[techdragon]

I dream of a consumer/residential ISP that’s that transparent about their network.

There were issues in Australia with the rollout of the NBN where the wholesale charging mechanism was basically designed to give structural kickback to back haul fiver bandwidth providers (including the national incumbent Telstra) as a way to get everyone on the negotiating table. So instead of needing bandwidth to a couple dozen places ISPs needed it to over a hundred, and we ended up with a significant fraction of the ISP market being throttled by ludicrous “contention ratios” I recall some notorious ones being over 100 to 1 but I’m on mobile so it’s a bit hard to go digging for historical links. (Whirlpool.net if you want to learn more)

The end result was a generation of frustrated young consumers did actually learn a little bit about this due to it being a widespread issue that even helped some companies differentiate their product in the market by beginning to advertise their contention ratios and it genuinely did help them get customers, but it likely would have just been “confusing” a decade early had the issue not become prominent enough that people had some idea what this thing meant when they were selecting an ISP.