EU takes a dump on others. Net neutrality is law: no roaming charges

[Rhinox]

Most people don't download and stream every single series of TV show ever made simultaneously every month

[Cleverness]

Streaming through Hulu/Netflix/Provider sites/etc is pretty common nowadays. I mean you can stream every NHL game if you subscribe for it. And most of these are paid services, not like I'm talking about people who are torrenting/free streaming.

[Callisto]

That would still be difficult to top 250 unless you use them 24 hours a day. Chances are if you're topping 250 consistently, you're probably doing something that negates your right to complain about data caps.

[Serra]

Most people don't download and stream every single series of TV show ever made simultaneously every month

Maybe he's trying to watch all the porn ever made. You ever consider that option?

[Pirian]

It still amazes me that people can use less than 250 gb a month. I haven't used less than that since at least 2011, probably longer. Last month i used 808 gb, and probably average over 500 gb per month...

A buddy of mine that was in China for a little over a year managed to shore up his steam library with 200+ games while he was there. When he got back he built a pc with 3tb of space and decided he wanted to have his entire library downloaded. He has been back since early December and has filled up 2 out of the 3tb before AT&T started to throttle him. He just added another 4tb of space, so he's not letting that stop him, but it only took AT&T a month to respond to that load, so I guess it's really just about picking off the people going waaaaaay the fuck over.

[Ghost_Wheel22]

My local brand ISP is pretty shit for speed ($65/mo for 6d/1u) but they have zero bandwidth cap or throttling. I'm on their top 5 list for usage and they actually brag about how they can handle the heavy workloads I can dish out. Glad my options are terribad 1d/.5u SUPERTURBOMAX DSL from Frontier or HughesNet. Frontier is still super pissed that their monopoly on the area for internet was touched and literally cut the fiber lines going to my town. Didn't end well since that fiber also served a school district and a few government offices.

[Gredival]

Because they don't have overlapping areas of service, for the most part. That's sort of the issue with attempting to apply monopoly laws to cable companies, they are already monopolies in the areas they service for the most part.

I did two stints in public policy work in telecom, and generally, the same is generally also true of most phone companies where they offer triple plays (landline phone service, internet, and cable TV). Any other service that requires build-out, natural monopolies emerge everywhere except in densely populated urban cities. And the industry fights tooth and nail against any possible new regulation even though other natural monopolies (power companies) get strictly regulated.

The AT&T deal was shot down because cell companies compete nationwide.

[Serra]

My local brand ISP is pretty shit for speed ($65/mo for 6d/1u) but they have zero bandwidth cap or throttling. I'm on their top 5 list for usage and they actually brag about how they can handle the heavy workloads I can dish out. Glad my options are terribad 1d/.5u SUPERTURBOMAX DSL from Frontier or HughesNet. Frontier is still super pissed that their monopoly on the area for internet was touched and literally cut the fiber lines going to my town. Didn't end well since that fiber also served a school district and a few government offices.

Wait, they cut the lines? Another company's (or the government's) lines? Also, those prices are ridiculous.

[Meresgi]

That would still be difficult to top 250 unless you use them 24 hours a day. Chances are if you're topping 250 consistently, you're probably doing something that negates your right to complain about data caps.

Nothing really "negates" your right to complain about data caps because there shouldn't be caps in the first place. It's not like we're eating up pieces of a pie and they have to say "Whoa there fatty, 10 pieces is all you get for this month...other people gotta eat too!".

If there was actual competition, data caps wouldn't exist. But these companies are allowed to do whatever the fuck they want, including shaping your traffic behind your back.

[Lucavi]

I believe Comcast 'caps' are a technicality, I have never, ever seen Comcast actually enforce a cap on someone, you have to top 250GB a month for 4 straight months or something

Agreed. Comcast, while stupid expensive sometimes, is one of the better souless companies out there. They've always been very good about fixing what needs fixin' 'round these parts, especially when the guy literally drilled a hole in my wall and installed a brand new wiring rig to replace my house's aging wires. For free. Because my old ones were old and he knew it.

[Guyverarmor]

Agreed. Comcast, while stupid expensive sometimes, is one of the better souless companies out there. They've always been very good about fixing what needs fixin' 'round these parts, especially when the guy literally drilled a hole in my wall and installed a brand new wiring rig to replace my house's aging wires. For free. Because my old ones were old and he knew it.

Agreed Lucavi. I know Comcast catches flak (as any company does ) but I lived up in Michigan for 6 months, I never had a problem with em other than some larger than normal late charges ( technically my fault ) and while I had 2 problems within those six months, the techs were very professional and did their best to fix what had happened. Once was due to a faulty modem, and another was because someone broke into the ped and spliced into the tap I was connected on.

[archibaldcrane]

I think we should all be in a holding pattern here until we see how they use the lack of net neutrality.

[Waraji]

All Comcast Tech's I've ever dealt with have been self employed Sub-Contractors for Comcast. Not directly employed by them but paid on a case by case basis.

[Lucavi]

I think we should all be in a holding pattern here until we see how they use the lack of net neutrality.

Honestly, aside from lobbying and complaining to them, there's nothing -I- can really do about what they decide to do. I'm not giving Comcast up because they have the most reliable and fastest internet where I live, and Comcast doesn't seem to have these ARR rubberbanding latency issues as badly as Time Warner and Verizon do.

These companies hold most all of the cards; you just have to hope they wield that power with respect and responsibility. I have been given no reason -not- to trust Comcast, aside from blah blah corporate shill blah blah, as we've had them for well over 10 years now and I've had nothing but pretty decent experiences with them.

[hey]

Most people don't download and stream every single series of TV show ever made simultaneously every month

Oh.

My local brand ISP is pretty shit for speed ($65/mo for 6d/1u) but they have zero bandwidth cap or throttling. I'm on their top 5 list for usage and they actually brag about how they can handle the heavy workloads I can dish out.

6 mbps, such a heavy workload! It's cute when ISPs try to pretend bandwidth is a finite resource.

[Ghost_Wheel22]

Doesn't help that the guy running is a glorified pc repair nerd from community college. Apparently you can only fit so many ketchup packets at once into the series of tubes. Still pretty pissed that 6 down is about the highest speed I can get unless I wanted to install a T3 line or something else that's outrageously expensive.

[Not Kuno]

Oh.

6 mbps, such a heavy workload! It's cute when ISPs try to pretend bandwidth is a finite resource.

I'm a noob with this, but I remember hearing back in the day with cable and DSL it used to go slower if lots of people in your area had it/used it a lot. Was that even true? Do other people not effect you now?

[Gredival]

I'm a noob with this, but I remember hearing back in the day with cable and DSL it used to go slower if lots of people in your area had it/used it a lot. Was that even true? Do other people not effect you now?

This is going to be extremely long-winded, because broadband public policy is actually what I used to work in.

TL;DR:

Lolno. Companies overcharge and in most cases speed bottlenecks are because of underpowered IT equipment used to run networks, not because of technological limitations transporting data.

Long Version:

The current fiber infrastructure offers practically infinite scalability for data being sent through the glass cables. The bottleneck is the quality of the equipment on the ends of the cables. When a neighborhood is comprised of mostly older folks whose internet use is limited to checking email and occasional Google research, the telecom company can get away with really light equipment. However when your fiber loop is connected to a large urban hub, like say Manhattan or Los Angeles, you need a lot of equipment to manage the data those lines are handling.

However the cost of this equipment is really insignificant to a company like Verizon or AT&T. The prohibitive part of building networks is laying the damn fiber itself. Telecoms get away with charging the rates they do because of the massive investment they made to lay the fiber in the first place (sometimes this was subsidized by the state though). This is why low density population areas get screwed with bad service; it's a natural monopoly. No competitor is going to pay to go lay down fiber lines anywhere except major cities because there just aren't enough customers to make it worth entering the market.

Now the caveat to this is that when companies went and laid fiber cables, they laid a TON of them because everyone wanted to make sure that we wouldn't have to go dig up concrete to put in more lines later. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes this cable laying was subsidized by state governments in the interest of improving the internet quality in the state. These abundant dormant lines are what we call the "dark" fiber network.

The secret that telecom companies don't want you to know is that you can get ridiculously cheap bandwidth by leasing or buying dark fiber and becoming your own ISP.

For example, if you haven't heard of President Obama's "Connect-ED initiative" it's his education plan to connect all schools in the US to 1 gigabit per second pipe by 2017 so that schools can use digital learning to remedy the current issues with our education system. Now that sounds super expensive to most of us because the internet companies would charge an arm and a leg for 1 gbps line.

The secret is of course is that as long as school districts own their own dark fiber networks, we would save millions in public school funding while getting better service; the median school pays $40 per megabit of bandwidth, compared to leasing dark fiber which only costs $0.70 per megabit and owning dark fiber which is a mere $0.08 per megabit. That includes maintenance and technical fees to keep the network running.

The only barrier to entry is the equipment at the ends of the cables. So the industry fights tooth and nail against any dark fiber initiatives, be it from schools or from cities and municipalities. Right now, schools can't use funding they receive for internet to buy the equipment necessary to run and maintain dark fiber networks; they can only buy subscriptions from the industry. The industry invests lots of cash to keep it that way, to make sure schools are tied down to using subscriptions because that means schools have to pay them thousands per month for internet. And it's also why, as someone mentioned earlier, they throw a fit when they lose monopoly when an entrant uses these to enter the market.

That's why it will take either pressure from extremely well funded new entrants (hello Google Fiber) or strict monopoly regulation (similar to how we regulate electric companies) for consumers to get truly fair prices for bandwidth and for quality of broadband service in the US to match other countries.

[Meresgi]

How long did it take this country to actually properly regulate electrical companies? Part of me is not surprised we havn't done the same with ISPs just because of how big lobbying is, but I mean there is precedent as far as I can see when your service is deemed to be needed by the majority of people, in 2014 I think the internet is pretty much a crucial part of our entire world infrastructure and without it, like electricity, we would be totally fucked now.

Also interesting on the dark fiber shit, I did not know you could get away with doing that.

[Serra]

That was both interesting and informative.

I had never even heard of this dark fiber thing. So, how exactly does one go about leasing/buying dark fiber..?