a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month
"Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.
I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed.
The internet is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more.
E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like
> I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down.
Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!
It's pretty obvious isn't it? They don't want anyone to understand how the system really works. They should not be allowed to put the words "Unlimited" anywhere in their advertisement. period. It's all deceptive advertising and they should be raked over the coals for it.
If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. Cable companies are soul sucking monopolies/duopolies and deserve no quarter.
I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest
Competitor services? Starlink aside, I have no options but what I have. I think many people at least in USA are in similar situation.
There usually are no competitors.
There's two (interrelated) values here --- speed ("flow rate") and volume.
"Unlimited data" refers to volume.
Gigabit refers to speed.
This customer presumably isn't too worried about the speed, but is rightly under the impression that he isn't being charged on volume and can thus use as much as the speed allows.
When it first started back in the Before Times, "Unlimited" internet was in contrast to dial-up connections which weren't always on. It's unlimited in time (as long as you're subscribed), not necessarily guaranteed to keep the max speed for the entire time.
That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.
That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.
NetZero and AOL both advertised as unlimited. If you had a extra phone line you could connect and download for as long as you'd like.
A 56kbps dialup connection saturated 24/7 will get you ~18GB per month.
Oversubscription ratios vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Perhaps ISPs could advertise the worst case but that would make their service look worse than it is. And of course no ISP will be the first to disclose.
BTW the FCC recently introduced "nutrition labels" for ISPs. https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
That’s why I think this has to come through rules and regs - any individual company can be honest, but it would probably come at the cost of dishonest competitors winning customers.
It has to be regulated because in most of the US ISPs have a de-facto monopoly on the infrastructure; the market has failed to produce more competitors with permits to dig and place fiber for a bunch of reasons.
If that’s the case they should market the plan’s throttling upfront. “Unlimited mobile data” comes with very clear fine print that isn’t buried in the TOS about how many gigabytes the customer gets before it drops them to 3g speed.
I believe in those cases even after you pass the throttling limit you can continue to transfer data at however much 3g speeds will get you for the rest of the billing period, and thus they won't cut off your service for using "too much".
> I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate.
I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to mislead. But it's something to be aware of because they will argue (and frequently some smug person that I guess has a boot fetish) and then blame you for not reading. But I strongly disagree. Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. You can't just hide stuff in legal language. No person has enough time to read all those TOS agreements and even if they did, it's not in normal language that's understandable by the average person. If a contact is fair only if participants are informed and consenting, then I don't think most of these contacts should hold up (they do).
But hey, we live in a world where courts have decided that "boneless wings" doing clearly mean "without bones". But I for one don't want to live in a country where that's okay.
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors with the legal system and I for one don't think enough people are upset. Apathy isn't working.
Edit: removing an apparently quite inaccurate comment. Apologies.
It /is/ how it works with PON based fibre networks. See https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-u...
Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.
A number of years ago one of the isps, might have been att dsl, argued that "unlimited" was a branding name for a tier. They had meant an affectation of limitless possibilities as a marketing term similar to "plus", "extreme" or "pro" and not that there was no cap on the data. I always ignore that word now and look for the actual terms
Put another way, if they're saying 12TB is their unadvertised effective data cap, he's only allowed to use his connection for 1 day a month.
My ISP lets me use the service all of the days of the month, not just one. His ludicrously low limit is unfathomable.
Hear hear! Furthermore any plans with "caps" should have to list the average bandwidth as the largest headline, with the peak bandwidth relegated to a subpoint. For example 1TB/month is 386 kB/sec. That's on par with a DSL connection, not 2024 broadband.
That would mislead and confuse a lot of consumers. It would suggest that a 5 Mb/s DSL connection with no data limit would be better than a 500 Mb/s cable connection with a 1 TB data limit, when in fact something like 90% of users will not come anywhere near 1 TB of data/month and will be much much much happier on the cable plan.
How is this nonsense still legal? It’s straight up nothing but deceptive advertising.
And this is a gigabit customer using 4% of their maximum. What the heck?
They can lie all they want; they are integrated with the government and they have no consequences for fraud.
I gave Cox over $2000 explicitly for unlimited data and still got nastygrams from them for uploading 4TB of my original digital photos to S3 for backup.
It’s effectively illegal to start new ISPs in America, that’s why this shit happens.
I would absolutely forward those to my state's public utilities commission.
Needs (2020). They may or may not still be doing this, but this exact article was already on HN at the time:
Yeah I thought it was a bit odd the mention of Pandemic internet traffic given most companies are now forcing return to office. Makes sense now.
Cox advertised gigabit to me. I always wanted it so I took the upsell. After six truckrolls (alternately telling me my signal was too strong -- installing attenuator, then too weak and removing it) for which I had to take a day off work every time, they eventually told me it was a mistake and my neighborhood didn't have gigabit.
Then the cherry on top was they wouldn't even put me back on my old plan because it "wasn't offered any more". So they tried to charge me an extra $15/month for half the speed I was getting before. I switched to a local wireless ISP that ended up being even more expensive for even slower service -- but at least they weren't liars and when I had a problem I could talk directly with the owner if it wasn't sorted (and no data caps).
I can't but think this is the business practice of a dying technology, yet another example.
I won the fiber lottery where I live, and I will never go back to cable (I had a choice). Let's just call the rejected cable choice a "30 Rock episode".
And that same cable provider eventually was called out for advertising a "10G Plan!". Yeah.
Meanwhile my fiber provider advertises options based on symmetric upload/download speeds. And I think this is the key in these days when we send a lot of outbound data with video call and offline backups.
Put in place a rule that only the lowest speed can be advertised by providers.
Cox was terrible - they knew they were the only broadband provider in my neighborhood and they took full advantage of it. Then AT&T put in fiber (when they installed it they put the box on my property) and I had seven times the speed for a fraction of the cost. When I called to cancel, Cox tried to cut me a deal.
There's a lot to be said for the better customer service and straightforward treatment. Worth the extra premium you got hosed with in the end.
They don't call it Cox for nothing, damn you got hosed on that one. I've always been careful with upsells as there's always a catch, or a Cox.
They made the choice to name themselves after a bunch of dicks.
Did you sue? Isn't that false advertising?
In the US you could seek recourse via your state Attorney General. You might hope the FCC would care (but they don’t).
The GP already lost 6 days of work… how much would the likely payoff be to make it work their while to continue dealing with that company?
FCC can be surprisingly effective. My friend had a problem with his ISP randomly dropping routes to some of the ASs, and the support was useless, because all the speed test sites were fine
An FCC complaint got that fixed in two weeks.
An additional option to consider is to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
I had an issue with my wireless carrier repeatedly refusing to issue credit for a months-long ongoing problem on their end.
Within 2 days in filing a BBB complaint, I had a rep from the company asking how much I thought seemed fair and if I wanted a bill credit or a check.
The attorney general’s office consumer protection division in your state does what most people think the BBB does.
BBB is just a review website. Like Yelp.
Filing a complaint with BBB is like saying 'I left a bad Yelp review' ... useful, maybe.. if the company cares..
You can't buy the satisfaction that comes from forcing the phone company to do what you require.
> to do what you require.
"To do what they advertised to you."
Wasn't worth it, I just wanted internet.
It costs many thousands of dollars to bring a lawsuit in the US, and you will almost certainly lose against a huge corporation with their own legal team. They can simply outspend you until you give up.
Not if the amounts are small enough for small claims court. The laws vary state by state but here in California, the max for small claims is $10,000 and the company can’t just hire a legal firm to defend it, they have to send a corporate representative. They can send a lawyer if they have general counsel employed by the company, but few companies are big enough to have that and those that are generally won’t send them out for small claims. Many times they won’t bother at all and it results in a default judgement.
The filling fees are in the hundreds of dollars and the judge are used to working with the general public as opposed to well represented plaintiffs with expensive lawyers.
You can often take telcos to small claims for the few dozens or hundreds they owe you, and they won't bother to show up. You'll get a default judgement for the cost of court filing (varies, $20-$100 usually). If they don't pay, you bring the sherrif to one of their offices to start dragging out an equivalent resale value of equipment unless somebody writes a check in ahurry.
"Heavy" use is just using what they pay for. If they can't guarantee that they should sell a lesser tier of service. Otherwise this is just fraud.
They paid for committed bandwidth? So they'd be paying $1000+/mo. But they're not.
I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down. A Google PM got me on a call and asked me if I wanted 20 gigabit for $200 a month the other day. No restrictions, I could run my business off my $70 if I really wanted to.
I don’t know what Cox is going on about, they need to get with the program.
That’s cool but it won’t work if everyone in your zip code tries to do it.
I pay $50 for 10 gigabits from Sonic. I don’t abuse it by deliberately running a speed test 24/7 or anything like that. I do use it for anything I want, at any time, without pausing to consider how much data it takes. Launch a NAS backup at 2PM on a weekday? Stream 4K video on 2 TVs at the same time? Download a mass of software updates? Without a second’s hesitation. The CEO is on record being very explicit that they sell you Internet access so you can use it as you see fit.
I have the best ISP in the country. You can’t convince me otherwise.
I think US internet would give you a run for your money on best ISP in the country. Been doing gigabit symmetrical for probably close to 10 years at very reasonable prices. When I called customer support about having a static IP, just ended up talking shop with whoever was on the other side. Amazing
Sonic is still in business? Had DSL with them 20 years ago.
They are so very still in business.
This one is probably in contention:
Other than being 6x the price though.
I wonder if it’s because EBP is a utility and so has a mandate to run fiber to all homes in its area, as opposed to private ISPs that can pick and choose.
That could be. Sonic has pretty good coverage local from leasing fiber from AT&T. Even then there are still dead spots in my city where people are stuck with Comcast et al. They only recently rolled out their own fiber several months ago where I live. That day my speed went up 10x and the cost cut in half.
It's a no-brainer for people who live in their coverage area, yet as you say, their coverage isn't complete.
But it's still $50 for 10Gb where offered.
Specifically the fraud is advertising gb service instead of 10mb99. QoS. It's as ridiculously as selling a prius that can do 200mph as little as 0 percent of the time.
They want to advertise their sevrice as meeting the federal broadband speed without having to actually build a network that can support it. That's fraud.
I pay considerably less that that for colocated 1 Gbps, from a Tier 1 provider, which includes rack space, air conditioning, and power.
For a thousand dollars of dedicated bandwidth I'd expect more like 10Gbps.
And a residential ISP would still be able to massively overcommit despite such a guarantee.
Went and looked at some FCC maps to fantasize about having ISP competition after reading, and it turns out North Dakota has the best fiber coverage in the US, followed by South Dakota. I assume it's a combination of government subsidies and the prevalence of telephone co-ops out there, but very interesting nonetheless.
FCC Map - https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=...
Vice article - https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-north-dakota-has-the-bes...
New America article - https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/united-states-broadba...
Story was reported on in 2020, during the peak of the lockdowns as well.
We truly fucked ourselves by giving these national ISPs so much power. In return, they abuse us, they collude to make sure other ISPs do not compete against each other to justify high prices and low bandwidth, and hire lobbyists to implement/push stupid laws in various states to prevent municipal ISPs (eg, Texas).
Voters should be demanding their local governments roll out fiber as a utility like Chattanooga, TN.
This article is from 2020.
Must be Cox punishing us.
On Cox, I've been trying to load it since then.
Cox in general is horrible. Their caps are 1.25TB, even on 1 and 2 Gigabit connections.
And it's not like they put you on slow speeds once you expire it, no, they charge you $10 per 50GB (!). Automatically. You cannot opt out.
Oh, and their counter isn't real-time...
Article is from 2020, when there was a big load increase from WFH.
They way HFC (cable internet) works you would have to cap upload speed for everyone on the network, as it uses time multiplexing for uploads.
They always have the choice to change provihahahahahhaha.
I am kidding, Cox is probably their only choice. They better write a letter to apologize as a neighborhood for their bad behavior.
with the ftc finally going after companies lately i really hope they go after these companies who make up entirely new meanings for words.
for example, it’s crazy to me that we allowed companies to redefine “unlimited” to mean “limited”.
when people pontificate on how we seem to be heading towards dangerous levels of low trust society—this is a great place to start. few things reach as many people as marketing. we can’t trust so much of what we’re being sold. that’s not good, at all.
Why has this 4 year old article bubbled to the top of HN?
I could only dream of having 10mbps upload... we are still stuck on DSL here, I am lucky to get close to 1mb upload, not enough to even watch my home camera feed reliably, especially with audio on.
During covid my local ISP got a grant to run rural fiber. We went from satellite to a full gig fiber connection. It has literally changed my home life.
Any more context on this? We've got copper AT&T DSL as our only option, besides Starlink. Have been trying to work with the county, look for grants, etc to present to a local ISP who's mentioned interest.
Starlink?
Absolutely not. And there's too many trees for any satellite service anyways
Why? Outside of disdain for the moron who owns SpaceX? The service is fantastic (for me, anyway) at a great price barely more expensive than a comparable fibre connection that I can't get anyway. Limits of geography are fair, but it seems that's not the primary reason.
A reminder of why we are getting FTC broadband labels: https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
Labels aren't going to help when you don't have choices, and most people don't have choices.
Just like prop 65 warnings don't help when everything has them.
I get 250 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload on Spectrum (Charter Communications) in semi-rural Texas for $60/month. (I'm itching to switch to GVEC.) Recently, I had Google Fiber 2 Gbps symmetric with an option for 5 and 8 Gbps with a trial for 20 Gbps.
Very familiar with Cox as they are the only cable provider in my area and fiber largely has not made it to any other part of the city except the really new and wealthy areas.
While I have not yet run into any caps with my gigabit plan I am painfully aware of how limited the so called "unlimited" gigabit plan is. During COVID it was particularly egregious. I was paying about what Mike was paying except from the hours of 11am to around 9pm my download would be capped at 10Mbps or so and my upload halved from whatever it is to around 2Mbps. Cox didn't have the common courtesy to tell anyone that they were QoSing entire city blocks because their "infrastructure couldn't handle it". I only learned this by isolating the network and running my own tests. After what felt like 30 escalations with their tech support and a large portion of my night they all but confirmed they were doing this to handle the "streaming services". I work from home - this was a major problem. Despite this I was simply upsold yet another super-duper plan rather than given anything I could work with.
I get regular outages with them and run my own tests on the coax. Despite having noise levels that are pretty good for the most part their service still doesn't work right all the time. Despite my insistence calling a tech out their labyrinthine tech support tree all but prevents you from talking to anyone but a moron with a flowchart where all roads lead to "reset the modem" or "upsell hardware" and a hands free phone.
I used to run my own modem as I prefer to control my hardware. When I upgraded to gigabit years ago I was forced to lease a modem from them as prior to this they refused to service my house with third party hardware installed. All problems were always blamed on my modem, or my router, or anything they could point to that wasn't them. Dealing with their technical support or on-call techs was worse than pulling teeth. It was like performing dental surgery with a sledgehammer.
I won't get into what it was like cancelling my cable TV. Yet another mess made more complicated by the same situation. At least it was easy to drop off the set-top boxes at the local store.
I hate the amount of control ISPs have over us with the last-mile laws. Companies like Cox can more-or-less do whatever they want in my town because they're the biggest players with the most pipes. The result is as expected - terrible service, fine print bear traps, and high cost.
I'm in the same city as Mike and have been a Cox customer for 15+ years. While I have had problems, for the most part I've been satisfied. I've not historically been a top-speed-tier customer though. They are running some kind of promotion right now where they've moved me from 500Mbps to 1Gbps for 12 months at no charge, and it's the first time where I've not gotten really anywhere close to the advertised speed (not even 500, now). I'm not sure what this accomplishes for them; maybe they'll cut speeds in half next year and try to suggest I just got accustomed to faster speeds.
Support is challenging when you need it. You usually have to talk to multiple people before your problem is resolved. For example, last time I got a new modem I had to be handed off twice before I got to a level where they could 'reset my registration,' and I definitely got the figurative stink eye over the phone for not renting their modem (which, is probably why it didn't "just work"). They usually try to sell you something like wiring insurance as well, and really like to emphasize the potential cost to you if they feel like they have to roll a truck. Fortunately, I've only had perhaps 3 support engagements (1 truck) in that 15+ years. Otherwise I'd be a lot less satisfied.
I'm hopeful that the various fiber providers 'coming soon to my area' will help with this. AT&T is here but not cheaper - they force you to rent their equipment - and I don't want to be an AT&T customer. At the very least it might stop Cox from raising rates $3-$6 a year.
A year ago, I had fast Cox internet for $70 per month. I moved a mile away, and Cox wanted at least $233 for any connection at any speed because AT&T was not a competitor in that neighborhood. I said no and relied on 5G until AT&T moved in a few months later with the $70 market rate. When business people take control of companies from engineers, we get enshittification. Cox has somehow managed to make me nostalgic for the enshittification phase, which has morphed into this logjammin phase where no one even pretends to be competent enough to fix the cable.
The root cause of the problem is that copper coaxial cable tv based (DOCSIS3.0, DOCSIS3.1, etc) last mile internet infrastructure is a shared/contended access medium for many modems connected to it.
It's built on a limited number of RF channels in a certain segment that have many modems all going to a single "port" on a DOCSIS CMTS (cablemodem termination system).
There is a great deal of absurdity in their claims to be selling a gigabit service product using coax-based technology, when the oversubscription ratio is INSANE. If you had more than a few customers on a segment trying to actually make use of gigabit speeds at one time (just 2 or 3 people downloading a torrent of a popular linux ISO at 980 Mbps will eat a huge amount of the total aggregate capacity of that coax segment).
Cox and Comcast and RCN and similar operators are squeezing every last dollar possible for the ROI out of legacy copper coaxial last mile stuff. Only in places where the local phone company or another operator is building proper FTTH (GPON/XGSPON) are they starting to overbuild their own network with their own FTTH. Comcast is doing it in the Seattle area, for instance, in areas where the local telco (Ziply or Centurylink) offers a symmetric 1 Gbps product based on single strand FTTH/GPON.
Your average coaxial cable tv last mile operator like Cox is a telecom industry dinosaur.
The article here was published in early 2020 during peak covid19 lockdown but the general technology problem of copper/coaxial last mile stuff from 25+ years ago is exactly the same today.
The FTTH offerings from Ziply, Cox, Comcast, Google, ATT, Centurylink etc are all the same "shared media with high oversubscription" design too. Among them the typical ratio is ~32 PON users for the given "base rate" PON standard, similar to a typical ~20-50 for coax at a given DOCSIS standard. Both have better/worse examples (particularly early gigabit PON deployments were 64) but FTTH has rarely been about getting dedicated bandwidth up to the neighborhood box... honestly most of the time the lion's share of the benefits are "it's a sign your area just got upgraded cabling and equipment for the first time in many many years" than anything to do with the physicalities of the wire.
For GPON that's 2.5 Gbps for downstream and 1.25 Gbps for upstream. So with a 32 split it's the same story of 2-3 people downloading a popular Linux ISO at 980 Mbps still eat up the entire fiber line for all 32 people.
The difference on the fiber, outside the better upload symmetry we already see, is it will be able to scale a lot more in the future. Some places already have 10G PON (which, unlike GPON, is usually actually said speed) such as where ATT offers 2G and 5G symmetric service. The next step will be 25G PON (again, about the actual nominal speed).
An actual Google PM called me up the other day trying to upsell me to $200 a month 20 gigabit. Said they’d give me a router but I’m free to hook whatever I want to the fiber, saturate it as much as I want, no worries. They must have a lot of extra bandwidth if this is a service they’re offering in my neighborhood.
Im not sure Google is GPON (or has passive splitters at all). They were very early to deployments, and their plans are always symmetrical (which doesnt make sense for any standard *PON deployment).
It is PON. When the underlying network is 2.4 down, 1.2 up you can offer 1/1 plans (with some degree of prayer).
> The FTTH offerings from Ziply, Cox, Comcast, Google, ATT, Centurylink etc are all the same "shared media with high oversubscription" design too.
No, they're really not, you can't compare single strand FTTH XGSPON on singlemode fiber (16:1 or 32:1 contention ratio), something that is built on 10G XGSPON tech, to something that is built on bonded RF channels on coax copper. The aggregate capacity per oversubscribed network segment is radically different.
Now, all of these cable operators also ARE building actual FTTH networks in certain areas because they see the writing on the wall for the longevity of how much more they can squeeze out of the copper. So in some very specific places the Comcast 1 Gbps last mile product is functionally equivalent to the local Verizon, or Ziply, or Lumen (Centurylink, now branded as Quantum Fiber) FTTH product.
Cable is definitely shared but CMTSes added bandwidth management features years ago. Cox could just slow down the "hogs" but they're too lazy/incompetent or they're using really old equipment.
This reads as though the cable companies aren’t aware of the limitations of their tech and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The last mile isn’t the same as today. Docsis technology continues to improve, more RF channels are being allocated to high speed internet, and cable companies are wholesale replacing their CMTS infrastructure with higher frequency (read: more channels) equipment.
The truth is that only some cable companies make these investments - you can look up “fiber node size” for respective performance across different companies. A fiber node being the place where optical is terminated and switched to coax. These have been getting smaller everywhere, but it only makes sense to invest there when the upstream infrastructure can support it. So from a consumer perspective, your “Linux isos” will be slow to download in any case until the upstream network is upgraded and your node is split to offer higher performance.
> This reads as though the cable companies aren’t aware of the limitations of their tech and that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I know, and you know, that the people doing the more serious engineering for DOCSIS based cable last mile segments are well aware of the limitations of the tech. What I was saying is that they are milking every last dollar of ROI out of the existing physical plant because overbuilding your entire network with XGSPON (it would be dumb to do 2.5G PON in 2024/2025) is a very capital intensive endeavour.
The shareholder value and profits of the company are increased in the short term by continuing to do copper as long as possible, even at the cost of thousands of unhappy customers dragging your company's name into the mud.
It's the fundamental business model problem, and executives at big dinosaur coax operator telecoms that have made the decision to do it this way as long as possible, until the coax/oversubcription situation becomes completely untenable in an area, or until a real XGSPON operator (maybe Lumen, or Ziply, or similar) which overlaps with your historical cable tv network rolls out a better product and you have no choice but to spend the money to keep up with the local competition.
You and I also know that no matter how much they mess about with DOCSIS3.1 and channel sizes and different RF configurations, the aggregate capacity of a few strands of fiber (using even the lowest cost and most rudimentary WDM) is much greater than RF over coax. Squeezing 2048/4096QAM RF stuff into coax is polishing the brass doorknobs on the titanic. It's not a viable long term solution!
Privatizing infrastructure clearly isn't working. It's time to nationalize. Cox is basically a mafia at this point, able to sell "service" and then threaten you to use the service in some arbitrary way, but keep paying btw or you get nothing.
Meanwhile billions and lofty promises don’t translate to benefits for real people.
https://www.atr.org/senators-demand-bead-program-accountabil...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/kamala-harris-announces-plan-...
what a bunch of Cox
man, as much as I hate spectrum, I will say, as much as I want to pay them for bandwidth and speed they’ll give me what I want, and sometimes even more. YMMV of course. imho this is why net neutrality should be a thing.
The engineering problem here is in limitation in aggregate Mbps/Gbps capacity in a specific last-mile service segment for N number of end user residential customers, due to use of DOCSIS3 on coax vs more modern FTTH access methods. Nothing to do with peering/net neutrality at the local city's IX point or how the ISP exchanges traffic with other AS.
"Thank you for paying us to use our service, now stop using our service, we just want free money."
I remember when we got Cox “Fiber” that wasn’t fiber at all. This company is absolute trash.
https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/cox-called-out...
I think if the company could offer Fiber To The Curb and then the last 10-20 feet between the curb and the house's router was either DSL or Cable or 5G, that would ba huge win.
FTTC would avoid this scenario at least where a heavy user brings down the whole neighborhood.
But perhaps the bandwidth through the last 10 feet of DSL/cable/5G isn't enough to upsell customers to convince them the switch or modem equipment is too big to fit at the curb.
Coax can certainly handle a short dedicated link. Or you could run an Ethernet cable into the house. Phone wiring I'd doubt the capacity, and wireless would cost the most and work badly.
For many years the Canadian ILEC Telus branded its last mile copper based ASDL2+ and VDSL2 products (10 Mbps to 100 Mbps, approximately) as "Optik" with lots of marketing images of fiber optic cables, when it was of course anything but. The DSLAM would have a fiber uplink, sure, but definitely not the last mile.
this isn't going to be fully effective until they name and shame.
little popups (like viasat did) that say something like "your internet will continue to suck until your neighbor at $address stops torrenting the 100gb h0rse archive"
and then they can get extra fees for "anonymous" as well as "unlimited"...
Or Cox can tell users what the limits are and cut off only those that exceed the limits. Punishing a whole region for one heavy user is ridiculous.
I can't wait for this future.
Like HoAs weren't already annoying. In this future, the ISPs will deputize the HoAs to have roaving bands of enforcers going door to door to encourage considerate bandwidth practices. Eventually, this will be escalated to authorized drone strikes on the offending addresses. So it will behoove you to ensure your neighbors are not borrowing your bandwidth.
Or alternatively they could take some of their record profits and upgrade their 30 year old infrastructure. The modern world is internet-enabled and these people are the ones with their foot on the hose selling water.
You mean, potentially have shareholders and executives get slightly less money? Preposterous! How would they afford their Aspen home or yacht in Monaco?
> name and shame
Can’t tell if this is serious or not. People here are doing basement and house work without any permits, without any gas line indicators, while being filmed. Neighbors are leaving because they fear a gas line puncture will lead to an explosion. The city won’t bother addressing it. Nobody, absolutely nobody gives a single infinitesimal fuck about a pipsqueak neighbor “naming and shaming” them over download limits. Laughable.