And how would this 'FU ComcastWarner' work in America? Anywhere you live you only have the choice of paying your cable provider, your telephone carrier or your wireless carrier for internet.
- DSL infrastructure hasn't evolved in a decade or more. You're lucky to get mid-single digit megabits/sec. I had 0.7 mpbs offered to me in Mountain View by at&t.
- Cable is the only speedy one, but they can price gouge you, limit the amount of traffic (see Comcast) and decide who to prioritize
- Wireless is getting faster, but is severely limited in transfer packages. You'd be paying an arm and leg just to get a few Gigabytes in total per month.
So tell me - how does this 'FU ComcastWarner' gonna work? Move to the one or two towns that have alternative internet (e.g. Fibre)?
Internet providers need to quit playing these shenanigans all the time.
What they do is they build public roads. You wouldn't allow a company to build a public road, and then go:
"Safeway trucks get a free pass, cause we have a deal with them; everyone else, $5 per vehicle. Except for you, Best Buy, you pay $25 - except Saturday and Sunday, when you may not pass at all."
I also see police on the roads, that prevent random lunatics from driving while tripping balls and ramming into my ass at 150 km/h during my morning commute. I think that's also a function of government.
Secondly, if you think the "no trucks over 3 tons" signs impinge on your "liberty", then go ahead and drive a 25 ton truck down that road, see what happens. I'm having this discussion about "liberty" versus common sense with my 3rd grade son all the time.
I certainly never said "no trucks over 3 tons" impinges anyone's liberty. I was implying that "no trucks over 3 tons" is equivalent to saying "no one is allowed to consume more than X amount of bandwidth" on my public pipe, which is exactly how the network providers are going to couch their arguments when trying to strangle Netflix.
There is probably a good technical reason as to why there is a 3 ton limit, i.e. the road (or bridge this road crosses) can't support >3 tons and will probably collapse under the weight of a heavier vehicle. There are also good safety reasons such as not wanting 25ton 18 wheelers using the road past your local primary school as a rat run. That's where your analogy fails.
Well a long time ago I would have been all for public roads, but alas do you really trust the Federal government to dictate what does go down the pipe and who is allowed?
Do you trust the Federal government to dictate what goes down the road and who is allowed to drive?
I recommend blind trust in nobody, as a rule. But with the government, at least there's the option of voting against the current office holders. Whereas when a Comcast-TimeWarner super-juggernaut takes over the whole market, what are my options? My lawyers versus theirs? Yeah, that would end up "well".
With the government, at election time, you have the option to vote between one corrupt asshole or the other. With corporations, you can just choose to not buy from them (therefore starving them of money).
So, in the case we're discussing here (and directly applicable to my own situation BTW, but that's anecdotal), people will have the "choice" between, let's see... Comcast-TimeWarner and... Comcast-TimeWarner. Great choice, I'll take seven!
Or I could choose to not buy, therefore starving myself of the resources they provide. That's even better!
So you really, really have to have Internet/cable, and they must give it to you cheaply and at high quality? If you're not even considering the option of walking away from them, you're giving them enormous leverage over you.
EDIT: This is the behavior of "rational economic actors", IMHO. If the benefit you get from the expensive Internet they offer is bigger than the cost, it's rational to take it. If it isn't, then it's rational to pass on it. If enough people do this, then the corporation realizes they get more customers by lowering prices (if they also act as "rational actors").
Many people really, in a practical sense, do have to have the Internet, and at reasonably high quality. Work and school being two common cases.
The 'rational actor' model is to economics what spherical cows [1] are to dairy farms. It is a simplifying assumption that is useful for certain general cases, but if you ever find yourself depending upon it in an argument, you're working at too shallow a level.
In this case, though, even if the rational-actor model were valid, you'd be wrong. In the case of monopolies and oligopolies, the rational-actor approach is to, basically, let yourself be screwed by the monopolist.
For example, in my case I'm in an area where I pay more money for worse broadband (ADSL) because I hate monopolists like Comcast. From an economics perspective, I'm an irrational actor, because I'm not optimizing for my own interests.
> Many people really, in a practical sense, do have to have the Internet, and at reasonably high quality. Work and school being two common cases.
Work and school are economic investments with concrete returns; financially, you get more out of Internet access than you pay. If you didn't need Internet for either of these, and just used it for Netflix or World of Warcraft (or any kind of recreation), would you reconsider paying for it?
Sorry, I'm not interested in jumping through your theoretical hoops. As a non-Comcast user who does need the internet, that doesn't seem like an interesting game to me.
Then do the constituents of your city, county, state, and country a service and either stand for election, volunteer time for a candidate that's not an asshole, or donate money to the campaign of a candidate that's not an asshole so they get on the ballot. Otherwise you get what you deserve.
Keep in mind that in some cases the municipals are sued by the companies that can't be bothered to implement quality broadband for trying to implement quality broadband.
Makes me wonder if it'll have to get to the point that a municipality says fuck you to both the broadband provider suing them and the county/state courts that allow such nonsense to implement their broadband anyway.
I've played many games of Starcraft on a Verizon LTE connection. Many (most?) online games have 250ms of latency "built in" to even the playing field for users with ping times below 250ms. LTE latency is usually closer to 50ms
250 ms for SC2 is a huge handicap and is definitely not added to the game. I can't imagine marine splitting(or really playing BW at all) with that kind of penalty.
That being said, Targa is famous for playing for a while via a 4g connection in Australia. So playing the game well is certainly possible.
It's pretty easy to do lag compensation on RTSs. You have the server run a copy of the game locally and just sync with the clients. Typically, RTSs have a lot of actions, but timing isn't as crucial. So, if things get out of sync, you just buffer until you everything catches back up again. You can even do things like vary the speed of the game (FPS) without the players noticing much. With games that rely on precise timing as a core mechanics (e.g. a shooter, fighting, or rhythm), the player is going to notice that an action took 10ms and then the next time they did it, it took 20, because they'll actually miss their target.
When municipalities offer cable they roll out with a competitive package but often fall behind in technology over time because they are slow to upgrade and have no leverage with content providers. I imagine it would be the same for internet.
Why would they need leverage with content providers? I don't want content from my municipal, I want access to the content of my choosing. Let me deal with content providers on my own terms.
Sure. But how many 'municipal' providers are there in places where a lot of the HN activity lies (i.e. SF/Silicon Valley) in say Mountain View, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Menlo Park, San Mateo, Cupertino, Los Altos etc?
It's a small patchwork all over the country.
So tell me - how does this 'FU ComcastWarner' gonna work? Move to the one or two towns that have alternative internet (e.g. Fibre)?