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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Before people cry about the falling sky - read the article. This is specifically about 5G Connections, largely impacting mobile phones and those few who have 5G home internet connections (I pity you).

With that said - many of you already pay for "enhanced" video over cellular data connections - and few gripe about it.

I'm all for open, dumb pipes and all, but the mobile device space is very crowded as it is, and it's really not a lot of fun to have Google Maps fail to load when you're in a crowded area because a ton of people are posting on Instagram or playing Fruit Ninja.

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> This is specifically about 5G Connections, largely impacting mobile phones and those few who have 5G home internet connections (I pity you).

What difference does it make? If they're allowed to deprioritize certain connections over 5G, how long until they're allowed to do it over any connection?

And I've never heard of "enhanced video over data" - is that a US only thing?

> and it's really not a lot of fun to have Google Maps fail to load when you're in a crowded area because a ton of people are posting on Instagram or playing Fruit Ninja.

You have very mixed messaging - first you say that it only affects some types of connections (with the implication that it's a bad thing, but at least it won't affect everyone), but now you're turning around to say it's a good thing, actually. The reason why we should advocate for ISPs to be blind to whether someone's using Instagram or Google Maps is because, if they're not, it won't be used for the benefit of the consumer like you imagine. It will be immediately used to segment the internet into pieces and charge customers separately for it, as just another way of squeezing more money.

> And I've never heard of "enhanced video over data" - is that a US only thing?

Most budget carriers in the US, and even some plans on premium carriers only serve 720p video unless you get a higher tier plan. The reasons are data consumption.

> You have very mixed messaging - first you say that it only affects some types of connections (with the implication that it's a bad thing, but at least it won't affect everyone), but now you're turning around to say it's a good thing, actually.

QoS is a good thing. If you talk on a VOIP phone, you reasonably expect the other person to hear you clearly - not garbled and choppy. On congested networks, sometimes the network has to decide which packets to drop or slow down. They can do it indiscriminately, or they can do it by need, with realtime communications clearly being a higher priority than a large file upload for example. QoS is nothing new, and it's likely already done by your ISP.

> It will be immediately used to segment the internet into pieces and charge customers separately for it, as just another way of squeezing more money.

Then, I wonder, why it has not already been done? ISP's have been free to do this since day one of the internet. Why just now?

The ideas around "net neutrality" are complex, and unfortunately don't mean the same thing to two different people. Fearmongering about some dystopian future internet has got a lot of people's feathers ruffled, mostly over nothing in my opinion.

It's not unreasonable for ISP's in general to charge people based on consumption. We already do this with bandwidth, after all. However, until the day where egress traffic is entirely free, there is costs associated with consumption in both terms of bandwidth and data size. Networks have finite bandwidth, and the faster someone's connection is and the more data they consume, the more of these finite resources they prevent other customers from accessing.

> They can do it indiscriminately, or they can do it by need, with realtime communications clearly being a higher priority than a large file upload for example. QoS is nothing new, and it's likely already done by your ISP.

I've not argued against QoS in general - of course the network has its limits. The thing I'm arguing against is that the power to discriminate between internet traffic based on its origin, not on the exact way the bandwidth is used in general. To my knowledge, the former isn't being done, yet.

> Then, I wonder, why it has not already been done? ISP's have been free to do this since day one of the internet. Why just now?

That's similar to asking why companies haven't implemented every anti-consumer practice imaginable to squeeze out the most money yet. <Major food producer> could've shrunken their product's packaging by 15% while retaining the same price two years ago, so why are they only doing it now? My guess is that, for one, this could be legally problematic in some countries. Also, if your competition isn't also switching to this model, your services would become a lot less desired. However, as the population of internet users nears 100% in first-world countries all while the ISPs require constantly increasing profits, I can easily foresee something like this coming in the future.

It would be a guaranteed money-maker - create more plans, where connection is throttled unless you're connecting to a Preferred Website, then ask companies to pay up to speed up their websites and upcharge users to get access to the full internet.

> It's not unreasonable for ISP's in general to charge people based on consumption.

Well, then they can do that. Consumption-based internet plans are extremely common - in some countries, even "unlimited" plans can even end up as "several terabytes of data and then severely throttled" plans. Still, I don't see where the ability to discriminate based on what website you're connecting to comes in.

Even then, it's very debatable that this is actually something that we need - given the present-day situation where internet usage is at an all-time high and ISPs seemingly have no issues building and supporting networks that make up for the average bandwidth that they can expect to use, limiting those services (barring a sudden explosion in average bandwidth use) would seem like price-gouging rather than rationing a limited service.

imo it doesn’t matter if the article is about 5G. This will come to home internet connections before you know it.

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