https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/blog/aussie-broadband-ann...
Edit: The real test though will be the bandwidth of our gov-sponsored, substandard, widely FTTN (instead of full FTTP).
EDIT: props for getting rid of limits and disconnects though. NZ providers are just saying we'll be able to cope with everyone working from home because we have a fancy network.
Last week they started laying cable down my street, so it seems pretty soon I'll be able to join the modern world.
Kudos for the multi-gigabit fibre, when we can only imagine of a gigabit lottery.
a fast local internet is useful mostly for local streaming services. (does youtube count as local in NZ now?)
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/03/16/rogers-waiving-long-d...
Now if we could take a second to talk about all the "From CEO..." emails that are being sent around...
https://news.expats.cz/prague-technology/t-mobile-joins-o2-i...
WFH (RDP/Webex/VPN) uses much less bandwidth than streaming Netflix.
But the kids being at home might make a big difference.
The storms we had 6+ weeks ago knocked out the landline (and adsl), so we've been tethering for any internet, which is 1 bar strength of 4g.
It's increasingly unlikely that Telstra (the fixed line telco) will ever repair the copper: we've had several promises and nothing yet (nor expected until April).
An entire political party decided that the internet was just for "movies and entertainment", "You don't need fast internet" and similar comments. This guided them towards penny pinching as a strategy which meant they succeeded in seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.
"Penny wise, pound stupid" is the old term for it.
Now, let's compare this to my state and local governments. They're slow, hate change, they're very careful about who to give money to because their main problem is avoiding corruption. A prominent local politician campaigned and won by promising to vote no on or veto everything. Every slow-down comes from a totally legitimate anti-corruption rule and you aren't going to speed the process up without creating Tammany Hall. My local politicians have only one way to make the news, and that's by messing something up. There is no carrot, only a stick.
Those two pictures align perfectly! As a result, my water service has never been interrupted, and I have never gone to the polls with a negative idea about anyone on the MUD board. It's a great system for everyone involved.
Now, my question is, how in the world does this work with internet service, an area in which there are changes at a rate greater than once per century?
You might also be mistaking the fad driven high margin web for the rather stable internet sitting underneath it, especially if you go all the way down to the cable duct where a lot of rural houses are still using copper put down in the 30ies.
The problem here is that laying down cable ducts requires both "right of way"(often exclusively held by whoever laid down telephone cables in the 30ies) expensive survey work and real physical labor(someone have to an actual trench), all of which requires capital and if you already own the copper cable for no significant increase in revenue.
Things can be done with radio signals and i suspect whenever 6G mobile arrives it might be municipal, but radio will likely never match the bandwidth potential of even the first optical cables ever laid down.
Was this just a really unfortunate typo for underserved?
Do you mean like the RDP marketplaces should slow down so people cant find a computer near the skimmed credit card they bought so that visa transactions go through?
Or something more like corporate hacking?
Or back to the RDP to install monero mining botnets?
I’m just trying to figure out which one you are referring to as “overtaxing”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
there is a basis for mutual coexistence, it is a maladaptation for anyone to destroy the basis of your existence.
in particular the idea of ransoming or disrupting connectivity and integrity of critical data, info ,services or creating compounding issues. If someone makes thier living doing that, now is not the time for thier own sake as well.
If you use more water, even if there is plenty of delivery capacity, they could literally run out of it. There is only so much in the reservoir.
If you use more electricity, even if there is plenty of transmission capacity, they have to burn more fuel to generate it.
Transferring more bits doesn't risk depleting the supply of bits and doesn't require burning more fuel. The worst it can do is consume all of the available transmission capacity. But the amortized cost of a bit is very low -- if you charged true cost then it wouldn't meaningfully deter usage, so you'd still need about the same total amount of transmission capacity. At which point charging for usage serves no legitimate purpose.
Very much doubt faceless corporations with automated billing cycles will take such an altruistic view on this but perhaps I'll be surprised.
Most will do the exact opposite I believe. The last financial crash caused massive cashflow issues for the big corps.
You have food distribution centers?
I'm jealous.
We have a full lockdown, yet everyone is outside and it's really crowded. There aren't people that give a (...) About the situation, especially in this city, because most of the people are higher educated.
This said, I also wouldn't say it's really crowded, I took the tram in to the office this morning to pick some stuff up (last day that'll be possible for a few weeks) and it was very quiet.
Anywhere people might gather is closed and the public are encouraged to practice 'social distancing'. But the army/police are not in the streets making sure people stay at home.
This is for now, i wouldn't be surprised if they extend it later on.
The thing is, Fastweb is big in residential internet connection but pretty minor as mobile provider.
No word from major providers (Vodafone, Tim, Iliad)
It also doesn't seem worthwhile to switch at the moment, since other solutions require a 1-2 year contract which I do not need (not to mention, it would also take 2-3 weeks to get a connection with those anyway).
There are not enough resources hosted within the region to make the distinction pointed out by donavanm worthwhile, unlike e.g. China or Russia. The local data from my plan gets used up predictably while I access resources in any part of the Internet.
However, I don't at all like the argument that if your neighbor can't pay her bill, it might not just impact her, but two of her neighbors, one of which is some kind of network engineer who fixes BGP thingies. And neither of the leaching neighbors who have some kind of critical need of her internet can help pay for it???
If you can fix BGP thingies, you ought to have your own WiFi, or be able to do better than leaching it.
In fact, I'd go as far aa saying thar internet today is an absolute necessity, on par with water and electricity.
We do not really know how long it will take. Emergency state and lockdowns may be the new normal. Everything that could work as usual should work as usual to not cause additional disruption.
You could be in hospital or you always pay cache not online, many people pay everything with money in hand in shops(that have such payment points) here in Romania, also if you have a smartphone I imagine attempting to setup accounts and try to pay online from the phone is a pain.
Asking university students to leave campus is hard. Switching from on-prem to online teaching overnight is harder yet. But teaching across the connectivity divide, where students don’t have access at home and the state just shuttered all the businesses providing “free” Wifi, is impossible.
I have been wronged many times by Comcast over the last 24 years; at least from my POV, this offer—provided they abide by it—erases most if not all my ill-will towards them.
Well done
Charter is waiving late fees, not terminating service, offering free service to households with students which don't already have service and opening their WiFi hotspots to everyone.
Verizon is waiving late fees and will not terminate service.
Cox is waiving late fees, not terminating service, opening WiFi hotspots to all and upgrading speeds on connections in their programs for low income customers to 50Mbs.
Comcast is eliminating data caps, waiving late fees, not terminating service, opening WiFi hotspots to all and offering 2 months of free service to those eligible for but not enrolled in their $9.95 per month program for low-income families. They are also increasing data rates for their low-income program connections.
Many other providers have also pledged to not terminate service.
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363033A1.pdf
"Bandwidth" is already rationed but is usually high enough you don't notice most of the time or its still good enough most of the time. If you do continuous transfers you immediately see the data rate limits already in place.
But these data rate limits are usually already throttled and therefore different to some monthly download data cap. Those data caps are often marketing/sales driven rather than the actual data rate. And often the real technical data volume limits are for data entering/leaving the ISP. That's the real cost that is being covered by bandwidth caps. They estimate the costs at their borders and cover that first.
Which brings us to the caching involved. The more caching the easier it is to lower costs or limits. Peering means that some ISPs are closer to each other than they otherwise would be. And Netflix and others using CDNs etc place servers at strategic locations to bring themselves closer. That 2GB movie stream is likely traversing a lot less equipment than you'd expect. In some cases, less than a video conference or game.
If caching fails and something got broken along the way, or... they don't have a close enough CDN site, or caching simply isn’t possible, that is when you have congestion[1] since your traffic now joins whatever else is at the ISP entry/exit points. They can still lower your data rate without touching some monthly data cap.
[1] I'm not discounting congestion within an ISPs network but as they have all the dials and can do whatever they like to sort that out its a separate issue. Redundant paths are a thing. Also, if they isolate congestion to a particular user or usage, eg bittorrent, they already have throttling for that.
Even with preparation, It would be a very difficult and impossibly contentious process.
As far as establishing effective policy: ISPs have a lot of practice rationing bandwidth, I'm sure there's a way that's fair enough. Putting a price on it is a good start.
Technically Comcast could implement it overnight by reducing everyone's data speed (or maybe throttling particular services), or instituting stricter data caps.
From a business perspective it's harder but if it was the only way they could keep their network afloat, I'm sure the could get the FCC to let them implement emergency throttling.
