This is simply the case of a provider, discovering that Cogent provides poor transit services, realizes that you actually have to pay in order to get good Internet peering. This has always been the case on the Internet.
As long as Comcast treats all traffic the same regardless of source, destination, packet type, etc.. I'm fine with their behavior here.
I guess the question is, did all other traffic see the same drop? And what changes in their network would cause this?
Netflix customers, in this situation, can point their fingers at Netflix (who, in turn, can point them at Cogent).
If Cogent provided 1 Gigabit of transit to Netflix, but didn't have circuits with which to connect Netflix to their customers, well, It will be interesting to see what kind of Liquidated Damages Netflix wrote into their contract with Cogent. Maybe it will be enough to pay their peering fees with Comcast.
In your opinion why doesn't the same responsibility apply to Cogent?
I agree in spirit, but how do you make the distinction? If Cogent has poor connectivity to the wider Internet, is it on Comcast to fix that?
Tata is also spectacularly bad with Comcast.
Peering is a practice where two sides agree to maintain their side of the infrastructure and not charge for metered bandwidth.
In old world there were a dozen of "tier1" providers who would all peer with each other more or less settlement free. It is conceivable that one of these providers (I think it was Cogent in this case) was offering "low rates" to take Netflix traffic and deliver that traffic to Comcast over their settlement free peering. As traffic flow between Cogent and Comcast was increasing, Comcast refused to upgrade the interconnect to accommodate the flow. Then: links get hot, traffic gets dropped, customers complain, Netflix+Cogent asks Comcast to behave, Comcast offers to unblock the pipes via direct Netflix<->Comcast peering for a "fee".
Now I don't know whether that "low rate" that Cogent was charging Netflix was lower than a "fee" that Comcast is charging. It might be that you are right and the fee overall reduced Netflix costs. What I do know however, is that Comcast is a monopoly and if unregulated, they can start extracting higher and higher rent from Netflix (or any other content provider for that sake).
This is one of the underreported issues in the whole net neutrality debate. In the late '90s I worked in the WAN engineering group doing capacity planning at a big regional CLEC, which actually was a Tier 1 backbone provider. It was widely assumed in the industry that the flat rate pricing model -- pay $X for Y "guaranteed" bandwidth -- was living on borrowed time and would be replaced by actual usage-based pricing, paying for packets like you pay for gallons of water. The flat rate model only worked because we generally could keep available capacity well ahead of demand. We could do that because we were adding customers like crazy, and customers sucking down high bandwidth were outliers. If those prerequisites ever changed we'd be screwed.
Well, here we are in 2014 and ISPs like Comcast are not adding customers like crazy anymore, because most of the people who want high-speed data from them already have it. But the customers they do have are, on a per capita basis, using much more bandwidth now than they were five years ago. And this is only going to get worse. The nightmare scenario is basically upon us: capacity requirements are climbing faster than ever, but those requirements are no longer being driven by customer acquisition. Which means either the ISPs eat the cost of upgrading their infrastructure (ha!) -- or they raise rates.
But wait, doesn't Netflix pay for all their bandwidth already? Well, probably not: unless industry practices have changed drastically, even those backbone trunks are actually oversubscribed. If you pay for (say) a DS3 line, there's an implicit assumption that you are not going to be pumping 44.736 Mbit/s through it 24/7. Netflix breaks that assumption.
I don't know quite what the solution here is, and I certainly don't want the kind of dystopian "the ISP only gives you access to web sites that you pay for" future the sharpest critics paint. But I don't see this as a step toward that dystopian future. What I see it as is the ISPs trying to figure out how to work usage into pricing models without saying "screw it" and actually adopting a usage-based pricing model.
If it is really expensive to accept Netflix's offer of free hardware and free bandwidth then the additional cost should be passed to the customer. The problem is that it's not actually more expensive and Comcast knows their customers can't choose someone else so it's a much better strategy to squeeze the content providers.
Let's do some simple math to prove your point.
Assume Comcast has about 10 Tbps of traffic at peak, single-counting all traffic that transits AS 7922 (Comcast's national backbone network). [1] Now assume that a full 50% of that traffic is originated by Netflix, and the market price for transit is $2/mbps. The percentage is likely quite lower than that, and given 5 Tbps of traffic volume and coordination between the two networks to reduce the number of miles the bits need to be hauled by both networks, the per-megabit price is almost certainly quite a bit less.
But even with these obviously flawed guesses, we're only talking about $120mm/year in costs. Netflix's worldwide revenue in 2013 was $4.3b [2]; Comcast's 2013 revenue from their US HSI business alone was $10.3b. [3] If 50% of Comcast's $10.3b business was in jeopardy, don't you think they'd find a way to absorb that $120mm?
[1] http://as7922.peeringdb.com/
[2] Netflix Q4 2013 earnings release, http://ir.netflix.com/results.cfm
[3] Comcast 10-K filed 2/12/2014
(edited: formatting)
Netflix could have held out, and made Comcast out to be the bad guy, or could have leaned on Cogent to get the circuits installed - but, in this case, they folded and just decided to pay Comcast. This will probably set a very bad precedent for them when it comes to renew those agreements in 5-10 years, or however long they will be. Maybe they are hoping for some competition to enter the US environment by then.
How would that work? Comcast customers by and large can't switch to another broadband provider and Netflix customers can certainly switch to another video provider (Comcast!). It's not like this is a brand new issue, Netflix has held out for a long time. The Comcast / TWC merger is what finally did it, 30M combined customers is too big to risk on a public game of net neutrality chicken.
Surely they're still working on lobbying efforts to make it illegal for a company like Comcast to simultaneously have a monopoly on selling broadband and compete with services using said broadband. It's pretty obvious at this point that internet access is a utility and it should be treated as such.
The Hacker News readership includes many people capable of starting ISPs. Comcast's large profits, which have been used to fund a string of high cost acquisitions, are a juicy target for potential competitors. Yet you never see discussion of ISP startups on Hacker News because the barriers to entry protect the current carriers. This wasn't the case in the 90s, and had Hacker News existed back then ISP startups would have appeared frequently.
The issue of telecoms not having competition has been the case for years. Back in the BBS days Jack Rickard used to harp on this in Boardwatch [1] magazine. I recall him saying something like, "Two guys with a screwdriver should be able to start a phone company."
Indeed. The late 90s / early 2000s were the golden age of the CLEC. There were certainly pain points (like getting copper pairs provisioned), but I remember not caring that my building didn't support Comcast Internet because I had an SDSL connection from Telocity and an ADSL connection from Speakeasy.
That said, most were either bought out, or went under within a couple years. It was a rough time for commercial SysOps in the mid-90's... not that I really feel bad for them. Times and environments change... The BBS and art scenes are still around today, but not nearly what they were in the early-mid 90's...
I miss it a lot... since most BBSes were based in a local area, there were a lot of get togethers, and you'd meet and talk to people you wouldn't necessarily do in today's internet, which is based in interest groups.
The cable industry has evolved into a bunch of regional monopolies that do not compete with one another.
The effect of breaking Comcast up AT&T-style would be... a bunch of regional monopolies that do not compete with one another. And then, as with AT&T, proceed to consolidate via M&A into larger regional monopolies... that do not compete with one another. Same as now.
Welcome to the American telecommunications industry.
""" But there's a silver lining for people who hate this deal: By the government's own standards, the Comcast—Time Warner deal should be blocked. To understand why, you have to know that there's a thing in antitrust law called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI. In very basic terms, the HHI is a way to measure the concentration of a given market. And the HHI is the test the government's lawyers apply if they want to see whether a proposed merger would create monopoly-like conditions. """
That's totally backwards. Comcast's customers are paying for access to Cogent's customers, including Netflix.
It's not Comcasts responsibility if Cogent did not have peering arrangement or had paid for sufficient capacity to handle their end of the connection, that their customer was paying them to provide.
If it was, I'd love to provide Netflix connection much cheaper than Cogent. I'll provide it over my 10Mbps uplink, and blame consumers ISPs when everything falls over.
Since you've paid Comcast, they're now required to go to my brother's ISP and arrange more peering, right? Also, since you're paying, I shouldn't have to pay my brother, and he shouldn't have to pay anyone else, right?
Come to think of it, why isn't all hosting bandwidth free? Why do Azure and AWS charge for outbound bandwidth, but not inbound?
Netflix pays level3 for transit service (you pay your brother). Comcast pays level3 (your brother) for transit service. Notice how level3 is neither the source nor the destination of the traffic.
Netflix's traffic increases from, for example, 500Gbps to 1Tbps. Comcast's level3 ports fill up because netflix increased in popularity.
In general networks that pass a lot of traffic like this end up peering directly and avoiding transit costs.
Comcast has two choices. They can either pay level3 for another 500Gbps or they can transition the full 1Tbps to free peering directly with netflix. And yes, I consider it Comcast's responsibility to do one of those two things with their subscriber revenue, which, incidentally, most other ISPs in the US are doing.
Instead they are choosing option 3 which is, leverage their local access monopoly to force netflix to pay them, and protect their cable and xfinity services.
This may be the cases for ISP-ISP connections, but every transit circuit I've ever purchased as an end-user has two elements, a Non Reccurring Charge (NRC) to set up the connection, and then a monthly recurring charge (MRC) consisting of, a port speed, and a 95th percentile metered usage charge.
e.g. I might get a gigabit port set up for an up front $5000 NRC, and then a 24 month contract for $2000/month port speed, and then pay $5/megabit @95th percentile of 5 minute averages sampled over a month.
The ISP samples the usage of my port every 5 minutes, (8640 samples in a 30 day month), drops the top 5% (432 samples), and then charges me the cost of the next sample (sample #8208) - If the sampled speed at #8208 was 1 Gigabit, and sample #8207 was 0 kilobits, then I am still charged $2000/month + 1000 * $5 = $7000/MRC for that month.
Cogent has always had a reputation in the industry for being the cut-rate player (to the point of other ISPs just dropping them as peering connections, resulting in companies literally not being able to communicate with their customers) - Netflix was trying to rely on Cogent to send data to their customers, presumably because they were charging significantly less than "Tier-1" transit-providers, and finally came to the realization that yes, you do get what you pay for.
None of this surprises me, and none of it appears relevant to the conversation regarding Net-Neutrality - this is a peering discussion, pure and simple.
Each individual Comcast customer has in theory paid for a DS3 worth of bandwidth (modulo the "cap"), which should be a reality-check that some of your assumptions from that era need updating.
The defense (and it was always a thin one) of ratio clauses in peering agreements was hot potato routing. The ingress traffic is what you actually have to haul a long distance, so the agreement says "you must meet us everywhere we peer, and you must maintain ratio." Together, those rules mean each individual path will be asymmetric but the overall load on the WAN will be shared between the peers. It was always slightly silly, though.
Hot potato is now over. CDN's are desperate to do all the work and bring traffic as close to eyeballs as the monopolists will allow because the cost of actually building a network is irrelevant compared to the rent the monopolists are extracting. The monopolists are selling so-called "transit" to haul packets 1 mile. They're really charging for access to their captive eyeballs, not for moving bits. If you want to send a few megabits to Asia, fine, whatever. You can do it for the same price. They're not even mad, "glad we could make a deal," etc. The situation is nakedly broken and warped, and everybody actually in the business knows it.
Peering has always been a mix of market power, shaming, and political excuses ("ratio" was one). What we're now seeing is the shaming and excuses fall away thanks to apologist bloggers and weak politicians, and market power emerge as the only thing that matters. Compared to this power, traditional outdated notions of neutrality are irrelevant: there is no need to give traffic less "preferential" treatment when you can simply depeer them and then try to sell them so-called "transit" to go 1 mile. "Paid peering" == "well, how much money you got? Let's make a special deal just for you".
Without meaning to express either approval or cynicism, market power has always been the only thing that matters in this business. But CDNs have paid big ISPs special rates for years, because they really do put special strains on infrastructure. And my impression remains that that's what this particular battle is ultimately about.
I personally think the resistance to usage-based pricing in the tech community is really weird, although I mostly see it on the consumer end. Hard caps are bad, and caps that only apply to some services are really bad, but charging more if you use more is completely reasonable.
(Not to mention that there are no inherent variable costs to transporting bits. Water needs to be purified, electricity is obviously usage priced - but you can be pushing bits forever once you have the hardware setup.)
With usage-based billing, the amount will float up and down and it's hard to understand how the amount is calculated. Usage-based telephone bills are broken down by calls, which you can probably remember.("What's this 46 minute call to 555-1234? Oh yeah, I called Mom last week.")
With IP traffic, how do you itemize the charges? Temporally? I used to get cell phone bills that included pages and pages of stuff like "Jan 27, 4pm, 239789987345 bytes". It was completely useless.
How about reverse DNS? That has other problems. • You use BitTorrent? Here's 247 hosts with incomprehensible names on your bill. • You use a VPN? A whole bunch of traffic is lumped together. • "Honey, what's all this traffic to nastyporn.com?" • It puts pressure on web sites to optimize their deployment strategy for billing clarity
The "correct" way is probably to log everything, then provide analytics software. But I can't imagine my Mom generating reports just to understand her internet bill.
Economically, sure, usage-based billing is a great idea. Alignment of incentives and all that. But practically, it's a pain for everybody involved.
My electricity bill shows only X kWh per month. There is no "itemization" of usage. However I can purchase watt meters that can monitor power anywhere (including the main grid connection) if I decide the bill is too high.
I can definitely imagine a similar service sitting on the router or provided by the provider that does bandwidth accounting to deliver a picture of what is going on. I'm sure there would be many third party device manufacturers willing to do this traffic accounting as well.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is exactly the assumption commercial customers paying for unmetered links are making, otherwise they wouldn't be paying for unmetered links. Not being oversubscribed is supposed to the entire point. If ISPs' business models depend on them being able to break their promises to customers paying for continuously saturated links that's their problem, but they're still on the hook for what they're being paid to provide.
I dunno.. being profitable enough to buy time-warner cable for billions doesn't sound like a nightmare scenario from their POV. It sounds like they'd rather spend the money becoming a monopoly than improve their infrastructure.
Netflix does not send any data. Comcast customers request lots of data from Netflix. Significant difference.
Another example (just in the other direction): A backup provider needs to pay up big-cable because their customers are uploading a lot of data?
I'm willing to wager that backup providers haven't run into any upload issues with Comcast for this reason.
Generally speaking settlement free peering requires that the arrangement be mutually beneficial. If the traffic exchange becomes inequitable then the side that disproportionately benefits would need to pay to cover it.
In this case Cogent was sending vastly more traffic towards Comcast than they were receiving (because of Netflix) so they were the misbehaving party.
I'll admit my knowledge of peering is minimal, but consumer ISPs have always been something of an anomaly if memory serves. The traffic flow is highly one sided, but peering with consumer ISPs is obviously necessary if you want to actually reach consumers.
For example, they are the 30th largest provider globally going by the CADIA rankings (http://as-rank.caida.org/?mode0=as-info&mode1=as-table&as=79...) and have large traffic sources as customers. From the CADIA list this includes Peer1, Dreamhost, SoftLayer, Hivelocity, and Liquid Web.
As a eyeball ISP I occasionally get offered cheap transit from hosters looking to balance their traffic ratios. From the CADIA list it seems like Comcast may be doing the opposite.
When we do business with cloud providers or other third parties, we usually start with internet based access. When the relationship gets bigger or needs to serve a large portion of our base, we typically either peer with that provider (in the case of big cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, etc) or establish dedicated connectivity between our networks.
I think Comcast, Verizon, TWC, etc has a point here -- as a relationship grows with another party, you should have a more robust connection. Netflix hasn't wanted to do that -- it prefers to use a shitty ISP (Cogent) for cheap, and augment it by co-locating content on end-user ISP networks for free. Services like Netflix and Youtube stretch the net-neutrality argument, because they aren't good citizens.
That said, the end-user ISPs cannot be allowed to discriminate, which their monopoly power will almost certainly enable them to do.
Assuming it wasn't harmed is also speculation and we should definitely be concerned about the deal and what it means for net neutrality.
Comcast will also likely work with Netflix to estimate traffic growth and make sure their infrastructure scales before they have problems.
Again, we don't know the details of the deal. Assuming net neutrality was not damaged is also speculation. We need more information to know what is going on.
I think it's ridiculous and self-serving for internet companies to complain about this. Getting bits to customers is a critical part of any online business. You can either do it yourself, or pay someone to do it. Does Amazon complain that UPS charges them to deliver packages to customers?
The more apt analogy would be if UPS decided to make Amazon packages ship super slow unless Amazon payed extra fees to "upgrade" the shipping speed back to average.
You could make the case that Comcast should have upgraded their peering with Cogent. That's the case in almost all of these disputes. But Netflix blinked first.
If you want to make useless shipping analogies, it's like Amazon ships using ABC to a rough wilderness. ABC uses simple cars that don't handle the terrain so they contract the local government to deliver packages in that area. You could say it's the local government's responsibility to fix the roads, or ABC's responsibility or anyone but Amazon's. Good luck.
Really, the point of the Internet is that you can communicate with other Internet users without having to worry about what ISP or network they are connected to or what arrangements govern that connection.
At least once a month for the past couple of years, Comcast sends me some junk mail begging for an "Account Review," in which they would add triple-play service to my business Internet account in exchange for a discount on all three. Those letters go in the trash on general principles.
Consumers are going to get screwed on the front & back end of this.
Further, assuming franchise agreements exist and were necessary, consumers and municipalities should expect better from their franchisees than abuse of monopoly.
Netflix is network heavy and competes with Comcast offerings using Comcast's own network. That was the key motivator here.
Even if Comcast has a monopoly in select areas, it cannot do price differentiation in just those select areas. IANAL, but that sounds illegal.
Funny, back when I was a Comcast customer, I do not remember paying for "Comcast Network Access." I remember paying for "Internet Access;" sure, I went over Comcast's network, but I (maybe naively) thought that such distinctions were irrelevant on the Internet (that was kind of the point, if memory serves).
No more silly than pretending the the abstraction of "files" and "directories" is reality. No more silly than pretending that your computer is running a Python program, when in reality there are sequences of machine language instructions being run. Computers are useful because of abstractions.
"There is no Internet, just a bunch of private networks connected together"
You might have missed the definition of "an internet:"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internetwork
There is, in fact, an Internet that we use every day. The overwhelming success of the Internet is due to the abstraction it presents, which is best-effort routing of packets from one host to another -- without regard for what networks the hosts are connected to, what arrangements govern their connections to those networks, and perhaps most important of all, what applications those hosts are running. On the scale of positive improvements to human communication, the Internet is up there with the printing press and written language.
"Now that real money is in play, the fiction of the internet is crumbling and the physical nature is becoming exposed."
No, what we are seeing is the impact of years of systematic attacks on the Internet by companies that are desperate to protect obsolete business models. Comcast is worried about the imminent demise of cable TV and all the power and profit that came with it. AT&T is worried about the demise of long distance fees, roaming charges, SMS charges, and all the power and profit that came with controlling the phone system. The recording industry and movie industry worked hard to leave the Internet divided into "consumers" and "services," even though the system itself was designed to be far more general.
In short, had we told these companies to adapt or die rather than tolerating their efforts to roll back the clock, we would not be in the situation we are in today. This has nothing to do with leaky abstractions, physical limitations, or the design of the Internet. It is just a power grab, a systematic effort to destroy a good thing that threatened the entrenched players.
Its a useful abstraction, but as physics causes CPUs to hit a performance wall on single threaded code, then you start banging up against the GIL and the failure of the abstraction to deal with parallelism. And when that happens you can't bury your head in the abstraction of a Python program. I'm not saying that abstractions aren't useful, but at the end of the day you have to concede that they are merely abstractions. When the abstraction becomes disconnected from the reality, reality wins.
> In short, had we told these companies to adapt or die rather than tolerating their efforts to roll back the clock, we would not be in the situation we are in today.
Adapt to what? Abstractions must adapt to reality. Reality does not have to adapt to abstractions. You can of course invoke the government, to regulate the reality into conforming to the abstraction, to the benefit of certain companies and the detriment of others. But history has not been kind to regulatory regimes of that nature. The deep irony of your position is that its the same thinking that led to the current mess with cable. In the 1980s, cable was the future. People invoked the potential to distribute educational material and public access material to the masses, and decided that such an important technology should be regulated. So they created the cable monopolies, under the conditions that they have cheap basic access rates ($13/month in Phila), carry public access or educational programming, and build out even to poor and rural communities. And it was an utter disaster in retrospect.
Keep in mind that this is New York City. You'll have lesser options in many other places in the US.
We have two FTTH providers (AT&T, Grande). Grande offers 1Gbps now, AT&T is 300Mbps now, 1Gbps this summer. Time Warner offers 300Mbps now (DOCSIS).
Google fiber is being deployed this year (1Gbps).
For my zip code they list AT&T UVerse, AT&T DSL, Cox and Time Warner. The reality of my actual address is that my only options are Time Warner and AT&T DSL (old school fully copper DSL, not UVerse). I'm positive these are my only wired options because I have researched this extensively (including actually calling the companies, not just relying on bad Internet data) due to being unhappy with my two options, and I continue to look into it about once every 6 months but nothing ever changes. Both AT&T UVerse and Verizon FiOS seem to have gone into deep slumber mode when it comes to service expansion.
The really sad part is that I've been using AT&T DSL for the past two years because while it is significantly slower than Time Warner cable in the bandwidth department, it has been far more reliable. Cost-wise both are a complete rip-off already, and if the government doesn't step in on the ISPs soon, I expect that the cost issue is going to get a lot worse, not better.
Also the information blurb at the bottom says I have a fiber provider, but none are listed.
Finally, it's missing some local providers which I am positive exist; our local power/water provider also provides Ethernet to local business and some residential areas, but it's not listed.
Comcast worries about the FCC and Congress, not its competitors.
It would seem that worry extends only so far. In this case, if what you're saying is accurate, Comcast intends to take (i.e., extract rent), and it just doesn't want to get noticed while it takes. Fear of the FCC and potential consumer backlash do not extend so far as to help it to reconsider its basic strategy of expanding rents, even as its merger with Time Warner is under review. There's a certain boldness to Comcast's move in working out this deal with Netflix.
ISPs have the option of making content providers(Netflix), or content consumers(you and me) pay more. They're choosing content providers because they don't want to make net neutrality more salient for their customers.
Netflix isn't just going to absorb those payments, they'll have to pass them along to customers. Customers will want some explanation for why their bill is going up . And if Netflix's per-user costs become substantially different at different ISPs, they'll have to start thinking about ISP-specific surcharges...
With Comcast I get ~3MB/s internet. DSL and Wireless broadband aren't even close to those speeds (in my area). So if I'm forced to pay a premium or switch, I have to "give up" significant performance.
PLEASE GOD GIVE ME GOOGLE FIBER.
Do a lot of people in the US only have access to one or two ISP's?? If so why? I'm in a not particularly urban part of Ireland and I can choose between at least 5 ISP's, decent speeds, and a good variety of prices.
I live in a suburb of a medium sized city. At my house, I have 3 choices for wired Internet access: Knology/WOW, AT&T DSL, AT&T Uverse. DSL is right out because it's too slow, so really it's a choice between Cable (Knology) and AT&T's Uverse (which is FTTN or FTTP depending on various factors).
We moved here a couple years ago, two miles away from our old house. Same city, same suburb, just 2 miles difference. At our old house, we didn't have Uverse as an option - it was just slow DSL through the phone company or a single cable provider. If I had lived three streets over (less than 100 yards), I would have had a choice between Comcast or Knology cable, and DSL.
In other areas of the suburb that are further out, you start to see Mediacom (another cable provider). There are probably some areas that Comcast and Mediacom overlap in.
I have a coworker that lives in a rural area, and all he has is Windstream DSL. Cable doesn't reach out that far.
Unfortunately, the min/max slider forces hard-coded values during page load, so I can't link to specific graphs. I suggest checking out "served areas"/min:1/max:1 and "unserved areas"/min:2/max:whatever.
Those maps suggest the "1 ISP" set (or any set, really) is fairly uniformly distributed across the nation. In my opinion, it's not quite as biased towards the urban/rural divide I expected.
http://www.broadbandmap.gov/summarize/nationwide
#ISP %USA
0 3.3%
1 8.9%
2 32.0%
3 35.6%
4 14.3%
5 4.1%
6 1.3%
7 0.4%
8+ 0.2%
Regardless, 8.9% of the nation is still a LOT of people, and "2 or 3 providers across the nation" isn't really a thriving economy full of healthy competition.
The interesting data points, I think, are the high end. A 4-ISPs isn't THAT different from 1-ISP (8.9% vs 14.3%), and those numbers drop off fast in the 5+ range.
Oh, and yes, I'm excluding radio, in any form ("G[0-9]", various satellite/asymmetric services, etc). Those are a different product entirely, and any similarity in feature set is only superficial. You can't play games or any other low-latency task over most wireless, and VoIP doesn't like the "several second" latencies of satellite, for example.
Most places are wired with one phone line, and one cable line. That phone line is generally owned by one specific phone company, and that cable line is generally owned by one specific cable provider.
So those are the choices of ISP: you can choose cable service or dsl.
For a few years the last mile over phone had to be shared with other IP providers, so you could choose between a) one cable company, or b) a few IP over DSL ISPs, but that ended sometime back.
There is also satellite providers, but they usually, I believe make a deal with your phone company, wireless, which is expensive, and fiber, which to my understanding is still just an upgrade from the over cable company.
How is the last mile provided in Ireland? And what are your choices of ISPs?
That seems to be where things differ. My phone line is owned by BT but I can still order internet through a different company. I pay that company an extra £10-15 per month for line rental (so I guess BT, even though they own the line chooses/or has to rent it to others).
There are more if you count wireless, but those don't really work as a substitute for real home broadband, even with companies (e.g. Clear) that pretend they do.
The BT Group was also forcibly split into separate operating companies, particularly OpenReach which owns the local loops and sells services to all ISPs including BT Retail.
These same areas are often also serviced by wireless providers, either cellular, satellite or some other kind of fixed wireless.
Note that while DSL tends to be available in every market, it may not actually be available at your home due to distance from the CO. Or it may be available but you're so far away that the performance would not be worth what it cost.
So the problem is that there's a clear hierarchy of what's good in any area. Where I live it's cable > DSL >> wireless/satellite. Compound this with the pricing structure: where I live it's wireless/satellite >> cable == dsl, with cable having some speed tiers that DSL can't match. At the end of the day, for any consumer trying to make a decision on value and performance, there's often really only one option.
I'm going to assert that this is how it looks for the majority of the geographical US. I'm not sure about the larger metro areas.
I live in a middle/upper-middle class suburban area in upstate New York.
In the US, you generally have a choice between one (two if you're lucky) cable companies and DSL.
If you live in a sparsely populated area the excuse is "well, it is expensive to wire you up because of distances". If you live in a densely populated area the excuse is "well, it costs a lot of money to put new infrastructure into a densely populated area".
In both cases, lots of other countries are managing to do both of those at far lower cost to the consumer than occurs here in the US. Ultimately the ISPs here in the US are just greedy, duopolistic fucks.
The only factor that determines the quality of your ISP options is having a competitive player in the market.
Many people in the US have quite a bit of choices: Cable, DSL, Cell+Internet, Wireless. Usually those that live in large urban areas. But the service and quality of these ISP's varies greatly, which Comcast--in my area, being top.
Those Americans that live in rural areas, may not even have access to high speed internet, or always on internet--see the Xbox 1 fiasco for more details.
This needs to be emphasized more. We rarely get to choose between equally cost-effective ISP options. The typical choice is one cable company, one phone company, and some kind of wireless service (possibly satellite). That is not competition, any more than heavy truck sales compete with mo-ped sales.
HBO charges Comcast a flat rate to carry their content, because HBO has great content.
Comcast then bundles HBO in various packages designed to bring a profit, knowing that people just want HBO, and are willing to pay extra for a bundle in order to include it.
In this case, Netflix is paying Comcast for the rights to use their End of Mile network.
Vote with your feet.
Because it's either Comcast or a DSL provider that won't give me a straight answer as to whether or not they service my address. And this is in Boulder.
Imagine if that fiber were used as a community network! Unfortunately, the town is not planning to do this -- they've excluded the fiber from their plans to take over the Xcel infrastructure.
For $70 a month from Comcast you can get Amazon, Google, and Facebook. For only $10 more a month you can add Netflix and Spotify. Want Pandora? Sorry, you'll have to switch to AT&T for that.
The broadband providers are used to this type of packaged service given their history as cable television providers. It's how they make their money beyond providing simple connectivity. Their future expansion and profits are linked to their ability to create exclusivity and extract revenue based on targeted demand.
I don't see any other way around this. Absent regulations prohibiting packet discrimination, I'm not sure I would do any different if I were in Comcast's shoes.