If I could make it longer, I might have said "Due to neglect of relatively cheap interconnects, US ISPs are and were measured to be providing sub-broadband connections to many portions of the Internet".
The title "ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance" just says that there was a study and says nothing about its results, but it's the results that are interesting. It was kind of a surprise to see the title changed out from underneath me. I did not know HN titles were edited in that way.
ISPs are rightly a little pissed that Cogent, for example, takes Netflix's money for transit service then hot potatoes the data right onto the ISP for the ISP to transit to the end customer.
Remember, Cogent is being paid to deliver the content, but they are contracting to carry more data that the interconnect can hold. Now you could say the ISP should just let them expand the interconnect, but that is no excuse for Cogent overselling their own capacity.
Interconnects have always been a wild west.
They can do this because they have a monopoly on their customers. Not just a "Microsoft monopoly" where there are plenty of alternatives but network effects that keep people using Windows, but honest-to-god monopolies not just granted but ENFORCED by the government.
What we have here is a failure of the government to break the monopolies, revoke the monopolies, or police the monopolies. A little legislation that said "you can't oversell your bandwidth by more than X amount" would go a long way towards giving consumers an effective stick to beat their ISP with for over-promising* and under-delivering.
Note: The * is there to denote that they've written the contracts such that basically no matter what happens they're not in violation of them. We're only entering those contracts willingly in the sense that it's an abusive contracts from one of two or three vendors, or no contract at all. It's kind of like asking someone if they'd rather be beaten or stabbed. Given the choice; neither. If I have to pick one, how big is the knife?
Cogent and L3 are ISPs as well, so I think saying "ISPs are failing to provide broadband speeds" is fair. However, to add context, L3 had a blog post a while back explaining that they are standing ready to add more capacity for cheap and that the congestion is, in at least one instance (in LA), Verizon's fault. http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/verizons-accidental-mea...
Generally speaking though, the original title is the one to us, and if you use something else, it will generally be changed to match the original one.
I've given up on trying to come up with what I think is the most useful title to HN though, or on trying to guess what the mods will do. I just use the original title and let the mods change it if they want. If I think the original title isn't good at explaining the main point of interest from a HN view, I feel sad, but oh well, that's clearly how HN wants it.
It might be convenient if HN had a tool like reddit to automatically fetch the title from HTML given a URL. In fact, if they had such a tool, I'd expect HN to maybe actually mandatorily make that the title and not allow you to edit it, since it seems to be HN editorial preferences not to let submitters write titles.
