You seem to be misinformed on how the internet works. Nothing is “free”. ISPs have to buy equipment, pay for expensive physical connectivity (without disturbing existing infrastructure), and usually have to deal with constant, ever increasing bandwidth requirements.
I’m all for a bit of net neutrality, but ISPs tend to get a lot of flak for policies like this, for seemingly no reason. For example, let’s say ISP A and Upstream B have a mutual bandwidth sharing policy (called Peering) where both sides benefit equally from the connectivity. ISP A determines that N is using all the bandwidth to Upstream B. ISP A has three options: N gets all the bandwidth to Upstream B (disturbing other traffic to/from that network), N has to be throttled to allow all traffic equally, or ISP A and Upstream B need to expand their network again (new equipment, new physical links) which will cost a lot of money. N doesn’t even pay ISP A or Upstream B, they just pay their ISP C. In the end, ISP A has to throttle N, and N is the one who had to expand/change their business model to deliver content to their customers. They had to go out and buy services from many upstream providers to even the load and designed a solution to install Caching boxes inside each ISP’s datacenter so their traffic could reach end users without going upstream.
IMO, the customers of A are paying A to access to the internet, including N. So A should charge their customers enough that they can pay for the equipment to deliver that.
In a working market with many participants, customers can choose a cheaper ISP that has congested/throttled peering, or a more expensive ISP with gold-plated interconnects.
The problem is that in the US, typically your choice of ISP is limited by geography. In many other places you have open fiber networks where the last mile is shared and then you can choose what ISP you want ontop of that, and the ISP is what determines how good your peering is.
And installing caching boxes inside of ISPs is actually a really efficient solution (as well as peer-to-peer)
You seem to be misinformed on how the internet works. Nothing is “free”. ISPs have to buy equipment, pay for expensive physical connectivity (without disturbing existing infrastructure), and usually have to deal with constant, ever increasing bandwidth requirements.
I’m all for a bit of net neutrality, but ISPs tend to get a lot of flak for policies like this, for seemingly no reason. For example, let’s say ISP A and Upstream B have a mutual bandwidth sharing policy (called Peering) where both sides benefit equally from the connectivity. ISP A determines that N is using all the bandwidth to Upstream B. ISP A has three options: N gets all the bandwidth to Upstream B (disturbing other traffic to/from that network), N has to be throttled to allow all traffic equally, or ISP A and Upstream B need to expand their network again (new equipment, new physical links) which will cost a lot of money. N doesn’t even pay ISP A or Upstream B, they just pay their ISP C. In the end, ISP A has to throttle N, and N is the one who had to expand/change their business model to deliver content to their customers. They had to go out and buy services from many upstream providers to even the load and designed a solution to install Caching boxes inside each ISP’s datacenter so their traffic could reach end users without going upstream.
That’s a good summary!
IMO, the customers of A are paying A to access to the internet, including N. So A should charge their customers enough that they can pay for the equipment to deliver that.
In a working market with many participants, customers can choose a cheaper ISP that has congested/throttled peering, or a more expensive ISP with gold-plated interconnects.
The problem is that in the US, typically your choice of ISP is limited by geography. In many other places you have open fiber networks where the last mile is shared and then you can choose what ISP you want ontop of that, and the ISP is what determines how good your peering is.
And installing caching boxes inside of ISPs is actually a really efficient solution (as well as peer-to-peer)