Re: Pet Peeves?
 

Soccer commentary on NBCSN (Arsenal/Swansea) constant stream of useless statistics, have to mute the commentary, just want to hear the gameplay not trivia and don't want either team to win :thumbdown:

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

Things are rarely as simple as they appear. I know someone who signed up for municipal fibre optic cable service, then got behind on her cable bill. ...... So the municipality disconnected her water! :blink: Mixing essential and nonessential services from the same provider is not a good idea. :unsure:

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

Can I use the personal responsibility argument here? :p. Pay yer bills and you gets your services.......

If the US private sector was good at providing high speed internet the public sector wouldn't be seeing a need to go in. However, they are not good at it as there is little to no competition and they see no reason to improve service because it will cut into profits. If other nations can do it so can they. They even see the need to block public sector efforts to get in on the act.

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

One of the bigger pending issues is that of Net Neutrality. If this is not upheld by the FCC it may allow providers to charge you more depending on what you actually use the internet for.

Dems for Net Neutraility, Reps against.


Also.
Municipal Broadband.
Where poorly served municipalities can set up their own broadband service for residents.
The big companies ATT, Comcast, Verizon etc...have lobbied against it saying it stifles competition, (even when they do not provide, or have no intention of providing a service in that location.)

They have several Republicans in their pocket.

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

I have noticed a pattern, that those arguing from the left are willing to excuse exploitative/ predatory behaviour from municipalities. It makes me wonder if they are genuinely concerned about the poor and downtrodden, or if for some bizarre reason they are driven to support governmental organizations no matter what the issue? :unsure:

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

No not really. One month I overlooked my water bill. The next one I got had a ten day warning of pay up or get shut off. That's only 40 days of non payment. I thought this was the way things worked in the US until I heard about Detroit cutting off water to residents who hadn't paid for a year or more. This did get a lot of attention from the left.

I don't necessarily think that one is better than the other. More often in this nation corporations and government are so intertwined that it has quite a fascist feel to it. It also seems there will be legal challenges to cities attempting to put in high speed internet.

However in this case, you haven't argued at all that the private sector could have pulled up its socks a bit and risen to other first world standards. It can't be news to you that cable and ISP companies have the lowest customer satisfaction out there. Nor can it be news that they are a monopoly in many areas.

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

Minimum service at maximum cost. The American way...

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

I'm still mixed on the issue of net neutrality. A company like Netflix makes its living by 'flooding' the internet with data, consuming vast amounts of bandwidth. Bandwidth is a limited resource and expensive to increase. I don't see a problem in charging them more for their usage than, say, a company like Amazon (let's pretend for the sake of this discussion that Amazon just sells goods, and not complicate it by the fact they now also stream media!). Don't know if it is a good analogy, but heavy trucks pay a higher tax to use the public road infrastructure because they wear it out faster.

How does net neutrality play into the business models of a company such as Vonage, which doesn't consume lots of bandwidth but does require decent 'QOS' (quality of service, translating to unsaturated networks in this context)?

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

I think the analogy is that a trucking company pays tax on each truck, a trucking company can't just build a link to the interstate and then operate 10,000 trucks without paying tax on 10,000 trucks. Like you say, a small number of web businesses are swamping the bulk of the internet dependant businesses that are not b/w intensive.

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

With net neutrality, everyone pays equally for each bit of traffic, whether they spew out millions (in which case they pay for millions) of only a few. What companies want to do is set up a system where only certain cars can use the freeway and everyone else has to cough-up extra fees or use the backroads. So it won't be dependent on the number of bits, it will be dependent on what the company pays, which would be easy to abuse to put smaller companies out of business.

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

The net neutrality question can be rather confusing. I suppose the real question, and perhaps the reason there is a Dem v. Rep take to this, is that if the Dems get their way, the Internet will be regulated as a utility. There may be some concern about exactly how much government control over the Internet will result from such regulation. So there may be more at issue than simply a question of whether heavy users should pay more for their use of scarce bandwidth. Today, you not only need to follow the money, but you also need to keep the proponent's ideology in mind, as that will reveal their real agenda.

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

The people against net neutrality are the ones who stand to make the biggest profit from restricting services.

I can't believe that conservatives are actually trying to paint the issue as taxing the internet and censorship, neither of which have anything to do with it. Actually, I can, it's all just putting up strawmen and funded by big business, as usual.

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

Posters on this forum putting up pictures of Full English Breakfasts and making me hungry.

Even if some of the pics look quite manky

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

Can you really believe that legislation ensuring "Net Neutrality" will actually happen without provision for the creation of a huge new bureaucracy and massive government intervention and control?

Re: Pet Peeves?
 

It's not difficult, testing internet speeds and costs is really easy. It's not like the FDA.