superjawes wrote:Concupiscence wrote:This is beginning to sound like "write your congressman" territory. Comcast deserves to get called out on this in the most embarrassingly public way possible. And JustAnEngineer should probably recalibrate his expectations of how current home users actually use the internet - it's a rare person I run into who doesn't have some kind of basic Netflix streaming package in this day and age, even if it's just being used with a Blu-ray player with streaming video support.
It's called Net Neutrality. It basically requires ISPs to provide equal access to all content instead of favoring their own services or doing their own censorship.
It gets very R&P very quickly, but just know that it is "write you Congressman" territory and this is the issue to write about.
Yep, this is Net Neutrality, or lack there of. Well, Net Neutrality has been dead for a while, but as I understand it, the content isn't so much the concern, it's the connecting AS networks that Comcast is worrying about. Adding ports and bandwidth is cheap these days, even if Comcast owns the cabling and the poles (they don't in my municipality, they lease from AT&T), it's still pocket lint to them to add backend bandwidth.
Now then, the issue is that Comcast is probably charging those connecting networks, probably Level3, and I would assume that Level3 is also charging Comcast. Netflix also has to pay for its pipes (also probably Level3), so that $8 ain't so bad from the end user's point, and all this cost should be payed for by the customer. Or, as they say, pass the savings on to you, dear customer.
So, depending on where you live, I would not only write your congressman, but also contact the municipality. Comcast negotiates the monopoly deals every four or five years with the city, and city officials would certainly like to know how they're treating their voters.