It's a good thing im in japan and don't need to worry about this (atm one day i'll return to the states who's state am I going to?). It is pretty screwed people are so greedy these days.
Take action to defend Net Neutrality! Keep things as they are right now!
- Thread starter Montoya
- Start date
I agree with Dear Leader that Ajit Pai is bought and paid for
so petitioning is futile
meaningful change will only happen with a Democratic administration backed by a Democratic Congress
so the time frame is the same either way
and while new regulations could be undone again, technology only moves one way
Well not like google and facebook are screaming their heads off about this, they would probably benefit from this, because it would take out their competition. This is not left or right issue, every customer is getting f@#cked in this deal.
EpilepticCricket
Space Marshal
5g has a minimum speed requirement of 100 mega*bits* per second per user. That's about 12.5 megabytes. Never mind the fact that 4g isn't even ubiquitous or sufficiently reliable in all areas after having those networks for years. ISPs and carriers will *always* do the absolute minimum they can to increase speeds and network reliability.
Ultimately, the internet needs to be declared a utility as opposed to being regulated like one. Only once it's a utility will all of this be put to rest.
WarrenPeace
Space Marshal
There's also the problem that as bandwidth increases, demand for bandwidth increases.
Back when all we had was DSL and dial-up, you had people posting "56k NO" warnings in image heavy threads.
As cable and fiber become more common, we now like to stream videos in 1080p 60 fps, and consider it unacceptable to have to drop down to 480p.
When we have 5G, consumption will increase to match. We'll be streaming ultra HD 8k 144fps, and complaining if we have to drop to 1080p 60 fps.
It sets a bad precedent, and if we get used to having to pay extra to match the performance we get now, we'll never get away from it in the future.
What if I were to tell you... I have to stream YouTube in 144p.
WarrenPeace
Space Marshal
Actually not capitalism, since you are already paying for their product its called extortion.
Dragonslaya54
Space Marshal
Lol, me too. I have to let it buffer a bit first though. I tried watching a movie I rented from YouTube in 360p. Between the buffering and watching, it was a nice 8 hour day.
Takes me 5 days to install a patch in Star Citizen and sometimes I have to let it install over several months due to my data cap. People ask, SteveTank, why not just increase your data cap you cheap little prick? I would but I don't have any cable or copper lines going to my house other than the crappy old phone lines that were put in 50 years ago. The only service I get is cellular, which means buying a dedicated hotspot and paying $200 a month for 30 more GB of data. I don't live in the middle of nowhere either. I'm in a well developed community where the surrounding neighborhoods have 50 mbps connections but my neighborhood got left in the dust because we have large houses and the cable companies don't want to spend the money to run the lines to our houses. There just isn't enough houses per every 500 feet for them to care. Heck, it's 600 feet from my house to the end of the street and that's just 3 houses.
Where is the fiber box for the other neighborhoods? 1000 feet from my house is the COX one and 2500 feet for the CenturyLink one. And yes, it's fiber, and no they won't run it to my house, and yes I ask them every time they come out.
Internet companies suck. I live in Arizona. Google Fiber tried to come to our state since we only have the 2 internet companies. COX and CenturyLink made it impossible for Google Fiber to run their lines anywhere. They blocked them on every underground route to anywhere and in the end Google could only run their lines through existing telephone poles above ground, which only the really old neighborhoods have.
COX and CenturyLink even had ads for their 1 Gbps connections to rival Google Fiber and said that it was available everywhere, but when you looked on the map for where you could actually get the service, it was only a few remote apartment complexes that had the fiber for them to actually sell it to you. Now that Google isn't pushing so hard to get here, the ads for gigabit have stopped and neither of the two rival companies are pushing for a better network infrastructure.
I'm glad that I'm moving at the end of the month but it's just to another city in Arizona, so I'll have better internet but the same companies and no choices. Destroying net neutrality will only make situations like mine worse.
Shadow Reaper
Space Marshal
Bandwidth and the demand for it has almost nothing to do with this problem. This is not a case of supply and demand. The question is whether providers should be allowed to artificially create scarcity to drive up costs, by throttling specific customers they think they can then manipulate to pay higher prices. Cheaper and more plentiful bandwidth does not come into this equation.
It really depends where you live.
In cities and populated places, its good (not as good as Korea or Japan).
If you live in the countryside, you are screwed.
I get 56k though a hard line and 4G through my phone. I live just outside of a large city and the people a half a mile away get 50 mbps.
50 mbps is the average around where I live. 100, 150, and 300 mbps are also availible. 1 Gbps is in very few places. Anywhere with a fiber line can get 1 Gbps but those are mostly buisnesses. I've seen 150 and sometimes 300mbps for $100 a month (USD).
Everyone I watch on Youtube looks like they have a potato for a head.
SOTS is quite an expirance at 144 and you can complete the expiriance by putting it on mute and letting the auto-captions put words in Montoyas mouth.
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Man, I feel bad for you. That is a horrible life for a nerd. I mean, sure. You found a way to get by. But is it really? I'm going to call up my ISP right now and yell at them in honor of your slow internet death...
I have been there before though. I rented a house for a couple months with the same issue. It was too far for DSL, and cable flat wouldn't work. I ended up buying back out of my lease. It was expensive, but I just couldn't live like that. Since then, I have tested every place I have moved into prior to signing. I even went so far as to call out a tech with the local provider to test the lines before I bought the house I'm in now.
Back to the subject though. Even though we aren't on the Comcast/Time warner ticket, we still have very limited options when it comes to our isp selection. Net neutrality is only necessary because of the position our providers have weaseled into. They have managed to form a monopoly without getting smashed by the antitrust laws. Now that they're there though, they will keep trying to apply that power to anything and everything they can. Today it's throttling, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.
That's why I'm with others that think the only solution is to list internet as a utility. They are using the same infrastructure (poles, easement, etc.) as other utilities. The internet is also necessary to so much of our daily lives, you could say it is just as essential as electricity or gas. It's not just for pron, games and the youtubes. Banking, communication, retail, commerce, etc. all run through that connection. So I think its' reasonable.
The only problem with that is, we would still lose. Just about everything the government controls ends up convoluted and ultimately dysfunctional. So maybe it gets fixed, maybe it doesn't. Maybe Net Neutrality will stop this train, maybe classifying it as a utility will. All we can do is inform our local and state politicians and hope enough other people do the same to sway their vote.
Shadow Reaper
Space Marshal
Is there a simple piece of equipment one can purchase to do such a test himself? I plan to be moving a couple times in the next few months, and if I could test the DSL lines before moving that would be important to do.
Hey, this is cool: http://speedtest.att.com/speedtest/
What sort of speeds does one need to play SC?
I don't know if they would have something like that available for consumers. If I remember correctly, DSL needs to come through the pre-existing phone lines (as opposed to the cable tv lines). The last time I had to use DSL, they were testing the distance by wire to their nearest hub(?). It was their nearest point where they sent out the signal. I understood it as similar to the nearest cell tower, just with internet over a wire. You distance to that "hub" and the quality of the signal/wiring along the way is what determined your speed and reliability. I also remember a signal booster was a bad thing to find on the line. So long story short, I don't know if there would be a way for you to test that without the presence of the actual provider.
Then again, this was about 15 years ago. I have used cable ever since at each location I've lived at. I'm sure they're not using the same stuff nowdays....
less than you would imagine
[over-simplified]
all the assets are already on your PC
you are only exchanging information about objects' state with the server
position, direction, velocity, etc, which tells your graphics card how to render the assets
[/over-simplified]
I used to play Eve Online on a weak wi-fi connection I leeched from my next door neighbor's 6mbps connection