So when Verizon says they are launching trials in 11 US cities they are lying?
5G is not pie in the sky. There’s real world testing going on and there’s no real reason to think we won’t see it by 2020.
I’ll give the same advice to you that I gave to SenorBeef. Take some time to research instead of repeating the same incorrect information.
I thought we needed net neutrality because of a lack of competition in ISPs.
:smack: I didn’t mention Netflix in that post…
Yes I agree. But if the ISP needs to increase their available bandwidth to service the rate packages they have already sold, then so be it. Yes it costs money. But that has nothing to do with Netflix. If they feel they can charge more for their services then they will.
Actually, I’ve forgotten what my original point was. Please disregard 
Comcast (or Verizon or take your pick of the ISPs) are not vertical monopolies either.
And monopolies are already heavily regulated by law (see: Antitrust Law).
Those companies will be careful to stay on the other side of that if only just.
This is like the 5th post in a row where you have ignored the point of my argument to post something tangentially related.
So, yeah, sometime, this year, they will launch “pre-commercial” service for just 11 cities.
The article even talks about some of the kinks they are still working out, and obstacles to be overcome.
Now, your prediction is that this technology, which is not yet ready for prime time, will be fully rolled out to all areas within 3 years?
Even if this is a realistic timetable, it still mans that for 2 1/2 years, net neutrality would have been in effect for the ISP’s, so quite a bit of damage can be done in that time.
You also assume that they will give that data at the same cost as broadband, which is doubtful, as 4g costs as much as broadband now, and has a cap that makes it useless as your primary connection.
In order to be useable to replace broadband, it’s not just going to need to be able to deliver a higher speed, it will need to deliver it to an order of magnitude more people than it currently does, and have a cap that does not limit your experience.
If they have any cap under 200 gb a month, then that’s going to be a non-starter for the majority of internet users. With 4k stuff coming out, people are going to be needing terabyte caps.
We do, I was just pointing out that cell companies are not exactly highly competitive either, and would operate under the same rules as the ISP’s, so even your panacea of wireless coming to the rescue, even if they can mange the technology and logistics, is a fairly doubtful proposition.
Probably not all, but certainly enough areas to be legitimate competition.
You and Senor Beef continue to make this a nitpicking technical argument using dubious facts. But that misses my original point. Again, the original point is that wireless providers limit what wired ISPs can do. Wireless internet is effectively the floor which the service wired internet provides can’t go below. So most of the doomsday scenarios like rerouting traffic, blocking sites, or throttling others to be unusable aren’t going to happen. Users will switch because a slow connection that brings back the data they want is by far better than a fast connection that blocks access to things they want.
You’re two sentences are contradictory. The first says we need net neutrality because of a lack of competition in ISPs. The second says that the entrant of at least 2-4 new competitors to the space isn’t a panacea.
No one from the pro net neutrality side has addressed the benefits it prevents. Let me use an analogy. Say I live in NYC and want to order something from a store located in Shanghai. I have several options for shipping:
(1) It can come by air. Fast, but expensive.
(2) It can go by boat from Shanghai to LA and then by train to NYC. Medium speed and medium price.
(3) It can go by boat from Shanghai to NYC. Slow, but cheap
Either way, it’s up to me to pay for what I want or for the company to bundle it into their price. This is good for everyone. Overall it is less expensive and we get our items when we need them.
Now, instead of a parcel let’s talk about getting a piece of data. It makes sense to have the same three options as above. (1) would be if I am teleconferencing with someone, (2) might be for normal webpages, and (3) for large file downloads. Net neutrality says that we can’t. As it stands now I am stuck with shitty teleconferencing and being able to download a file in 2 minutes instead of 3 is no solace.
Legitimate competition, where? If I do not have access to high speed networks, if I am not in a city, then I do not benefit, and I am stuck with the broadband options offered to me by my ISP.
We didn’t get 4g out here till several years after I was seeing ads for it on tv, so I don’t see 5g getting out here any time soon. So, great for the people in the city, who can choose to take advantage of a higher speed (assuming that they have no caps), but not so much for the rest of the country.
As long as the wired internet provides a higher speed, and a higher (or no) data cap, broadband will be prevalent.
And your comment about a slow connection makes no sense. Net neutrality is not going to allow ISPs to entirely block traffic, just slow it down. So, if I can get 90% of what I want on broadband at high speed, with 10% of it being throttled because they are not paying protection money to my ISP, compared to 100% of anything I want throttled to modem speed once I have exceeded a few hours of video, I think I’m going to go with the first, especially as it’s going to be less expensive.
You complain that we get bogged down in the technical, but the whole thing is technical. You will always get faster speeds and higher date caps from wired than wireless, that’s a technical fact, but a fact nonetheless.
That’s not a contradiction. That’s an observation.
The current situation is that there is no competition at all for useable broadband. You are saying that here in some number of years, there will be competition, but it will be slower, have less capacity, lower data caps, and be more expensive. On top of those detriments to them being true competition, they will also be operating under the same rule of being allowed to throttle traffic, and will have even more reason to do so, as their bandwidth is much more limited.
The only way that there would be effective competition would be if there were many competitors, all offering the same product, and that you could switch between easily. The only way that could happen is if you had several ISPs running wires by your house to pick and choose from. This is logistically difficult, and so ISP’s tend to be a natural monopoly, and as such, need to be regulated like one.
You said we should pass laws to forbid vertical monopolies.
No one is a vertical monopoly so banning it won’t help and besides, monopolies are already accounted for in the law.
I am not following what you are on about at all.
You have those options when you purchase your broadband package from your ISP.
Want fast, you pay for a fast line, want medium, you pay less for a medium line, slow is fine for you, you can pay the least for a slow data line.
Your analogy is more like if I want something shipped from company A in shanghai, although I’ve already paid to have that shipping done, it will come slower than something from company b in shanghai, because they paid UPS to slow down company A’s shipment.
That’s why “monopoly” is an arbitrary term the way it is used in economics today. Nobody can define “monopoly”. It has simply become a tool of political activists and scheming competitors of very successful companies.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think it is as you say. I thought it was along the lines of:
My ISP is Comcast. They having streaming movies and TV shows that I can purchase and watch online. They are more expensive than Netflix, so I switch to Netflix. I no longer purchase movies from Comcast.
Since they are my ISP, they see I have started streaming from Netflix servers a lot. I also no longer purchase Comcast movies or TV shows. At this point, they slow the connection between my IP and the Netflix servers, making streaming from Netflix impossible in the hopes that I switch back to purchasing movies and TV shows from Comcast instead.
That’s what I thought net neutrality was preventing. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
You have latency and bandwidth confused.
That’s one of the things that net neutrality is preventing. It is also preventing fox from paying comcast to slow down MSNBC’s streaming video, and other fun shenanigans like that.
Net Neutrality says that ISPs have to treat all data equally. So yes, it prevents them from prioritizing Comcast data over Netflix data. But it also prevents them from prioritizing WebEx (teleconferencing) data over Comcast and Netflix data.
No, I do not believe that I do. Your analogy was using latency as the only benchmark, so I assumed that your analogy was also addressing bandwidth as an issue. If I was wrong, to assume that your analogy contained the more important part, I appologize.
I may not have applied them as well to your analogy, but your analogy is pretty weak, so it doesn’t really map onto the internet very well.
So, to fix your analogy, the latency is how long it takes to get a package, and bandwidth is how big that package is.
You have already paid a flat rate to a company to ship you stuff from all over the world.
You want something from the other side of the world. If you paid for the good internet package, then when you order stuff from somewhere else, it comes in big boxes, and it comes very quickly.
If you paid for second tier, the boxes are smaller, and take longer to get there.
If you paid the least, you have lots of tiny boxes, arriving one a week.
Losing net neutrality is allowing the company to be paid to ship you smaller boxes, or take longer to deliver them to you.
True, but you want them to prioritize traffic based on application. You don’t really care about actual companies. Besides, all you need is higher bandwidth in order to have a smoother teleconferencing experience. You don’t need QoS markers throughout the backbone.
I thought so. But other posts in this thread were confusing that issue.
So?
Why is your teleconference more important than my binge watching?
We are paying the same amount for the same services from the same ISP, why does your app get a preference to mine?
I could see a system where you pay an extra premium, as a user, to get packets from specific IPs delivered faster, but that would be a very complicated and nasty system.