On the Ring Neighbors app, you see all sorts of videos where the posters are making criminal accusations all the time. (usually it's a guy selling electricity door to door, but his skin tone is wrong, so they assume he's there to rob the house)
They claim to be working for your electric company (not true), they claim to keep your service you need to pick a provider (not true - you can keep your existing provider even with retail choice and even if you do nothing). They always seem to lie about the price (sometimes its ridiculous).
I've had them at our door. We have a locked building - the guy claimed that a neighbor suggested he talk with us. But he couldn't tell me which neighbor (this is a small condo - I know everyone, all our doors are within 30 feet of each other). He couldn't even point out which neighbor it was.
I do know of some folks who signed up with these guys and bragged for a bit about how much they were saving. Then they went radio silent.
Where I come from it's a known scheme where one guy gets you distracted at the front door with some semi-plausible sales pitch like re-sealing your driveway while his accomplice goes behind the house and robs you blind. Of course, even when the apparent salesman is a genuine salesman, that doesn't mean he's a nice person. Door to door salesmen praying on politeness to get unsuspecting victims into high pressure sales situations in their own living room is common enough that my blanket response to all salesmen knocking on my door is telling them to fuck off. In a certain sense, calling a salesman a thief might actually be giving him the benefit of the doubt.
This sounds like precisely the sort of pearl-clutching urban legend the parent comment is describing. The wealthy neighborhood I grew up in had all sorts of stories along these lines - "be on the lookout for gypsies" etc., despite a vanishingly small crime rate.
Of course, they’re buying the electricity from the local utility, so the contract generally looks something like a monthly price of U - x for a couple months (U being the price set by the utility, x the promised discount), followed by a number of months of U+z, z>>x.
They don’t mention the U+z; that’s left to the fine print.
"Retail choice" is the ability of individual households to buy directly from retail suppliers[2], and the history there is a bit spottier and less conclusive. It's not as widespread and participation has actually declined[3].
[1] http://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx
Imagine single shared spectrum easy to setup eSIM, easy to terminate contracts. Unfortunately most countries want your ID nowadays when you sign up for internet...
In reality that hasn't been true for decades, beginning with the initial work on spread-spectrum communications in the WWII timeframe. But the regulatory system has yet to catch up fully with the technology's potential.
https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/49yuwx/til_gp...
The whole idea behind SS and UWB techniques is that the noise floor is under your control, rather than Boltzmann's.
There are optimum codes to use, such and Gold (GPS) and Walsh (IS-95 CDMA), but they still have non-zero cross-correlation, so your users are limited. Still no free lunch.
Point being, the obstacles are regulatory, not technical.
4G & 5G uses OFDM, essentially distributing the data over slow, narrow band channels to get around the multi-path issues with trying to use even wider band CDMA. Then MIMO to actually increase the capacity, which only works when you have multi path.
This gives a good summary, specifically page 32, but CDMA is essentially dead soon.
Channel capacity is not the problem. Do you own a radio capable of VHF/UHF reception? Turn it on. Tune it to a randomly-chosen frequency between, say, 600 and 1000 MHz. What do you hear? Now, repeat this exercise 5,000 times, and let me know how many of those iterations yield anything but white noise from your receiver's own front end and IF strip.
There's your "channel capacity."
This problem is purely regulatory. Everything should be frequency-agile at this point in time, but it's not. Never mind CDMA or TDMA, we haven't even picked the lowest of the low-hanging FDMA fruit yet.
There's one network (ran by one gov agency) and rest of the players are basically MVNO's, doing customer support, marketing and negotiating peering. Just like traditional ISPs work in many western countries.
don't feel bad though, English vocab can be tricky for native speakers too. for example, "in-" usually means "not", like "indestructible" means "can't be destroyed", but "inflammable" and "flammable" mean the same thing...
net neutrality certainly implies more regulation, but at a local level the monopolies/duopolies are often propped up by regulations.
If you see someone getting abused or needs help, I think you should do the right thing and try and help them, because everyone helping each other reduces risk for everyone and makes a better society.
On a related note, I went with Griddy, which is actually a cool startup approach to it.