T-Mobile is writing the manual on how to fuck up the internet | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile is writing the manual on how to fuck up the internet

theverge.com

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> As soon as you reach that cap, you’re kicked down to 2G speeds which are basically unusable for most things worth doing on the internet. When I was on T-Mobile’s 1GB plan before it announced Music Freedom, I nearly used my entire data allowance listening to Google Play Music on a one-way bus ride from New York to DC.

There's another solution to this, that the corps would also like us to forget: own your media and take it with you. Use re-sellable mediums so you can "rent" even if nobody is offering rentals on the media you want.

Honestly it almost feels entitled to complain that your ISP will let you pull multiple HD video streams for hours on end every day for free.

> The truly simple solution is to just offer unlimited data access for everything.

The problem is that nobody's network has unlimited capacity. Even if you believe their complaints of congestion are false and they're just penny-pinching on their infrastructure and adding fees to squeeze every last dime of profit, there will be some physical limit to what they can do. I'd be interested in hearing a counterpoint here -- can the networks really profitably support something absurd like every subscriber streaming video 24/7? While that may look like a strawman, the article emphasized several times about how they want "truly unlimited", so the only way to give that is to assume everybody is saturating the bandwidth their hardware is capable of, and doing it 24/7, right?

There's a key difference between a broadband isp and a mobile service. Customers have a much wider choice of mobile carrier than they do a last-mile isp.

Of the mobile carriers, T-mobile was the one to at least attempt to shake up a pretty terrible mobile service landscape by providing some level of customer oriented value. So personally they get a bit of a pass from me, though I do worry about long term implications T-mobiles 'zero rating' of some services.

I agree with the difference between land-line and mobile providers. If a provider has the benefit of monopoly control of a wire into my house (or some other government-enforced monopoly), then net-neutrality should be part of the price they have to pay for that.

But if it's like mobile and I can switch to any other provider I want, then let the market work instead.

If you pay for an N GB/month data plan, and your ISP provides you with N GB/month that you can use any way you want with no throttling or blocking based on origin or content type, then they have satisfied net neutrality.

If the ISP wants to offer additional free services on top of that, I don't see how that can be a net neutrality issue. If it harms competition, then it might be an antitrust issue, so deal with it there. No need to try to shoehorn it into net neutrality.

At what point did it become okay to have such profanity in the main titles of news articles?

So FCC rulings against this type of service is not applied to mobile providers?

Correct, that was the notable caveat to the new Net Neutrality regulations years ago.

I don't love it, but it makes sense. The moral authority to heavily regulate last mile ISPs comes from the fact that consumers generally don't have a choice. Consumers have several choices for cellular carriers, and if consumers find this to be an actual problem then it can be sorted out through competition.

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