What you are concerned with is false advertising.

network neutrality is a lot more serious than any type of false advertising a telecomm can put out. as consumers, if we're smart enough to see that our service plans aren't 100mbps, ok no big deal. yes, they're both evil, but false advertising isn't really even part of network neutrality as a debate.

now if we have no say in how fast certain websites respond, depending on how much we're paying (or they're paying), that's an entirely different topic. i can walk away from a provider if they're lying through advertising. but who's going to stop them from throttling your connection based on which website you're visiting?

legislation is the only thing that can stop the big 3 from this type of thing. you'll notice that in the past, the FCC has actually punished traffic discrimination (like when comcast was shutting off bit torrent, a complete violation of neutrality rules). if there's no legislation, the duopolies can do whatever they want and all have a big orgy price gauging at the same time.

Wondering, because by the nature of TCP/IP, it's hard to get the full capacity of a link with a single TCP connection -- such as an HTTP download. You'll get much closer to full utilization with multiple connections -- such as with P2P app parallel downloading.

But to further complicate things: if you are saturating your uplink (as is also typical with P2P apps) on an asymmetric service, you may impair your download connections' throughput (as upstream ACKs on the downloads are occasionally dropped). So you should also cap your upload rate to something under the uplink capacity -- the P2P app or a home router may have configuration allowing this.

With those in mind, I've usually observed my throughput on DSL or cable modem links as much more than 60% of the advertised speed -- and sometimes more than 100% of the advertised speed!

In a simple test situation (say ftp or http over a lan link) you are using TCP/IP/and some hardware link layer and you'll see close to wire speed.

Multiple TCP connections improve things as long as each connection's 'teeth' aren't aligned. Consumer broadband asymmetry makes it worse, because when one direction gets saturated (like an uplink) and loses ACK packets on connections that are primarily downward, the downward side still backs off, even if it wasn't yet close to using downward capacity.

Your example of getting full capacity from a LAN link isn't very instructive for what happens over broadband links. Suppose your NIC supports 100Mbps and every link to your LAN destination has at least that capacity. Your NIC will be the bottleneck; you won't trigger the TCP mechanisms. As soon as your 100Mbps local link hits your 10Mbps cable modem, the TCP congestion control becomes a significant factor.

Regulations on the behavior of companies reduces choice (only large companies can afford the legions of lawyers required to comply with them; small competitors go out of business). The only regulation we need is the regulation to tell the truth -- you don't tell the truth, you are sued out of business. The end. Yet, this is the only regulation we do not have, or that the government is unwilling to uphold.

If governments would concern themselves with enforcing the rule of law, and upholding the sanctity of contracts, we would all be better off. But, since large companies can buy political friends (through lobbying) and legal protection against fraudulently advertising services which they do not intend to deliver (through teams of lawyers) but small, efficient companies cannot, we therefore lose our freedom of choice -- by our own hand.

I'm sorry, but I worked as an electrician for several years in the UK. There's regulations on everything from the thickness of the cable to how low a wall socket can be mounted to how high a light switch can be mounted. The regulation book is almost two inches thick. There's no big nationalized companies except for industrial electrical work, like wiring up factories. Every single person I worked with worked for themselves or for a small company, most of which were father-son companies.

Regulations for electrical work were put into place to stop people scamming people and burning your house down. Here in Canada regulations only came around relatively recently, and from people I've talked to (many are electricians from the UK) they're utterly disgusted with what people got away with. One house had its lighting done with speaker wire attached to a 10 amp fuse, by all rights that house should have burnt down.

Here in Canada there's virtually no regulations on phone companies. They introduce new charges however they want, Bell even charges you if there's a problem with their equipment they installed. Back home that's not even heard of, BT came into our house numerous times to fix problems. There's also numerous smaller companies you can go with, in fact there's a flood of them for everything.

Speaking from experience, regulation helps people. It makes it harder for big companies to bully the little guy and allows a much more even playing field. It also prevents the whole pyramid scheme of big business, where thousands of people working for $10 an hour do all the work for a few people being paid $10,000 an hour. In fact, nearly everyone in the business makes an extremely good wage (I think our best pay was ~$4000 for ~3 days work) and incompetent people tend to go out of business through lack of business or lawsuits.

My father in law has been an industrial electrician for 40 years, and there have been relevant standards for much longer than that. Standards are not necessarily regulations. And for this whole time, buyers of electrical products and installations could choose to contract for -- and enforce -- any electrical Standard THEY chose. Not one selected by some bungling government employee.

For example, if you choose to buy a CSA approved ladder, that is your choice -- you have knowingly chosen to purchase a product that complies with a certain set of standards. However, you may choose to buy a ladder from me, which I build to a higher set of standards. Should that not be your choice? Or, do you wish to make "CSA approval" a regulation for ladder manufacturers.

If you opt for universal ladder "CSA approval" regulation, have you increased or decreased your safety?

The word you omitted is that you 'claim' to build your ladder to a higher set of standards. As it isn't measured against CSA regulations, or independently verified in any way, then unless we perform rigorous testing ourselves, we have no way of knowing how safe or unsafe we are.

Even in the event that we properly test your ladder to the point of breaking, and are satisfied that its breaking strain was significantly great, we have no assurances that the replacement ladder we purchase from you was built to the same high standards as the demo.

So, while I agree with your initial arguments that contract law ought to be more enforceable, I think this argument confuses regulation with standards. Under your original argument, your faulty ladder could only get away with the 'CSA approved' lie for so long until it was sued out of existence.

If your ladder were superior, one would assume that either word of mouth, market forces, or superior marketing would get you rewarded appropriately.

People need to understand their mileage may vary.

I seriously doubt people were getting their nominal bandwidth during events such as 9/11 or Obama's inauguration.