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Well that's fantastic, thank you Telus. I know it's been mentioned before in this thread but how's Eastlink? They do cable in my small BC town and they don't seem to have limits.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 02:42 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 18:00 |
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Is there anyone who seems like they'll be maintaining reasonable caps? I'm stuck with primus until I move (Only here till the end of april, and I don't want to bother getting a new connection for feb/march/april). I'll probably wind up in the Toronto area. I'm guessing tekksavvy is the only choice? Heh. Knowing this was coming, I've used ~500gb of data this month. X_X
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 03:46 |
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Is there anyplace with info/details on how much the gov't has subsidized the building of the internet infrastructure the big providers are using? It would be a nice card to pull out to use against the "IT'S A PRIVATE BUSINESS THEY CAN CHARGE WHATEVER THEY WANT HURR HURR" folks, if it is the case.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 03:47 |
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seems like a good thread to put this in. A quote from the PR guy at bell from an article about netflix in Canada: quote:“A bit is a bit is a bit. If you’re a heavy user, regardless of what’s causing the heavy use, you will pay more. That’s the concept,” said Mirko Bibic, Bell Canada’s senior vice-president for regulatory affairs. “The caps we’ve established are well above our average users. If you’re a super-super heavy user, you should pay more.”
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 04:16 |
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less than three posted:For any of you who switched to Telus (or remember their PR guy saying on TV that they wouldn't be charging overages.) I love that. A month ago "We wont charge for Overages!" they get a ton of signups, most probably in three year contracts, and since it wasn't in writing 'Lol, just kidding' They got to use the CBC for free advertising as well..
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 04:29 |
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blackswordca posted:I love that. A month ago "We wont charge for Overages!" they get a ton of signups, most probably in three year contracts, and since it wasn't in writing 'Lol, just kidding' CBC has a hardon for the CRTC. They've got a loving section about it on their website.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 04:33 |
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quote:“A bit is a bit is a bit. If you’re a heavy user, regardless of what’s causing the heavy use, you will pay more. That’s the concept,” said Mirko Bibic, Bell Canada’s senior vice-president for regulatory affairs. “The caps we’ve established are well above our average users. If you’re a super-super heavy user, you should pay more.” loving fuckhead mouthpiece.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 04:38 |
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http://www.vancouversun.com/Opinion+Usage+based+billing+time+come/4180711/story.html Oh, stories like this make me laugh..
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 05:42 |
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blackswordca posted:http://www.vancouversun.com/Opinion+Usage+based+billing+time+come/4180711/story.html Shithead von smugenmire posted:Or, to put it another way, if every hour of HD represents 2.6 GB, you could stream 96 hours a month, or more than three hours a day, every day. Anyone watching that much video needs to get a life.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 05:50 |
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I demand a refund for the bandwidth I spent to load up that lovely opinion piece.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 05:59 |
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I don't even care how many hours worth of tv or games are represented by such and such giabytes. If I pay monthly for a 1MB connection, my cap should be 1MB*60s*60m*24h*30d = 2.6TB ie. the only way I could conceivably beat my cap is by somehow abusing my account with 2 connections or something.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 06:00 |
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I was reading that in Nova Scotia they are putting in fiber that can pull 170 mbit or something like that.. whats the point of a service that can blow through your monthly cap in under an hour
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 06:03 |
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I love that guy's car analogy. You need gas to run a car, dumbass. He forgot that highway is like the line transferring the bits, not the loving car. We don't pay more for the highway if we drive 100 times more in a month than someone else. Of course you would pay more for gas, it's inherent to the operation of a car. Does it actually cost more, besides in electricity cost, to send bits up and down a dumb pipe? In fact, every highway except the 407 (maybe a few more?) is funded by everyone, just like the infrastructure for our internet was, wow. Except there's no one company imposing their will on drivers for usage fees. And people arguing for this crap secretly hopes that no one knows about the rest of the world's Internet access options? Dudebro fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jan 28, 2011 |
# ? Jan 28, 2011 06:17 |
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The whole thing was filled with stupid analogies, he had the good old "... like what it costs to deliver mail!" whopper right at the beginning. I love when that one gets trotted out. I sent him a polite email he doesn't deserve trying to correct him on a few things while painting the broadstrokes about why its bad for Canada but I doubt he will read it beyond the analogies I tried to throw in.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 06:19 |
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priznat posted:Is there anyplace with info/details on how much the gov't has subsidized the building of the internet infrastructure the big providers are using? http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&sourc...asBoGqw&cad=rja I haven't read it in depth, but a few numbers: Federal: $410m since 2003 $260m from Ontario $17m from Yukon $193m from Alberta $75m from Quebec $129m from Sask. $30m from BC
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 06:30 |
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Pweller posted:I don't even care how many hours worth of tv or games are represented by such and such giabytes. If I pay monthly for a 1MB connection, my cap should be 1MB*60s*60m*24h*30d = 2.6TB You can't be serious... Come on man get a loving clue. This is just ridiculous.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 08:31 |
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It's not unreasonable to charge the highest users more for the bandwidth they use. Just that the cap needs to start at a higher point, and the price needs to be loving realistic. Two dollars a gigabyte, right now, is about 200 times higher than it actually *should* be -- I don't think anyone would be pissy if they paid their flat fee or $35 or whatever for the first hundred gigs and then another cent for each gig after that. And whatever the situation is now, it should *always* trend towards lower costs and more throughput. Right now it's doing exactly the opposite.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 08:35 |
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It's a knee jerk reaction to their TV services and Movie Rental services taking a huge nose dive. That said, I'm going to also add the many stories that Bell are complete dicks when you try to cancel on them, even a landline they are complete and utter dicks who try to shove $200 in charges and fees that are completely illegal basically, lies, it's fraud but I doubt they expect anyone to see em through on it. Cancelled a landline, they tried to insist I agreed to a year contract when the service was upgraded at one point, I refuted that said they had nothing on paper, no recorded conversation saying I agreed to that and that I wouldn't pay their insane cancellation fee, they eventually cleared the insane cancellation fee. The whole time was spent arguing with ESL indians who frequently feigned misunderstanding. However they won't stop sending me junk mail asking me to come back to their lovely service. Rogers however haven't been much grief at all in terms of customer service. CRTC is indeed useless though, between not standing up to ISP's to changing a law that would allow news media to tell lies so long as they don't hurt public health/safety/welfare I fully expect that the latter will be used to reinforce their phoney stances on bandwith usage.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 09:06 |
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Wonder what spin the ads will have now? "With our new enforced caps, we are protecting our customers from the dangers of unlimited internet use such as viruses and stolen identities"
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 09:33 |
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Godinster posted:CBC has a hardon for the CRTC. They've got a loving section about it on their website. 1) In a restaurant I would be upset if I was forced to pay for a glutton at another table. 2) Abolish the CRTC, blah blah free market 3) Small businesses and indie content providers who make videos 30-60sec long will benefit from this 4) Internet is a natural monopoly and should be delivered by the government like water, where he is still in favour of UBB. How he got to point #4 after all that trash was beyond me, so I called in to complain that the internet has near-zero variable cost and this is all about the big telecom companies protecting their TV by making you pay them for media regardless of how you get it. The guest was on at roughly 6:45AM if you want to complain: http://www.cbc.ca/metromorning/contact/
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 13:03 |
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Crossposting from the other bandwidth capping thread.quote:Like that other guy have mentioned, New Zealand is a pretty good example how things can turn around rather quickly. They had poo poo all competition just a few years ago with high price, low cap adsl1, and now they all have better caps, faster speed and most of the cabinets are being upgraded towards VDSL fed by fiber.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 13:28 |
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DaNzA posted:Lastly there's an article on ars talking about NZ is also funding and building a nationwide fibre network that will cover 75% of the population by 2020. Good for them and I think the way they are doing it is brilliant. That's amazing and done really well. I'd be proud to see the Canadian government do the same.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 13:51 |
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THANK YOU http://openmedia.ca/blog/cbc-news-pays-openmediaca-visit CBC News segment with good sound bites. Also http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/netflix-charging-by-the-gigabyte-is-ridiculous.ars : Netflix posted:Netflix: ISPs who charge by the gigabyte are ridiculous univbee fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jan 28, 2011 |
# ? Jan 28, 2011 16:51 |
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orange lime posted:What motivation do they have to decrease their costs? You already pay exactly what they want you to, and they're the only game in town. There is literally no reason for them to do anything that benefits you because what do they get out of it? So they could invest in upgrades. But will they? HELL no! Why WOULD they? Over-capacity will just provide incentives to gouge customers and resellers THAT much more. If they DID increase their capacity, it would just make it that much more likely that the resellers could successfully go to the CRTC and say that they're charging too much to be justifiable as a traffic-management measure, which could mean that the CRTC forces them to drop the rates or revisits the reseller-UBB decision. And because they're all part of cozy oligopolies (except in Saskatchewan, which is probably going to end up with the best internet in Canada thanks to SaskTel), there won't be competition. It'll NEVER increase. We will have 25-60 gig caps FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. Your loving KIDS will have those caps. (Until they start exploiting it to channel you towards "free" websites. Which is the end-point for all this, of course. Once the Canadian public gets used to caps, they'll start discriminating on wired connections just as they do with wireless.)
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 17:24 |
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Nomenklatura posted:Yeah, this is what's bugging me. UBB as an ITMP measure might make sense if they were up against some sort of hard physical limit, like spectrum or some such thing. But that's not the problem. The PROBLEM is that they under-anticipated demand in the age of ubiquitous streaming and downloadable media. I feel I should post this again Bell's capacity is doing just fine. There is no problem except that Bell wanted to monetize per-gigabyte and was losing customers to independents using their DSLAM because of it. If there is capacity problems they're really localized. Bell admits this itself in its CRTC filings.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 17:28 |
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Thanks, I hope that the OpenMedia guys are bandying this about. It's a good counter to the "heavy users should pay more" line. (Another response might simply be "We don't charge cable users by the program. Why charge internet users by the byte?")
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 17:35 |
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Nomenklatura posted:Yeah, this is what's bugging me. UBB as an ITMP measure might make sense if they were up against some sort of hard physical limit, like spectrum or some such thing. But that's not the problem. The PROBLEM is that they under-anticipated demand in the age of ubiquitous streaming and downloadable media. Stop believing the lie that they HAVE bandwidth problems! Where's the proof they have any kind of need for upgrades?
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 17:39 |
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fishmech posted:Stop believing the lie that they HAVE bandwidth problems! Where's the proof they have any kind of need for upgrades? Where's the proof that they don't? That's the problem. There's no way to get reliable data like this without going directly to the source and we have no idea if they're lying or not.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 17:47 |
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Nitr0 posted:Where's the proof that they don't? That's the problem. There's no way to get reliable data like this without going directly to the source and we have no idea if they're lying or not. The proof is that people in this thread were happily doing hundreds of gigabytes per month with no issue! If there were congestion problems, they would know about it, because poo poo would get slow. Congestion isn't invisible!
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 17:51 |
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Dudebro posted:I love that guy's car analogy. You need gas to run a car, dumbass. He forgot that highway is like the line transferring the bits, not the loving car. We don't pay more for the highway if we drive 100 times more in a month than someone else. Of course you would pay more for gas, it's inherent to the operation of a car. Does it actually cost more, besides in electricity cost, to send bits up and down a dumb pipe? Someone on TVO used this metaphor to explain why this isn't UBB in the way that they are trying to position it as. Imagine if gas stations operated like this (instead of the actual legitimate UBB way they operate now). You pay the same flat rate of 10 gallons. Did you fill up 7 gallons this time? $50. 3 gallons? $50. A litre? $50. Did you fill up 12 gallons? Well that's $60 because anything over 10 has a significant overage fee. It's obvious that everyone's getting ripped off here and yet for some reason this is argued as acceptable for telcos.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 17:51 |
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fishmech posted:The proof is that people in this thread were happily doing hundreds of gigabytes per month with no issue! If there were congestion problems, they would know about it, because poo poo would get slow. Yea! A bunch of random people on an internet forum spread around Canada is a great way to determine congestion issues!!!!!!!
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 17:58 |
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Nitr0 posted:Yea! A bunch of random people on an internet forum spread around Canada is a great way to determine congestion issues!!!!!!! Instead of fixing a broken car a better solution would to stop using it as often right? The issue is even if they're having congestion problems they should trying to fix it instead of stopping people from using it. The problem will only get worse.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 18:04 |
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Nitr0 posted:Yea! A bunch of random people on an internet forum spread around Canada is a great way to determine congestion issues!!!!!!! Anyone who's not experiencing congestion does not have congestion issues! And of course, even if there WERE congestion issues, bandwidth caps wouldn't fix it! When congestion does happen, it's because a whole bunch of people are on at once, who may not actually transfer much on a monthly basis! Imagine there's 50 people on this one node, they all have 5 megabit downstream connections and the connection to that node from the outside world is only 50 megabits downstream. One guy on the node is constantly downloading at 5 megabits per second no matter what, he's pulling 1.6 terabytes every month. Everyone else on the node only uses the internet from 5 PM to 6 PM and is downloading youtubes and maybe streaming an hour of Netflix, etc. To make it easier we just assume that the 1 dude gets to maintain his speed, the other 49 people are now splitting the remaining 45 megabits, and thus each getting 0.9 megabits down for that one hour. Those people are all going to have problems doing what they want to do even though they're barely heavy users at 12 GB a month each. They're going to have congestion, and even if you kick off the guy who does 1.6 terabytes a month, everyone else still suffers, since now they're getting 1.02 megabits per second each for the one hour a day they each use the internet! And putting, say a 5 gb cap on them won't help matters either since they will still be using the internet at about the same time! So if there's no congestion issues - caps are a cashgrab with no benefit. If there ARE congestion issues - it's STILL a cashgrab with no benefit to average people! So either situation, caps don't solve anything! What WOULD solve things in the case of congestion is one of two things. 1) Upgrade the relevant infrastructure. 2) Institute unbiased throttling to maintain quality of service when and only when the congestion exists.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 18:27 |
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The problem is you have absolutely no oversight into these networks so for you to sit there and say "Well the solution is simple, just build the network up" isn't a solution since you don't have any idea what it takes or what upgrades are required to deliver 25Mb/s unmetered to everyone like some people in here are demanding they get. You can be sure if everyone started running through hundreds of GB per month (which with current internet trends is getting to be pretty easy) you will see your congestion issues pop up really quickly. This is a vicious cycle folks and it's not going to be broken that easily. fishmech posted:Anyone who's not experiencing congestion does not have congestion issues! This isn't realistic. You're not going to have everyone using the internet at the exact same time. Also yes the caps would solve congestion because little johnny who was downloading 1.5tb in a month is now limited to 100gb so he can't be using up the network 24/7 like he was before. Nitr0 fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jan 28, 2011 |
# ? Jan 28, 2011 18:31 |
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What are you suggesting then? I don't understand. Yes it's a huge project to overhaul the networks, but there is no other option. Caps and over charging people won't help much. Except more money for them. There's going to be another 30 000 little johnny's in 5 years from now. What happens then? Lower the caps more!!!
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 18:46 |
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I agree the networks need to be overhauled to meet current and future demands. There needs to be some sort of government oversight to determine if these problems exist or if they're all made up by the large companies to make more money. It's just unrealistic for some of you to sit here and say that you demand your 25Mb/s connection unmetered right now so you can run through 2tb a month and Bell has the capacity to do it and they're ripping us off and gently caress everything! Nitr0 fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jan 28, 2011 |
# ? Jan 28, 2011 18:51 |
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Nitr0 posted:I agree the networks need to be overhauled to meet current and future demands. There needs to be some sort of government oversight to determine if these problems exist or if they're all made up by the large companies to make more money. I don't think were asking for 25MB unmetered just give us something realistic. $70 a month for a 70GB cap? Really? Pretty sure if they capped it at 200GB no one would complain.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 18:58 |
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kuddles posted:The thing that drives me up the wall with those making this type of argument is that it pretends that everyone against this move obviously wants everything for free, and doesn't understand that while the concept of usage based billing sounds fair, that isn't what's being implemented. That's what really bothers me about this whole argument. I don't live in Canada, but when Time Warner was trying to pull that poo poo down in Texas, they used a similar term (consumption-based billing), which is entirely divorced from actual usage if you're one of the claimed majority who stays under their arbitrary cap. They're essentially admitting that they're ripping people off who use less than their cap since unused data transfer doesn't roll over to the next month. You guys really need to hammer on the terminology there and emphasize that it's really not usage-based. That plan for New Zealand that was mentioned further up sounds fantastic, though, especially since they're forcibly separating the people maintaining the lines from the people delivering service, which is really the problem here. If a phone company or a cable company can force people back to their own services by artificially limiting their Internet usage, there's really no incentive not to do that. The only reason they can pull that off is because the barrier to entry for setting up an ISP that owns its own lines and hardware is so astronomically high that there's not much chance of any real competition, so it's not like consumers are going to have any real choice other than who they're going to let ream them in the rear end. Either that poo poo needs to stop or telecommunications need to start being heavily regulated as a utility because they're becoming (or they probably already have become by now) as important as roads and there's no good reason to let profiteering ruin things for everybody.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 19:02 |
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Nitr0 posted:I agree the networks need to be overhauled to meet current and future demands. There needs to be some sort of government oversight to determine if these problems exist or if they're all made up by the large companies to make more money. I'd really like an explanation why practically the entire rest of the developed world is somehow not having this problem, and that even in countries that do have real bandwidth barriers like Australia and New Zealand with their undersea cable monopoly, they aren't charging anything close to these rates.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 19:27 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 18:00 |
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Because NZ is maybe 700,000 square km and Canada is 10 million square km.
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# ? Jan 28, 2011 19:29 |