The "fast lane/ slow lane" reality had yet to be instated.

So to me that is an actual problem that needs fixing today

They want to stop that and institute multiple "lanes" of slower and faster traffic.

like Netflix wanted to get free connections where as previously they had to pay for them.

You use a certain amount of "unlimited" and it is fast, hit a threshold, and it is slowed down or "throttled". How will net neutrality help or hinder this, because it sucks. I cannot imagine that things will get worse.

available to do so. It's kind of a lie.

As to "Net neutrality" that doesn't address the issue of usage caps.

Roughly 30,000 times what a typical smartphone does. Think net neutrality will kill that before it gets off the ground?

If you look at the cost of providing data (just under $3 a gigabyte), each car costs more than $3 million a year to run, just in data.

any slow down/throttling. I stream quite alot of Netflix and Hulu and YouTube vids, don't have access to cable or Internet.

Without Net Neutrality, cable and phone companies could carve the Internet into fast and slow lanes. An ISP could slow down its competitors' content or block political opinions it disagreed with. ISPs could charge extra fees to the few content companies that could afford to pay for preferential treatment — relegating everyone else to a slower tier of service. This would destroy the open Internet.


When Congress enacted the 1996 Telecommunications Act, it didn’t want the FCC to treat websites and other Internet services the same way it treats the local access networks that enable people to get online. Congress understood that the owners of the access networks have tremendous gatekeeper power, and so it required the FCC to treat these network owners as “common carriers,” meaning they couldn’t block or discriminate against the content that flows across their networks to/from your computer.

However, in a series of politically motivated decisions first by FCC Chairman Michael Powell (now the cable industry’s top lobbyist) and then by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the FCC decided to classify broadband Internet access service as an “information service,” meaning that the law sees it as no different from a website like freepress.net or an online service like LexisNexis. These decisions removed the FCC’s ability to prohibit ISPs from blocking or discriminating against online content (it also removed the FCC’s ability to ensure that ISPs protect your privacy).

In Verizon vs. FCC, the court stated that the FCC lacks authority because of “the Commission’s still-binding decision to classify broadband providers not as providers of ‘telecommunications services’ but instead as providers of ‘information services.’”

On Feb. 26, the FCC voted to define broadband as what we all know it is — a connection to the outside world that is merely faster than the phone lines we used to use for dial-up access, phone calls and faxes.

Doing so gave the agency the strongest possible foundation for rules prohibiting discriminatory practices.

The new rules, rooted in Title II of the Communications Act, ban throttling, blocking and paid prioritization.


Net Neutrality is crucial for small business owners, startups and entrepreneurs, who rely on the open Internet to launch their businesses, create a market, advertise their products and services, and distribute products to customers. We need the open Internet to foster job growth, competition and innovation.

Net Neutrality lowers the barriers of entry for entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses by ensuring the Web is a fair and level playing field. It’s because of Net Neutrality that small businesses and entrepreneurs have been able to thrive on the Internet. They use the Internet to reach new customers and showcase their goods, applications and services.

No company should be able to interfere with this open marketplace. ISPs are by definition the gatekeepers to the Internet, and without Net Neutrality, they would seize every possible opportunity to profit from that gatekeeper control.

Without Net Neutrality, the next Google would never get off the ground.



The open Internet gives marginalized voices opportunities to be heard. But without Net Neutrality, ISPs could block unpopular speech and prevent dissident voices from speaking freely online. Without Net Neutrality, people of color would lose a vital platform.

http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-what-you-need-know-now

The good news is that Comcast is required to honor net neutrality until 2018 under the terms of its merger with NBC Universal acquisition in 2011, and Charter is bound by a similar obligation until 2023 under the terms of its acquisition of Time-Warner Cable this year. It’s also possible that some form of limited net neutrality protections could make it through congress, so long as the bill did away with the FCC’s reclassification of internet providers as utility-style common carriers. “There is a recognition from the industry that we can’t re-litigate every time there’s a new administration,” says Harold Feld of the digital rights advocacy group Public Knowledge.

But it’s doubtful that such a bill would ban the biggest threat to net neutrality: charging customers for some data usage while exempting certain sites or apps, a practice known as “zero rating.” Critics of zero rating argue that it amounts to a form of picking winners and losers on the internet, because services that don’t count towards a customer’s data cap will have a distinct advantage over those that do.


https://www.wired.com/2017/01/year-donald-trump-kills-net-neutrality/

whether net-neutrality is law or not, there are still market forces. I don't know about you, but my net providers have been promoting high speeds for years.

Everyone else has every right to be concerned because they don't have a whole lot to choose from. Those same market forces aren't in play.

...including MVNOs for your phone. Check your zipcode at DSLREPORTS.com.

That's very helpful information.

Less than 25% of Americans have 2 or more ISPs that offer 25 mbps down. About 10% have 2 or more ISPs that offer 100 mbps down.

There is effectively no competition, especially in states that ban municipal ISPs. Yes there is the slowly expanding Google Fiber, but that's not practical in many places. Oddly in the places we do see it, the local major ISP magically drops prices, which aren't in effect elsewhere.

That's before you get into data caps on wired ethernet which is a bad joke as there is no valid technical reason for those to exist except for the fact that ISPs don't have to compete.

The amount of data sent to the individual viewers is very small.
Folks who like to stream movies should be worried.

which it is important to note, aren't restricted by "net neutrality".

Netflix, which was a big net neutrality supporter has in the meantime faced reality and built a better
network for themselves.

they will have an incentive to throttle your streaming services. Interesting development to moderate this has happened with Frontier, they are now offering Netflix access via a channel (800), for a cost I presume. This is possibly where this may end up, deals for streaming services through a carrier and throttled otherwise.

... and I frequently didn't achieve that speed.

Definitely no videos. Dialup warnings like SalmonChantedEvening uses on his LOL cats were appreciated. I could download picture-heavy pages in the background, giving priority to text.

Our local phone and cable company didn't even know what high speed internet was back then, but the phone company would lease you an "alarm line," which was a direct unswitched twisted pair of copper wires between you and your ISP. One of our neighbors set up a neighborhood wireless network using such a line. I later got my own direct connection to a local ISP, which I still have, although it's been transmuted into some kind of dsl. It's just fast enough for one 720p quality video stream.

The telcoms can't annoy customers too much. Their business model of selling various "packages" is obsolete. If they start impeding certain traffic then the major internet powers such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft will happily squash them like insects.

The internet isn't something that can be shoved back into the bottle.

Bringing back dial up.

To appear to be in another country? I don't know if that will help.

It might not matter anyway. Around here COX rules the roost and is the only cable company in town. Soon enough HSI will be well over 100.00 per month for that service ALONE. Not that many years ago you couldn't spend 100.00 per month if you had everything including their phone service. If you get their gigabit service it's already 100.00 per month and they have already told the lemmings it will jump to 125.00 per month in two years which will be in 2018.

I have and pay for their upgrade to 50 mbps service. ROFLOL,I check that speed quite a bit with Speakeasy and NEVER get more than about 25-27mbps. Of course with their BS advertising it's always "up to" that speed,never really that speed. Just did one:

Download Speed: 20725 kbps (2590.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
That's 20.72 mbps--just a wee bit shy of that advertised 50 kbps.

Of course as USUAL in the Feb bill you get yet another of their rate hikes and fee increases. It wasn't all that long ago that HSI started here with Road Runner and 19.95 per month.

Look at it as a chicken. If one person is eating, they get the whole chicken, more than enough. 4 people, there is enough, just enough. 10 people, unless you prioritize, everyone goes hungry. Prioritizing measns some are fed, most go hungry. Peak hours for usage will always be limited unless you are prioritized somehow.

Lots of capacity has been added...Not to say problems no longer exist
Demand continues to sky rocket...
A bigger problem is too slow a package...With the happy death of time warner, we see a opportunity for upgrading lots and lots of folks...I am generally nervous about merger mania in the industry, but damn time warner needed to be fixed or killed

I doubt anyone will notice any difference, frankly. It's main pages are mostly text and load very quickly. Some threads with massive numbers of images might load more slowly, though, but I doubt it, really.

The real impact will be on websites that stream videos, but that aren't in the first tier of websites.

I have surfed and posted from super remote areas where I only had an Edge data connection on my phone, slower than dial up, and thankfully because the layout here is so simple and not data intensive it worked well while other websites did not.

Helped me pass several hours that would have been far more boring.