4 ms·

So no carrier anywhere offers true unlimited? It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds, and throttles v

So no carrier anywhere offers true unlimited? It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds, and throttles video to some arbitrary max resolution?

bitJericho 9y ago
That's what a monopoly brings. It won't take very long for other countries to eclipse the US in tech.
- rayiner 9y ago
  What monopoly? There are four major nationwide carriers. That's more competition than in: search, mobile operating systems, package delivery, and many other markets we think of as competitive.
  - kingbirdy 9y ago
    I don't think anyone on HN thinks those are competitive markets, they're all oligopolies
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Whatever else they are, they're also the expected outcome for capital-intensive markets with difficult-to-differentiate products. It would be weird if we had 10 competing nationwide carriers. (Not "bad". Weird.)
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    Four nationwise carriers? They are all colluding on territories, price, features and service! Why aren't there hundreds or thousands? That would be real competition.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Why would there be hundreds of carriers? What purpose would that serve in the market? Each carrier would necessarily serve a far smaller number of customers, which would leave each with less capital to build out and maintain a network. We had this with independent ISPs in the 1990s (I ran technical operations for the most popular such ISP in Chicago, EnterAct). It was not an unalloyed good. Most of the independent ISPs were pointless. They were each independent re-implementations of the same basic architecture, each with its own idiosyncrasies and incompetences. Some couldn't bill correctly. Some couldn't keep a Livingston Portmaster online consistently. None of them could secure an email server or reliably monitor all their POPs. Internet service was drastically more expensive, drastically less reliable, and harder to buy.
      - bitJericho 9y ago
        And now in Chicago all I can get is Comcast. Thanks a lot. There's no reason why we can't require leasing for all carriers, ISPs etc, to any company that wants to lease it. That works just fine for DSL. I recall having the option with DSL. Obviously I chose my telco and had good service and decent billing. That was a fine arrangement. When it comes to cell phone service? I can use any pay as you go carrier, sure, but not on the Verizon network? What do I get in return for that, I can use a verizon phone on any carrier. Except I can't, cuz they're violating their agreements with the FCC. Screw these cell carriers.
        tptacek 9y ago
        If you can't get AT&T in your building, then no independent provider was going to help you. Every independent ISP in Chicago in the 1990s was leasing last-mile from existing providers. I've had leases in commercial spaces in Chicago that didn't have AT&T wiring either, and gone over the price quotes to fix that. It's super expensive, and the subscriber dollars aren't there for people to do that work speculatively. Verizon (or MFS, at the time) didn't stop leading last-mile to independent ISPs. Independent ISPs died because the economics weren't there for them: large consolidated providers offered the products 95% of consumers wanted at lower cost and drastically higher performance. To me, this whole discussion about ISP competition is sort of bucketed in the same place my brain reserves for complaints about the fact that ISPs no longer offer shell accounts. Can you believe there was a time where the quality of the Unix shell you offered ISP customers was a major competitive differentiator? I'm sure there's a species of ISP customer that is really unhappy their ISP doesn't make it easy to run their own mail server, or have a freenix-competitive NNTP server, or offer any kind of shell account. But for the overwhelming majority of the market, Netflix matters more than any of those things, and AT&T and Verizon probably do a better job of delivering Netflix than any independent ISP would.
pilom 9y ago
Verizon does indeed provide a truly unlimited plan. You just can't buy it from them. It's the grandfathered plans from 2006-2009. You can still find them on Ebay for a couple hundred dollars up front [0]. They are still 100% truly unlimited and unthrottled and if you keep the sim in a hotspot instead of a phone the video is unthrottled. I consistently use 100GB per month working remotely without any slowdowns [1]. [0]: http://therecklesschoice.com/2015/12/07/mobile-internet-and-unicorns/ http://therecklesschoice.com/2015/12/07/mobile-internet-and-... [1]: http://therecklesschoice.com/2017/07/29/how-we-get-internet-as-digital-nomads/ http://therecklesschoice.com/2017/07/29/how-we-get-internet-...
com2kid 9y ago
> It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds The majority of the throttling from carriers only happens on over-saturated cell towers, at that point, someone's data is going to be delayed, and honestly choosing the person who already used a lot of data seems more fair than just calling rand(), or even worse, degrading the experience horribly for everyone. The new wording in Verizon's plans sounds like they will first degrade people on the "Go Unlimited" plans, then degrade people on Beyond Unlimited who are over 22GB. It is unfortunate that they bucketed people into two categories of who gets slowed down first, but they do have to choose somehow. (And if the tower is incredibly saturated, everyone is going to experience degraded performance, that is how RF works, the laws of physics don't care what cell phone plan someone has!) The video resolution thing is nasty though.
jimbokun 9y ago
Honest question: is it economically viable for any carrier to offer "unlimited" plans, in terms of both speed and data consumed? Does any carrier have the capacity to handle that kind of traffic for all their customers in all their locations? Seems the fact no carriers are offering unrestricted, unlimited plans is pretty telling, I would think.

So no carrier anywhere offers true unlimited? It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds, and throttles video to some arbitrary max resolution?

bitJericho 9y ago

That's what a monopoly brings. It won't take very long for other countries to eclipse the US in tech.

rayiner 9y ago
What monopoly? There are four major nationwide carriers. That's more competition than in: search, mobile operating systems, package delivery, and many other markets we think of as competitive.
- kingbirdy 9y ago
  I don't think anyone on HN thinks those are competitive markets, they're all oligopolies
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Whatever else they are, they're also the expected outcome for capital-intensive markets with difficult-to-differentiate products. It would be weird if we had 10 competing nationwide carriers. (Not "bad". Weird.)
- bitJericho 9y ago
  Four nationwise carriers? They are all colluding on territories, price, features and service! Why aren't there hundreds or thousands? That would be real competition.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Why would there be hundreds of carriers? What purpose would that serve in the market? Each carrier would necessarily serve a far smaller number of customers, which would leave each with less capital to build out and maintain a network. We had this with independent ISPs in the 1990s (I ran technical operations for the most popular such ISP in Chicago, EnterAct). It was not an unalloyed good. Most of the independent ISPs were pointless. They were each independent re-implementations of the same basic architecture, each with its own idiosyncrasies and incompetences. Some couldn't bill correctly. Some couldn't keep a Livingston Portmaster online consistently. None of them could secure an email server or reliably monitor all their POPs. Internet service was drastically more expensive, drastically less reliable, and harder to buy.
    - bitJericho 9y ago
      And now in Chicago all I can get is Comcast. Thanks a lot. There's no reason why we can't require leasing for all carriers, ISPs etc, to any company that wants to lease it. That works just fine for DSL. I recall having the option with DSL. Obviously I chose my telco and had good service and decent billing. That was a fine arrangement. When it comes to cell phone service? I can use any pay as you go carrier, sure, but not on the Verizon network? What do I get in return for that, I can use a verizon phone on any carrier. Except I can't, cuz they're violating their agreements with the FCC. Screw these cell carriers.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        If you can't get AT&T in your building, then no independent provider was going to help you. Every independent ISP in Chicago in the 1990s was leasing last-mile from existing providers. I've had leases in commercial spaces in Chicago that didn't have AT&T wiring either, and gone over the price quotes to fix that. It's super expensive, and the subscriber dollars aren't there for people to do that work speculatively. Verizon (or MFS, at the time) didn't stop leading last-mile to independent ISPs. Independent ISPs died because the economics weren't there for them: large consolidated providers offered the products 95% of consumers wanted at lower cost and drastically higher performance. To me, this whole discussion about ISP competition is sort of bucketed in the same place my brain reserves for complaints about the fact that ISPs no longer offer shell accounts. Can you believe there was a time where the quality of the Unix shell you offered ISP customers was a major competitive differentiator? I'm sure there's a species of ISP customer that is really unhappy their ISP doesn't make it easy to run their own mail server, or have a freenix-competitive NNTP server, or offer any kind of shell account. But for the overwhelming majority of the market, Netflix matters more than any of those things, and AT&T and Verizon probably do a better job of delivering Netflix than any independent ISP would.

pilom 9y ago

Verizon does indeed provide a truly unlimited plan. You just can't buy it from them. It's the grandfathered plans from 2006-2009. You can still find them on Ebay for a couple hundred dollars up front [0]. They are still 100% truly unlimited and unthrottled and if you keep the sim in a hotspot instead of a phone the video is unthrottled. I consistently use 100GB per month working remotely without any slowdowns [1]. [0]: http://therecklesschoice.com/2015/12/07/mobile-internet-and-unicorns/ http://therecklesschoice.com/2015/12/07/mobile-internet-and-... [1]: http://therecklesschoice.com/2017/07/29/how-we-get-internet-as-digital-nomads/ http://therecklesschoice.com/2017/07/29/how-we-get-internet-...

com2kid 9y ago

> It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds The majority of the throttling from carriers only happens on over-saturated cell towers, at that point, someone's data is going to be delayed, and honestly choosing the person who already used a lot of data seems more fair than just calling rand(), or even worse, degrading the experience horribly for everyone. The new wording in Verizon's plans sounds like they will first degrade people on the "Go Unlimited" plans, then degrade people on Beyond Unlimited who are over 22GB. It is unfortunate that they bucketed people into two categories of who gets slowed down first, but they do have to choose somehow. (And if the tower is incredibly saturated, everyone is going to experience degraded performance, that is how RF works, the laws of physics don't care what cell phone plan someone has!) The video resolution thing is nasty though.

jimbokun 9y ago

Honest question: is it economically viable for any carrier to offer "unlimited" plans, in terms of both speed and data consumed? Does any carrier have the capacity to handle that kind of traffic for all their customers in all their locations? Seems the fact no carriers are offering unrestricted, unlimited plans is pretty telling, I would think.