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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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @12:43AM (7 children)
The people injecting bleach and drinking lysol are probably the same idiots that believe concast. I really can't believe someone is that dumb.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @01:21AM
In WW1 the Germans cleansed the lungs of the English working class with chlorine gas while they were observing lockdown due to machine-gun fire. Nobody died of coronavirus.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday April 29 2020, @03:33AM (5 children)
Did you forget about the people (mostly kids) eating Tide Pods, long before Covid-19? Dumb has been around for a long time.
Still, I have to wonder if they're immune to Covid-19...
/s
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @07:16AM
Federal funding for you - conditional on ahhhh joking! Funding approved.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Snotnose on Wednesday April 29 2020, @01:41PM (1 child)
You might try a Trumptini: 1 part bleach, 1 part disinfectant, 1 tide pod.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday April 29 2020, @11:40PM
Ya gotta admit, it'll kill the virus!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 29 2020, @03:08PM (1 child)
Or in truly ancient times, when one asked another to "hold my beer". Aye, stupidity has been with us for time beyond reckoning.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @03:16PM
Hold my bleach.