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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn't seem to care what I do with it.

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.

Quality of service, networking term for rate limiting. Essentially whatever the QOS is set to is the maximum speed you will see.

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.

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