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Internet should be public like many other utilities.
This is the only answer
Cries in having a for-profit, NYSE traded electric utility
The internet should be entirely decentralized. We have the technology.
The internet IS decentralized.
Not nearly as much as it should be. In many places certain ISPs have near monopolies over internet access, and domains and dns used on the web are managed by ICANN. Sure, there’s alternatives to that, but barely anyone knows or uses them
Not to mention things like Cloudflare, AWS, and GCP.
I understand what you’re saying but it feels wrong to lump Cloudflare in with Google and Amazon. Clouflare, thus far anyway, has been mostly a force of good for the internet.
So was Google in its first decade or so. Hell, I’ll even grant that AWS, GCP and k8s have been mostly benevolent. But these parties becoming near monopolies for hosting or routing is costing a price of centralization.
Companies having a geographic monopoly over access to the internet doesn’t change the fact that the Internet as a whole is decentralized.
That being said, yes, something should be done about ISPs.
lol. Net neutrality and FCCs Ajit Pai. Educate yourself bra.
I don’t think you understand what decentralized means
hm, i didn’t think about that yet, this is actually a pretty interesting thought.
I think we as a society need to have a debate about this.
The internet is free and public. You can go to any mcdonalds and go all the internetting you want. At home, its all the buried cabled that have to be checked on and maintained that you have to pay for.
Lmfao you think they actually maintain that shit? They dont check on it, that’s part of the problem.
Won’t they start pulling more and more tax for it then ? Having it private keeps the competition at least, wouldn’t you agree ?
Your taxes already subsidize it. You just don’t see any benefits for your money in the current system because they pocket it without making upgrades.
ISPs in the US are notorious for getting public funds for services that they never provide, so I wouldn’t be too concerned about that.
Exactly. They’re getting massive handouts from our money. Let’s cut out the middlemen and pay a utility directly.
What competition? Tax me and give me fucking municipal fiber instead of giving giant paychecks to wealthy assholes who invest nothing in improving the service but raise everyone’s rates regardless.
Ah yes competition. I get to choose between two providers, charter and at&t. Same price, about the same speeds.
Not where I live. All private Internet, but very limited choices that all keep getting more and more expensive.
They also tend to deliberately stay out of each other’s service areas so they can ramp up prices with de facto local monopolies.
I guess to answer that, wonder if your water, electric, or waste companies are gouging you. If they are, like in Texas, then yeah maybe?
Everywhere I lived, people and voting have strong control over utilities and they are fairly priced because it’s a service not a business
Please tell us how “keeping it private” ensures competition and prevents monopolies. For extra credit, let us know WHO is responsible for preventing monopolies.
Where did I say it prevents monopolies ?
Where I’m from if it goes public I’m sure the govt is going to take advantage of it with piss poor speeds. When it’s private, at least there are companies competing with decent speeds even though it’s expensive. It’s a choice between the lesser of two evils.
Where I’m from private is slower, more expensive, capped, and throttled. Public is faster, cheaper, unlimited and unregulated. And private lobby’s/bribes politicians to put laws in place preventing public.
Where I use to live was all private. CenturyLink was the only option as they had an agreement with Comcast that Comcast wouldn’t come into my area.
I paid $60/month for 500kbps down. Yes kilobits.
It’s so weird to read these articles. I live in a shithole country, but even here fibre internet with 2.5gbps speeds is easily available… 5G ain’t bad but against it never feels replacing that kind of connection for me.
It actually seems common for less developed countries to have better internet than the more developed ones. Germans always complain about their internet, for example. I believe the reason is simply that your country laid down lines relatively recently, so they’re compatible with high speed internet, while Germany laid down their lines 30 years ago, so they’re fairly shitty in comparison. It tends to be a lot harder to convince governments or bosses to replace something that seems to work fine, and it can be costlier too.
Yea its similar to why the electrical lines and plugs suck in the US, they were just here at GEN 1,while others had to wait so they got better versions.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the lines, but the headends. Coax is very capable of transmitting lots of Data fast. Due to the tree topology of cable however, the headends have to be extremely fast. If everyone on the tree of 100 has 1000 Mbit, that headend needs to have 100 Gbit of capacity. Most of those headends however cap out at 10 Gbit and sometimes service up to 300-500 ports. German cable providers cheaped out and didn’t upgrade their infrastructure for quite a while. The coax line technology didn’t change in the last 30 years.
German cable providers cheaped out and didn’t upgrade their infrastructure for quite a while.
This is always the real reason.
Rich people being cheap.
Well, I live in Germany and I know quite a few people who have internet so bad IPoAC would be a valid option. You can get fibre but A it’s fucking expensive and B you need to live somewhere where there actually is fibre. Most people either have DSL or cable. DSL is “slow” (depending where you live up to 250mbps. Most places only get up to 100mbps) and expensive (although not as expensive as fibre). And cable is fast (up to Gigabit) and a bit cheaper but the biggest pile of garbage I‘ve ever seen.
Yeah, travelling to Germany a few times, even data always sucks, both wifi and mobile. We joked that Germany has the beet economy in EU because the net is so bad people don’t waste so much time on Facebook…
Mobile data highly depends on the carrier. We have three distinct mobile networks: D1 (Telekom), D2 (Vodafone) and E (Telefónica aka O2) and Telekom is the best by far and O2 is a joke although comparably cheap.
We used to have four but about ten years ago (whoa, time flies) Telefónica bought the fourth carrier, e-Plus and the E1 and E2 networks merged. Probably was a smart business move because they’ve become less of a joke since.
As a customer of both Telekom and O2, i highly disagree…the Telekom net most of the times is shittier than the O2 one - even though the O2 one sometimes looses connection all together, in those cases the Telekom connection doesn’t have Internet at all either.
Maybe it’s a regional thing but my experience is Telekom 5G always and O2 5G maybe if you‘re in a big city (or just randomly in that one 200 inhabitants village), 4G usually most places and EDGE even where none else has service.
I see Avian carrier I upvote
I live in the US in a pretty large city and I would never even think to replace my fiber with 5G. I’ve never seen 5G get above 25 Mbps, when I was getting those speeds with COAX 10 years ago.
I pay for 1Gbps fiber now and will never go lower.
I wish I had fiber. I get 100 Mb from T-Mobile 5g and 80 from spectrum. I’ve had two significant gaps in coverage from T-Mobile, but I also had internet during a power outage with a generator and an extension cord, which was huge.
For 50$, I’ll take that over a more consistent 80mb for 100-120$.
Definitely a rural thing, less 5g congestion and all. a physical line makes way more sense in a city, ideally fiber, but 5g internet has a pretty big niche.
I get 500 Mbps on 5G home Internet on a bad night. I would still take fiber over 5G any day, but it can be much better than you’ve seen.
Damn, really? That’s actually shocking and impressive.
here we are getting some limited “5G” (bandwidth is fucked it’s basically early 4G speeds but with a 5G written at the top) here and there, but most cable connections are still on ADSL2. if you want fibre you have to pay for replacing the cables and congratulations now your bandwidth maybe increased from 8 Mbps to 16 Mbps but now your data cap costs are twice more expensive and you basically limited your choice to 1 or 2 ISPs.
the irony is now that almost everyone are on the mobile network the speeds are basically the same as landline connections but data caps are much more expensive. internet here is just fucked.
Iranian?
lmao yeah. long live Mokhaberat
When you said ADSL and 16Mbps I thought to myself no other country in the world could possibly share this experience
That makes two of us lol
Also where the fuck do you have 5G? I would consider myself lucky at 4.5G (but it works alright)
mostly around my university but i have also seen the 5G symbol pop up at random places. it’s never consistent though outside uni. the speeds are almost the same as 4.5G so it really doesn’t matter.
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How the fuck can they not compete with 5G? Is using the advantages of their wired infrastructure to just provide customers with the same service as always but without the bandwidth caps, effectively overcoming the 1 major disadvantage of mobile internet, really that hard?
Cable definitely does have a capacity and speed advantage over 5G in most cases. But 5G is plenty fast and reliable for most people these days, and it’s cheaper because there is no last mile maintenance. T-Mobile doesn’t need to repair a bunch of decades old coax line every time the wind blows.
Perhaps they should have invested in infrastructure with the government handouts they were given to do so?
They spent it all blocking access to the fiber lines that are already there and padding the wallets of their execs.
I’ve seen that last mile, you’re lucky if the cable is buried more than one shovel length down. It’s the tech equivalent of the porn trope of using spit for lube.
Depends on where you live. Here in the city I live, the last mile is in underground conduit next to power, water, and sewer lines. It transitions to pole-mounted at the suburbs.
I get 1600Mbps down, 180 up on my 5G home internet (for $60/mo). The fastest cable can offer here is 600 down, 30 up (for $120/mo).
So yeah, I’d say 5G is fast enough for most people. It maxes out my ethernet ports. I have to use wifi to hit my bandwidth cap. Eventually I will upgrade to 2.5G ethernet.
How the fuck can they not compete with 5G?
According to the article, for the last few decades the cable and telecommunications companies have avoided upgrading infrastructure to increase profit margins, while wireless companies have been building and upgrading towers like mad. Wireless companies have also successfully lobbied to gobble up a bunch of frequency allocation to increase their bandwidth.
I think if you allow a bit of simplification, it’s essentially the same thing as Ethernet vs Wireless as your home network solution. The other is slightly better in performance and reliability but way less flexible. That’s why 5G is winning.
5g is by far the best option in my shitty small town in Iowa. The two wired options are more than twice as expensive for less than half of the speed.
People need to start speaking out more against this type of behavior, and I don’t just mean in blogs and forums. I mean write the FCC, write the Attorney Generals in your state. Dare i say, write your congressmen (yeah, mine are the apathetic, pro-business politicians who don’t really care about the little people too).
Make some noise folks.
Seriously, companies like this get away with these shenanigans because we the people have been beaten into submission for so long that we believe we are powerless (I’m guilty of feeling this way). We need to start changing that. And nothing is easier than writing letters these days.
It can, in regards to network saturation in rural places that only have one tower whose use spikes during holidays, not to mention being immune to signal jammers and interference.
The fact that this is even legal shows how incredibly weak the regulations are. They are essentially non-existent, with the consumer ripe for maximum exploitation. Just forcing people to buy is legal at this point huh?
Incidentally, Spectrum is my only choice thanks to an exclusivity agreement, but we aren’t forced to pay. We can actually opt out at our location. 5G home internet is way more reliable and faster in my area.
Regulate! All businesses are self-interested!
Sounds like cable is just in its natural death throes and will be gone soon. Markets will take care of this too, if we just let them: i.e. don’t let cable companies lobby against 5G etc.
They’ll still have some role since 5G practically requires fiber optics as its backbone anyway.
Why is this legal? What kind of shithole country allows this?
The usual shithole country where capitalism and the free market has been allowed to run completely rampant. In Germany it’s even illegal to not allow users to use their own modem and router. You are entitled to use any company that serves your street. It might take a while longer if your building isn’t connected yet, but a landlord can’t just prevent you from choosing a company. Same with electricity providers.
It is a loophole in the current Federal Communications Commission’s regulations, where these kinds of deals are supposed to be forbidden. The Commission doesn’t seem to like it either and may close the loophole in the future, but the regulatory process takes time.
I love how in the “FAQs” of that agreement, there is no “why.” Which is surely the most F of the A’d Q’s.
It is, in fact, the only Q I A’d.
I’m paying 10 euros a month for the plan on my 4G router because even though I have fibre available aswell I just don’t feel like paying 30€ a month for it. 70 bucks however? That’s ridiculous.
Just like the cable TV companies that will stop at nothing to trap their customers in their overpriced af prison?
They’re the same companies.
Alternatively, it’s possible cell companies like T-Mobile will lobby against these anticompetitive agreements, since it does reduce their number of potential customers. I don’t like cell company lobbying any more than ISP lobbying, but in this case, let them fight.
Something tells me T-Mobile’s got a little too much class solidarity to have any interest in reducing the profits of Charter Communications.
Why would T-Mobile reduce their own potential profits to ensure that Charter continues to have higher profits?
This is the stupidest timeline.
Sue. 🤷
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So other commenters have opinions that I think are rational, but the part that I think is key that they’re missing: Tenant Unions.
I have some (in my opinion) tyrannical yet lazy land lords/property managers at my current apt, and have attempted to form a tenant union. Apparently no one agrees with my level of disgust at our treatment, so I’ve kind of wiffed at the effort.
Which is to say that it takes real work, but it can be done and there are resources for you, but that’s the first step: don’t go alone.
Over that, then.
“It’s legal 'cuz we wrote it down” is a bullshit argument not worth entertaining.
Sure if you have time and money to throw at the problem, but lawyers aren’t cheap and you need a strong argument.
Resorting to internet-tough-guy “just sue them” might feel good to say but it’s impractical and, quite frankly, incredibly naive advice.
A number of states don’t have many prohibitions on what fees get charged as long as it gets disclosed and is done so fairly and with “reasonable” (whatever that is) notice.
So what are you going to do? Sign the lease with the fee clearly stated then roll the dice? If you lose, now you’re out the cost of a lawyer, time out from work, stuck in a year at a place that’s sketchy, and the bonus consolation prize of being forced to pay for internet that you don’t want.
Your best bet is to not sign a lease (or renew) from a property like that and leave a 1 star review saying they force you to buy internet even if you don’t want it from a provider.
I’ve gone through disputing fees from a landlord and required the use of a lawyer. Had it went to court, it would have been a substantial headache to deal with.
As opposed to moving, in this market, which is cheap and easy.
Do you know how much it costs if you have to get a lawyer out of pocket?
A few hours of time easily gets you a few guys and a moving truck for a couple hours.
Sue the fucking landlord. While looking for another place to stay.
You’d be more effective taking all of that cash and flushing it down the toilet. It would have the same result, and it would force the landlord to pay for a plumber.
Your mandatory arbitration clause would like a word with you.
The landlord can do bulk billing, and they can refuse to allow other companies to service the property. As a tenant the first one doesn’t mean you have to buy in to that, and the second doesn’t apply to wireless providers. Both things are a basis to sue.
Also this was a simple search away. Please do the simple searching yourself from now on.
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This is an addendum to the original lease. They don’t have to sign it and the landlord still has to honor the terms of the original lease.
Also this was a simple search away. Please do the simple searching yourself from now on.
Please don’t post one word comments and then get annoyed when someone asks you to elaborate.
I have 5G home internet. Downloads are twice as fast (and uploads 8x faster) than cable here—the next fastest available service—for half as much. No arbitrary bandwidth cap, either.
