A husband. A father. A senior software engineer. A video gamer. A board gamer.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Yes. And they didn’t not endorse Trump, as well. Which is the whole point here. They are laying down their arms just in case the wannabe authoritarian fascist dictator happens to win.

    And the one fighting chance, outside of voting, and taking up arms, is a free press. Benjamin Franklin knew this and used it to its fullest capacity. And that is what is dying — without a free press, the vote is then in danger because any semblance of truth is already dead.

    Then what are we left with?

    Guns. And death.

    And guess who benefits from that?








  • No, I specifically stated that the technology has moved past that, especially in the fiber business. That is not ignoring it, I’m stating he’s flat wrong. This isn’t coaxial shared bandwidth like the late 1990s/early-mid 2000s. That time has passed. The problem here is a fundamental misunderstanding that the technology no longer requires such data cap/bandwidth tradeoffs (in the wireless business, this may still be necessary due to the congestive nature of wireless signals and how towers handoff/pickup/etc, but it is not necessary in the wired business any more). And if an ISP can’t properly support 1Gbps, they shouldn’t offer it. Anecdotally, for my use case (I don’t saturate my 1Gbps synchronous fiber 100% of the time, but there are times I’m downloading on Steam, many many GBs) my ISP handles it perfectly fine – and not once has a data cap been introduced.

    Outside of the wireless space, data caps are a money grab – pure and simple. And playing psychological games with consumers, as you have alluded to, in order to get them to not use the bandwidth they pay for is also quite unethical, in my opinion.



  • I’m confused where you believe consumers are given choice here.

    Data caps are usually scaled up with faster bandwidth, not the other way around as you attempt to define. And that’s simple marketing that attempts to excuse the use of data caps.

    Also, data caps are artificial and are literally a money grab under the erroneous guise that data is manufactured and thus has intrinsic value. A congressman literally compared it to manufacturing Oreos — which is complete nonsense.

    Also, if what you say is true, then why does AT&T impose no data caps on their fiber network? Clearly this is a marketing issue, not a technical one. And perhaps in the past with the way coaxial internet was engineered, an argument could be made for data caps. The industry has grown up since then, technically speaking, and there is no cause for data caps except to continue to line the pockets of ISPs.

    I agree with you that working toward consumers having a choice of ISP is where most efforts should lie, but the FCC can walk and chew gum at the same time and remove anti-consumer practices such as data caps, all the while pushing for more competition at the last mile. They’re not mutually exclusive concepts.