Don't Terminate People's Internet Connections | Hacker News Reader

Don't Terminate People's Internet Connections

labs.ripe.net

304 pointsventi129 comments

Here in Australia, a few responsible providers like Aussie Broadband have already announced unmetered data usage and temporarily stopping all service suspensions.

https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/blog/aussie-broadband-ann...

Edit: The real test though will be the bandwidth of our gov-sponsored, substandard, widely FTTN (instead of full FTTP).

I would expect rationing of the available bandwidth to become more important, not less, as the entire population is stuck at home using it all day.

Aussie Broadband have announced unlimited bandwidth for those on limited plans, but also that those few making extreme use of available bandwidth will be throttled. They might slow their connections down, too.

That’s if congestion was ever actually a problem to begin with.

That's what I've been wondering ... will they ever try using "we need zero rating to prevent network overload" again if they'll demonstrate now that they don't?

I wish I could say no, but: Yes. In time they could claim - potentially truthfully - that an increasing number of increasingly connected devices engaging in more complex applications by ever more data hungry end users drove additional demand relative to the levels seen in the past, even during past crises.

Reality is that peak usage (at least in Canada) is in the evening hours. Impact from WFH during office hours will just use excess daytime capacity.

WFH (RDP/Webex/VPN) uses much less bandwidth than streaming Netflix.

But the kids being at home might make a big difference.

Having kids at home without an internet connection these days is something most parents would rather not experience. Right up there with lack of electricity but lower in the priority list.

I'd have thought Netflix in particular would use less bandwidth than video conf because of the amount of peering / caching tricks they can do to bring their service "closer".

Note: I'm not talking purely bits transferred - I'm referring to network boundaries. In-network congestion should be easier to manage for an ISP and I'd expect plenty of them make it so Netflix and others' traffic is effectively "in-network".

Sure, but any sane ISP in a big enough metro will have ports are the local Internet Exchange where Amazon, Netflix (if you exceed the appliance), Google, MSFT, etc. all peer at.

After that, what’s left?

In Canada, it’s actually the incumbents that largely refuse to peer freely.

What is more important is that WFH traffic is far more balanced in it's up/down ratio and hence is likely to have neutral pearing costs if it leaves the ISP's network at all.

Not to mention that most of the people now moving to home office will be spending their time working in relatively low bandwidth applications not sitting video conferences.

In Canada Rogers (and I believe Bell), two of our biggest ISPs, have removed data cap fees on internet and ended long distance fees for calls in response to the virus:

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/03/16/rogers-waiving-long-d...

Two out of three mobile providers in Czech Republic already made their mobile data unlimitted due to the crisis:

https://news.expats.cz/prague-technology/t-mobile-joins-o2-i...

In the US, Comcast generally doesn't get a good rep - but they've done the same: https://corporate.comcast.com/covid-19

Now if we could take a second to talk about all the "From CEO..." emails that are being sent around...

FYI - AT&T and other major North American ISPs have also lifted data caps for the next 60 days.

Wait, is Comcast Comcast again? I thought they were Xfinity now (to run away from precisely that bad rap).

I always thought the corporation was still Comcast but they'd just rebranded their products as Xfinity. Could be wrong though, haven't fact checked that.

Xfinity is the name of their consumer/residential package. Possibly to distance themselves from bad PR associated with the Comcast name.

Xfinity is how long it takes to get ahold of a CSR.

Looks like CenturyLink is joining in: http://news.centurylink.com/fccpledge

As a kiwi it blows my mind how bad your broadband is over there. My cousin recently moved to some rural Aussie town and will be getting 25 megabit, tops. Here in NZ we're rolling out 4 gigabit connections nationwide over the next 6 months.

EDIT: props for getting rid of limits and disconnects though. NZ providers are just saying we'll be able to cope with everyone working from home because we have a fancy network.

Yeah it sucks, and what's worse is that there's no near-future course correction by the policy makers. This is going to come back and bite us in some very uncomfortable places.

Kudos for the multi-gigabit fibre, when we can only imagine of a gigabit lottery.

I'm confused, what do policy makers have to do with it?

Let no tragedy go to waste...

"Here in Australia Labor’s plan was for a nationwide network with 93 per cent FTTP coverage. Under the Coalition’s model, only around 20 per cent of NBN Co customers will enjoy FTTP. Around a third of fixed-line premises will be lumbered with FTTN."

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/n...

At least some of that could be due to the fact that Australia is way larger geographically though, right? It's a lot more cable to run.

Then you'd expect the situation to get better in denser areas of Australia far more than it does.

The "Australia is way larger" thing ignores that the situation in the cities is just as bad, or sometimes worse.

Australia is pretty densely settled though. I mean I have cousins on the Eyre Peninsula so I know what "thinly settled" means, but most people live in (comparatively) densely settled suburbs.

Not at all. NZ is even less urbanised than Australia. The long-distance transit cables between cities in Australia all mostly already existed before the NBN even started.

You could cover more than 80% of our population just cabling up (literally) about half a dozen reasonably dense cities.

The actual reason is political. One side of politics privatised the state owned monopoly telco, creating a single huge, anti-competitive behemoth. That made progress with the internet stagnate for a decade. Then the other side got in, tried to work with the telco but they wouldn’t budge, and then surprised everybody by deciding to just build a provider-neutral network that was FTTP to 90-93% of the population. This was going fine - a few months behind schedule but on budget (projected at AU$44.1bn) after a few years.

But the opposition managed to convince a bunch of people in the media that it was hugely over-budget (despite the fact it wasn’t, and that all their financials were on the public record) and that a sensible solution was to stop that, and instead buy the old copper networks off the incumbent provider and spend a few billion to do a bit of an upgrade. They were “absolutely confident 25 megs is enough for anyone” and said this would cost max $29bn. They won Government, turned the network on its head and it’s just been one problem after another with huge widespread service quality issues, massive cost overruns, delays etc.

So now the cost of their “more sensible, cheaper, and quicker to build” network is nearing $60bn and finishing two years later than the original FTTP schedule (before they won Government, the party that wrecked the project promised to have it done by the end of 2016!)

So it’s just a big mess. Nobody really knows why they chose to do what they did when pretty much all the experts said to just continue with FTTP (they paid some consultants with links to their party to say their idea was great to get around that). Some say it was business links between party members and the incumbent telco, or the cable TV network they own half of. Others say it was because they had a deal with Murdoch (the leader of the opposition actually happened to have lunch with him the day before they announced their policy) because he owns the other half of the cable TV network. Perhaps it was just because they couldn’t accept that it was a good idea the way it was...

25mbs is bad?! Lol I would KILL for that -- here in small-town Canada I'm still on DSL that tops out at 12mbs. My dad who's on a farm gets six through a point to point connection that he pays an arm and a leg for -- although he's shortly getting an LTE connection at 25.

Last week they started laying cable down my street, so it seems pretty soon I'll be able to join the modern world.

Also in Canada here, albeit the big-city part - our telecommunications sector is uniquely bad in terms of bandwidth / service for value and consumer choice.

We have organizations like Internet Society Canada (https://internetsociety.ca/) that are aiming to help change that, but it's an uphill battle.

It's very regional. A while back someone here on HN was trying to tell everyone how easy and affordable it was to get 10Gb fiber these days and didn't seem to be aware of how ridiculous that statement was. Sure enough, when challenged they produced a link to a company that assured me they could not service my company's area, which not only isn't rural but is also a stone's throw away from a rather large IT company who's name you'd definitely recognize.

Hell, my company has several branch locations which are relegated to point-to-point wireless links in the sub-Mb range.

My parents live 75 km away from Montreal. It's a small, somewhat isolated town, but still: it's not remote in any sense of the word.

Their only broadband option is LTE (and data prices in Canada are through the roof) or satellite (also expensive).

From what they're telling me, people from the area formed a co-op and got government funding to lay fiber. Except now that it's happening, incumbent telecomms also want a piece of the pie, doing everything in their power to lobby, slow things down through the CRTC and give them time to put their own systems in place before the co-op.

how much international bandwidth are you getting now though? when i lived in auckland more than a decade ago, the local bandwidth was rather irrelevant to me, as most of the websites that i needed to access were overseas and i paid about a dollar per GB for that.

a fast local internet is useful mostly for local streaming services. (does youtube count as local in NZ now?)

It's worth noting for context that the NBN was meant to be FTTP across the entire country, until the most recent conservative government came in and promptly cancelled all that.

My area is fixed mobile only now.

The storms we had 6+ weeks ago knocked out the landline (and adsl), so we've been tethering for any internet, which is 1 bar strength of 4g.

It's increasingly unlikely that Telstra (the fixed line telco) will ever repair the copper: we've had several promises and nothing yet (nor expected until April).

Australia. The only country that makes the USA look good for broadband...

Hey... things have gotten better in the states in the last few years. Not great, but metropolitan areas have fiber. My old building that was built in 1965 got wired with AT&T fiber about a year ago.

Part of the problem with that, is that it's single-provider fiber.

If you don't like AT&T's offerings, you can't go with another ISP.

In a lot of buildings - there's exclusivity arrangements so that no other provider can install fiber.

This is why Australia's NBN was a good idea - the fiber is rolled out by a single body, all the ISPs have equal access.

My apartment has NBN Fiber, I have an ONT provided by NBN, and off that ONT there's four 1Gbit ethernet ports - I can call up my choice of ISP(s) and ask for service from any of them.

The idea for having four data ports was that you could have multiple different network conections.

Perhaps your employer wants you to have a 1Gbit connection direct into their network - no worries, they can provision directly onto one of those ports, and then it doesn't matter what malware might be on my home network, it won't impact the work device.

Perhaps you need some kind of remote-monitored medical gear - well having that on the public internet is a bad idea, so your healthcare provider could provision a port for that, too.

It also means that if I want to switch ISPs, I call up the new ISP and ask for a connection, and when they get around to setting it up - I switch over to their port. Not working? No worries, switch back to the old ISP and continue using that until the new ISP figures it out.

While I think both countries' ISPs like to compete for a yearly "silliest restriction and worst customer experience" award, the NBN in Australia is a government screwup mostly due to the actions of vested interests and vested politicians.

An entire political party decided that the internet was just for "movies and entertainment", "You don't need fast internet" and similar comments. This guided them towards penny pinching as a strategy which meant they succeeded in seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.

"Penny wise, pound stupid" is the old term for it.

... and now I learn that NZ has done similar things to AU.

If the current strategy of making telecommuting the default takes hold post corvid-19 the governments of the industrialized world is going to be forced to treat internet the same way it treats other core infrastructure like roads or railways which means that nationalization will happen if the industry fail to deliver high speed and low prices to the undeserved rural areas.

There is hope that now politicians will face real pressure from their voters to get Internet regulated as utilities and to properly fund its build-out.

I'm sure it was probably a typo, but I just want to point out it's COVID-19, not CORVID-19. Don't want anyone mistakenly thinking this is related to birds of the crow family.

I understand why the WHO avoids animal names,but CORVID would have been a much cooler choice.

This was my first thought as well. We don't cut off water or electric without plenty of warning, typically months of past due bills or eviction. When the service goes out, it is responded to as a public safety matter.

I'm not an expert, but my local MUD board has made basically no improvements since the invention of plumbing. I happen to know how their systems work and they are designed to be the deadest-simple things that will work reliably forever. There's no such thing as a "high performance sewage system" unless you count a really big one as high performance. This attitude generalizes to civil engineers in general who prefer safety over experimentation.

Now, let's compare this to my state and local governments. They're slow, hate change, they're very careful about who to give money to because their main problem is avoiding corruption. A prominent local politician campaigned and won by promising to vote no on or veto everything. Every slow-down comes from a totally legitimate anti-corruption rule and you aren't going to speed the process up without creating Tammany Hall. My local politicians have only one way to make the news, and that's by messing something up. There is no carrot, only a stick.

Those two pictures align perfectly! As a result, my water service has never been interrupted, and I have never gone to the polls with a negative idea about anyone on the MUD board. It's a great system for everyone involved.

Now, my question is, how in the world does this work with internet service, an area in which there are changes at a rate greater than once per century?

Plumbing or Highway constructions were/are highly complex high-tech when the government decided the private industry was unable to maintain it to the standards society needed 50+ years ago.

You might also be mistaking the fad driven high margin web for the rather stable internet sitting underneath it, especially if you go all the way down to the cable duct where a lot of rural houses are still using copper put down in the 30ies.

The problem here is that laying down cable ducts requires both "right of way"(often exclusively held by whoever laid down telephone cables in the 30ies) expensive survey work and real physical labor(someone have to an actual trench), all of which requires capital and if you already own the copper cable for no significant increase in revenue.

Things can be done with radio signals and i suspect whenever 6G mobile arrives it might be municipal, but radio will likely never match the bandwidth potential of even the first optical cables ever laid down.

> undeserved rural areas

Was this just a really unfortunate typo for underserved?

of cause, modern spellcheckers are an dual edged sword.

in germany this is already the case. there is a supreme coirt ruling from 2013 that defines internet access as a basic right, at the same level as access to water and electricity, or a landline. there was a case several years earlier, that a landline could not be terminated even if the payments have not been made. having internet as a basic right should affort it the same treatment

In this time and age I think an internet connection is a human right. There should be free internet access, although limited bandwidth, for those who cannot afford it.

I agree. The internet should be a bit like roads. Yeah sure, you can put up a toll road somewhere, but you can't generally block people from using the road network.

In first world countries it is. In Poland since 2009: http://www.prepaid-wireless-internet-access.com/page/Poland+...

Not universally. In Germany, there is only a federal decree guaranteeing 56kbit/s modem speed, and this is not a human right but merely an obligation to the state telco.

In Poland Aero won its licence on preferential terms with obligation to provide free mobile internet for everyone who wants it.

It is limited and many people will rather choose commercial providers (faster, more flexible plans) but it is working and is free.

PS. Germany has toll-free highways, Polish are quite expensive..

Smart message, hopefully it is received at the cell phone companies. I noticed TMobile is going to give everyone unlimited internet for a couple months whether you have that plan or not - but they didn't say if they were going to avoid shutoff's for no pay.

For cell phone companies physics is an actual limit, you can have multiple cables laid to improve bandwidth but radio spectrum is only one. You can of course keep making cells of the wireless network smaller and smaller but if you go so small that say each house/apartment has personal one you have invented wi-fi basically.

to all those who are blackhat , this is not the time to commit crimes and give people reason to want to dissconnect services, if you are a criminal at least realize that you are overtaxing your bread and butter. give it a break for a while until the system can handle the load of light and dark together

Sadly, I think the people who are irresponsible enough to commit crimes in normal times are also going to be irresponsible enough to commit crimes in a crisis situation, and even to look for ways they can exploit a crisis to their own benefit.

For example, there have been COVID-19 phishing and malware scams already. Yes, people are using this pandemic to scam other people!

I'd think that right now blackhat is having the time of their life as more and more holes are opened up to allow for things like remote work as unfortunate as that is.

Can you elaborate on that?

Do you mean like the RDP marketplaces should slow down so people cant find a computer near the skimmed credit card they bought so that visa transactions go through?

Or something more like corporate hacking?

Or back to the RDP to install monero mining botnets?

I’m just trying to figure out which one you are referring to as “overtaxing”

similar to the virus or with any sort of lotka/voltera dynamics you cant take so much of a targets budget that it cant survive, that means if you subsist off others like animals do [consumers] those others[producers] must have enough "stuff" left to stay afloat or everyone goes down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...

there is a basis for mutual coexistence, it is a maladaptation for anyone to destroy the basis of your existence.

in particular the idea of ransoming or disrupting connectivity and integrity of critical data, info ,services or creating compounding issues. If someone makes thier living doing that, now is not the time for thier own sake as well.

Yeah but the prey for blackhats numbers in the billions. There is an abundance upon which they can gorge.

up to a point when the prey develops a search image and avoids predation. this is when the predator search image must undergo behavioral extinction, and find a prey that can be harvested with some level of success. When exploitable individuals are no longer contactable the interpredatory competition has to thin out the predators, until more predation naive individuals are born or immigrate to the area etc.

I think tragedy of the commons will prevent this. Why should I hold back if I know that others won't?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

oh, it would be weird for a hacker to do that kind of thing.

the vast majority of "hacks", the kinds with efficient markets, don't have those kinds of consequences, almost negligible consequences really.

nobody is trying to overload internet-connected generators or some infrastructure where there are consequences.

I just can't imagine what kinds of hacks you think are actually happening to fit your dynamic.

Unfortunately a lot of people lack any common sense or sympathy for others. On the other hand it might be a good time to motivate and teach users to stay safe.

In Australia we're already seeing malware installing SMS messages that claim to be virus information updates.I want to find whoever is sending them and let them know how terrible they are. With extreme prejudice.

Internet should be viewed as a utility.

Most other utilities charge based on how much you consume.

And most other utilities don’t cut you off if you fail to pay.

Which utilities are those? Electric and gas utilities will absolutely cut off customers who are several months in arrears. Although some areas restrict cut-offs during cold weather. Water utilities usually won't cut off service completely but will install a flow restricted that will allow you just enough water to live.

Most areas also have some kind of rate assistance or subsidy program for low income utility customers. But they still have to pay.

Some utilities decided to not terminate utilities due to non-payment during the current pandemic.

Most other utilities have cost structures that scale with actual consumption rather than capacity.

If you use more water, even if there is plenty of delivery capacity, they could literally run out of it. There is only so much in the reservoir.

If you use more electricity, even if there is plenty of transmission capacity, they have to burn more fuel to generate it.

Transferring more bits doesn't risk depleting the supply of bits and doesn't require burning more fuel. The worst it can do is consume all of the available transmission capacity. But the amortized cost of a bit is very low -- if you charged true cost then it wouldn't meaningfully deter usage, so you'd still need about the same total amount of transmission capacity. At which point charging for usage serves no legitimate purpose.

ISPs have cost structures that scale with actual usage. Cables and routers have a fixed maximum capacity. Within that capacity each marginal bit is virtually free, but as traffic increases they eventually they have to pay for hardware upgrades. Cisco doesn't give routers away for free.

Legitimacy or lack thereof is irrelevant when setting prices.

> ISPs have cost structures that scale with actual usage. Cables and routers have a fixed maximum capacity.

In other words, they don't scale with actual usage, they scale with maximum capacity.

When you take your monthly cable bill and divide it by what it pays for, almost all of it is going to things that don't scale with capacity. Having routers that are ten times faster doesn't require you to have ten times as many staff. They don't use ten times more electricity. They don't require ten times more office buildings or utility poles.

If you take the cost of the capacity upgrade and amortize it over total usage during peak hours, it adds a couple of bucks to the bill for the people who use the most. But that's not enough to deter usage by so much that you don't need the capacity upgrade. You need the capacity upgrade whether you charge per bit or not. At which point the upgrade is a sunk cost and charging for usage is inefficiently discouraging use of a resource that is being paid for either way.

That's kind of a big statement to make without support. What do you mean "viewed as a utility"? What policy or economic outcomes would result from that? Remember, utilities aren't perfect either; they're still monopolies and still bad. Because they're government-regulated, there often ends up being even more cronyism than a regular oligopoly. I at least have two options for internet where I live; I have one for gas. It's practical (if extremely capex-intensive) to pull more internet fiber; it's not really practical to create another gas distribution network. Heck, I get pretty good FTTH gigabit symmetric from one of the "big guy" ISPs, and it's not nearly as pricey as I expected. It's also a little different because the marginal cost of an additional BTU is much higher than that of an additional gigabyte of data transferred. Not non-existent, but pretty small.

message needed in this time. Please don't think about money in times like this. we need each other and we are all in this together. stay safe and let other's be safe too.

>We'll mop up society's collective bills at a later point in time

Very much doubt faceless corporations with automated billing cycles will take such an altruistic view on this but perhaps I'll be surprised.

Most will do the exact opposite I believe. The last financial crash caused massive cashflow issues for the big corps.

> To illustrate, in the Netherlands we are in lockdown, because of the COVID-19 hazard: you are expected to only leave your house if it is absolutely critical, such as to pick up food from the food distribution centers, to get meds, to go work in a hospital, etc.

You have food distribution centers?

I'm jealous.

I'm from the Netherlands, I think what he means is supermarket. Because distribution centers deliver food to the super market itself instead of the customers. Otherwise I'm not sure what he/she is talking about.

We have a full lockdown, yet everyone is outside and it's really crowded. There aren't people that give a (...) About the situation, especially in this city, because most of the people are higher educated.

We don't have a full lockdown. We have "work from home if you at all can, try not to socialise, etc." It's certainly not "you may only go out if you're going to the supermarket, pharmacy, hospital or you risk fines." Many shops are still open, for example.

This said, I also wouldn't say it's really crowded, I took the tram in to the office this morning to pick some stuff up (last day that'll be possible for a few weeks) and it was very quiet.

I'm not even sure what he's talking about. The Netherlands is not on lockdown, not compared to Spain or Italy for example.

Anywhere people might gather is closed and the public are encouraged to practice 'social distancing'. But the army/police are not in the streets making sure people stay at home.

Funny language issue - as terminating a connection also means providing an endpoint. Perhaps "Don't disconnect people's internet".

Here in italy Fastweb pledged set up a 1-million gigabytes traffc pool from which all subscribers draw automatically. Once the million is over, traffic will be drawn from the account (granted, Fastweb offers ~50 GB/month for 9.90/month).

This is for now, i wouldn't be surprised if they extend it later on.

The thing is, Fastweb is big in residential internet connection but pretty minor as mobile provider.

No word from major providers (Vodafone, Tim, Iliad)

Currently for me 4G is the only option to work remotely (the only alternative would be going with a wimax provider, or sat). I don't normally incur in the data size caps, but I will soon in the current situation, even when trying to be conservative.

It also doesn't seem worthwhile to switch at the moment, since other solutions require a 1-2 year contract which I do not need (not to mention, it would also take 2-3 weeks to get a connection with those anyway).

About a month ago my Hong Kong mobile service provider offered subscribers a free local data package. Not unlimited, but a nice gesture.

What's "local" mean here?

Im guessing they meter users differently for traffic going inside and outside the country. On the upstream/provider side it’s not uncommon to see a 2-10x price difference between connectivity inside an island/country vs international carriage.

I believe this is their speak to make it clear you cannot use that data while roaming.

There are not enough resources hosted within the region to make the distinction pointed out by donavanm worthwhile, unlike e.g. China or Russia. The local data from my plan gets used up predictably while I access resources in any part of the Internet.

Could it be that they're including the rest of China in local? Are peering arrangements between HK and the rest of China such that this would make sense?

No, China and Macao both mean roaming data (not included in “local data” quota on regular plans), though the rates are good.

Overall, maybe a good sentiment and maybe a good idea. In many areas I think this is being done.

However, I don't at all like the argument that if your neighbor can't pay her bill, it might not just impact her, but two of her neighbors, one of which is some kind of network engineer who fixes BGP thingies. And neither of the leaching neighbors who have some kind of critical need of her internet can help pay for it???

If you can fix BGP thingies, you ought to have your own WiFi, or be able to do better than leaching it.

On the internet this sentiment is called virtue signalling: it costs you nothing, but people around you think you are a good guy.

Except this "sentiment" will genuinely help people who lose their jobs due to corona and won't be able to pay bills. That extra money from not paying a bill can really help out.

If they won’t be paying for food, paying rent, paying for commute, paying for gas, the life of people who lost jobs due to corona will also be much easier. What’s so special about internet? Nothing.

Also, this sentiment will actually help nobody: if some isp decides to stop taking money for internet, they will do it without suggestion by ripe. That original post was virtue signaling, noise with no practical outcome.

On the other hang people who actually spend resources (for example those isp who continue to provide the internet to those who lost jobs) actually make change, and we are thankful to them.

AND... I didn't say it was a bad thing.

But it is bad that you have two people leaching off some hypothetical other person's WiFi, neither of which is willing to pay for their own or help her. And you aren't "fixing BGP thingies" for free or if you are out of work.

Why isn't the mooching neighbor helping pay?

I'm ALL for the ISP's relieving bandwidth caps and not cutting service due to emergency related financial difficulties - for their subscribers.

Knowing how evil telcos can be, I'm legitimely surprised they didn't exploited this crisis and their virtual monopolies to squeeze more money from customers.

I was surprised to hear from a struggling mother of two that Charter of all companies was offering free 60 days of Internet. That should let her kids keep up with online school.

At a certain level of evil, during a crisis, they risk causing enough trouble to receive congressional attention. The last thing they want is new laws and regulation that impact their future ability to be evil.

If you live in a condo, what about sharing your internet on the guest WIFI network? Does it make sense? Will people misuse it? (It probably violates TOS, I guess.)

Not sure about any TOS but I’ve been sharing my WiFi for more than 10 years now. I live in an appartment block in an Eastern European capital.

I guess it depends. At least in my contract for connectivity is a clause then I cannot share the connection with people not living in the same household. I would imagine it is fairly common.

Does that mean you cannot have guests using your connectivity? I'm assuming they still can. What if they stay outside your apartment? What about staying outside apartment for one week? So many questions

It excludes people even temporary present in the apartment. So guests are supposed to be fine. If they are outside and their phone auto-connects, it is technically a breach, yes.

I asked about it and have in writing that the intention is to prevent sharing with neighbors. But I mean, there is no way to enforce it either way so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Where I live, it is illegal for utility companies to cut power during winters, for obvious reasons. Same should be for internet.

In fact, I'd go as far aa saying thar internet today is an absolute necessity, on par with water and electricity.

I'm wondering what people's thoughts are on net neutrality in light of this new work from home situation. Would it make sense to offer a free tier with limited access?

Anyone working from home doesn't need a free tier, right? What is a working professional going to do with an internet connection that only goes to Facebook and Wikipedia?

The message does not really make much sense to me. Both service payments and pay dispute handling is overwhelmingly done online, so it is not affected by coronavirus and lockdowns.

We do not really know how long it will take. Emergency state and lockdowns may be the new normal. Everything that could work as usual should work as usual to not cause additional disruption.

I think the problem the article was communicating is running out of money if your job is hit (and you live next to a network engineer slash mooch)

>Both service payments and pay dispute handling is overwhelmingly done online,

You could be in hospital or you always pay cache not online, many people pay everything with money in hand in shops(that have such payment points) here in Romania, also if you have a smartphone I imagine attempting to setup accounts and try to pay online from the phone is a pain.

Eh.. there won’t be. But it’s not because of some altruistic motivations, it’s bad PR and the sheer numbers of lost customers would out weight the benefit of terminating for non-pay.

At least in the US, the few the major residential ISP's have a virtual monopoly so wont loose many customers and have proven in the past not to give a $#@ about bad PR.

Actually, Comcast has been a hero of late. The have advertised that they will give away basic internet for free, and bumped up the speed of existing subscribers in addition to bumping up their data caps.

Asking university students to leave campus is hard. Switching from on-prem to online teaching overnight is harder yet. But teaching across the connectivity divide, where students don’t have access at home and the state just shuttered all the businesses providing “free” Wifi, is impossible.

I have been wronged many times by Comcast over the last 24 years; at least from my POV, this offer—provided they abide by it—erases most if not all my ill-will towards them.

Well done

Here in the US the vendors are not doing this.

I use Mintmobile (US) for my cellphone. They are a cheap provider. I pay $180 a year for 2GB of a data a month. They emailed the other day saying data is free for the next month.

AT&T has dropped all data caps, waived any late payment fees, will not terminate service and has opened their WiFi hotspots to everyone.

Charter is waiving late fees, not terminating service, offering free service to households with students which don't already have service and opening their WiFi hotspots to everyone.

Verizon is waiving late fees and will not terminate service.

Cox is waiving late fees, not terminating service, opening WiFi hotspots to all and upgrading speeds on connections in their programs for low income customers to 50Mbs.

Comcast is eliminating data caps, waiving late fees, not terminating service, opening WiFi hotspots to all and offering 2 months of free service to those eligible for but not enrolled in their $9.95 per month program for low-income families. They are also increasing data rates for their low-income program connections.

Many other providers have also pledged to not terminate service.

I was pretty sure most US Internet vendors pledged [1] to "not terminate service to any residential or small business customers because of their inability to pay their bills due to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic."

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363033A1.pdf

As far as I know Sonic's fibre has never had any caps. I for one have never hit them.

I'll play the devil's advocate. Bandwidth is a finite resource, and it could be in critically short supply. In those circumstances, I wouldn't expect everyone to get more bandwidth, I'd expect it to be rationed.

The problem is how do you establish effective rationing with no preparation? It's nigh impossible.

Even with preparation, It would be a very difficult and impossibly contentious process.

For the downvoters, I'm just pointing out that removing all caps and limits doesn't automatically create abundance.

As far as establishing effective policy: ISPs have a lot of practice rationing bandwidth, I'm sure there's a way that's fair enough. Putting a price on it is a good start.

For the downvoters, I'm just pointing out that removing all caps and limits doesn't automatically create abundance.

True, and if they can provide reliable service without the data caps, then it makes the public (and in a perfect world, government regulators) question why they need the data caps at all -- if their network runs fine for months without any data caps, then why do they need those caps at all?

It's easier and fairer to load balance and keep upgrading backhauls when they get full.

Do you mean from a technical or business perspective?

Technically Comcast could implement it overnight by reducing everyone's data speed (or maybe throttling particular services), or instituting stricter data caps.

From a business perspective it's harder but if it was the only way they could keep their network afloat, I'm sure the could get the FCC to let them implement emergency throttling.

At least three factors regarding rationing of bandwidth: Data rate, data volume and caching.

"Bandwidth" is already rationed but is usually high enough you don't notice most of the time or its still good enough most of the time. If you do continuous transfers you immediately see the data rate limits already in place.

But these data rate limits are usually already throttled and therefore different to some monthly download data cap. Those data caps are often marketing/sales driven rather than the actual data rate. And often the real technical data volume limits are for data entering/leaving the ISP. That's the real cost that is being covered by bandwidth caps. They estimate the costs at their borders and cover that first.

Which brings us to the caching involved. The more caching the easier it is to lower costs or limits. Peering means that some ISPs are closer to each other than they otherwise would be. And Netflix and others using CDNs etc place servers at strategic locations to bring themselves closer. That 2GB movie stream is likely traversing a lot less equipment than you'd expect. In some cases, less than a video conference or game.

If caching fails and something got broken along the way, or... they don't have a close enough CDN site, or caching simply isn’t possible, that is when you have congestion[1] since your traffic now joins whatever else is at the ISP entry/exit points. They can still lower your data rate without touching some monthly data cap.

[1] I'm not discounting congestion within an ISPs network but as they have all the dials and can do whatever they like to sort that out its a separate issue. Redundant paths are a thing. Also, if they isolate congestion to a particular user or usage, eg bittorrent, they already have throttling for that.

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