I’m an unfortunate captive of the oligopoly of the internet industry in the USA. In many places, you have 2-3 choices of internet, and all of them suck ass. I’m in this situation. All internet providers in my area have a 1-1.5 terabyte data cap. So when I download Call of Duty for 250 gb and it fails and has to update or reinstall, I’ve wasted 500 gb, and have now reached 50% of my data cap in just 1 day. There are crazy fees, for example, Cox Cable says:
If you go over, we’ll automatically add 50 gigabytes of data for $10 to your next bill. That’s enough for about 15 hours of streaming HD video. If you use that 50 gigabytes, we automatically add another 50 gigabytes for $10 and so on until you reach our $100 limit of data overage charges or until your next usage cycle begins.
So your $90 a month internet can easily become $190 a month, which is fuckin criminal, like that is so scummy and asinine how that can even be legal. But it is perfectly legal. The FCC is also looking into these data caps but now that we have a new anti-federal government president elect… This is probably toast… Nothing will change now that most federal agencies are about to be deleted.
From a technology standpoint too, nothing is really getting better
Comcast is still using Coax instead of Fiber Optic and desperately trying to convince people that somehow, someway coax can be just as good. Do with that info what you will, I have no opinions on it. There was a Federal program started recently to expand rural internet access, which will probably be gutted in 2025 leaving many without suitable internet again. Fiber Optic is fast, but still, not new technology, and doesn’t solve a critical issue… It doesn’t matter if you have 2 Gigabit internet if no one in the world is uploading even half that fast. A single download on Steam is like 450 Mbps, Epic Games launcher is horrifically slow. I get like 120 Mbps max when downloading Fortnite updates even with 1500 Mbps internet hard wired to my router with top tier hardware
It’s just sad to think about the future of internet in the USA, and knowing we’ll be imprisoned by these data caps for the foreseeable future.
1.5Tb data cap, jeez. I regularly push 6tb of monthly traffic by myself. This feels like mobile internet all over again, but now with wired…
No. And I’m sorry to say, this administration is coming for social media as well. I hate watching the orange potato talk, and I dislike the individual who posted this, but unless you want to sit through a double long “reaction” vid by a youtuber who makes their living “reacting”, this is the shortest one.
He wants to gut moderation and make it so it requires a court order to remove any account from social media. There’s a lot to unpack here. It’s a scripted speech, illustrating the thinkers behind his administration this go. It talks about 1A, says everything in the speech is for 1A, including dumping the Hatch Act (keeps us safe at polling sites and makes buying votes illegal), but you should really listen to what he says about moderation of social media.
To me, it reads as a way of removing any anti-establishment, anti-MAGA spaces to talk without actually removing the spaces.
Echo chambering helps no one folks, I hate hearing him speak too, but you need to hear this one. https://youtu.be/xJfUXVOoFBo?si=pqphBah-_0YwW11V
It doesn’t matter if you have 2 Gigabit internet if no one in the world is uploading even half that fast.
Just to point out something, yes, there may not be many services online (except torrents perhaps) that will max out your gigabit connection, but you are looking at it from the perspective of a single user. I’m in a family of four, also with a roommate in the house, and with everyone gaming and streaming and doing their thing, it can easily saturate it. We had to pay extra for no caps though or we’d be toast. They at least did offer that. Dicks.
Anyway the point of a high speed connection is to be able to do many things simultaneously, not really one giant thing by itself.
there may not be many services online (except torrents perhaps)
Hmm… arr, matey
Yo ho ho.
We had to pay extra for no caps
fr fr
Well, maybe now with a republican FCC
lol, no
Well, maybe now with a republican FCC
I’d be surprised if it even exists a year from now
Oh I expect it to. The FCC censors airwave transmissions
Damn that’s a spectre that I hadn’t even thought of yet.
The reds want to get rid if any agency that oritects us.
I feel your pain, I was stuck with Cox for many years and was paying $170 a month for one gig down, 30 megs up. Unlimited data. But the unlimited data was a lie because they called and threatened me once because I was uploading too much, apparently uploading doesn’t count for the unlimited data. Stupid assholes.
I was fortunate enough to move recently to a house that actually had fiber. My fiber provider just raised the price of their lowest plan, which is the one I’m on, 500 Mbps symmetrical for $65 a month. It used to be $50 a month. However, they lowered the price of all their faster plans. If I wanted, I could get 8 gigs symmetrical for $150 a month. That’s less than I was paying for Cox just a year ago for 1 gig fake unlimited.
At my current provider, all their plans are truly unlimited, even the lowest tier one like the one I’m on.
$170 is fucking insane for internet. 😡
Ya their top tier plan was $150 for 1 Gig down 30 Mbps up, 1.25 TB data cap. You could pay an extra $20 a month for"unlimited " but they only allowed you to pay for “unlimited” on their top speed plan. Like I said their unlimited was also a straight up lie.
To be fair at that house I had roomates so we were all splitting it 4 ways.
It doesn’t matter if you have 2 Gigabit internet if no one in the world is uploading even half that fast. A single download on Steam is like 450 Mbps
This sounds more like the infrastructure in your area just isn’t up to delivering those speeds, regardless what the last mile to the home is.
I promise you Steam’s CDN absolutely can deliver more than 450Mbps. It regularly maxes out my 1.5 Gbps at home, and I have no doubt that it could potentially go even faster than that if I had a better connection.
Like plugging a 10Gbps network switch into a 100Mbps gateway, it sounds like a fast final link to the home is being choked out by poor infrastructure in the region and can’t be fully utilized.
Comcast is still using Coax instead of Fiber Optic and desperately trying to convince people that somehow, someway coax can be just as good.
Comcast are starting to offer 2Gbps symmetric (same speed up and down) via DOCSIS 4.0 in some areas.
Yep. It’s pretty nuts how much they can push over copper. And remember that just having a coax cable at your house doesn’t mean it’s copper the whole way back to the ISP.
You’re right - upstream connections are usually fiber. In fact there’s a name for this type of network: HFC (hybrid fiber + coax)
Is it on coax or fiber? And do you still share that bandwidth with your neighbors?
The 2Gbps symmetric though Comcast is still cable. In theory, DOCSIS 4.0 supports up to 10Gbps down and 6Gbps up over cable, although real-world speeds are always lower than theoretical speeds.
You share bandwidth with your neighbours regardless of whether it’s coax or fiber. A common contention ratio for residential connections is between 40:1 and 50:1, meaning the bandwidth is shared between 40 and 50 people (i.e. 1Gbps of upstream bandwidth per 40-50 people with a 1Gbps connection). This is usually fine as it’s very unlikely that every customer will be using the full bandwidth at the same time. Residential usage is usually very spiky with only brief periods of high speed usage.
What about FTTH ?
I have a direct line from the DSLAM (?) to my apparent.
The bandwidth is still shared… It’d be prohibitively expensive to have dedicated bandwidth just for your connection, and most customers don’t need anywhere near that. Unlimited, dedicated 1Gbps is around 320TB of data per month.
A business-grade connection has fewer people sharing it, but it’s still shared. The only fully-dedicated connections are enterprise-grade connections (like in a data center), and even then it’s an upgrade that costs quite a bit. :)
Well it isn’t shared before the upstream server, that’s what FTTH is.
I’m seriosly interested in information supporting your claims, not because they are wrong (of course we share at a certain level, that’s the whole idea of the internet itself is) but because they are quite vague.
BTW for 40€ I get 10Gb/s symmetrical. I’m not in the US.
Well it isn’t shared before the upstream server, that’s what FTTH is.
FTTH just means that there’s fiber going into your house.
Most residential fiber internet connections use a technology called PON (GPON for gigabit or XGS-PON for 10Gbps). My understanding is that the fiber from your house goes into a splitter box in the street, which takes fiber connections from many customers (usually either 32 or 64 customers) and multiplexes them into a single fiber by either using different wavelengths of light or by time multiplexing. Upstream from this, bandwidth is shared.
Upstream from this is the internet, so it’s no longer shared (it goes wherever it wants to and it is the servers that are “shared” by users). So there might be a bottleneck in the “splitter box” but that’s it.
Pretty sure it depends on where you live. My CenturyLink gigabit internet in Seattle is superb, symmetrical up/down, $75/mo. Haven’t had significant problems in 10 or 15 years.
Yeah, it all still depends on how close you are to the fiber, whether pushed over twisted-pair or coax. In some areas, for digital over twisted-pair, it may even still depend on how close you are to a central office. It varies wildly across the country.
I support people who work from home all over the country. People in the boonies are using mobile data and satellite. Those who aren’t suffer terrible DSL connections.
I have coax, and 2 gigabit is an option for me because the fiber Xfinity uses runs right along my neighborhood.
Rural island off the coast of a european country:
10g fiber for $65/mo (I don’t even think they cared, I asked for more and I think they made up a number).
House literally down the street from google in silicon valley:
Comcrap $100 for shit cable, I’m paying $250 for actual upload speed.
This country is ruled by the corrupt.
In my country unlimited fiber was $6/mo. Imagine the shock when I moved to the US (also in Mountain View initially). Eventually I got AT&T fiber for “just” $40/month, but now I moved to an area outside their coverage and it’s back to Comcast :(
I’m in EU and I have 2 different internet connections without a data cap, because I work from home and don’t want to commute to the office if one type is down. Both have bandwith caps tho (that way they are cheaper and it’s still good enough for me).
However, I want to suggest you use traffic shaping. In Linux, I used “trickle” many years ago, so I could download things without disturbing my family streaming or video calling. Idk how it works in other OSes, but the idea is to send a big download through a special network filter that slows it down to your configured bandwith, delaying it so much that you don’t reach your bandwidth cap. (The dowload will take months.) Also, I think I have seen something like this built into Steam and Filezilla. If I remember correctly Steam also had the option to pause downloads manually, but you have to remember to keep an eye on it, if you do that.
Qbittorrent has the option to set limits for both upstream and downstream bandwidth. I believe this works on any platform. Not sure if Mac or Windows have system level bandwidth settings.
The 18-26 year olds just signed over our country to billionaire fascists. I had hopes for them, but they are collectively idiots. Born into late stage capitalism, spent their formative years growing up in the Age of Hate, and actively chugged down propaganda via YouTube and all social media.
No, we are not.
You can’t just blame 18-26 year-olds. This was a failure across all age groups. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/interactive-how-key-groups-of-americans-voted-in-2024-according-to-ap-votecast
And isn’t signing over the country to corporations something that’s been going on since the 1970s or something? I mean that comment is wrong on any level.
Way earlier than that, sunshine. The earliest example is probably the railways.
Nah, Those were different times. You can’t directly compare a time when is was perfectly fine to own people, or have them die in large quantities while working in the mines or building the railroads, to modern day neoliberalism and turbo capitalism. I mean a lot of time has passed since then. And we invented social capitalism, workplace safety in the meantime. We kinda agreed that forced labor is to be frowned upon. That is all connected and has it’s roots in industrialization. Yes. But living situations changed massively. The way companies are set up changed. And we’re generally not living in the age of industrialization anymore.
I’d say it has happened in the latter half of the 1900s, after WW2. At first there was an economic boom in quite some areas of the world, people got wealthier. Way more educated during the early 19th century. Especially in the USA. Wealth was distributed more evenly. And sometime after, things took a turn for the worse. For example the US disconnected from the rest of the western world with life expectancy. Healthcare was made into a rip-off. Education decreased. Newspapers, access to (neutral) information which flourished at times, became the media landscape it is today…
That all happened within the last 60 years or so.
The younger age brackets broke slightly in favor of Harris. It was the folks between mid-life crisis and retirement that broke hard for Trump.
Harris did not out perform Biden in ANY category.
She somehow managed to perform worse with women than Biden did (53% vs 55%.)
No, the Democratic party ran a candidate that wanted to keep the status quo in a period the whole country needed change.
And during the last 4 years the sitting president was actually sleepy Joe. He should have arrested trump and his co conspirators and throw away the key after a very public trial.
But instead, they did nothing to stem the tide of fascism. If you want to blame people, blame the technocrats Trump was projecting on during his campaign. As if he is a small portion of who he says he is, he will show everyone what the Dems should have done.
No, the Democratic party ran a candidate that wanted to keep the status quo in a period the whole country needed change.
Name a time in history that “voting for change” isn’t what’s “needed”. The term has lost all meaning for how overused it is. Just like “think of the children” or “save the whales”.
If change is needed every 4 years, then that means 4 years ago you either voted the wrong guy in, or he didn’t do what he promised.
I’ve always been of the belief that campaign promises need to have more importance. If the American people vote for a candidate based on their promises, as they always do, then those promises damn well better happen.
If I campaign, and promise everyone free chocolate pudding. Then by 4 years later, everybody in this country damn well better have chocolate pudding.
Once voted in, it should be a federal crime to stand in the way of delivering campaign promises. So if I contact a pudding company, and they refuse to accept the contract to produce pudding, then the CEO is arrested, and the plant is seized by the government. The staff will be kept on, paid by the government. Anyone who quits will face criminal charges. Long story short, hell or high water, we’re delivering that pudding.
Because what happens if I don’t? Then on re-election day, not only am I barred from running, I’m also publically humiliated, and executed. Live on tv. Broadcast on every channel.
Which means you can’t campaign on vague promises, because then it’s easy to argue that you failed. You have to promise cut and dry easy to prove obligations. And if you fail, you die. If anyone stands in your way, it’s a federal offense.
The underlying problem with this country is that nothing means anything. Nobody stands for anything. Courts have no consequence. Explain to me how a 34x convicted criminal was even allowed to run for office, much less win? Explain how he’s not facing a court date. Explain how he won’t be in jail for his court ordered convictions.
The answer is, this all means nothing. Money rules this country. Fuck you. Fuck the citizens. Fuck justice. Fuck equality. Fuck everybody besides the rich. They fuck you. Not the other way around. I am an American, but I am NOT a patriot. I am ashamed of my country. I am embarrassed by my fellow citizens, and my government alike. You can’t blame one without the other. The citizens voted for fascism. They wanted this. They’re fine with the system being toothless and slanted. I’m just caught up in the crossfire. I’m not the worst affected. I can only feel empathy for those affected. And feel disgust for anyone wearing a red hat with white text.
Change in this case is not, “were doing everything completely different”, but more of where the focus of the policy is. And the focus on “the economy” does shit for normal people. I’m sure wrecking the economy will hurt them… but the simple fact is biden-harris failed to adress the issues facing a looooooot of americans.
And your chocolate pudding example perfectly aligns with the failure to imprison Trump. The Americans don’t care about ANY of his crimes because the justice system and the president did not Care.
If it was soooooooo important, he would have been thrown in jail, publicly prosecuted and executed for treason… and he was not. Instead everyone danced around it, and SHOWED the American people there are zero consequences while saying “he is so dangerous, he is so bad, he is a criminal”. Well like you say, talk is cheap. Put up or shut up… and the American people said the same. All the anti Trump rhetoric was dismissed because if any of it where true he would have been in jail.
The fact Biden is the most pro worker and pro u ion does not mean shit if the whole world saw you use executive power to publicly stop the strike. The fact that he later in backrooms got them ak OK deal… was done in the limelight… so that’s an own goal. He should have targeted the Corporation at the same time… but he did not.
So I get what you are saying. And I argue, the Dems fucked themselves… a lot… repeatedly…
Boomers and the owner class gutted the country…
Some clown online blames gen z for voting +2 for trump after Harris and DNC botched a campaign 🤡
Pathetic, try again
Crappy (30-40mbit/sec) but uncapped FTTC here, plus 5G FVA at 300mbit/sec but 1Tb monthly cap here.
Combining both and separating heavy traffic (fucking fortnite and many steam big games) on the crappy uncapoed, and arr’ing too, leaves tons of data for high speed anything.
Total cost? 22€ + 24€ = 46€/month, no surprises. A lot more expensive than having fiber indeed, but I am deep into the woods, so.
Ah, and when i go over my 1Tb data cap on the FVA, I get throttled to 6mbit/sec, nothing extra to pay.
So I’m familiar with the Fiber to the Cabinet/Curb (FTTC), but the only FVA I’m familiar with is an attenuator and I know you’re not talking about checking light levels through fiber. What’s FVA in this context?
I’m guessing here, but the only thing that makes sense in context is Fixed Wireless Access, FWA.
Maybe some error with the initialism snuck in because Shimitar is from Italy. I could see myself doing something similar, since in German we read W as “vee”.
Exactly! FWA… My typo ;)
Ah, that would make sense.
Yes, my typo… FWA ;)
It’s just bizzare to me that there’s data caps on your internet plans. Especially since you’re already paying 5x more than I’m for unlimited connection. I assume there must be some other reasons for this too than just greed. Perhaps the size of your country? I mean even Texas alone is almost as big as entire Europe.
Texas alone is almost as big as entire Europe.
There has been a fad recently for fake size comparison maps about this, presumably made by insecure Texans with giant trucks and tiny penises
Texas is slightly bigger than France, and about the same size as France and Switzerland combined
And while the USA are roughly double the area of the European Union, the whole continent of Europe is larger than the US.
Some cities have municipal internet service, which they are able to provide at a much, much lower rate than commercial options. Here’s one example of a resident in Lafayette, La. They would on average pay $73.10 annually on the municipal network, versus $690.87 annually on a private network. The same article also shows much lower average rates for commercial networks when they have to compete with public services.
So yeah, it’s just greed.
I had to sign up for a business account because of Cox’s data cap. Sadly they’re my only option and they suck ass.
No, it’s going to get worse with the Trump administration.
