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| Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 21:44:37 -0500
From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday
Message-ID: <1nrgv5l7dwc7b.1in9d0ouo0jq9.dlg@40tude.net>
On Fri, 30 Jan 2015 20:59:47 -0500, Barry Margolin wrote:
> When enough people use it in the formerly wrong way, it becomes
> "right"
Sorry: no matter how many sales 'droids intend "unlimited" to mean
"throttled each month to 100 Kbps after the first 500 MB in traffic",
that is not now, was never, and never will be, what "unlimited" means
:-) .
Cheers, -- tlvp
--
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
|
| Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2015 10:19:55 -0500
From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday
Message-ID: <20150201151955.GA3689@telecom.csail.mit.edu>
On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 09:44:37PM -0500, tlvp wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2015 20:59:47 -0500, Barry Margolin wrote:
>
> > When enough people use it in the formerly wrong way, it becomes
> > "right"
>
> Sorry: no matter how many sales 'droids intend "unlimited" to mean
> "throttled each month to 100 Kbps after the first 500 MB in traffic",
> that is not now, was never, and never will be, what "unlimited" means
> :-) .
Yes, but ...
... what, exactly, does "unlimited" mean?
This might seem like an obvious question. It's not.
Does "unlimited" mean "without limits"?
Obviously not: there are limits imposed by the technology which is
currently deployed, by Claude Shannon, by government regulation, and
by such mundane factors as battery capacity, transmitter power, and
the human capacity to process and absorb information.
Does "unlimited" mean "all the bandwidth we have anytime you want it"?
Obviously not: some of the bandwitch has to be reserved for control
signals, for voice calls, for E911 position reporting, and for other
"unlimited" users whom are surfing the net at the same time.
Does "unlimited" mean "Not subject to rate caps"?
Obviously not: any shared-use system has to have rate caps. That's the
only way to avoid bandwidth hogs and the Tragedy of the Commons.
There's no way around it: "unlimited" is "impossible".
Bill
--
Bill Horne
(Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly)
|
| Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2015 10:19:26 -0800
From: John David Galt <jdg@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday
Message-ID: <malqne$hbv$1@blue-new.rahul.net>
On 2015-02-01 07:19, Bill Horne wrote:
> Does "unlimited" mean "Not subject to rate caps"?
Yes. That may be an unrealistic promise, but the companies that offer
it have promised it anyway.
> Obviously not: any shared-use system has to have rate caps. That's the
> only way to avoid bandwidth hogs and the Tragedy of the Commons.
>
> There's no way around it: "unlimited" is "impossible".
And so we can assume that Real Soon Now, all those companies will
withdraw their dishonest "unlimited" offers and start telling people, in
their ads, exactly what the limit is and exactly what will happen
(whether that is throttling, or extra charges, or both) to customers who
go over that limit.
Then we'll finally have honest competition, and the bidding by high-use
customers for the additional capacity they want can begin in earnest.
(Perhaps resulting in the building of more capacity, if it will pay to
build it.)
This is why the TracFone ruling is a major Good Thing for consumers.
|
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2015 17:29:46 +0000 (UTC)
From: wollman@bimajority.org (Garrett Wollman)
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday
Message-ID: <malnqa$2jcc$1@grapevine.csail.mit.edu>
In article <20150201151955.GA3689@telecom.csail.mit.edu>,
Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> wrote:
>Does "unlimited" mean "Not subject to rate caps"?
>
>Obviously not: any shared-use system has to have rate caps. That's the
>only way to avoid bandwidth hogs and the Tragedy of the Commons.
Actually, no, that's not the case. Obvious counterexample: TCP, which
has rate control, but no rate cap. In an uncongested channel,
given time,[1] TCP will send at the maximum rate, and if sharing with
other (correct) TCP implementations, it will automatically find the
"fair share" transmission rate (which is the maximum rate that does
not induce congestion).
This has actually been formalized: there's a class of rate-control
algorithms known variously as "TCP friendly" or "TCP compatible" which
have this convergence property provided that the vast majority
(doesn't have to be all) of competing traffic employs a similar
rate-control algorithm. It's entirely possible that there exist other
classes of rate-control algorithms with the same property within-class
but that don't play nice with TCP. (And by "TCP" here, we're
specifically referring to the post-Van Jacobson TCP with congestion
avoidance.)
-GAWollman
[1] Sometimes, it takes too much time, and a great deal of recent work
on TCP has gone into finding the channel capacity faster and more
accurately without losing the fairness property over congested links.
--
Garrett A. Wollman
wollman@bimajority.org
Opinions not shared by
my employers.
|
What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
repeated, than the story of a large research program
that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
|
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