Now I feel bad as my favorite porn site is in Australia. :o

Bezos and Musk’s satellite internet could save Americans $30B a year

Competition drives pricing, and everyone is going to get two more competitors in 5-10 years.

thank Crom for that net neutrality...oh, wait...
 

:neutral:

Starlink was suppose to fill the sky with many tiny satellites. But I have notices a trend. For weeks, no visible Starlinks. Suddenly, over a 20 minute period, over 24 appeared in a group. Most only in a 5 minute period. How long before these 'space out'?

Satellite constellations from Amazon, SpaceX, and Oneweb do not talk directly to handsets. These talk to ground stations. Gateways that, in turn, retransmit to other receivers.

More problems exist. Many countries have not authorized frequencies for these satellite. So ech must turn off when over certain countries.

A satellite that can talk directly to phones (as Iridium must do do) still must be quite large. And must support 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G technologies.

Companies such a Vodafone and Rakuten are working together to develop a technology that does not require ground stations.

There are only a few hundred up right now, another 60 going up on Saturday morning.

Net neutrality update:

Nothing has happened

in fact we had a lockdown in which everyone worked from home and streamed video all day long

no blocking, no throttling, no pay for play!!

So. What new political boogeymen are we worried about today, that will turn out to be nothing?

Download 1.27 Mbps
Upload .29Mbps

Well it is the same... but I wouldn't say everyone worked from home and streamed video all day. I was usually able to stream a low quality video. I have a cell booster now which improves that option a bit (3 bars now) but we don't have an unlimited data option so that's limited.

I think most of us have too much on our plates right now for boogeymen. I guess the left has Trump refusing to leave and the right has fear of masks.

Well sure, for a long time the people wearing masks were either bandits or doctors and they both took all your money.

He fails to grasp the purpose of subverting net neutrality. It is to increase profits.

Izatso...

AT&T and Verizon both torture the meaning of the word “unlimited” by offering multiple unlimited plans. But the more expensive ones are either paired with the company’s own streaming service, or the companies degrade the quality of the video under certain conditions. These practices may give the carrier’s content an advantage in the marketplace over smaller, independent video producers.

Sprint has been throttling internet traffic to Microsoft’s Skype service, causing the video quality to be poorer than it should be, which is especially worrisome because Skype is a tool that competes with Sprint’s calling service. These are only two examples of how companies can favor their own content over competitors’ without rules forbidding this behavior.

Comcast has new speed limits where videos will be throttled to 480p on all its mobile plans unless customers pay extra.

A recent study shows that the largest U.S. telecom companies, including Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, are slowing down internet traffic from apps like YouTube and Netflix.

Verizon’s throttling of services even affected the Santa Clara County Fire Department’s ability to provide emergency services during the California wildfires. The fire department experienced slowed down speeds on their devices and had to sign up for a new, expensive plan before speeds were restored.

Redditor AbeFroman21 posted that he and his family are without power or internet due to Hurricane Florence, and that Verizon has throttled their internet access to an unusable trickle, offering to unblock them if they pay for a higher tier of service.

CenturyLink briefly disabled the Internet connections of customers in Utah last week and allowed them back online only after they acknowledged an offer to purchase filtering software.

Doesn't sound like nothing to me.:eyebrow:

Net neutrality rules never applied to wireless service, and that's 6 out of 7 of these claims, most of which are from 2018.

That explains why violations of net neutrality are most egregious on wireless services.

And never will since the FCC lost control. The commerce Commission sure as hell won't slow them down.
EDit: Also, 2018 doesn't matter they started disemboweling the FCC in 2017 right after the election and killing net neutrality shifting to commerce means the damage can't be undone without an act of congress.

But how about those items huh.

The meaning of "Unlimited" has nothing to do with net neutrality, it's a marketing issue which belongs with the FTC, not FCC. But also, it's now 2020 and Verizon has only one Unlimited. I have this plan. It's unlimited.

Sprint throttling traffic to Skype was a claim from researchers collating information from a third-party app, and Sprint disputed the results. But more than that, The researchers themselves could not reproduce their findings. That's... unimpressive.

We already went over reducing video sizes over mobile in this thread, and why they were a benefit to everyone in 2018 and not a net neutrality violation.

We already went over the Santa Clara firefighters in this thread. It had nothing to do with net neutrality.

Centurylink blocked people in UT based on their understanding or misunderstanding of a UT state law requiring customers to opt-out of filtering. This has nothing to do with net neutrality.

Finally, a Redditor claimed he didn't get good wireless service during a hurricane, LOL. Are you fuckin' kidding me? This has nothing to do with net neutrality.

~

I am done here. This is my last post on this topic. Please, by all means, have the final words, and enjoy the thread in the future without my input.