[Theodores]

My ISP - Virgin in the UK - has a transparent proxy cache for streaming video sites. If I want to watch an episode of Breaking Bad then it is there, instant. However, that 1992 B-side tack with 200 views 'buffers' for a while. That probably is because it is not cached down the road or further upstream at some Akamai CDN. It probably has to come straight from the heart of the GooglePlex, Sergei's very own hard drive...

Given that most people watch what they are told to watch, i.e. the same stuff as everyone else, and, since almost all of that can be cached by the ISP, why would they throttle? The final mile I pay for, I could buy the basic 'throttled to 5Mbs' service but they kindly let me pay for a sensible level of bandwidth. How is this throttling thing different in the USA?

[SwellJoe]

"why would they throttle?"

Because they want to slow the demise of their television business unit. Many of the telcos here in the states not only also offer cable television service, they also directly compete with Netflix (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/0...). If they can make Netflix slower than the Comcast online offering (and they can), then more users will often choose the Comcast offering, even if it is inferior in every other way...and, most nefariously, the consumer probably won't know why Netflix is "so slow" and Comcast streaming is so fast.

In short, Telcos want the ability to kill their rivals, without having to provide a better product. They succeeded in doing so during the 90s on the broadband Internet front (there used to be thousands of independent ISPs in the US; they were killed by the telcos abusing their monopoly power, it's a story I've told here before, and so won't go into again).

[Theodores]

Thank you for that. The situation is different in the UK, at least with my ISP. They have teamed up with Netflix rather than throttled them.

http://about.virginmedia.com/press-release/9410/virgin-media...

In the UK cable TV took a lot longer to arrive than in the US. When it arrived it quickly merged into some monster debt vehicle that had to be refinanced somehow. Nobody really went for cable, it took on a new life with the Internet. This competes with ADSL copper from BT and various competitors. There is no local monopoly, if I go for Talk Talk instead of BT then the same wire to the door gets used. Sounds like we have a better market over here.

[dasil003]

I moved from Mountain View to London and I have to say the whole telecom system is night and day better in the UK. It's embarrassing how the wool has been pulled over the eyes of Americans in terms of believing that the country has good telecom infrastructure and value.

In the UK I pay £10($16)/month for my mobile service on pay-as-you-go vs $70/month on contract in the US (which high limits than I needed, but it was the cheapest I could get). Similarly, I pay £30($50)/month for my FTTC connection from BT, which gives me actual sustained speeds night and day of 75/15mbps up/down vs something like $80/month (and it rose by a dollar or so every single month) for a highly variable 10/2mbps up/down cable from Comcast in Mountain View that suffered heavily during prime time.

Oh, and don't get me started on nationalized healthcare and the willfully ignorant propaganda that has been fed to and swallowed by the American people hook line and sinker.

[dzhiurgis]

Moved from eastern Europe to London and the only thing that is actually better is 3G coverage. The rest is expensive/extremely low quality.

Just came back from holidays at parents. 300 Mbps FTTH is £20/month, however it's not all bells and whistles. Speed to London is 200 Mbps. To NY - 1 Mbps. Neighbouring countries get 100-200 Mbps and I couldn't establish a real pattern, but international torrent speed is usually 25% of the national one.

The thing is we have monopoly and no one is bothered to play that game "rent from us, it's competition" because everyone knows it's extremely inefficient. Where as in London I could choose among 5 or so "competitors", which offer precisely the same service (and all of them won't offer upload speed of more than 200-300 Kbps - it's hardly enough for video chats (which gave me the idea that not only upload speeds should be advertised, but also streaming bandwidth)).

Oh, and how about the whole BT's rollout of FTTC? Why would you'd be saving couple ££'s, when you know for sure that couple years later that will have to be upgraded?

Mobile plans are roughly half price, 3G coverage over the country is spotty and 4G is virtually non-existant.

[Theodores]

In the UK we were able to get something good enough using the copper that was in place 'since Marconi was a lad' simply by putting in better boxes at the local telephone exchange.

Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, after the wall fell, the situation was 'well, let's start from scratch'. Hence in places like Latvia you have internet speeds both ways (uplink as well as downlink) that are ridiculously fast compared to what is offered in the UK.

When it comes to the fat pipes, a lot of it was put in place during a speculative bubble more than a decade ago. Remember companies like Nortel? I think the bubble burst before they got to places like Riga. So it does not surprise me at all what you are saying.

Incidentally 3G was also a weird speculative bubble in the UK, more than 20 billion or so went on the auction for the radio spectrum. Maybe things were a bit more realistic in Eastern Europe.

The situation in the USA is going to be quite scary. Lots of areas that were remote but sophisticated, e.g. Missoula in Montana, could fall off the map as a desirable place to live, just because of poor internet speeds. It does not seem the government is that alarmed about the country turning into internet have's and have not's.

[dzhiurgis]

My dad lived in a small town and his phone number (which we found in phone book from certain occupation before Russians), was 55.

So the phone lines were there for a while.