Verizon, TWC, Comcast. All of these providers are local monopolies.<p>This is the root of the problem.<p>Here in Australia I can choose any number of retail ISPs that will service my Fibre to the Home connection.
If I was not living in the building I am now I would be able to choose any number of ADSL ISPs.
This creates competition and fixes the problem.<p>Funnily enough this access is legislated here in Australia.
Yes.
Legislated.<p>There can be no ISP monopolies in Australia.<p>Better yet we have embarked on building a Fibre to the Home national network called the National Broadband Network which functions under the same scheme, ensuring we won't have any bullshit monopolies for the foreseeable future.<p>Americans should campaign for the same solution, enforce last-mile wholesale and legislate separation of ISP retail from ISP wholesale business units.<p>Everyone wins.
I think this issue may be more subtle than we want it to be.<p>I'm no fan of monopolistic ISPs, but it <i>is</i> 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. You pay per byte sent, just like how the sender of a letter pays postage. This has always been the case, and as long as Verizon charges Level 3 the same amount per-packet as they do any other sender, there's no violation of net neutrality.<p>So Level 3/Netflix is making the argument that all Verizon has to do is install some additional network cables and everything would be fixed. Well that's a convenient argument, given that Level 3 sends way more traffic than it receives on that link, and currently (it seems) isn't paying for that difference. I hate to say it, but I think Verizon may actually be in the right here, at least insofar as that Level 3 should in fact be paying for that peering arrangement. Level 3's blog post seem deceptive on this point.<p>That said, Verizon has a video service that competes with Netflix. Verizon's video service presumably doesn't have to pay transit fees to reach Verizon customers. So what's to stop Verizon from charging unreasonable fees in order to stamp out competition? Presumably, this is the real problem: Verizon and Level 3 cannot agree on a price, because Verizon has no reason to offer a reasonable price.<p>So Level 3 and Netflix are waging a public campaign to shame Verizon, presumably as a bargaining chip to get the price lower. But neither side is really being truthful with us.<p>I'm just happy that in my area I can get sonic.net, an ISP whose only business interest is delivering packets.
"Verizon, you're my enemy, I'm going to continue paying you every month while I work around your stupidity with my VPN..."<p>That's just how fucked up this situation is.
They have trained their agents on how to respond to complaints about speed... <a href="https://twitter.com/CyrisXD/status/489950468483731458/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/CyrisXD/status/489950468483731458/photo/...</a>
I do the same thing as the OP, I use an OpenWRT router with OpenVPN back to a VPS I have and it improves streaming video quality and speed for Netflix and more. Highly recommend it.