Law requires 25Mbps home Internet. T-Mobile lowers speed to 600Kbps after 50GB cap.
I use TMobile and do Internet using tethered data from my phone. That’s MY cap… I’m doing fine every month for a couple of days until I hit 50GB, and then it’s 600Kbps for the rest of the month. It’s kind of miserable, but I can watch YouTube at 480p and I can play WoW. The minimum cost, with minimal phone service: ~ $80/month . And I’ve tried throwing money at TMobile but they don’t offer better service to PAYING customers, let alone their charity cases.
US is a weird country.
I live in EU, and I haven’t even heard of bandwidth quotas on home fiber. Cheap mobile subscriptions have some, though. But mostly it’s just no limit.
It used to be that way in the U.S. but Americans love companies extracting rent at the same time the public is subsidising them.
Americans are ignorant and utterly obsessed with laissez-faire capitalism
Americans are ignorant and utterly obsessed with laissez-faire capitalism
The oligarchs are. The patriots I’ve met all understand that capitalism requires guardrails and protections. It’s similar to democracy that way, actually.
You mean data quotas, bandwidth is what is capped.
T-Mobile had a similar subscription in the Netherlands for mobile internet: you got a certain amount of GB with normal bandwidth, when you reached that quota, your bandwidth got limited to 400kbps (but unlimited amount of data).
Not for home internet though.
You can still watch YouTube at 600Kbs, at 480p. I know because I’m a paying customer of TMobile, and I get capped at that every month, after about three days of sweetness.
This is one reason why privacy is important, companies knowing your info directly impacts your wallet.
This particular one has nothing to do with privacy. They have to offer a specific type of plan by law, they nerfed that plan.
Which is not to say corporations knowing everything about you is good in any way, but this is simply a different issue (with corporations)
Agreed. Whether they can see your traffic or not, they can still determine how much bandwidth you’re using and what plan you’re using.
Technically under the most private way of doing things we could just lump all traffic from a geographical area into one and not let them know who is who. So then they wouldn’t even know how much bandwidth you used. They also wouldn’t be able to do seperate “plans” it would just be you paying a flat rate for access to the same internet connection everyone else uses.
I’m not sure if that would be the most equitable solution either as what would prevent Netflix or YouTube from setting their servers up in your geographical region and consuming all your bandwidth for their own profit while only paying the same rate that you do? It could also be challenging for rural regions as they’ll have a lot fewer people sharing the cost of the infrastructure over a large area.
I don’t think you understood what I meant by geographical area. I’m talking like a neighborhood. I imagine people would notice a data center next door.
So they broke the law, so somebody there who signed off on this will be going to jail, right?
Right?
Municipal Broadband would be nice to have.
From the linked press release:
Governor Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced an agreement with T-Mobile USA, Inc. (T-Mobile), requiring the company to improve and expand the home internet service it offers eligible New Yorkers under the New York Affordable Broadband Act (ABA).
As a result of OAG’s investigation, T-Mobile will remove the data caps associated with its ABA plans and deliver 25 Mbps download speeds to all ABA plan subscribers, unless network congestion requires temporary reductions. In addition, T-Mobile will offer ABA plans in all areas where it provides home internet service and make its ABA plan webpage discoverable by search engines.
WHERE’S THE MOTHERFUCKING PUNISHMENT?! All I see is where they’re making T-mobile pinky-promise to start following the law they’ve been breaking all this time, while being allowed to keep every single goddamn penny of their ill-gotten gains!
NO mention of prison time for executives.
NO mention of punitive fines.
NO mention even of restitution to wronged customers, which is less than the bare fucking minimum!!!
The only even slightly useful part of that press release is this at the bottom, because every New Yorker should be absolutely livid about this weak-ass corporatist shit:
Contact the Governor’s Press Office
Contact us by phone:
Albany: (518) 474-8418
New York City: (212) 681-4640Contact us by email:
Press.Office@exec.ny.govWhat do you mean? Low-income consumers who feel they were wronged have the right to fair compensation through forced arbitration.
(Tonge firmly in-cheek, if not obvious)
I wonder if the low income people could get the maximum payout if they brought it to small claims?
Someone with a better memory or search engine capability can weigh in, but I’m pretty sure T-Mobile had a bunch of restrictions lifted for no reason that were imposed on them because they were illegally charging customers who switched plans or something.Edit: this was bothering me so I did some more digging. Verizon was the company I was thinking of, but I confused it with TMobile because the FCC waived restrictions on their merger with sprint and there were a bunch of antitrust lawsuits about that.
Any punishment to the company will be paid by it’s customers anyway… For any large company fines and legal fees are calculated in as a cost of doing business. Prison for execs will just lead to fall guys getting the job while the real beneficiaries i.e. major stakeholders will pull the string from the shadows. If you want this to stop you have to go after them. Something like community service or % of their stock holdings going to the victims would be more effective imo.
Edit: You may not like what i’m saying but deep down you know i’m right.
True. However, fining them will impact their profits, which impacts the valuation of the company and their competitiveness (due to needing to charge their customers higher prices as you mentioned, compared to their competitors), and both will hit the pockets of the shareholders. The only thing that needs to be kept in mind is that breaking the law should not increase profits more than the punishment would decrease it, so netto it should impact their profits.
And morally it is justified to compensate the victims.
Calling it affordable broadband while throttling people to 600 Kbps after 50 GB is like selling a discounted bus pass that turns into a pair of shoes after four rides. And hiding the plan from search engines? Apparently the cheapest way to provide low income internet is making sure nobody can find it.
isn’t is basically just a phone plan without a number?
Thats what all cellular plans are these days, an internet connection.
yeah, but cellular data is usually limited in the USA
50 GB? That’s a couple iOS or other OS update, or just streaming video a lot. A quick check shows my house over 500GB last month.
Gonna ration data with the same ethos they restrict what people on food stamps can purchase.
It’s 30 mins at full speed.
It’s around 4.5 hours at full speed. Remember that internet speeds are in megabits, not megabytes to falsely increase the speed number as well.
Internet speeds being measured in bits instead of bytes is absolutely not to falsely represent Internet speeds, nor is there anything false about it to begin with. Measuring network transmission speeds in bits is an engineering custom used in telecommunications long before consumer internet existed and for good reason. A byte being 8 bits is the standard today, but in the past a computers byte could be anywhere from 1 to 48 bits depending on your hardware, therefore measuring internet speeds in bytes per second would be meaningless.
Even today where we’ve standardized 8 bits to a byte, measuring internet speeds in Bytes or Megabytes per second would actually be more misleading than the Megabits we use today, since not every bit in a packet is used for user data transfer nor is there even user data in every packet. 25 megabits per second is equal in size to 3.125 megabytes per second, but if you put 3.125 megabytes per second on the tin, people will expect for example to be able to download a file at 3.125 megabytes per second but they can’t. Assuming no bottlenecks and perfect efficiently, they’d only be able to download a file at a speed closer to 2.5Megabytes per second.
There are good reasons to use bits for engineers, but residential internet consumers are not engineers. In no other context do you market incomprehensible engineering details, just here because higher number is better marketing. Almost everyone I know is confused why the speeds they pay for don’t match the speed of downloads in Chrome. Marketing in bits is anti-consumer, since average consumer does not understand what actual download speed they will get when buying.
Marketing in bits is anti-consumer, since average consumer does not understand what actual download speed they will get when buying.
It’s not anti-consumer to advertise a product’s capabilities in the most accurate way possible. When you pay for internet bandwidth you’re not paying for download speed, you’re paying for a transmission rate. Advertising internet plans based on the speeds you get in Chrome would not be possible and therefore any attempt to do so would be deceptive to the customer.
Almost everyone I know is confused why the speeds they pay for don’t match the speed of downloads in Chrome
The Internet bandwidth they pay for will never match the speed of downloads in Chrome, even if you convert bits to bytes.
What you’re missing here is that you want the number you pay for from your ISP and the number you can measure downloading a file at to match. But they never will, because they’re two completely different concepts. One of those number is a constituent part of the other number. They’re not interchangeable.
You can give an accurate enough estimate. Yes, you may have to make some assumptions on protocol and server. And yes, you will be a few percent off. But so what? It is much more informative to the average consumer than transmission rate. In the first place, transmission rate is also a meaningless metric without information on overprovisioning, latencies, etc. Except instead of an understandable but slightly inaccurate download speed estimate, you have one engineering parameter that is unhelpful to an engineer anyway without more information as well as not understandable to the average consumer.
PS: I am not saying I can’t include engineering parameters, but it shouldn’t be the main marketing number.
Accurate enough for who? It wouldn’t be accurate enough for me. And it certainly wouldn’t be accurate enough for the consumer who you described as expecting that estimate to match reality. And worst of all, it wouldn’t be enough for any consumer protection agencies or remedies. So many assumptions would have to be made based on factors entirely outside of their control in order to sell to you based on your file download speed. And if you allow them to sell you a product based on assumptions of things outside of their control, then you then have no recourse to hold them accountable. I don’t want companies to sell me a product based on a number offered via a shrug. I want a promised number I can measure against what I’m getting.
Transmission rate is the only metric with any meaning in this context, because the transmission rate is the product they’re selling to you. The overprovisioning and etc is actually accounted for in the transmission rate they’re selling you. Thats why they almost always overprovision your connection based on what you’re paying for.
It’s as if you’re asking for a car dealer to sell you vehicles based on how many how many people you can move between two locations per hour, instead of the number of seats it has and the speed it can go. They would have to start making guesses based on the average waistline of people in your area, the speed limits of the roads in your town, your driving ability, what routes you like to take, etc. that might be sorta handy because you don’t have to do that math yourself now, but it’s not going to be all that accurate to you specifically, and if that number of people is lower than what they estimated, it’s kinda on you because they don’t know if your friends are petite or 600 lbs, etc etc. But if they sell you a car that seats 5 people of normal healthy size and it can go 100mph, and they deliver you something that seats 4 with a top speed of 80, they’re accountable for that.
Artificial static throughput caps on modern networks are asinine and archaic, especially on shared mediums.
Network providers should permit shared best effort throughput, with a sliding temporal window which keeps a tally of usage and feeds into a ratcheting deprioritisation of slot allocations. This would permit short bursts of maximum throughput, which is more efficient and frees the channel quicker, and slots longer transfers into the remaining default channel space.
Differentiate service based on the dimensions of the monitored and enforced windows, not an arbitrary static sphincter.
Yeah but how are we going to exploit the poors with a system that works?
Differentiate service based on the dimensions of the monitored and enforced windows, not an arbitrary static sphincter.
How would you explain that in a simple way people can understanding?
Small data really fast, big data slow
If there’s no traffic jams, you’re free to drive however much it want
If there’s traffic jams, the more trucks your company have in traffic the lower priority you get for them. That gives everybody access because those with the most trucks can take some off the street to raise the priority for the others a bit, and that in turn gives room to others
As an example, the initial unconstrained window would be measured in minutes:
Small: 1 minute
Medium: 5 minutes
Large: 30 minutesThe sliding window and tally falloff could also vary. It would help the network providers better utilise and monitor their networks, and users can plan for big downloads by keeping their service quiet for a period before they begin.
what’s funny is all these internet companies can just give everyone affordable high speed and still make a profit
greedy mf’s, they don’t give a shit about their customers
As a former subscriber to both T-Mobile’s fixed wireless home internet and their subsidiary Mint Mobile’s fixed wireless home internet, this explains a lot.
Oh, Mint Mobile, as in “for just $15 a month” Mint Mobile?
I’m irrationally angry about Mint Mobile. They lean so heavily on the message that they’re cheaper than everybody else, and it is some of the most cynical, anti-consumer bullshit I’ve ever heard. You barely have to look into it at all before you see that offer is
- only valid for the first three months, and
- only for new users. On top of all that,
- those first three months are gonna cost you more than the advertised $15 because of hidden fees.
Outside of those first 3 months, they’re charging at least as much per month as most off-contract providers.
And I understand that none of the above is unique to Mint Mobile. I guess it’s Ryan Reynolds’ smarmy delivery in their ads that makes it seem so arrogant, like, “Yeah, I’m already rich, and I’m getting richer by lying to you about a cellphone contract, what are you gonna do about it? I’m Deadpool, just buy it, you idiots!”
Fuck Mint Mobile. And Ryan Reynolds, too.
I’m going to be completely serious here:
I signed up for Mint Mobile’s fixed home wireless service because I’d had such a great experience with their phone service. I’ve used their phone service for a long time, and it’s been rock solid.
It’s really weird, but their mobile service is fantastic. Their fixed home wireles service was absolutely awful. There’s literally no reason why it should have been bad, but I prepaid for three months of their fixed home wireless, and switched to a different provider very soon after signing up. Their mobile service is still very good, and absolutely worth it. It literally is $360 per year. One payment, once a year, unlimited. Works well.
I was completely baffled why their fixed wireless was so bad.
work your job all day to help some ass hole boss get rich, come home to relax and your internet gets secretly slowed down - so your bosses kids can also own you online in literally any multiplayer FPS.
bigger they get, shadier they deal
T-Mobile: “Yeah. So? What are you gonna do about it? Uh huh. Nothing. That’s what I thought, bitch.”
