So no carrier anywhere offers true unlimited? It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds, and throttles video to some arbitrary max resolution?
The majority of the throttling from carriers only happens on over-saturated cell towers, at that point, someone's data is going to be delayed, and honestly choosing the person who already used a lot of data seems more fair than just calling rand(), or even worse, degrading the experience horribly for everyone.
The new wording in Verizon's plans sounds like they will first degrade people on the "Go Unlimited" plans, then degrade people on Beyond Unlimited who are over 22GB. It is unfortunate that they bucketed people into two categories of who gets slowed down first, but they do have to choose somehow.
(And if the tower is incredibly saturated, everyone is going to experience degraded performance, that is how RF works, the laws of physics don't care what cell phone plan someone has!)
The video resolution thing is nasty though.
Seems the fact no carriers are offering unrestricted, unlimited plans is pretty telling, I would think.
[0]: http://therecklesschoice.com/2015/12/07/mobile-internet-and-... [1]: http://therecklesschoice.com/2017/07/29/how-we-get-internet-...
(Not "bad". Weird.)
We had this with independent ISPs in the 1990s (I ran technical operations for the most popular such ISP in Chicago, EnterAct). It was not an unalloyed good. Most of the independent ISPs were pointless. They were each independent re-implementations of the same basic architecture, each with its own idiosyncrasies and incompetences. Some couldn't bill correctly. Some couldn't keep a Livingston Portmaster online consistently. None of them could secure an email server or reliably monitor all their POPs. Internet service was drastically more expensive, drastically less reliable, and harder to buy.
There's no reason why we can't require leasing for all carriers, ISPs etc, to any company that wants to lease it. That works just fine for DSL. I recall having the option with DSL. Obviously I chose my telco and had good service and decent billing. That was a fine arrangement.
When it comes to cell phone service? I can use any pay as you go carrier, sure, but not on the Verizon network? What do I get in return for that, I can use a verizon phone on any carrier. Except I can't, cuz they're violating their agreements with the FCC. Screw these cell carriers.
Verizon (or MFS, at the time) didn't stop leading last-mile to independent ISPs. Independent ISPs died because the economics weren't there for them: large consolidated providers offered the products 95% of consumers wanted at lower cost and drastically higher performance.
To me, this whole discussion about ISP competition is sort of bucketed in the same place my brain reserves for complaints about the fact that ISPs no longer offer shell accounts. Can you believe there was a time where the quality of the Unix shell you offered ISP customers was a major competitive differentiator? I'm sure there's a species of ISP customer that is really unhappy their ISP doesn't make it easy to run their own mail server, or have a freenix-competitive NNTP server, or offer any kind of shell account. But for the overwhelming majority of the market, Netflix matters more than any of those things, and AT&T and Verizon probably do a better job of delivering Netflix than any independent ISP would.