No, it’s more of a subsidy from a giant incumbent in a tightly-regulated market with minimal competition to a new entrant in a highly competitive market. It’s classic leveraging of monopoly power.
What monopoly power does AT&T have? It is extremely easy to switch carriers, and the mobile market is very different than cable, where there is usually only one entrant in any given market.
Other companies would be forced to pay them if they wanted the same treatment.
It’s WORSE that they own HBO Max. ISP’s are able to favor their own content.
This is the big thing. Broadband and wireless providers hate the thought of just being utilities. Utility companies that provide a basic service for a nominal monthly charge are boring and low margin and are just stocks owned by old people. Executives of this company, who have compensation tied to the stock price in many ways, want their stock to be a hip happening tech/media stock so they can reap the personal rewards of the nutballs valuations that tech stocks get.
The big thing is that, say you are some startup, and make some competing product in that space… Something that competes directly with HBO Max, for instance.
You’re at a permanent disadvantage, because the guy controlling the distribution infrastructure can make his own content more attractive to customers. So that makes it harder for you to compete, and supports the development of monopolistic practices among the ISP’s.
This is, ultimately, the crux of net neutrality.
Bingo. Preferential treatment, fast lanes, or any of the other types of schemes, even ones that superficially seem to benefit users in the short run, ultimately harm users in the end.
ISP execs have wet dreams about carving the internet into walled gardens and jacking up rates. They would love to parcel things out cable style.
So they keep trying, trying to find an in. Find a method insidious yet palatable to set precedent. This is them trying to find an apple sweet enough that the public doesn’t notice the poison at the core.
With everything else going on I missed Charter trying to sneak this through.
Eat shit, fuckheads.
“Oh look guys, we are not making as much money on TV packages now because more people are streaming. Wonder what we can do to boost our revenue?”
So many threads about Comcast being utter tapirs, let’s use this one
Regulate the shit out of them, Joe.
These giant utilities only exist because the cities, counties, state and government allow them to. It’s time they be reminded that their purpose is not to hold the country back in order to make larger profits.
If Starlink doesn’t have any data caps then I’d guess Comcast just handed Elon Musk most of their Northeast customers on a plate. I’m one of them. I really, really hate Comcast and if Starlink works as advertised, I’m gone.
Starlink doesn’t want you as a customer for a while. Their first markets will be rural, underserved areas where Comcast doesn’t have a footprint as they scale up.
I imagine it’ll be several years until Starlink is ready to take on millions of customers.
Me too
Doesn’t Starlink still have a delay from ground to sat to ground? And then, of course much less, ground to user? How will that work for online games? MMOs?
There’s a whole thread dedicated to this exact question!
In summary: it will be low enough latency and fast enough, mostly because there’s going to be a lot of them, and they’re not in geostationary orbit, they’re in Low Earth Orbit.
So LEO means handing off to other sats? Won’t that still be an issue?
Each satellite communicates with the four nearest satellites via laser. It’s a crazy mesh network!
Here’s a good explanation, scroll down to “How will Starlink internet work?” section. There’s lots of other good information in that article though.
If you are curious you can look up videos on YouTube from current customers who are testing it out.
Path in the near term is ~550km up to satellite in orbit (1.8 ms), ~550 km from satellite to groundstation, and from groundstation it’s like any other ISP. So it’s adding maybe 4 ms of latency compared to a terrestrial ISP. When they get inter-satellite lasers and switching (which may be 5 years out or more…) latency on long-distance routes could be lower than terrestrial internet, since light travels faster in space than in fiber optics.
Not good enough. Seize the companies, find some charges to jail the execs for life, and turn them into publicly owned utilities.