Live data from Hacker News

FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

theregister.co.uk

21–30 of 169 posts

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#21
post #6

It’s been over two years since Net Neutrality was repealed. I remember at the time there was a lot of talk about how the internet was going to be ruined by throttling, paid “fast lanes”, etc. Have any of these things happened? Or did that turn out to mostly be fear-mongering?

T-mobile has been throttling and creating paid fast lanes pretty heavily and I now pay as much in data overage fees to comcast per month as half my total bill.

Do you know that that Net Neutrality ABSOLUTELY allowed for throttling for the reason of network congestion? All TMobile needs to say is we're under heavily load and are allowed to slow everyone down equally. Also network caps were allowed under NN, they're allow to create tiers on bandwidth but not priority.

Are you claiming that T-mobile slowing specific sites or people? Do you have a source for that?

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is 3TB "HUGE"? If you're using computers like a normal person, that'll be gone pretty quickly. I remember using 1-4TB a month in my youth on a connection that couldn't push 1MBps. Given the recent emergence of high-definition video streamed to every home, it seems like three times that probably wouldn't be enough. EDIT: Capitalization error, mbps > MBps.

4TB/1mbps is 46 days. It’s impossible to use 4TB in a month with that connection.

I forgot that MBps is different than mbps. Just a capitalization error.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#23

It’s been over two years since Net Neutrality was repealed. I remember at the time there was a lot of talk about how the internet was going to be ruined by throttling, paid “fast lanes”, etc. Have any of these things happened? Or did that turn out to mostly be fear-mongering?

.org is getting sold, all data plans have transfer caps, google is not even showing urls to mobile users anymore, yes things are going to hell.

Mostly correct, essentially all new plans have transfer caps. I still have a vintage Verizon data plan that's bonafide unlimited. Data overage is gotcha-capitalism robbery.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#24
post #6

It’s been over two years since Net Neutrality was repealed. I remember at the time there was a lot of talk about how the internet was going to be ruined by throttling, paid “fast lanes”, etc. Have any of these things happened? Or did that turn out to mostly be fear-mongering?

T-mobile has been throttling and creating paid fast lanes pretty heavily and I now pay as much in data overage fees to comcast per month as half my total bill.

Haven't mobile operators always been free to throttle speeds and create special data classes? I thought net neutrality was only for traditional fixed ISP connections.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#25
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much data are you using monthly? My comcast "cap" is 3TB monthly... which is a HUGE amount of data for a residential user. I've never even broken 1TB... If you're hosting something, might be worth upgrading to a business connection, which doesn't have data caps and comes with static ip's and a SLA. As an aside - I'm personally OK with data caps so long as they don't impact most users (80/20, 90/10 or something li…

I could be Ok with data caps per tier, if that actually led to lower costs for lower tiers. As it is, I pay a huge amount of money for low quality internet service. Also, 3TB is not huge for a family, especially in the age of 4K streams.

Ya, 4k might be changing the math a bit, and ISP's might need to upgrade the caps, or offer different caps per tier like your idea.

Either way, I don't want to subsidize the guy torrenting Blue-Rays and pushing 10TB a month when I'm only using 1TB.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#26

It’s been over two years since Net Neutrality was repealed. I remember at the time there was a lot of talk about how the internet was going to be ruined by throttling, paid “fast lanes”, etc. Have any of these things happened? Or did that turn out to mostly be fear-mongering?

It's not ruined yet, but the stage is set for the Internet to become cable+and+TV 2.0 with surveillance on the side; to become a mostly one-way medium from a few large media companies to the masses - with the added benefit of these and other companies taking advantage of the return path to surveil you.

When everyone thinks of an Internet plan as what TV shows and streaming media they get, with FAANG and remote work access on the side, why should ISPs do anything but allow access to whitelisted services and companies that pay them for access?

It's not going to be a quick process, but since telecom providers own the lines, and people have no choice but to give them money, they aren't going anywhere and can wait it out.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#27
Would introducing competition for internet access at the residential level help prevent the type of consumer abuse that was predicted to happen? If Comcast is my only choice for broadband and there is no net neutrality, they can set whatever terms they want. If I have a choice between Comcast, three LEO internet providers, and four fixed wireless providers, Comcast loses its leverage.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#28
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

T-mobile has been throttling and creating paid fast lanes pretty heavily and I now pay as much in data overage fees to comcast per month as half my total bill.

How much data are you using monthly? My comcast "cap" is 3TB monthly... which is a HUGE amount of data for a residential user. I've never even broken 1TB... If you're hosting something, might be worth upgrading to a business connection, which doesn't have data caps and comes with static ip's and a SLA. As an aside - I'm personally OK with data caps so long as they don't impact most users (80/20, 90/10 or something li…

My main complaint is that Comcast gives no insight into how they calculate your usage beyond a generic bar graph.

I was using steadily 600-700GB of data a month on my gigabit plan. It suddenly spiked to 2TB - from what I could tell there was no change in behavior, my ubiquiti gear wasn't showing this amount of usage. This went on and used up my two 'courtesy' months of overages forcing me to pay the extra money to remove the cap.

A month after paying this my usage amounts dropped back down to where they were before.

The gigabit services works well, but I find the cap hard to accept without any ability to question it.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#29
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much data are you using monthly? My comcast "cap" is 3TB monthly... which is a HUGE amount of data for a residential user. I've never even broken 1TB... If you're hosting something, might be worth upgrading to a business connection, which doesn't have data caps and comes with static ip's and a SLA. As an aside - I'm personally OK with data caps so long as they don't impact most users (80/20, 90/10 or something li…

I could be Ok with data caps per tier, if that actually led to lower costs for lower tiers. As it is, I pay a huge amount of money for low quality internet service. Also, 3TB is not huge for a family, especially in the age of 4K streams.

What I’d really like would be switching to QoS: a blanket cap is a crude metric for allocating a limited resource but it’d be nice if you could pay for shares or something similar, encouraging off-peak downloads for things which aren’t latency-sensitive (OS updates, backups, etc.).

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#30
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

T-mobile has been throttling and creating paid fast lanes pretty heavily and I now pay as much in data overage fees to comcast per month as half my total bill.

Do you know that that Net Neutrality ABSOLUTELY allowed for throttling for the reason of network congestion? All TMobile needs to say is we're under heavily load and are allowed to slow everyone down equally. Also network caps were allowed under NN, they're allow to create tiers on bandwidth but not priority. Are you claiming that T-mobile slowing specific sites or people? Do you have a source for that?

NN didn't allow slowing particular apps or particular users relative to others unless there was a major problem. The wireless carriers wanted to do these things, but it's unclear whether they implemented targeting specific individuals/apps or not after the repeal (I doubt they would announce something so unpopular), or just said "apps X, Y, Z don't count against data plan R." I think there's enough technical people who can create reproducible evidence of network throttling through custom apps that load test various website APIs and comparing wireless carrier network performance to identify which companies are doing what dirty tricks.
Post reply on HN