[Thunderbolt General] allquixotic:
Yeah, no kidding. I am so fed up with American ISPs in general right now. Let's see, where to start:

< rant >

* All the landline carriers in my area either provide terrible uptime and refuse to fix line quality problems (Verizon DSL, Comcrap copper cable); refuse to come to my suburban neighborhood (Verizon FiOS); or cost enough money to be completely out of the buying range of middle or even upper-class citizens (T1 / T3 and other dedicated lines *start* at $400/month for 1.5 Mbps and run into the multi-thousands).

* All the wireless carriers in my area either give you speed and reliability but don't let you use it (VZW and AT&T capped bw) or have such a spotty network that you can't get decent service (Sprint).

Seriously, is it so much to ask to want to act like an ordinary online consumer? To consume data and online services in ways that would, frankly, make the likes of Amazon and Google see dollar signs? But no, the ISPs don't want this -- they want to constrain you as much as possible, to maximize the profit they make on every byte that goes through their network. It's greed, pure and simple.

When 2 GB updates to several of my games on Steam are released several times per week, I want to be able to download them without calculating how many months' worth of bandwidth I'll have to save to download them.

When we're watching an HD 1080p (or heck, even 720p) streaming video off of Amazon or Netflix at night, we don't want to have the video constantly "buffering" because we can't get enough bandwidth to stream it in real-time.

When I want to backup an MP3 album to an online locker or server, I don't want the upstream to be so constrained that it will take 16 days to transfer 75 MB.

I just want a connection that's like, symmetrical 10 Mbps, uncapped and completely unrestricted, pings under 100 ms to servers within 50 miles, and 24/7/365 uptime with about as much downtime as the power grid or hot water heater (i.e. very little).

The providers have really tied our hands: they foster this burgeoning online marketplace where people can buy streaming videos, download games, play multiplayer games, and have bandwidth-intensive, real-time video conversations. Then they don't provide the infrastructure for us to use these things satisfactorily. So people don't use them, and the companies slowly die.

Is it any wonder the U.S. economy sucks? People would buy more online services (games, movies, etc) if we had support from our ISPs to do these things in a fast and painless way. FiOS is supposed to be that, but you can't get it -- not around here. And due to umpteen political and/or financial reasons, it will never, ever come here.

I almost want to pack up and move to one of the cities where Google decides to build their pilot 100 Mbps networks. Live where the bandwidth is, or something like that. Screw Verizon.

And now, with the chance that they'll not grandfather me in, and instead limit my LTE to 5 GB, I will essentially be without the ability to really use LTE either. I'll end up returning the phone and going back to 3G, and just slugging it out with the crapDSL constantly dropping out and giving us about 10 Kbps of upstream.

I'm not one to sit there and download stuff off of bittorrent, but I do like me some tethering sometimes, and even when I'm just using my phone, I play multiplayer games, have VoIP conversations, listen to streaming music, and download a whole lot of apps and videos. I bet I could bust through 5GB without even tethering once. And I pay for all my content legally (or watch YouTube :rolleyes:)

How is this allowed to continue? When will "the powers that be" realize that the health of the internet and digital media economy is directly related to peoples' ability to get unlimited, high-bandwidth data connections both via landline and on the go? So many nations are ahead of us in the sophistication of their landline networks, and in some places, they've even had mobile networks competitive with (or superior to) LTE for years -- of course, uncapped.

< /rant >

Bah, I don't want to think about it anymore. Sorry to hijack this thread with a rant. It all boils down to "People in power are acting stupid and greedy" -- in other words, business as usual.