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from the also-have-great-deals-on-oceanfront-property-in-Kansas dept.
Charter tries to convince FCC that broadband customers want data caps
Charter Communications has claimed to the Federal Communications Commission that broadband users enjoy having Internet plans with data caps, in a filing arguing that Charter should be allowed to impose caps on its Spectrum Internet service starting next year.
Charter isn't currently allowed to impose data caps because of conditions the FCC placed on its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. The data-cap condition is scheduled to expire on May 18, 2023, but Charter in June petitioned the FCC to let the condition expire two years early, in May 2021.
With consumer-advocacy groups and Internet users opposing the petition, Charter filed a response with the FCC last week, saying that plans with data caps are "popular."
"Contrary to Stop The Cap's assertion [in an FCC filing] that consumers 'hate' data caps, the marketplace currently shows that broadband service plans incorporating data caps or other usage-based pricing mechanisms are often popular when the limits are sufficiently high to satisfy the vast majority of users," Charter told the FCC.
Or you could offer some kind of software that shows which users are hogging the network.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:18AM (12 children)
Hey, if people can vote for Trump, I guess anything is possible...
People are pretty stupid. They bought into a cell phone service where they paid to receive calls! How dumb is that?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:52AM (7 children)
It would be pretty dumb if people had a choice. But that's the thing with telcos: they have a monopoly. And even when there is a choice, the competition is only an illusion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:02AM (6 children)
They did have a choice, to steadfastly refuse to buy into such a corrupt system. Means doing without, but that's the price to pay to see that you don't get ripped off.
Most countries in Europe didn't rob people this way. So it's wasn't like there was no choice. People like pricey trinkets, and the rest of us pay for the next 20 years.
The real problem here is that rich people didn't have to care about the price and bought right in, and we got fucked, on the short run granted, but the top 20% control 80% of the consumer market. We pay their prices and get inferior products
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:11AM (5 children)
People in Europe don't get shafted as hard because the EU regulates telcos a lot more heavily.
Case in point: the EU finally told cellphone operators to drop the roaming charges ripoff [bbc.co.uk] in 2017. If that's not in the consumer's best interest, I don't know what is.
In the US, the ripoffs can go on unabated, because the state refuses to intervene.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:32AM (2 children)
Ironic that you link to the BBC reporting on how the EU stopped the roaming charges ripoff.
Lots and lots of Brits who voted leave are going to get a huge shock when they get back from their next Greek holiday, aren't they?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @03:31AM
No no, they're free to negotiate their own rate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:01AM
That depends on whether the British government will use its regained full sovereignty to continue the practice.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:06PM (1 child)
When I was traveling in Germany in the late 1980s, I could call around on my AT&T long distance card for rates similar to what I paid back home... which were quite a bit lower than they had been just a few years earlier. On the other hand, my friends' domestic phones made a little "peep" noise every time they charged you 0.20 for your time on the call, and when calling international it was hard to understand the other party due to the near constant "peeping" - effective charge rates were much higher than they ever had been in the U.S. both for international and longer distance domestic calls. Payphones without a calling card? Forget it, I think I paid 25DM for 10 minutes from Berlin to Canada.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday August 17 2020, @12:01AM
You need a walkman with a cassette tape with two minutes of blue beep (Commodore 64 program) quarter tones. Dial the long distance number and when it says you must insert blah for the first blah minutes, put your headphones up to the mouthpiece and hit play. Make sure to leave a few seconds between the tones, if you fuck up and play half of a tone the operator drops on the line immediately and says..... SIR!!!!! SIR!!!!!! You have to insert real money!!!! (Also happens when your headphones are turned up too loud and the tone distorts.)
One time that didn't happen I was calling Hawaii and played about two minutes of the tones into an operator's headset. (Just a story... totally didn't happen.)
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:54AM (3 children)
That came to an end pretty quickly. Now cell phones have larger free calling areas than landlines (what's a landline? Something you hang your laundry on to dry?)
You can ruin their business model - stop streaming shit. You won't die.
Or you can choose to be a slave.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @03:12AM (2 children)
I prefer to live in the gray between area. As in, option three. I could keep streaming shit and suffer (option one). I could stop streaming shit and not die, as you say. (Option two!)
Or I could "stream" it once. ..via bitorrent. After that, it's purely lan-traffic no matter how many times I re-watch it. For bonus points, the second-hand dvd/bluray collection can live in a box in my basement, without any damage-from-usage. They get paid, I get what I want, my physical copy stays pristine. everyone wins!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:04AM (1 child)
Except you possibly, because even if you have an owned physical copy, you are infringing copyright by uploading data to other people during your bittorrent.
Is it easy to rip Bluerays yourself, or do you need a specially hacked drive to do so?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:43PM
Let's be clear: I don't give a single fuck for their copyright. If the copyright owner disagrees with me, they're welcome to catch me if they can. The odds on that transaction are forever in my favor.
I make a point of paying for a physical copy because to my mind, that's the fair and right thing to do, and I sleep better knowing the books are balanced (balanced to my satisfaction, anyways; I'm sure the copyright owner would disagree). If someone else is getting copyrighted data uploaded from me to them during a torrent session, well, they can deal with their own sleeping problems, if any. None of my concern.
I can't be arsed to rip things myself, it's far less hassle to let a soi-disant 'expert' deal with the arcane bullshit of formats and encodings and aspect ratios and containers and codecs and so on and on etc. My sole exertion is to rename files to something that XBMC can parse while still being human-readable.