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We'd get free electricity and gas too then. Not gonna happen.

• pmlnr 7y ago
  Electricity should happen though with enough renewables.
  • Apocryphon 7y ago
    Turns out "disaster socialism" is a real concept: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/disaster-socialism-will-coronavirus-crisis-finally-change-how-americans-see-the-safety-net-will-bunch/ar-BB116bRX https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/disaster-socialism...
• jedberg 7y ago
  The difference is that with gas and electric, there is an increased cost to the utility to deliver more electricity and gas. With bandwidth there is almost no additional cost to deliver more bandwidth. Yes in aggregate they need to upgrade their equipment, but if they just got rid of data caps tomorrow, they would incur almost no extra cost. If electricity and gas suddenly became fixed cost, the cost to the utilities would go up dramatically.
  • rsynnott 7y ago
    > With bandwidth there is almost no additional cost to deliver more bandwidth Depends how awful your infrastructure is. The big ISP in Ireland was still using microwave links as backhaul for ADSL until at least 2012 or so (in one particularly ridiculous case, a whole village only had 8Mbit/sec backhaul), and I believe there are still some developed countries where that kind of setup is common. Interestingly, back in the mid noughties, said ISP either gave ADSL customers a 20GB cap or no cap, depending on if their local exchange had a fibre backhaul. To confuse the issue, they referred to the latter as "fibre powered broadband".
    • iptrans 7y ago
      The grandparent’s comment still stands. Upgrading backhaul is a fixed cost. There is no incremental cost for usage. Very much different than power generation.