AT&T announces 5G will be like home internet, pay more for faster speeds. - Polidicks

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/att-says-5g-will-be-priced-like-home-internet-pay-more-for-faster-speeds/ We dont need net neutrality, the cable companies will regulate themselves!

"Consumers are willing to negotiate with terrorists for Internet", says AT&T CEO, more like it.

If the data is truly unlimited, fine. But it won't be. Cunts.

God damn we need to end this bullshit.

Honestly, as bad as it is for consumers I'm surprised they haven't already done it for 4G. I mean there is no reason for them to offer full 5G speeds for one price. If the slower ones are cheaper overall its actually beneficial for customers as you really don't need full 5G speeds. So as long as its just about the bandwidth and not other crap I would actually be okay with it. Knowing US carriers though it will likely end up be just more expensive though.

So here we fucken go, isn't it.

Tbh I would vastly prefer paying for different speeds than different data limits. but we all know that’s not how it’s gonna be. Pay for data limits and pay for data speeds. this Is the future ashit pie wanted

hot take: i'll allow this if there's truly unlimited data with no throttling ever

Let me pay $20 a month for one line with unlimited data and 20mbits speed and lets go dude.

They will never give up data caps. It is such a massive income earner and they can slowly crank up those prices so the average joe gets used to it. Hell, they'll do the same with home internet - today it is 1TB caps and in 5 years when speeds have doubled it will still be 1TB (want extra data, that's an extra $50 a month? Go over? That's $1 per GB over)

Honestly just nationalize isp and telecoms, they're fucking deadweight cancer.

They tried that and it failed for home internet.

Not all Telcos though please. If the FCC and DOJ would stop fucking approving mergers (Level 3 + Centurylink, AT&T + Time Warner) then things would be a lot better. Also if the government provided funds for local governments to build out their own residential fiber, then we'd be a lot better off, since the real issue is last-mile for most consumers.

I mean it depends on where you live, there's Facepunchers with less than 200GB caps in the USA if I remember correctly. I have a 200TB cap a month which is reasonable but if I were to somehow go over they charge per GB.

In still a 5G skeptic. AFAIK the wavelengths being thinner makes them more suceptible to interference and such. And as always, latency, quality and consistency are way more important than Max bandwidth. Some are billing it as a substitute for proper home internet and I just don't see it.

I think only legacy DSL (ADSL1) customers are stuck with 250GB cap. Those are few and far between compared to 10 years ago. Those are unwanted markets that they would sell in a heartbeat to another teleco.

tfw my internet only has a 2 TB cap with my current policy then again I end up with a few hundred gig left over each month anyway so I guess it's moot? anyway my own providers say we can get unlimited in a year or two once they get the infra set up

Not just some. Cell providers are going to make a genuine push into the home internet space in the next decade. And assuming they can sell it on the consumer side (Like, say bundling a access point with your unlimited phone plan for $50 a month) then I think we'll see non-insignificant buyup. Comcast should be a bit more aggressive on their counter tactics, wherein they've been turning most residential customers' Modem/Router/WAP into open access points. If they expanded this I could see a service from Comcast you can buy, where you get unlimited access to those WAPs, without having a terrestrial connection yourself. I've also seen a lot of support from traditional companies in deploying WISP-style networks, which is a shame since nothing beats terrestrial fiber.

Real rich of them to say this. When he had their god awful capped "internet" it maybe half the advertised speed on a great day, otherwise it was dogshit. I'm still waiting for more ISPs in my area that don't use ancient ass copper lines that slowing every month.

If it were up to me I'd bust up the large telecom companies, and have at minimum two competitors everywhere Right now it's 'Customers will pay this much for this internet because they have no choice' It's like my power company. I have to pay whatever they tell me I have to pay. if I don't like it, I can't just switch companies. I'd just have to go without

I have a better idea (better is subjective of course), nationalize the telephone lines and cable networks, and break up the cable companies. They've grown too large and they do little to improve their networks. As far as I'm concerned, that $700,000,000,000 in tax breaks and fees we allowed them to accrue is price enough for the lines to be re-designated for public use.

I don't understand why we'd even need 5G. 4G is more than fast enough most of the time.

It's a lot better for gaming and game streaming.

Maybe where you are, but unless I'm standing within yelling distance of the tower, I only get ~20 Mbit/s down, and 4 Mbit/s up on a good day. On a bad day it's more like 6/1.

Kind of weird to use mobile connection for gaming, do people really do that? Yikes. Maybe it has more to do with the network itself rather than the 4G technology then, considering I don't have that issue myself?

Action games are becoming pretty popular on phones.

5G isn't really about what we consider ordinary usage scenarios nowadays. 4G mostly meant increased network speed, while 5G as far as I know is focused on allowing a way larger number of devices to be connected reliably and with much lower latency. Smart cars, remote systems and machinery, other IoT stuff, all on the same network.

Which is mostly useless if you ask me. Don't see why we should grant control of our own infrastructure to the Chinese government just so we can have access to those gimmicks.

4G bands are already dogshit in a lot of older buildings due to poor signal penetration so using even higher frequency bands (ie shorter wavelength) is going to make that even worse, even in newer buildings. It's pretty much an unwritten rule among telecom providers that they do not fully support indoor coverage for this reason.

Those things aren't gimmicks, they're the progression of technology. Cars using cellular networks to communicate with each other is basically required for larger automated driving adoption so the vehicles can tell one another what the fuck is going on, rather than relying on just their own sensors. Remote monitoring devices could use cellular networks rather than satellite networks, providing data faster and in larger quantities hopefully. IoT has the potential to be really quite useful, but the use cases themselves still need to evolve quite a bit, either way they could benefit from cellular network access. We don't (and probably shouldn't) need to rely on China for our telecoms infrastructure, but the ability for the network to support a larger number of hosts and not crumble due to the ever increasing bandwidth usage is required. It's a shame our governments are going with what is probably the cheapest option at the expense of safety and quality.