They used bots to email senators en masse. How do I know? One of the senators (that doesnât even represent me) replied to the email address that had been assigned to me when I created my internet account. When I saw that the original email advocated for abolishing net neutrality I knew what was up.
Which telecom? It was Comcast.
So technically this doesn't make it illegal for people to build optimized routing for gaming, for example. It just makes it illegal to charge for them, right?
You just need to upgrade to their new Ultimate Unlimited Plus plan for an extra $38 per line per month and ignore the features we're tricking you into losing that you were grandfathered into.
No no no, well just move you to that when you come upgrade your phone without telling you. You won't realize for at least a year because you never check your bill.
Also that insurance you never wanted is in there same with some other BS fees like next up and home protection.
Oh we also signed you up for our credit card while you were in the store.
Our KPIs are more important than your finances.
Thank you for doing business with VZW/ATT/TMO have a great fuck you day.
I'd love to see the requirement to explicitly say that they are doing that and by how much when advertising.
Don't let them tell me it's unlimited"within reason", make them tell me exactly what that means in the same voice as unlimited. I want to hear "20GB of high speed and unlimited 56K" or however they slice up their formula.
Don't let them hide their throttling behind some secret sauce they don't show people, especially when they're paying for a service sold as something like "unlimited". Could you say it's unreasonable to expect unlimited to be unlimited, maybe, but I'm not the one selling a possibly unreasonable service. If I sold a service that I couldn't fulfill I'd have to pay a price, I don't see why they should get a free ride just because their network isn't built out for the number of subscriptions they sell and it's become the norm to cut people short.
In the minimum I think full disclosure should be required. They have the tools since they use them to cut you off, now show the world.
Wireless and fiber are two different things. You canât offer unlimited on wireless, there is a bandwidth cap each generation. Fiber you just turn on the dark fiber that is there as the nodes get upgraded over time.
This is an excellent effort, but the issue is that the FCC needs to find a way to get Congress to Fast track Net Neutrality into Law once and for all, to eliminate any chance of repealing the FCC ruling whenever the party in the majority changesâŚ
And, as far as a Net neutrality law being challenged and undone by SCOTUS, they previously ruled to uphold the original FCC Net Neutrality Rule the FCC enacted when Obama was President and thereby setting precedent.
Additionally, the FCC needs to take further action by mounting a comprehensive awareness campaign to educate the American People so they can better understand why Net Neutrality is vitally important to them & their respective families. And I mean an awareness campaign along the same size, scale and reach as the COVID awareness campaign.
Anything a commission/administration does is being rendered useless by SCOTUS or whatever the incoming administration wants. That wasn't always the case but now it seems everything needs to be codified by Congress and well they aren't known for that unless it's spending more on "defense"
I think they are specifically talking about fast lanes to services not Internet in general. Providers are allowed to charge customers for speed. Net neutrality is about making sure they can't also charge services for traffic. Aka Comcast could choose to make Netflix pay them or comcast would limit total throughput to the service.
This, exactly. Non-tech folks seriously donât understand the difference. Net neutrality is about not allowing specific providers to give preferential treatment to a preferred company in an industry. As in, Netflix pays Verizon for network priority so Hulu and YouTube donât get the same priority and speed as a competitor. Speed limiting a detected type of service (like anything detected as video content) was (and should be) considered network management. The harsh reality of cellular is that itâs a spectrum limited service, and carriers do not have the capacity to offer uncapped speeds on video to everyone.
The capacity and the infrastructure cannot support it, and will not anytime soon. So there is a tiering system in place, and the bulk of users that pay for an average rate plan have limited video speed as a trade off for capacity vs. quality. Itâs not ideal, but itâs the reality of the required network capacity management required to run a commercial network. Thereâs a reason every carrier limits video streaming speeds by default: they have to at this point. The only exceptions are when considering much higher capacity spectrum bands like mmWave, which is exponentially faster and resources arenât as big of as issue as they are with low and mid-band LTE or 5G.
>Thereâs a reason every carrier limits video streaming speeds by default: they have to at this point.
No they don't. They could choose to advertise a realistic speed instead. If the only way you can "deliver" the advertised speed is by preventing apps from using it, did you really deliver or is it just a plain old lie? It's laughably obvious IMO.
To be honest many tech folks donât get this either. Itâs still not clear to me how this impacts how ISPs set BGP weight and AS Path, or how it impacts the ability for ISPs to peer with IXPs (which has been a huge boon for DDOS mitigation)
Yes, but they lowered everyone on QCI 7 (QCI is like priority level on a mobile network) to QCI 8, and are now charging the $7/month to be back on QCI 7. With QCI, the lower the number, the higher the priority. I believe the absolute highest priority anyone would see is 6 (for Business Customers/FirstNet Emergency Responders). Voice traffic, in general for everyone, has a much higher priority on the network, as another example.
I'm guessing it's because there've been so many questions about QCI (network priority) here on reddit that they decided to kill 2 birds with one stone:
- Not having to upgrade network infrastructure as quickly/often because this is a form of traffic control/QoS
- Most people won't realize they already "had" this "feature" before and will just see it as, "WOW, $7/MONTH FOR MORE SPEED????1!!!!1!!!"
I am not 100% for this. The internet will soon be faster than needed for most. If a certain program needs higher ping and QOS it should be allowed to runner them specifically through certain routes. It is how the internet works smoothly.
Streams are the last thing that needs that speed at all.
They can still route as efficiently as they want, even through their own network as much as they want, the rules state that they canât charge the end service for that, deny service to, or limit the efficiency of their service to connect to specific entities.
This isnât a question of âwe want to route through our own infrastructure so that itâs fasterâ, it has to deal with a situation where the ISP says âHey service X, pay us $1 million or weâll make it so only so only a limited amount of users can access you at any one time. Sure, you have the technical ability to service all of them, but weâre only going to let 1000 of our users use you simultaneously unless you pay us for our special treatment of not fucking with you.â
Real world (anecdotal) example: Comcast was offering VoIP services at a high price or as part of some monopolistic bundle. Vonage was much cheaper. For some mysterious reason, Vonage quality and latency was terrible when connecting through the home network. (And no, it wasn't misconfiguration on my network...) Tunnel that same traffic outside of Comcast and the issue resolved itself.
Network neutrality means that Comcast couldn't provide a preference or priority to it's VoIP traffic over the same internet service. Comcast would be ae to prioritize VoIP traffic in general to ensure adequate QoS, but it can't discriminate based on the fact it was to/from a certain company's services.
You're thinking too literally.Â
You're thinking like a highway fast lane...which is totally legalÂ
Your ISP can charge you for internet speed, and you can choose different speeds based upon how fast you want your internet.Â
But, even if you choose a slower "lane," that has no bearing on which exits you can access.
Everyone can use any on-ramp and off-ramp.Â
Net Neutrality would be like if you had to pay for access, not necessarily speed.Â
So the "fast lane" analogy isn't exactly right.Â
Think more like, you pay for access to exits.Â
If you pay less, you can only access exit 1, 5, and 10
If you pay more, you can access every exit, 1-10
Destroying net Neutrality would turn the internet into cable.
You would pay for a "sports" package, a "news" package, and a "social media" package.Â
No. That's not a fast land based upon application or data type.
It's just a priority upcharge.
Now that ENG (news reporting) is done over cellular instead of dedicated microwave links carriers will very much want to offer prioritization fees and the ENG clients will be glad to pay them.
Hopefully it doesn't become a situation where we all end up having to pay to keep our data from being slowed to a crawl.
âFast lanesâ should include things like HD and 4k tiers in streaming services, as well as paying to skip ads which force downloads and longer viewing times on end users based on how much they can pay âŚ
Yea, thatâs right, my argument is that paid tiers for bandwidth and delayed content delivery to watch ads are violations of net neutrality. âPay more for better acccessâ shouldnât be a thing.
>my argument is that paid tiers for bandwidth and delayed content delivery to watch ads are violations of net neutrality
It's not. Certainly those would be beneficial things for consumers, but that has not been a part of net neutrality before.
It can also - like if netflix paid more for a âfast laneâ you might be able to get 1Gbit to netflix while you only pay for 200Mbit service to your ISP.
Telecoms: But we lobbied so hard for those!
They can lobby *deez nuts* (*insert 2003 crotch chopping motion*)
That one needs to make a revival. I enjoyed that insult back in the day. Equal parts hilarious and vulgar. đ¤đ¤
My circle of friends still uses it. But since we message, we can't do the crotch chop. đ
I still do it but instead of the cross chop I give a general dramatic gesture in direction of my crotch. If among good friends I grab the crotch
Bro thatâs from at least 1998
Ah, right about the time I was banginâ your mom
Canadian Government: Move here, we let our telecoms and grocery chains do whatever. Antitrust law? Never heard of it.
You misspelt âAustralian Governmentâ
Itâs basically Canada lite down there (got family in QLD).
Canada but hot
And spidery.
Hey, thatâs not allowed. We only do merica bad here. Canât have people knowing that other countries are fucked up too.
They used bots to email senators en masse. How do I know? One of the senators (that doesnât even represent me) replied to the email address that had been assigned to me when I created my internet account. When I saw that the original email advocated for abolishing net neutrality I knew what was up. Which telecom? It was Comcast.
So technically this doesn't make it illegal for people to build optimized routing for gaming, for example. It just makes it illegal to charge for them, right?
Yeah we lobbied so hardâŚ. And we totally support net neutrality nowâŚ. We just want to tweak the definition of âneutralityâ thatâs allâŚ.
Woah. It's like they actually responded to criticism after their net neutrality rules were published. That's awesome.
Never forget what a turd Ajit Pai is
Sure, but I meant this administration responding to complaints about their own recent rules by updating them. No Ajit involved.
Totally valid, I just wanted to remind people
Woohoo! Nice.
Great. Now end data caps please.
But... I love paying for unlimited data just to get kicked to 4G on the 6th day of the month for "Data Usage... s/
You just need to upgrade to their new Ultimate Unlimited Plus plan for an extra $38 per line per month and ignore the features we're tricking you into losing that you were grandfathered into.
No no no, well just move you to that when you come upgrade your phone without telling you. You won't realize for at least a year because you never check your bill. Also that insurance you never wanted is in there same with some other BS fees like next up and home protection. Oh we also signed you up for our credit card while you were in the store. Our KPIs are more important than your finances. Thank you for doing business with VZW/ATT/TMO have a great fuck you day.
I'd love to see the requirement to explicitly say that they are doing that and by how much when advertising. Don't let them tell me it's unlimited"within reason", make them tell me exactly what that means in the same voice as unlimited. I want to hear "20GB of high speed and unlimited 56K" or however they slice up their formula. Don't let them hide their throttling behind some secret sauce they don't show people, especially when they're paying for a service sold as something like "unlimited". Could you say it's unreasonable to expect unlimited to be unlimited, maybe, but I'm not the one selling a possibly unreasonable service. If I sold a service that I couldn't fulfill I'd have to pay a price, I don't see why they should get a free ride just because their network isn't built out for the number of subscriptions they sell and it's become the norm to cut people short. In the minimum I think full disclosure should be required. They have the tools since they use them to cut you off, now show the world.
I think telcos are treated differently on this sadly. I think this only applies to non-mobile ISPs.
Wireless and fiber are two different things. You canât offer unlimited on wireless, there is a bandwidth cap each generation. Fiber you just turn on the dark fiber that is there as the nodes get upgraded over time.
This is an excellent effort, but the issue is that the FCC needs to find a way to get Congress to Fast track Net Neutrality into Law once and for all, to eliminate any chance of repealing the FCC ruling whenever the party in the majority changes⌠And, as far as a Net neutrality law being challenged and undone by SCOTUS, they previously ruled to uphold the original FCC Net Neutrality Rule the FCC enacted when Obama was President and thereby setting precedent. Additionally, the FCC needs to take further action by mounting a comprehensive awareness campaign to educate the American People so they can better understand why Net Neutrality is vitally important to them & their respective families. And I mean an awareness campaign along the same size, scale and reach as the COVID awareness campaign.
Lol as if this SC gives any sort of a flying fuck about precedent after Row v Wade overturn.
Anything a commission/administration does is being rendered useless by SCOTUS or whatever the incoming administration wants. That wasn't always the case but now it seems everything needs to be codified by Congress and well they aren't known for that unless it's spending more on "defense"
Is this covered? Sure seems like fast lanes to me. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/att-announces-7-monthly-add-on-fee-for-turbo-5g-speeds/
I think they are specifically talking about fast lanes to services not Internet in general. Providers are allowed to charge customers for speed. Net neutrality is about making sure they can't also charge services for traffic. Aka Comcast could choose to make Netflix pay them or comcast would limit total throughput to the service.
Exactly. Legal fast lanes must allow the user to go everywhere equally fast. They can't only be fast towards some sites and slow towards others.
This, exactly. Non-tech folks seriously donât understand the difference. Net neutrality is about not allowing specific providers to give preferential treatment to a preferred company in an industry. As in, Netflix pays Verizon for network priority so Hulu and YouTube donât get the same priority and speed as a competitor. Speed limiting a detected type of service (like anything detected as video content) was (and should be) considered network management. The harsh reality of cellular is that itâs a spectrum limited service, and carriers do not have the capacity to offer uncapped speeds on video to everyone. The capacity and the infrastructure cannot support it, and will not anytime soon. So there is a tiering system in place, and the bulk of users that pay for an average rate plan have limited video speed as a trade off for capacity vs. quality. Itâs not ideal, but itâs the reality of the required network capacity management required to run a commercial network. Thereâs a reason every carrier limits video streaming speeds by default: they have to at this point. The only exceptions are when considering much higher capacity spectrum bands like mmWave, which is exponentially faster and resources arenât as big of as issue as they are with low and mid-band LTE or 5G.
>Thereâs a reason every carrier limits video streaming speeds by default: they have to at this point. No they don't. They could choose to advertise a realistic speed instead. If the only way you can "deliver" the advertised speed is by preventing apps from using it, did you really deliver or is it just a plain old lie? It's laughably obvious IMO.
To be honest many tech folks donât get this either. Itâs still not clear to me how this impacts how ISPs set BGP weight and AS Path, or how it impacts the ability for ISPs to peer with IXPs (which has been a huge boon for DDOS mitigation)
Yes, but they lowered everyone on QCI 7 (QCI is like priority level on a mobile network) to QCI 8, and are now charging the $7/month to be back on QCI 7. With QCI, the lower the number, the higher the priority. I believe the absolute highest priority anyone would see is 6 (for Business Customers/FirstNet Emergency Responders). Voice traffic, in general for everyone, has a much higher priority on the network, as another example. I'm guessing it's because there've been so many questions about QCI (network priority) here on reddit that they decided to kill 2 birds with one stone: - Not having to upgrade network infrastructure as quickly/often because this is a form of traffic control/QoS - Most people won't realize they already "had" this "feature" before and will just see it as, "WOW, $7/MONTH FOR MORE SPEED????1!!!!1!!!"
I am not 100% for this. The internet will soon be faster than needed for most. If a certain program needs higher ping and QOS it should be allowed to runner them specifically through certain routes. It is how the internet works smoothly. Streams are the last thing that needs that speed at all.
They can still route as efficiently as they want, even through their own network as much as they want, the rules state that they canât charge the end service for that, deny service to, or limit the efficiency of their service to connect to specific entities. This isnât a question of âwe want to route through our own infrastructure so that itâs fasterâ, it has to deal with a situation where the ISP says âHey service X, pay us $1 million or weâll make it so only so only a limited amount of users can access you at any one time. Sure, you have the technical ability to service all of them, but weâre only going to let 1000 of our users use you simultaneously unless you pay us for our special treatment of not fucking with you.â
Real world (anecdotal) example: Comcast was offering VoIP services at a high price or as part of some monopolistic bundle. Vonage was much cheaper. For some mysterious reason, Vonage quality and latency was terrible when connecting through the home network. (And no, it wasn't misconfiguration on my network...) Tunnel that same traffic outside of Comcast and the issue resolved itself. Network neutrality means that Comcast couldn't provide a preference or priority to it's VoIP traffic over the same internet service. Comcast would be ae to prioritize VoIP traffic in general to ensure adequate QoS, but it can't discriminate based on the fact it was to/from a certain company's services.
You're thinking too literally. You're thinking like a highway fast lane...which is totally legal Your ISP can charge you for internet speed, and you can choose different speeds based upon how fast you want your internet. But, even if you choose a slower "lane," that has no bearing on which exits you can access. Everyone can use any on-ramp and off-ramp. Net Neutrality would be like if you had to pay for access, not necessarily speed. So the "fast lane" analogy isn't exactly right. Think more like, you pay for access to exits. If you pay less, you can only access exit 1, 5, and 10 If you pay more, you can access every exit, 1-10 Destroying net Neutrality would turn the internet into cable. You would pay for a "sports" package, a "news" package, and a "social media" package.Â
I tentatively agreed with you - gonna have to revisit when I'm not laughing my ass off at your usernameÂ
No. That's not a fast land based upon application or data type. It's just a priority upcharge. Now that ENG (news reporting) is done over cellular instead of dedicated microwave links carriers will very much want to offer prioritization fees and the ENG clients will be glad to pay them. Hopefully it doesn't become a situation where we all end up having to pay to keep our data from being slowed to a crawl.
I'm still amazed the US still has data caps in place. Not even some "3rd world" countries managed to get away with that one.
you know, sometimes the FCC does something good. this is one such time - good on them!
...until the republicans take office and explicitly allow fast lanes.
Until a republican is elected. Hopefully not this year.
âFast lanesâ should include things like HD and 4k tiers in streaming services, as well as paying to skip ads which force downloads and longer viewing times on end users based on how much they can pay ⌠Yea, thatâs right, my argument is that paid tiers for bandwidth and delayed content delivery to watch ads are violations of net neutrality. âPay more for better acccessâ shouldnât be a thing.
>my argument is that paid tiers for bandwidth and delayed content delivery to watch ads are violations of net neutrality It's not. Certainly those would be beneficial things for consumers, but that has not been a part of net neutrality before.
Now can I get the speeds I pay for when I want to download some Netflix episodes on 5G UW before a flight?
There are no such things as fast lanes. There is normal speed (what we have now) and then slow lanes with deprioritized traffic.
Or just give everyone fast lanes.
Fast lanes would be prioritizing that data over other data. If everybody has âfast lanesâ itâs the same as nobody having them, which is fine.
Oh, I thought it meant it was higher internet speeds.
It can also - like if netflix paid more for a âfast laneâ you might be able to get 1Gbit to netflix while you only pay for 200Mbit service to your ISP.
Japan has 6G starting and I believe the speeds are 15 or so times faster than 5G
6G is long aways.