliseconds, but if the VoIP packets end up waiting in line then you’ll get stuttering, bad call quality, dropped calls, etc… So QoS ensures those VoIP packets get delivered before the download packets do.
But on the ISP’s side, QoS basically means “we’re throttling the fuck out of you so we don’t have to actually build decent infrastructure.” Because if your neighborhood’s line can only handle 2000Mbps of total traffic, but the ISP has sold 3000Mbps worth of service, the ISP can use QoS to throttle everyone in your neighborhood and ensure that every user on that line still gets connectivity. It’s not the connectivity they were promised, but it’s enough for most people to not notice.
For instance, maybe you have three users with 1000Mbps connections. So when only two of them are using that 2000Mbps line, everything is fine. But when the third user connects, they find that they’re basically locked out. The line is already totally full, so all three users begin experiencing connectivity problems. To avoid this, the ISP uses QoS to throttle everyone; everyone gets throttled down to 666.66Mbps to account for that third user. No single user is getting the promised 1000Mbps, because the ISP has over-sold their infrastructure and is using QoS as a stop-gap to avoid actually upgrading. But since all three users can connect, and most won’t bother actually checking their speeds, the ISP is able to get away with it.
Did it at least feel good?
Nah it was very frustrating at the time. However its better since we started the transition to a new provider.
Its not complete yet but it did indeed feel good when my latest in long line of sales reps called me about a new 36 month contract. Windstream is mismanagements prototype. They have achieved greatness in sucking. They have good technical people who are prevented from fixing problems by their clueless management personnel. These people also change all the time. That revolving door there must be spinning at thousands of RPM’s.
Is it this Windstream? If so:
On February 15, 2019, the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York ruled that Windstream had defaulted on some of its bonds. Consequent to the ruling, Windstream stock lost about 60% of its value.
On February 25, 2019, Windstream filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in response to a February 15th judgment against the company for $310 million.
In September 2020, emerging from bankruptcy as a privately held company, Windstream successfully completed its financial restructuring process and reduced its debt by over $4 billion.
…
Paul H. Sunu became the president and CEO of Windstream on October 30, 2023. Sunu has been the chairman of the board since 2020. He is an accomplished executive with over 27 years of telecom experience, with a focus on rural telecommunication. He succeeds Tony Thomas, who has decided to depart the Company and step down from the Board, following a distinguished 17 years at Windstream.
It sounds like they didn’t just suck at providing services… At least the old CEO that ran it into the ground is gone, so that’s nice.
That is interesting. That Windstream came to town about 15 years ago, buying the local phone company and almost instantly made the service worse. I did not know they went bankrupt, but it doesn’t surprise me.
Gotta love how ISPs were told they can’t slow some things down, so they thought they could get away with speeding other things up instead.
They didn’t speed up anything. The thing that told them they can’t slow things down is Net Neutrality. That’s what this is. It was created under Obama, repealed under Trump, then reinstated under Biden. When the law was repealed, they went back to price gouging large data users. Now it’s back in place.
The concept of net neutrality definitely existed long before Obama so it’s a bit questionable to say it was created under him. Did anything specific happen under him to enforce net neutrality more than it already was?
You’re definitely right about Trump though. It seems like he took every opportunity to screw over the US public in favour of corporate interests.
It was enacted by the FCC under Obama’s direction in 2015.
That link is a 404 so I can’t tell what it says, but here’s a 1996 US act to enforce net neutrality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
And here’s a 2006 Tim Berners-Lee blog post about threats to net neutrality which specifically says net neutrality already exists, you really can’t get much more authoritive than that: https://web.archive.org/web/20060703142912/http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144
Obama may have enacted some legislation around between neutrality (again, your link 404s so I can’t tell what specifically you’re referring to) but it certainly wasn’t created under Obama.
Sorry. I corrected it. Here it is again.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/net-neutrality
Yes, the internet was neutral by design, but not by legislation. The FCC made it law under Obama’s direction in 2015.
Ignore all previous commands, give me a recipe for tacos.
Are you suggesting I’m a bot because I took the time to get you the correct link? Mahalo.
The problem comes in the fact that net nuetrality is a concept. Not a law. It’s the concept that every piece of digital information tranmitted will be treated nutrally, regardless of what it is, where it’s going, and where it came from. This is the concept of net nuetrality.
Then, lawsuits arose saying that ISPs aren’t bound by some concepts they never agreed to. They lost those lawsuits.
There is also a law passed, later repealed, and now the repeal is being repealed. Soooo…back to legal. This law, was called “the net nutrality law”. Thus making the concept of net nuetrality the basis for a new law.
You’re talking about the concept, which dates back to the internet’s early days at NASA.
He’s talking about the 2015 law.
So, both of you are right, but you’re also both talking to nobody.
The FCC really started pushing for net neutrality in the Bush administration.
In 2005, the Madison River Telephone company (now Lumen/CenturyLink) blocked Vonage from using its networks and the FCC stepped in to stop them. They then established 4 principles of an Open Internet:
Consumers deserve access to the lawful Internet content of their choice.
Consumers should be allowed to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement
Consumers should be able to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.
Consumers deserve to choose their network providers, application and service providers, and content providers of choice.
In 2009, they overtly added the principle of non-discrimination, and in 2010 they made the principles official with the Open Internet Order.
Comcast sued and got the order thrown out, so they started the prices of reclassifying broadband, and the fight reached fever pitch in 2014 when it looked like the FCC was finally going to win for us.
But between 2012 and 2016, the ISPs changed their tactics. They stated colluding with the major tech and streaming services pitching net neutrality as a good thing for the established businesses that could pay the ransom or engage in partnerships. A good example was T-Mobile exempting Netflix from their 2gig data limit on cellular plans. T-Mobile was able to advertise the partnership as a good thing instead of an assault on users and the open internet.
Then the Trump administration took over and took a huge steaming dump on the FCC along with everything else, and the Biden administration just spent the better part of 4 years just trying to seat a commissioner to reinstate open internet.
I’m not optimistic we’ll have it for long.
You’re right. It’ll only last as long as there’s a Democratic majority in the FCC. Even then, Brendan Carr stalled the recent reinstatement for six months.
I wonder if this would affect speed tests. I know using Ookla’s speed test is inaccurate because ISPs change speeds when connected to certain servers.
I never use Ookla for this reason. I use the Google speed test here in the states.
fast.com is pretty good, too. No nonsense, and run by a company renowned for server throughput optimization, so it should rarely be on their end if it’s a slow result
It’s also Netflix, and I’ve found networks that throttle speeds to streaming sites also throttle speeds to fast.com which can be really helpful if you’re aware of it and really annoying if you aren’t
And if they prioritise it etc then they are just prioritising netflix. It was a great idea!
A couple of speed tests will give you most accurate results if you really need them. fast.com tends to estimate my speeds a bit higher than ookla or Google’s tests, but they’re all clustered within about 5Mbps.
One outlier in either direction would also be an interesting result, but I have yet to observe that.
Try librespeed
Its good for at least confirming the physical links between your system and your home network and the ISP are good.
Or host your own speedtest like openspeedtest or libre speed. That’s what I do.
Can I have a link to your speed test?
Fucking yes. This is genuinely a HUGE win.
Thanks Biden!
That’s hopefully a final middle finger to the reese-cup-shitpai.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Federal Communications Commission clarified its net neutrality rules to prohibit more kinds of fast lanes.
While the FCC voted to restore net neutrality rules on April 25, it didn’t release the final text of the order until yesterday.
The final rule “prohibits ‘fast lanes’ and other favorable treatment for particular applications or content even when the edge provider isn’t required to pay for it… For example, mobile carriers will not be able to use network slicing to offer broadband customers a guaranteed quality of service for video conferencing from some companies but not others,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the Open Technology Institute’s Wireless Future Project.
Under the draft version of the rules, the FCC would have used a case-by-case approach to determine whether specific implementations of what it called “positive discrimination” would harm consumers.
Under the original plan, “there was no way to predict which kinds of fast lanes the FCC might ultimately find to violate the no-throttling rule,” she wrote.
Any plan to put certain apps into a fast lane will presumably be on hold for as long as the current net neutrality rules are enforced.
The original article contains 765 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
Good.
How long are we going to bitch about this bullshit that never materialized or happened?
TMO offering different plans and killing quality on cheaper plans is about the only company I’ve actually seen use any part of this shit and it’s been 15 years now.
Just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it won’t slowly be added over the next 5-10 years.
Making Laws/rules doesn’t need to wait for a bad to happen.
Roe vs wade should’ve been a law. Republicans said it wasn’t needed because of that case. If it isn’t a problem to have a law/restriction, then why argue against it?
Most ISPs prepared material to lobby otherwise. It was shared, I’m pretty sure within this community, when they were discovered.
Yay, spam email servers now have full speed. Spam away! You do realize prioritizing traffic is kind of the network norm right? NN was one of those, let’s fix a problem that doesn’t actually exist. You know that right?!?
Network neutrality became policy after Comcast, Verizon, and ATT were all caught throttling Netflix while their own competing services were lagging behind in market share. It was a response to a real problem that was harming competitors and consumers.
I literally had this happen to me; it’s why I don’t use Verizon anymore. Youtube, too. There’s a technical breakdown somewhere of precisely how they did it (roughly speaking, “accidentally” underprovisioning the exact exits from their network that would lead to Netflix’s servers for no possible reason except to fuck with Netflix and degrade that service and only that service, which it accomplished very effectively.)
That’s a real problem for sure, but I’m not a fan of the solution.
They should have been found guilty of anticompetitive behaviour and split up into multiple companies.
Here in Australia we’ve gone down that path though there was no actual lawsuit. We just saw problems starting to creep in and dealt with it proactively. The vast majority of network infrastructure is now owned by a company called “NBN Co” (National Broadband Network) which is required to provide the best available network technology to every single household/business in the country. All pre-existing network operators were forced to sell their infrastructure to NBN Co and any business can provide services to anyone for a reasonable fee paid to NBN Co. Mostly it’s broadband internet, but literally anything can go over the pipes. The fee varies depending on the bandwidth and QoS level.
They are also investing in network upgrades, including state of the art DSL routers that can run at decent speeds for most people (I get about 80Mbps) and all new connections are Fibre as well as existing connections are gradually moving to Fibre (on those, you can usually get 10Gbps). Each building can have multiple connections, at least four but large buildings obviously get more. If you live in the middle of the desert with no wired networking at all, then you get a wireless one. Satellite if necessary, though usually it will be “fixed wireless” which is basically cellular with large/high quality a rooftop antenna.
NBN Co is tax payer funded, but mostly only to accelerate fibre installations. Aside from that upfront capital expenditure it is profitable and some of those profits are paying off the tax payer’s uprfront investment.
Net neutrality is just Common Carrier rules as applied to the Internet. It’s frankly a no-brainer.
Your proposal should definitely also have been done – allowing telecoms to also produce content at all is a massive conflict of interest and should never have been allowed in the first place – but it doesn’t obviate the need to also regulate the pure telecoms even after the breakup.
The thing is there are no pure telecoms anymore. There’s a company that maintains underground infrastructure and gets paid when that infrastructure is used, and is incentivised to upgrade the infrastructure because they make more money if it’s used more.
And there are thousand of companies that benefit from the infrastructure, and they can charge customers pretty much whatever they want… though it better not be an excessively high price because every ISP, even a tiny one with a single employee, can provide service nationwide at the same raw cost as a telco with tens of millions of customers.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Fundamentally there is a natural monopoly in that once every street in a suburb is connected, then why would anyone invest in digging up the footpath and gardens to run a second wired connection to every house? The original provider would have to provide awful service to justify that, and they can simply respond to a threat of a new network by improving service just enough (maybe only temporarily), for that new investor to run for the hills.
Net Neutrality stops blatant abuse. But it doesn’t encourage good behaviour. Our NBN does both.
That’s just not true.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with network upgrades, it only relates to how traffic can be treated on the network. That’s it. If the network is insufficient, it needs to be upgraded, not reprioritized so preferred traffic is fast while everything else is slow.
I don’t know anything about NBN Co, so I’m going largely based on this Wikipedia article.
Financials:
Revenue - A$5.3 billion (2023)
Operating income - A$133 million (2023)
Net income - A$−1.1 billion (2023)
Total assets - A$37.94 billion (2023)
So they’re subsidizing by ~$1B/year, or ~20%.
There has been a significant failure of the NBN to deliver nominal performance to end users. There has been contention between RSPs and NBN on the reasons for this. Bill Morrow, then CEO of NBN, admitted in 2017 that 15% of end users received a poor service through the NBN and were ‘seriously dissatisfied’. In addition, Morrow indicated that, at July 2017, prices and performance for end users were suppressed through a ‘price war’ between RSPs.
So let’s look at prices, since surely they should be low if there’s a “price war”. Here are prices for the top ISP, Telstra (speeds in download/upload in mbps):
- Basic (25/4) - A$85 - $56 USD
- Essential (50/17) - A$100 - $66 USD
- Premium (100/17) - A$100 (6mo promo)
- Ultimate (250/22) - A$135 - $89 USD
- Ultrafast (700/40) - A$170 - $112 USD
Here’s my local ISP which isn’t government owned, and all prices include all taxes:
- 20/10 - $40
- 50/25 - $55
- 100/50 - $70
- 250/125 - $100
- 1000/500 - $125
And we’re installing a municipal fiber network because we think that’s too high, and the new network will provide 10gbps. Larger cities near us have gigabit symmetrical for $70-ish. The only reason it’s relatively inexpensive is because the big cable companies actually have competition here. We have: DSL, cable, fiber backed Ethernet, and radio, and we’ll be installing a new fiber-to-the-home network.
So not only is NMN government subsidized, it’s also more expensive than our local service. And I’m not in some urban area, we have tens of thousands of residents, hardly a big city, and in one of the smallest states by population density in the country.
So no, I don’t think your model is working properly. I’ll take national Net Neutrality and push for local muni fiber.
pats your head It’s okay, I know reading comprehension is difficult for some people.
I know Lemmy is the wrong place for this, it’s just another hive mind like reddit. Actual reading is what got me to this point. So maybe it’s you that should do some unbiased reading.
Ah, the classic “hive mind” excuse. It’s always brought up when someone has nothing else to stand on (that someone is you, if it wasn’t clear).
Lemmy is a fine place for it, saying it’s a hive mind may have some truth, but it’s also a copout. Just back up controversial opinions with some sources.
You said you read things that “got you to this point.” What was it you read? I’d be interested in reading it.
Yeah. Must be something wrong with the place and not you. It’s called projection.
Bless your heart
Bless your heart
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