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Comment by geoelectric | Hacker News Reader

Mixed feelings. I do think zero-rating violates net neutrality, however benignly. This zero-rating is plainly a threat to Netflix and crew, at least assuming you can random-access shows and not just catch sequential channel streams.

However, as annoying as it is to see Comcast find a new predatory business model, I don't see much difference between this and VOIP or even traditional cable, other than at the terminating end the bridge serves the information into your local network so that non-dedicated clients can get at it too.

If all this really does is move the functionality of the set-top box into an app, which is my current read, it's really hard to say this isn't OK.

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I see their zero-rating as a much smaller issue than the data caps.

"It's ridiculous that in this day and age, people have to worry about their internet usage like it's some kind of limited resource."

The caps are driving additional zero-rating services.

Well "internet usage" is a limited resource, you need better/more equipment to support more usage.

"Unlimited Internet" was always a bit of a misnomer, at least now they're being honest about it

1 Mbit/s sustained translates into a bit above 300 Gbyte per month.

So they can easily get back to fair use by limiting speeds to a couple of megabits. Of course that would kill streaming tv.

Another way of looking at it, you can listen to audio 24x7 and not go over quota. Watching tv all day every day is not going to work.

But most people aren't streaming 24 hours a day, but only in a specific period. So if the plan is 300 GB/month, then having higher speeds is more interesting than having slower speeds (especially if a slower speed doesn't let you actually use all your data)

That's sort of where it went wrong. You offer video streaming rates and now people think, cool, tv, let's turn it on all day.

If you offer data rates where you can afford to offer fair use, then each year you can offer higher data rates. Which is what people like.

Where I live, I see this problem mostly on mobile. You see telcos offer insanely high 4G data rates and a data limit that is low enough that you can burn through that in a couple of minutes.

The net result is that nobody cares anymore. In general, people don't want to keep track of their uses. It makes for a poor experience.

The beneficial solution to the customers and the country as whole is to kick the providers to upgrade the infrastructure, not to let them suppress the marked by sitting on obsolete infrastructure and killing the competition.

Zero-rating is explicitly not forbidden by the FCC's net neutrality rules.

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