They are doing it. If you have a slow connection and the video start to buffer a lot, there is a banner that appear right under the video linking to the video quality report. I saw it yesterday
Good. We need to Name-n-Shame these ISP's into doing good by their customers.
There was an interesting interview with Comcast CEO the other day where he said, "[We] don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated.”
But then he attempted to shift the blame to content providers:
"Roberts followed up this statement by saying that Comcast is mostly hated because 'it’s the company consumers have to deal with when other companies raise their prices.'"
They generally offer better pricing for faster speeds with less BS, ie no monitoring, ad injections, throttling, etc.
You will have to look for ones in your area, but they are there. Usually each major city will have a few. Rural areas will tend to have more WISP's (wireless isp's) that are also small and all about their customers.
The recourse is to call your Senator and Congressman and demand they force big ISP's to lease fiber/copper to smaller companies, much like phone-line providers are required to lease their copper to other companies. This will help spur competition, which means everyone wins.
I don't know what you mean by "major city," but I look in Milwaukee every six months or so. There simply aren't any "independent ISPs" here with remotely comparable speeds or prices.
Hi! I'm one of the four (that I know of) independent ISPs that serve Milwaukee and the surrounding areas with a combination of WISP, Fiber, and Copper technologies. We all suck at advertising and rely on referrals.
In the Milwaukee market we all focus on business users (and generally ones that need symmetric or high-upload service and would be looking at a fiber build) or MDU applications because... For the past several years we've seen a consumer preference for absolute lowest cost over quality or available bandwidth. At the extreme end we still have users on wholesaled ILEC DSL on provisioned for 768k download that just don't care enough to upgrade or switch because they like the sub $20 price. It's ILEC controlled so I can't just upgrade them out of the goodness of my heart either.
The participants list for our little Internet Exchange is somewhat workable as a directory of area independent ISPs although some of us are datacenter operators or as far away as Racine or Madison: http://www.mkeix.net/
This is my experience as well, just across the pond from you (West Michigan).
Home users demand the world for $19.99 a month and no contract. Therefore, they get terrible Comcast / TWC / ATT (essentially, they get what they asked for).
There are a lot of people trying to run the "independent ISP" gauntlet, all over the US. (And I'm biased, as I am one of them). But those consumer prices usually only work if you offer bad/slow service, have a complete monopoly, or have government subsidy.
Since most Independents don't have or won't do most of those, they have to focus on business, as those are (usually) the only people who care enough to put actual money into service.
There was an interesting interview with Comcast CEO the other day where he said, "[We] don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated.”
But then he attempted to shift the blame to content providers:
"Roberts followed up this statement by saying that Comcast is mostly hated because 'it’s the company consumers have to deal with when other companies raise their prices.'"
http://bgr.com/2014/05/28/comcast-ceo-roberts-interview/