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The FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai is signaling new broadband policy changes that can only be described as friendly to ISPs and hostile to consumers. In a "Notice of Inquiry," a public comment step often taken ahead of rule changes, the commission proposes that both fixed and mobile can be counted as broadband under Section 706 of its rules. That differs from the current standard, developed under Tom Wheeler, that requires timely deployment of both wired and wireless networks in the US.
On top of that, the FCC has suggested that if mobile networks are providing this "broadband," all one needs is 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds. That's less than half of the 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up speeds currently required to fit the definition of home broadband. At the same time, the Notice of Inquiry proposes to leave home speeds at the current level.
The FCC says the "statutory language" gives it the right to scoop mobile and land transmission into one broadband basket. Section 706, it says, defines advanced telecommunications tech "as high-speed, switched, broadband that enables users to original and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics and video telecommunications ... without regard to any transmission media or technology."
[...] The FCC's Democrat Commissioner Mignon Clyburn doesn't agree with gist of the Notice of Inquiry. "We seek comment on whether to deem an area as 'served' if mobile or fixed service is available," she wrote in a concurring statement. "I am skeptical of this line of inquiry. Consumers who are mobile only often find themselves in such a position, not by choice but because they cannot afford a fixed connection."
[...] The Notice of Inquiry calls for public comments at this link until September 7th, with reply comments due by September 22nd. So far, the commission has done a lousy job of handling comments about net neutrality, with intermittent or no access during an eight-hour period on May 7th, 2017. That was either due to a DDoS attack or, as some security professionals think, just a bad commenting system. Anyway, even if lots of folks express their disapproval, the FCC doesn't really care.
I'm guessing they just don't want to have to provide actual broadband to unserved areas to qualify for special perks and subsidies. Which is precisely why I live in a town rather than fifteen miles away from the nearest one.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/10/fcc-mobile-data-as-broadband-slower-speeds/
Also at: Ars Technica.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:02AM (5 children)
A bigger problem is the data caps on internet, especially in rural areas. My grandparents live in an area where $60/mo for 10GB/mo satellite is a "good" deal, and not even mobile internet is a viable alternative. That basically makes the internet unusable, because they can go through most of that in a month with OS updates disabled, and they aren't even heavy internet users. Even if mobile were an option, the data caps there aren't much better, and might even be worse.
I stayed there a while with them, and I'll tell you right now, I can deal with the ridiculous latency a hell of a lot better than I can the impossibly low cap. The only way it's been even remotely usable, ever, is when the provider had a loophole where VPN traffic didn't count against the cap, but they figured that out and fixed it a while back.
Anybody that thinks data caps like that are "good enough" clearly doesn't know what it's actually like to live with one as the only form of internet access.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:14AM (4 children)
One way to make that life more bearable is to route the http traffic through a proxy on the internet that strips out all the html code junk before it's sent home. Many pages are now 1000 kByte.. for something that in a distant time took 10 kByte tops. Ontop of that a local heavily caching proxy can be employed.
Video can be recoded on the fly with more efficient codec and lower bitrate if there's a need to squeeze the last bit.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:48AM (1 child)
I tried stuff like that for a bit when I stayed there, but it didn't matter what I did, because no matter how efficient I was, I couldn't do anything about their usage. They're the types where, if you even touch one of their keyboards, you'll get blamed for "breaking" something weeks later when they do something stupid, so it just wasn't worth trying to help them with tricks like that, or even something as simple as ad blocking to reduce traffic.
So, I found a better workaround. When their connection goes over the cap, it throttles you down to dialup speeds (but with more latency! woo!), right? Well, except that whatever the ISP does with the throttling doesn't (or didn't, at least) count icmp traffic, so I set up a ping tunnel on a VPS I've kept for years and routed all my traffic through that after the month's bandwidth ended, then kept doing what I normally did with net traffic. The latency had a negative effect on the tunnel, so it was still fairly slow, but a lot better than dialup-slow, and I could even get away with Netflix through it as long as I turned off HD. :P
Probably sounds kind of selfish, but I did everything I could to try helping them and "no good deed goes unpunished" as the saying goes, so I gave up trying and just minimised how much pain their internet usage caused me. :/
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday August 13 2017, @06:38AM
When you find yourself helping such people - don't. It's just a waste of your mental strength.
Especially when it's for free.
Fun thing with ICMP ;-)
Another trick if sites like Facebook is open for "free" is to open a scratch page. Encode packets as Base64 or better, post them. Have another computer read them and delete. Subsequently it then sends it using raw IP socket on the real internet. Yummy yummy ;)
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:38PM (1 child)
That won't work so well with more of the web going HTTPS, for which proxies will just use the CONNECT verb and pass all the crap straight through.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 14 2017, @03:51AM
You can setup a proxy portal or add certificates.