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For many years in the early aughts, broadband providers insisted they needed to impose usage caps and costly overage fees to help manage network congestion. By 2015, leaked documents from Comcast revealed that was never true. In the years since, even industry CEOs have acknowledged that the limits are little more than an additional tax on captive customers in uncompetitive U.S. broadband markets.
As COVID-19 struck, ISPs quickly bowed to pressure to eliminate such restrictions so home-bound Americans weren't inundated with significantly higher bills. In a press release, Comcast makes it clear that its network has (gasp), performed perfectly well under the added load -- despite a 32% increase in upstream traffic and 18% increase in downstream traffic. There's been a 77% surge in gaming downloads, a 37% bump in streaming video consumption, and a 228% bump in VOIP and teleconferencing use. This is, Comcast says, causing no issues for Comcast:
"Our ongoing, proactive network investment to add fiber and capacity has put us in a good position to manage the increases that we are experiencing today. While the COVID-19 experience is new and unprecedented, the Internet ecosystem is flexible and performing the way it was designed. We engineer the network to handle spikes and shifts in usage, and what we have seen so far with COVID-19 is within our capacity."
Many ISPs, like Comcast, backed off the "congestion" claims a few years ago after their own memos, and numerous researchers and journalists, kept debunking them.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:07PM (5 children)
yes, the tethering really bothers me too. in some areas it's my only option for internet access. I hear custom firmware on android can get you tethering? I might look into doing that soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:12PM (4 children)
I had a flashed phone, worked fine up until the telco managed to put a barrier in that required using their shitty app. There must be a way to fool the system so it doesn't realize it isn't your phone making the requests.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:30PM (3 children)
ssh tunnel? In my case I use tmobile and I don't have any problems with tethering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @01:32AM (2 children)
Well, let's see what happens after they are done their merger.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @03:12AM (1 child)
Merger? It's more like sie germans taking over. Nice surprises may happen (if you are not Comcast)
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:11AM
Not scary any more, they've got stricter rules than US about Nazis.