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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Free nights and weekends is exactly anti-net-neutrality.

I have always been an advocate for more, open, spectrum, and simple laws to outlaw intentional interference. We are not operating dumb radios - we can dynamically change or allocate spectrum channels to load balance congestion and avoid making it worse.

To legally cordon off everyone into separate silos is a hatchet solution to a nuanced problem with much better solutions if you could just incentivize good behavior and punish bad in commons.

I do not believe for a second we cannot technologically transfer h265 video via radio to every individual in even the highest population densities if we had full access to building infrastructure around all of the spectrum of light we use for communications.

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> To legally cordon off everyone into separate silos is a hatchet solution to a nuanced problem

I have a sneaking suspicion that it's been done this way so that it can be treated like "property" legally protected and commoditised as such.

The bottleneck here is the law, which as everyone knows "is an ass" (by which I mean in all seriousness it has difficulty dealing with such nuance)

I can't think of a reason why free nights and weekends would be anti-net neutrality.

One simple example would be Verizon only allowing free nights and weekends to certain services. For example, Verizon allows free night and weekend data usage for Hulu but not for any other streaming video services. This is a huge loss to Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube and any other streaming services, including those whom don't yet exist since it would be harder to gain users due to the newer service "using more data" than using Hulu (read: the Verizon subsidized alternative).

At least, I'm assuming that's what OP meant. Not simply that "free nights and weekends" would be anti-net neutrality on its own, but that it could very easily be made more proprietary than it initially sounds. And we've seen it done in the past when free nights and weekends were were restricted to those within your telco, the x-amount of people within your network that are free to call[I believe AT&T made it 10?], the free mobile to mobile that was eventually restricted to free mobile to mobile only within the same telco again, etc., etc.

"Net neutrality" is a problematic term because it seems to mean different things to different people depending on their perspective/motive. For instance, I've seen arguments that T-Mobile not charging for SD video streams is net neutral because any company is allowed to get into the program.

In its strictest (and IMO, most useful) sense, "net neutrality" is the concept that data is data is data. It doesn't matter whether it's carrying video or whether it's carrying text, whether that comes from Google or whether it comes from the server in your basement, or whether it's being transferred at 11am or at 11pm.

IMO that definition is the most useful because it's the clearest - anything else ends up getting into some debate about why this applies and that doesn't. I'd very much like to keep my neutral internet connection - the creeping preferentialism on my cellphone connection is not welcome.

Smaller or up-and-coming carriers can't always afford to give away their service for free, whereas larger carriers can offset the losses more easily.

Edit to clarify, it's more "anti-competitive" than "anti-net neutrality"

The Shannon-Hartley theorem is a harsh master. You cannot squeeze more then bandwidth times log 1+S/N through a radio link. You cannot have antenna gain beyond the diffraction limit. Power amplifiers have limited bandwidth.

Which is exactly why the law is the limiting factor rather than physics.

We have the ability to programmatically build radios that can adjust bandwidth channels on demand, in fairly broad ranges. But because spectrum is treated as a commodity to be owned by private entities, nobody can utilize the potential of load balancing across all possible radio spectrum (both immediately and in macroscopic economic trends).

If we are stuck with the ~800mhz combined spectrum openly available today, of course we will continue to see incredible bottlenecks in congested wireless environments. But in practice there is about ~10ghz of practically usable spectrum for wireless data transfer, and you can fit a lot more channels in the low end.

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