If you want speed then you will have to pay for it

The price may go up because service providers are being petty, but, at least in the US, the government's decision means that it is easier to break up regional monopolies by opening up the possibility of other companies being able to expand into an area, and thereby drive prices lower through competition. As it stands at the moment, several ISPs have regional monopolies which are not technically illegal under federal law, because they don't have a national monopoly.
 
We have just got Infinity where I live and I was given the choice of 38mb/s for about £20 a month or 60mb/s for £30 a month. I really don't understand why you shouldn't pay more for a higher speed but this is more about companies paying for access to ISP's faster line speeds isn't it?
 
I have Infinity 2 80/20 and get pretty much that, 70% of the time. BT openly throttle P2P traffic at peak periods (essentially 5pm to midnight) and I have a feeling that they throttle at other times too because my connection goes up and down like a yo-yo, especially recently. I'm guessing as they get more and more people onboard the network is having trouble keeping up.
 
For BT Infinity they are allowed to throttle your usage based upon the fair usage clause in the contract with you the end user. They do have some completely unlimited packages out there if you ask them enough of the right questions, but for them Infinity is just a stepping stone as they actually want to be able to run fibre to the house and get rid of traditional telephone systems moving everyone onto VOIP. This means you will just get a single bill with no variance each month as everything will be data traffic and no call costs on their behalf.

The decision in the states is about big companies paying ISPs to prioritise their traffic over others, hence killing the ability for a small start up to compete. Imagine if you came up with an idea that revolutionised video streaming and set up your own site. YouTube could pay the ISPs to allow their traffic to flow faster than yours, and you couldn't afford to pay that cost being a small start up. It would mean no-one would use your system due to the fact that videos kept buffering and stalling whereas YouTube they got great service from.

Strangely enough it was the ISPs that wanted this in place, not the internet companies themselves. The big already in place companies that provide data across the internet (Google (and everything they own), Netflix, Amazon etc) were all campaigning against the ability to pay for better service from ISPs and wanted net neutrality.

Originally the decision in the US was to allow for ISPs to make these charges and they started a 120 day public consultation on the matter. The consultation was flooded with millions of public comments driven by the big companies getting their users to protest and a number of very good TV spots on the matter (See
for a funny yet informative view of the matter from last year). I am glad to see over the weekend they have changed their minds and decided to go with what content providers and the general public wants to see :)
 
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