When Broadband Duopolists Fight, We Win? Maybe . . . .

WHEN BROADBAND DUOPOLISTS FIGHT, WE WIN? MAYBE....
[SOURCE: Public Knowledge, AUTHOR: Harold Feld, Media Access Project]
[Commentary] Feld gets his big brain around the surprising letter from Hands Off the Internet to the Federal Communications Commission saying that the FCC has authority to act on the Network Neutrality complaint and declaratory ruling against Comcast and urging the FCC to do so expeditiously. He looks at the technical differences between cable's broadband offerings and Verizon's fiber-based FIOS offerings. In the case at hand, Comcast advertises it has a high-speed network as good as Verizon's, but it doesn't. Instead of spending lots of money to build a network that matches what they advertise, they spent a lot less money to go to a company called Sandvine, bought equipment designed to “shape” user traffic without users finding out, and continued to lie through their teeth to their customers, even when directly asked. In fact, as a leaked memo shows, Comcast continued to instruct its line staff on how to lie, obfuscate and generally mislead customers who called to ask point blank whether the reports in the AP about shaping BitTorrent traffic were true (and reportedly threatened to fire employees that refused to lie to customers). Looked at this way, you can see why the telcos (and therefore their sock-puppet Hands Off the Internet) would be a shade peeved about Comcast’s decision to “manage” their network in such a “cost effective” but deceptive manner. Because if Comcast can keep pretending its network is just as good as FIOS when it isn't, and can even lie when asked about it directly by customers, then Verizon just wasted a couple of bazillion dollars and took a two-year stock beating for _nothing_.
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1269