Data plans compared to a “tasting menu, a buffet, or unlimited soup and salad.”
Fuck that. It costs them nothing to send data through. They are charging people on imaginary shit from subsidized ground lines that we already paid for through taxes. ISPs are as useless as Healthcare Insurers.
Well, we recently learned how to deal with health insurers.
It’s all greed. It’s been a while since this was discussed as far as I know, but wasn’t there talk about making Internet service into a utility and be regulated like the power and water companies? There should be a flat fee and that’s it. None of this tiered or capped bullshit. It’s alllllllll pure insatiable greed.
a few cents per month per megabit/sec (the speed of the plan) is what their ‘cost’ is to provide the pipe to a subscriber.
No its not because its paid for by the government in most expansion cases. They get to lay pipe for free and charge us for the service.
Except that unlimited soup or salad costs the business money to provide.
Data doesn’t. It’s simply 1s and 0s.
It doesn’t cost an ISP any more to provide the 4 trillionth 1 than it does to provide the first one.
Consuming data also doesn’t deny data availability to someone else, unlike electricity or water.
If I decide to fire up a hydroponics operation and start using 4000x more electricity and water than my neighbors, that could impact them negatively. If I run a torrent farm? Not so much.
Depending on what kind of line it is and whether it’s dedicated to you or being shared between you and other people, it actually can have a negative effect on other people using the service. Take cable for example, where you’re sharing it with like 32 other neighbors. Another example would be 5G home internet. It works really well, but it can bog down under high utilization. But for dedicated customers such as fiber? Yeah, I don’t see any excuse for this.
