Hacker News Reader

Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of monopolistic ISPs, but it is true that when you have a peering point with unbalanced traffic flows, the side sending more traffic is supposed to pay the side receiving more traffic.

Such an arrangement with a consumer ISP is so preposterous I have to assume that Level3 and Verizon never expected flows to be symmetric.

Level3...isn't paying for that difference.

Right, because Verizon's customers pay for the difference.

View on HN

The beef of the problem is that Verizon is both a consumer ISP and a transit provider.

Except in the case of Netflix, it's purely an ISP.

It looks to me like the OP is making more of a beef about Verizon's advertised speeds being significantly different from their actual speeds. That Verizon is continuing to advertise speeds that it intentionally is not delivering, IMO, constitutes fraudulent advertising. This can and should be the basis of, and resolved by, a class action suit.

It's no different really than an ISP that advertises 100Mbps, has ethernet to the home, but only a T3 to the Internet.

I'm sure their customer contract has clauses which specify that "actual speeds may vary". This does not, however, make their advertised speeds any less knowingly false.

Of course, their actual advertisements include disclaimers so they're not actually making claims about their upstream connections - legally, they would be able to get away with a T3. The problem is that there's no economic reason for a competitor to lay their own last-mile lines to the vast majority of consumers and compete on upstream features, since not enough people care enough to switch for them to recoup the capital investment. It's truly a first-mover-takes-all scenario.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com