They can prioritize the delivery of the TV service and telephone service that is delivered on the same physical cables as the internet service. There's only so much bandwidth available on each physical connection, and they're delivering several services on that physical connection.

If the startup service is using the internet service, and the Internet service is prioritized under the telephone service, indeed it will potentially be slower, but not because the startup is being discriminated against. It would be slower because ALL Internet traffic over that link is discriminated against.

The most likely reality is that any additional services will have a minimum QoS set that is required for a reasonable experience. This would only be hit if the customer premise is utilizing the entirety of the physical connection...essentially they're providing guarantees that TV/Phone/Internet/etc. would work at at least a certain level of quality, which would be at the expense of other services based on what those minimum level of qualities were defined as.

What happens if you want to move to another phone provider which operates through the Internet? As people have said, nowadays most phone connections do anyway. So why should the ISP phone connection be any faster than another one?

And while today this may sound weird (we are used to have phone connections via our ISP) what happens if tomorrow's technology (say an interactive film) ends up in the same situation? A startup creates a field, just to get squashed by the ISP who picks up the idea (that clearly works) but gets extra priority because it is their own service.

But can't the QoS and prioritization be left to the customer to decide dynamically? If they have too many video streams open, they'll see reduction in quality of all of them. And they can decide to close / pause the ones that are of lower priority. Why should Verizon's TV _always_ be prioritized? Bandwidth and Service are two different things. Everyone is paying for bandwidth. Why also give priority to Verizon's service when Verizon's bandwidth requirements is already subsidized by it's customers?

Thanks for elaborating. Hmm, I suppose that is fair since it is their wiring investment at the "last mile". I like the idea of a minimum QoS for the different data traffic. As long as consumers could transparently see, expect, and receive minimum numbers for any given service, that should be okay, especially if they can opt to increase Internet bandwidth in lieu of buying any "specialized" service offerings.

That's only a problem if the internet as a whole isn't fast enough, and the FCC is supposed to ensure that this never happens.

And a great job they've done at that up till now. My cable internet providers in the past couple years (3 of them) have all been complete crap.