This is one reason why privacy is important, companies knowing your info directly impacts your wallet.
This particular one has nothing to do with privacy. They have to offer a specific type of plan by law, they nerfed that plan.
Which is not to say corporations knowing everything about you is good in any way, but this is simply a different issue (with corporations)
Reminder that net neutrality is dead. I use a VPN because otherwise my ISP decides on my behalf when I’ve had enough 1080p YouTube and slows down specifically that connection
Wait, you can get around T-Mobile’s YouTube throttling with a VPN? 50GB is a pittance; I am beyond done with having to switch to 480p after I use it all up in a day. Most games are 100+ GB these days and a Blu Ray REMUX can easily top 70GB, so it’s stupid easy to tear though 50GB simply by downloading one single game or movie. Unlimited should mean unlimited.
480p for you!
bigger they get, shadier they deal
ISPs doing dirty tactics, what else is new?
The same companies who display in the open “up to” on all of their plans. Their speeds are never guaranteed.
Up to includes zero.
This is exactly why I refuse to even consider those silly hot spot cellular based services for your home. They spend decades capping and throttling that shit. There is no trust there.
I tried to use one for a month when I cancelled Comcast. They’re garbage. For home internet, you need it to always work. Having no internet is unacceptable, especially if you work from home. Well, the cellular hotspot services go back and forth between having signal and not having signal, so the internet is routinely not working.
They work in a pinch but never for normal everyday use
50 GB? That’s a couple iOS or other OS update, or just streaming video a lot. A quick check shows my house over 500GB last month.
Gonna ration data with the same ethos they restrict what people on food stamps can purchase.
It’s 30 mins at full speed.
It’s around 4.5 hours at full speed. Remember that internet speeds are in megabits, not megabytes to falsely increase the speed number as well.
Internet speeds being measured in bits instead of bytes is absolutely not to falsely represent Internet speeds, nor is there anything false about it to begin with. Measuring network transmission speeds in bits is an engineering custom used in telecommunications long before consumer internet existed and for good reason. A byte being 8 bits is the standard today, but in the past a computers byte could be anywhere from 1 to 48 bits depending on your hardware, therefore measuring internet speeds in bytes per second would be meaningless.
Even today where we’ve standardized 8 bits to a byte, measuring internet speeds in Bytes or Megabytes per second would actually be more misleading than the Megabits we use today, since not every bit in a packet is used for user data transfer nor is there even user data in every packet. 25 megabits per second is equal in size to 3.125 megabytes per second, but if you put 3.125 megabytes per second on the tin, people will expect for example to be able to download a file at 3.125 megabytes per second but they can’t. Assuming no bottlenecks and perfect efficiently, they’d only be able to download a file at a speed closer to 2.5Megabytes per second.
There are good reasons to use bits for engineers, but residential internet consumers are not engineers. In no other context do you market incomprehensible engineering details, just here because higher number is better marketing. Almost everyone I know is confused why the speeds they pay for don’t match the speed of downloads in Chrome. Marketing in bits is anti-consumer, since average consumer does not understand what actual download speed they will get when buying.
Marketing in bits is anti-consumer, since average consumer does not understand what actual download speed they will get when buying.
It’s not anti-consumer to advertise a product’s capabilities in the most accurate way possible. When you pay for internet bandwidth you’re not paying for download speed, you’re paying for a transmission rate. Advertising internet plans based on the speeds you get in Chrome would not be possible and therefore any attempt to do so would be deceptive to the customer.
Almost everyone I know is confused why the speeds they pay for don’t match the speed of downloads in Chrome
The Internet bandwidth they pay for will never match the speed of downloads in Chrome, even if you convert bits to bytes.
What you’re missing here is that you want the number you pay for from your ISP and the number you can measure downloading a file at to match. But they never will, because they’re two completely different concepts. One of those number is a constituent part of the other number. They’re not interchangeable.
Why wouldn’t it be possible? Convert Mbit/s to a reasonable real-world mb/s estimation for download/upload to a reasonably close location, with some losses built into the estimate.
You’re asking why it’s not possible, and then explained a work around that would be needed because it’s not possible.
What you’re suggesting is that instead of selling a service to you based on a quantifiable number based on things within their control that you can reasonably hold them accountable for, they should sell their service to you based on a series of educated guesses about what you could potentially get based on a number of factors entirely outside of their control.
You can give an accurate enough estimate. Yes, you may have to make some assumptions on protocol and server. And yes, you will be a few percent off. But so what? It is much more informative to the average consumer than transmission rate. In the first place, transmission rate is also a meaningless metric without information on overprovisioning, latencies, etc. Except instead of an understandable but slightly inaccurate download speed estimate, you have one engineering parameter that is unhelpful to an engineer anyway without more information as well as not understandable to the average consumer.
PS: I am not saying I can’t include engineering parameters, but it shouldn’t be the main marketing number.
Accurate enough for who? It wouldn’t be accurate enough for me. And it certainly wouldn’t be accurate enough for the consumer who you described as expecting that estimate to match reality. And worst of all, it wouldn’t be enough for any consumer protection agencies or remedies. So many assumptions would have to be made based on factors entirely outside of their control in order to sell to you based on your file download speed. And if you allow them to sell you a product based on assumptions of things outside of their control, then you then have no recourse to hold them accountable. I don’t want companies to sell me a product based on a number offered via a shrug. I want a promised number I can measure against what I’m getting.
Transmission rate is the only metric with any meaning in this context, because the transmission rate is the product they’re selling to you. The overprovisioning and etc is actually accounted for in the transmission rate they’re selling you. Thats why they almost always overprovision your connection based on what you’re paying for.
It’s as if you’re asking for a car dealer to sell you vehicles based on how many how many people you can move between two locations per hour, instead of the number of seats it has and the speed it can go. They would have to start making guesses based on the average waistline of people in your area, the speed limits of the roads in your town, your driving ability, what routes you like to take, etc. that might be sorta handy because you don’t have to do that math yourself now, but it’s not going to be all that accurate to you specifically, and if that number of people is lower than what they estimated, it’s kinda on you because they don’t know if your friends are petite or 600 lbs, etc etc. But if they sell you a car that seats 5 people of normal healthy size and it can go 100mph, and they deliver you something that seats 4 with a top speed of 80, they’re accountable for that.
If it wasn’t to confuse people, they could just show both bits and bytes. There’s no reason not to. I’ve seen this occasionally with ethical ISPs who care about their customers (extremely rare) - they would display it like this:
Typical evening speed: 25Mbps (approx 3 megabytes per second)
Almost everyone I know who isn’t in tech is extremely confused by this distinction. Absolutely they keep the bigger number because it directly benefits them. If they’re offering the 3 speed, but competitors are offering the 25 speed, of course customers want the bigger number! Normies don’t even know what a bit is.
I don’t particularly think the historical value of a byte is really relevant either. It’s been 8 bits for half a century now.
Since 1975 or so, the word byte has come to mean a sequence of precisely eight binary digits
I don’t think it’s a big deal or a hill to die on or anything. Since everyone does it, at least it’s consistent. But the industry is kind of shooting themselves in the foot because they get ten thousand service desk calls per day complaining about slow internet speeds that are less than one eighth of the advertised number.
There’s no reason not to include a helpful subtitle that gives you an approximation of file download speeds ( other than consumers mistaking it as a promise the company can’t actually keep), but that’s a completely different animal than advertising the bandwidth itself in bytes. Because simply converting the bits into bytes will not result in the number that the customer ultimately sees.
All you would have in that scenario is the same confused consumer calling the service desk asking why the number of Megabytes they paid for is not the number of Megabytes they get when they download a file.
This as absolutely a hill worth dying on for me. I don’t think it would be a good thing for companies to stop advertising their products based on their precise and accurate capabilities in order to sell to a consumer based on a guesstimate around one subset of use of that product.
Found the marketer.
Not a marketer, just a network engineer who cares about honest and accurate advertising.
From the linked press release:
Governor Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced an agreement with T-Mobile USA, Inc. (T-Mobile), requiring the company to improve and expand the home internet service it offers eligible New Yorkers under the New York Affordable Broadband Act (ABA).
As a result of OAG’s investigation, T-Mobile will remove the data caps associated with its ABA plans and deliver 25 Mbps download speeds to all ABA plan subscribers, unless network congestion requires temporary reductions. In addition, T-Mobile will offer ABA plans in all areas where it provides home internet service and make its ABA plan webpage discoverable by search engines.
WHERE’S THE MOTHERFUCKING PUNISHMENT?! All I see is where they’re making T-mobile pinky-promise to start following the law they’ve been breaking all this time, while being allowed to keep every single goddamn penny of their ill-gotten gains!
NO mention of prison time for executives.
NO mention of punitive fines.
NO mention even of restitution to wronged customers, which is less than the bare fucking minimum!!!
The only even slightly useful part of that press release is this at the bottom, because every New Yorker should be absolutely livid about this weak-ass corporatist shit:
Contact the Governor’s Press Office
Contact us by phone:
Albany: (518) 474-8418
New York City: (212) 681-4640Contact us by email:
Press.Office@exec.ny.govSomeone with a better memory or search engine capability can weigh in, but I’m pretty sure T-Mobile had a bunch of restrictions lifted for no reason that were imposed on them because they were illegally charging customers who switched plans or something.Edit: this was bothering me so I did some more digging. Verizon was the company I was thinking of, but I confused it with TMobile because the FCC waived restrictions on their merger with sprint and there were a bunch of antitrust lawsuits about that.
I wonder if the low income people could get the maximum payout if they brought it to small claims?
Any punishment to the company will be paid by it’s customers anyway… For any large company fines and legal fees are calculated in as a cost of doing business. Prison for execs will just lead to fall guys getting the job while the real beneficiaries i.e. major stakeholders will pull the string from the shadows. If you want this to stop you have to go after them. Something like community service or % of their stock holdings going to the victims would be more effective imo.
Edit: You may not like what i’m saying but deep down you know i’m right.
Guess we shouldn’t ever punish them then.
Yeah, it makes no difference, the system is rigged, you have to go after the real beneficiaries.
work your job all day to help some ass hole boss get rich, come home to relax and your internet gets secretly slowed down - so your bosses kids can also own you online in literally any multiplayer FPS.
There is a reason they call themselves the uncarrier
As a former subscriber to both T-Mobile’s fixed wireless home internet and their subsidiary Mint Mobile’s fixed wireless home internet, this explains a lot.
Calling it affordable broadband while throttling people to 600 Kbps after 50 GB is like selling a discounted bus pass that turns into a pair of shoes after four rides. And hiding the plan from search engines? Apparently the cheapest way to provide low income internet is making sure nobody can find it.
isn’t is basically just a phone plan without a number?
Jesus just 50GB a month? That wouldn’t last me a day …
4h at full speed. Uncapped is effectively an 8TB cap, so they delivered 0.6% of what they were supposed to.
My grandma has a plan like this and visiting her for less than a week detonates her (hidden) cap just from my phone backing up its apps.
My home internet sits at multiple TB a month despite backups etc. not even running through it since it syncs to my local nas on the same network.On 50GB you coulnd’t even install a large game.
50,000mbit / 25mbit/sec = 2,000 seconds = 33 minutes
x 8
Gotta convert the 50GB to Gb to match the 25bit/sec
Artificial static throughput caps on modern networks are asinine and archaic, especially on shared mediums.
Network providers should permit shared best effort throughput, with a sliding temporal window which keeps a tally of usage and feeds into a ratcheting deprioritisation of slot allocations. This would permit short bursts of maximum throughput, which is more efficient and frees the channel quicker, and slots longer transfers into the remaining default channel space.
Differentiate service based on the dimensions of the monitored and enforced windows, not an arbitrary static sphincter.
Yeah but how are we going to exploit the poors with a system that works?
Differentiate service based on the dimensions of the monitored and enforced windows, not an arbitrary static sphincter.
How would you explain that in a simple way people can understanding?
If there’s no traffic jams, you’re free to drive however much it want
If there’s traffic jams, the more trucks your company have in traffic the lower priority you get for them. That gives everybody access because those with the most trucks can take some off the street to raise the priority for the others a bit, and that in turn gives room to others
It’s like a buffet at Golden Corral versus the ones that send the little plates down a conveyor belt.
The Golden Corral model is far more efficient at scale.
Small data really fast, big data slow
Basicslly the more data you use, the lower priority you are
So the person browsing the Web doesn’t get slowed down by the person redownloading their entire steam library, but if there’s bandwidth for everyone then they all go full speed
The downside is some heavier services need to be as fast as possible for good service, like video calls, while you’re not going to really notice if your game takes another 2 minutes to download (and this is the way stuff is prioritized now by default)
You could split the difference, but it doesn’t really fix the problem, it just fixes the data limiting nonsense. And we should just make that flatly illegal
Really, they should only be able to sell 50mb/s service if their network can provide that to all of their users on at any point in any average day.
So when GTA6 releases, maybe it’s a bit of a slow Internet day, but if they can’t provide what they promised every evening when everyone is streaming TV?
Then they need to start giving people some of their money back. That way they’ll make sure to upgrade their network proactively
Really, they should only be able to sell 50mb/s service if their network can provide that to all of their users on at any point in any average day.
All residential ISPs are over subscribed. If they could provide the full bandwidth to all of their customers simultaneously, then most of that bandwidth would go unused.
And also that would make residential connections expensive as hell and waste resources on every step on the network. I’m on a relatively small ISP but still have symmetric 1Gbps connection. If every customer even on this small ISP had their full bandwidth available to everything all the time they’d need at least several Tbps combined capacity which would take considerable chunk of all the capacity we have on the whole country to abroad just to serve few thousand houses.
As an example, the initial unconstrained window would be measured in minutes:
Small: 1 minute
Medium: 5 minutes
Large: 30 minutesThe sliding window and tally falloff could also vary. It would help the network providers better utilise and monitor their networks, and users can plan for big downloads by keeping their service quiet for a period before they begin.
T-Mobile: “Yeah. So? What are you gonna do about it? Uh huh. Nothing. That’s what I thought, bitch.”
Remember that T-Mobile officially supported Starlink. Thus, it is a technofascist company that openly supports genocide.
Remember that Starlink is used in Ukraine as well as on a lot of wildfire and earthquake sites. The deduction here is a bit too rushed.
the conclusion is the same: break up star link.
from the only current option for shoving that many satellites in the sky?
Seconding the other person. Musk sucks but Starlink is objectively a good thing.
Starlink is objectively a fucking terrible thing, possibly worse than data centers.
Rural connectivity is a good thing, but why do we all pretend it’s cheaper to invent a private space company to launch disposable satellites that burn up into toxic byproducts and need to be refilled every few months so that the sky internet can be controlled and monitored by the same people that want machines to automate all the labor so they can let us die because they hate having to deal with us?
We should run fiber to every home and business.
good luck running fiber to any national parks, boats or planes
I wasn’t thinking of rural connectivity here (I’m not informed enough on that to have an opinion) but more on its uses by Ukraine, in disaster relief and for avoiding censorship in authoritarian states. For example it’s the only way anybody inside Iran not associated with the government can actually get internet.
Starlink ruins the night sky at scale, wastes a massive amount of resources to launch, and requires continuous replacement. In limited usage it is pretty good, but as the intended full replacement of glocbal networks as a whole that it was deaigned to be it is horrible.
Okay that’s fair.
It has its uses, but that doesn’t mean that the FCC should continue to give Musk’s company rural internet grants. Those should go to local fiber PUDs. Musk can fund it on his own.
It also means that you are supporting Musk when you use it, even if it’s the best option. It’s important to remember that.
