If you have shell access to a Linux machine in a College of Engineering attached to some university somewhere [0], try this:

1) Use youtube-dl to get the actual URL of the video that Youtube is sending to your machine that's slow as balls. [1]

2a) Wget that url on your home machine.

2b) Wget that url on the machine attached to that university.

3) Notice the discrepancy between download speeds of those two machines. In particular, notice if your home download starts at full speed, but is throttled to super slow speeds after a couple minutes of video have been downloaded.

4) Run a traceroute (I love using mtr for this) to ensure that the route to Youtube from your home machine goes directly from your ISP's network to Google's network. If this is the case, then there's noone to blame for poor performance other than your ISP and Youtube.

Comcast used to severely throttle Youtube videos downloaded on my connection here in SF. Using the method outlined above, I discovered that:

* I had a direct path from Comcast to Youtube at both my house and at the university.

* At my house, the first minute or two of the video file was fetched at full link speed (~6MB/s), the remainder of the video (even when downloading a 1080p MP4) was fetched at ~100KB/s.

* The very same file when downloaded at a university across the country was fetched at full link speed (14MB/s) and never slowed down.

[0] To lessen the chance that the campus network admins will be artificially throttling your connection, natch.

[1] You will notice that this URL is super-long and appears to encode all sorts of fun stuff in the domain name. This (along with a traceroute) leads me to believe that accessing this URL at another physical location won't give you a file from another CDN that's closer to that other physical location.

i found a aDSL number for ATT that was not advertised (and you reached a person on the first minute!) that was the result of some obscure regulation that they had to provide dsl without charging for a phone line if so i wanted. it was a very good service. as i was next door to their trunk.

i moved, less than 20miles, but another city. called att to transfer service, the rep read something and the burst out a sad "ah, sorry, this is verizon territory".

and that is exactly what i get here. verizon. nothing else. the 2nd or 3rd biggest city in los angeles, and i can choose, verizon.

And today you can get a 1 Gbps connection (in reality it works at 900 mbps in Europe and at around 300 mbps across the Atlantic) for less than $20 per month.

How could you call the banning of new infrastructure (through an insane ammount of regulation) by local authorities in the USA as Free Market?

Recently there have been some troubling signs when (government) monopolies started to buy smaller private ISPs. Internet is still cheap and fast, but who knows what will happen…

Bulgaria here. We still have them - smaller ISPs who don't run proper cabling, it's just the major ones don't run their cables through trees any longer. And I want to note - even when they did ran them through trees and a storm would cut the cables or fry the routers, replacements would be put up within an hour. The only downside to me, as a consumer, is that during a storm, a lightning bolt might hit a cable and fry my pc, but that's a very very low probability and I just run the cable through a surge protector.

Yeah, the advertised throughput is a bit slower being ADSL2+, especially on the upload (although you can bond two channels for a simple twice the cost. and if you really need upload, inquire to see if they've got "Annex M" support yet). But it's fast enough, very predictable, and you won't be giving your money to assholes.

Also FWIW, Speakeasy is also still around, they've just renamed to Megapath and raised their rates a bit.

There is nothing about what you described that was ever free market. Were Verizon not have been granted what I'm sure was exclusive rights for laying cable in your town, there'd be many providers vying for your business.