Portuguese ISP Shows What The Net Looks Like Without Net Neutrality (boingboing.net) 244
"In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages," argues a California congressman -- retweeting a stunning graphic. An anonymous reader quotes BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow:
Since 2006, Net Neutrality activists have been warning that a non-Neutral internet will be an invitation to ISPs to create "plans" where you have to choose which established services you can access, shutting out new entrants to the market and allowing the companies with the deepest pockets to permanently dominate the internet... the Portuguese non-neutral ISP MEO has mistaken a warning for a suggestion, and offers a series of "plans" for its mobile data service where you pay €5 to access a handful of messaging services, €5 more to use social media; and €5 more for video-streaming services.
The congressman notes this arrangement offers "a huge advantage for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in front of people, which stifles innovation."
The congressman notes this arrangement offers "a huge advantage for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in front of people, which stifles innovation."
The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically, if you don't take care of your working class somebody's gonna come along to do it for you, and you won't like what that somebody does to you and yours.
Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. When your subjects start feeling pain, then you feel pain, and in the worst way because they have nothing to lose.
Lets be honest here, the primary overwhelming, key factor in the US is healthcare. When a doctor's appointment costs $500 because you don't have insurance but only $20 if you do (not because they insurance is actually paying anything, it's just a price reduction to the actual cost), then you know your society is 100%, totally, fucked up.
Irrational healthcare pricing (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent up...
My wife had some blood tests done a few years ago, which initially were not covered by insurance. Cost to us: $1047.00; the provider helpfully offered a payment plan.
After much discussion and expenditure of hours we don't really have to spare, insurance covered the blood tests. Cost to the insurance company: $44.00, our copay was $4.00
So if your name is "anthem", $44.00; if your name is "nobody", $1047.00.
23.8 to 1.
This system is beyond fucked, it is simple ordinary Mafia extortion: Your money or your life.
Very similar to the net neutrality question, where the golden rule applies: He who invests properly in congressional races makes the rules.
The 2006 Supreme Court ruling about campaign donations was a silver-plated invitation to the party for a few, and a red hot poker for the asses of the many.
Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
And killing net neutrality takes away one of the few open opportunities people had to improve their lively hood, by concentrating power to control human communication into the hands of select few who want to keep the general population living paycheck to paycheck, which is one of the few ways to enslave them.
Very, very few people can take advantage (Score:4, Insightful)
Try telling somebody making $8/hr at Walmart who's only skills are blue collar ones that they can go off and be the next Zuckerberg. They'll actually agree with you because their pride won't let them admit that it's impossible; that ship sailed. But when that person goes to the polls and he/she's all alone she's going to pull the anti-NN lever because those folks are promising them jobs they know they can actually get and do. And that's sort of the problem. Folks like you look at the polls and see people support NN because they like the dreams you're selling, but they don't really believe in it. That's half of why Trump one. Millions of people who wouldn't admit they're gonna vote for him...
Vote for Net Neutrality, write/call reps for NN. (Score:2)
Net neutrality is a critical issue that will determine people's access to the Internet—a network that has gone from being largely unknown and unpopular to indispensable even for the poor (one might argue particularly for the poor). Lots of people with computers of any size will tell you that the number one thing they do with their computers depends on the Internet (they may not word exactly that way, but anyone who u
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Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you understand - we're talking about people who are living paycheck to paycheck living in an apartment, buying food, utilities, medical insurance, and getting by with an 11 year-old car.
They did NOT chose to be in that position. They were sold economic fairy tales of how globalization will raise everyone's standard of living up. Instead, most of the gains are going to the economic top.
Now why many of them voted for a billionaire reality TV personality is a whole different discussion.
And remember here in the States, we don't have the social safety nets that much of Europeans do.
Medical is all on us until we hit 67. Most of us are buried under student loans - even if we went to a state school and graduated with a marketable degree.
We must own cars in most of the country.
And housing costs have outstripped regular people's pay. The biggest problem in my Metro-Atlanta, Georgia, USA county is that the typical working class person can't afford to live here. We actually have homeless families. And it's because the free-market for their labor says they get paid shit and the free-market for housing says they pay dear.
We in tech are lucky enough to have high paying skillsets (and the parents who gave us the talents to do them) where we don't notice what is going on outside of our little bubbles.
This world wide wealth disparity will not end well. We are seeing the problems already: social unrest, people like Trump being elected, what's going on in Venezuela, ....
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today billions of people have them. I would argue that in some regards people are better off, even the poor
Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
Being forced to carry a surveillance device so you can participate in society is not an improvement.
Re: The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:2, Interesting)
The difference between land and an iPhone is night and say.
An iPhone contributes to an employee's productivity. The ability of an employee to buy land offers little benefit to the employer.
An iPhone costs a little under $1,000, and being company owned can be reallocated if the employee leaves before the phone's useful life ends.
A piece of land costs at least twice as much as an iPhone, plus the cost of developing the land. Devel
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Having somewhere for their employees to live is very valuable for a company... That's why many used to build houses for their staff.
If people can't afford to live near where they work, then they will either suffer long commutes (resulting in tired and frustrated employees), or they will choose to work elsewhere. Employers should very carefully consider the availability of affordable housing for their employees.
Re: The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:2)
Land here is hundreds of thousands an acre.
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I would argue that in some regards people are better off, even the poor
People are WAY better off, ESPECIALLY the poor.
Don't mistake what is happening in America (and Europe) for what is happening worldwide. Over the last 20 years, nearly everyone is doing better, with the biggest gains going to the poorest people earning between $0 and $3 per day. The only "losers" have been unskilled poor people in rich countries, which is only about 5% of the global population. By worldwide standards, the American poverty line puts you at about the 85% level of global income: They are "r
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I said that a few days ago and got modded troll when it should be insightful.instead of tryin to keep up with the joneses,maybe try just doing you and you will see it isn't so bad
I noticed they say "ISP"s, but this is really mobile providers, not cable ISP. Also, the plans themselves seem pretty reasonably priced, and provide users with choice. Seems to me like this is more a twitter reaction than a thoughtful one. Net Neutrality does not prevent services from separating traffic types, only from treating same type traffic different depending on the source.
/. articles that are offended that the FCC in the US moved to credit mobile services as
Its also funny because there have been
Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
The absolute numbers are nearly meangless. If you make $10 a month but a weeks groceries cost $0.50 and a luxury apartment runs $2.00, you're doing quite well. If you make $5000/month but rent is $4500 for a hole in the wall and food is $400/week, you're in deep guano.
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Or you have a family and your employment status recently changed.
Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking a deliberately simple analogy literally is what is absurd. My implication is that someone making 60K in SF may be worse off than someone making 15K in a developing nation.
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You should probably ask your mommy or daddy to explain analogies to you.
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Rich and poor are usually measured relative to the people in your neighbourhood, not the people far way in totally different living comditions.
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Here in this country there are people who can't afford rent and food on a full time job.
Over the last 20 years, food prices in America have gone DOWN. Per square foot, housing prices are unchanged [mentorworks.ca]. Houses are more expensive mostly because they are bigger. Housing prices have soared in some coastal cities (which also tend to have high incomes), but in most of America, food and housing are more affordable than ever before.
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Owning a cellphone is hardly a great indicator of being "better off."
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You need a data plan or live somewhere where it is easy to leach WiFi. Data is expensive for the poor. My cheap pay as you go plan costs $10 for 60 MBs, you know how fast you can go through 60MBs in this day of the average web site being 5+MBs?
Sure I have a cheap cell phone, it's another bill to pay and hardly used.
What's scary is the kids who used to hang out at the park now hang out on facebook. It's hard for me to see that as an improvement. I also have a hard time seeing parents needing to check up on t
Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
LOL how incredibly privileged you must be to believe this. You greatly overestimate not only the number and quality of jobs available, but the number of employers who won't instantly circle-file any application that doesn't list a college degree (of the specific level they're looking for - you could be overqualified just as easily as you could be underqualified). You have a libertarian's child's understanding of the job market and I'm guessing no Gen. Y friends who aren't similarly overprivileged.
Re: The trouble with Net Neutrality (Score:2)
I am poor (Score:2)
You make a good point about how much better and more stuff we have than we used to, and even than most humans alive right now do. That's not the problem.
The problem is that people living hand-to-mouth are at risk of catastrophic loss because of minor incidents. A simple accident resulting in a broken leg can cause a family to lose a week's income, possibly more depending on the job. Losing a week's income can result in losing their car to repossession or their housing to eviction or foreclosure (most peo
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I don't think you understand
I don't think you read to the end of my post.
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It's not completely irrelevant (Score:2)
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Well, hmm, need jobs, how about more internet wiring, more bandwidth, greater access, the best infrastructure in the world how about fucking that instead of fucking American wars all of the fucking god damned place as a truly insane job creation scheme because a handful of psychopaths profit by it. The internet has become an essential part of modern infrastructure just like roads. It affects property values by between 5% and 10% and so it cost property owners tens of thousands of dollars difference for a co
Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
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but when the basic data is like 10gb and overages are $10/GB but is that data meter tested to be fair like gas pumps are?
Re:Not quite (Score:4, Interesting)
The fundamental with net neutrality is not all traffic is equally cheap or expensive to transport.
Suppose I have VDSL2 with AT&T U-verse, and so does my friend who lives in my neighborhood (served from the same VRAD). If we open a peer-to-peer connection with each other, our traffic could theoretically run through the VRAD's local switch fabric without even touching its fiber backhaul. We could fully saturate our upstream connectivity to the VRAD without having the slightest impact on anybody else.
Now, take it up a level. Friend #2 is also a U-verse customer, but he's a few blocks away... served by a different VRAD, but both of our VRADs run fiber through the same central office 3 miles away. In this case, our traffic might have some impact on others sharing our respective VRADs, but it's still running entirely over AT&T's local loop, whose raw capacity vastly exceeds anything individual users could even fantasize about doing.
OK, now take it a level higher. Friend #3 is a U-verse customer who lives 10 miles away. Our P2P traffic goes from home to VRAD to CO, from CO to AT&T's regional NOC, to CO to VRAD to home. At this point, it might have a meaningful impact on other customers, but it's still likely to be trivial because it's still traveling entirely over AT&T's own local backhaul.
Time to get a bit more complicated. Friend #4 lives across the street, but gets his internet through Comcast. Our P2P traffic goes from house to VRAD to CO to AT&T NOC, then somehow gets to NAP of the Americas in Miami, where it gets passed along to Comcast, who relays it to THEIR regional NOC, sends it to my friend's neighborhood, and sends the final few thousand feet over coax. In this case, NOTA will pile on some charges of their own to exchange traffic between AT&T and Comcast, but they're still fairly low.
Now, let's assume I'm streaming video from Netflix. Netflix pays to bring their own fiber into AT&T's NOC and probably colocates their own server to further reduce and cache the amount that has to be backhauled from minute to minute. From AT&T's perspective, this isn't much different than the scenario with friend #3... Netflix has their own network connection into AT&T, so the only AT&T backhaul that gets used is from NOC to CO to VRAD.
Finally, let's suppose someone starts their own guerrilla VOD streaming service with a name like "Voogle". Voogle's datacenter is in Kansas City, and their network service provider has to either peer privately with AT&T (and Comcast, since my friends with Comcast watch them too), or they have to find some other mutual interexchange point. As I understand it, public exchange points (like MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST) no longer exist, and all exchange points (in the US, at least) are now privately peered & leave it up to the networks to negotiate their own traffic carriage agreements. So... Voogle's NSP has to negotiate peering and transport arrangements to AT&T and Comcast (because both are big enough to say, "you need us more than we need you"). If Voogle's traffic is light, their NSP probably won't charge them much. If Voogle is streaming 4k video to thousands of customers, their NSP is likely to charge them quite a bit.
In any case, the "Voogle" case is no worse than the scenario with friend #4... Voogle's traffic originates on NEITHER AT&T nor Comcast, and it's up to Voogle to figure out how to affordably GET their traffic to the regional datacenters of AT&T and Comcast (or at least, to network exchange points into which AT&T and Comcast have their own abundant connectivity). From the perspective of AT&T and Comcast, it's more expensive than the "Netflix" scenario (because Voogle isn't big enough to peer with them directly), but it's no WORSE than a peer to peer connection between an arbitrary AT&T customer and an arbitrary Comcast customer.
Things get messier with international traffic (say, between a Comcast customer in Miami and a server farm in London or Bangalore), but dependin
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The fundamental [issue?] with net neutrality is not all traffic is equally cheap or expensive to transport.
Not sure why you needed a full page to explain that, it's pretty obvious. Net neutrality means you pay the same whether you have a cheap or expensive mix of traffic. Note that this typically only means your half though, like if you're video chatting with someone in New Zealand you pay a bit to reach "the backbone" and they generally pay more because it's harder to reach. Still you have content services like Netflix, YouTube, Spotify and CDNs like CloudFlare and Akami who can set up local servers for really
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All the technicalities in that big explanation really showed where the point comes from, and I totally agree with the reply that in essence, ISPs want to be gatekeepers. They are using this gatekeepr powers not get the average revenue - they are trying to have competitive offers with their gatekeeping in order to acquire more users or more revenue and have an economy of scale that surpasses the average. Because that is the only thing their investors really care about: growing revenues. They are creating dem
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Net neutrality means you pay the same whether you have a cheap or expensive mix of traffic.
Absolutely wrong. NN means all traffic of any given type is treated equally. "cost' of the traffic is not even considered. NN means all video traffic is treated equally, etc. It does not prevent treating video traffic differently than non-video traffic, nor bundling of traffic types.
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If Voogle's traffic is light, their NSP probably won't charge them much. If Voogle is streaming 4k video to thousands of customers, their NSP is likely to charge them quite a bit.
That was way too much text to read, but this point is wrong. NSP's already have peering arrangements with each other, and the charges are generally based on net difference (upload/download etc).
When I worked for a large ISP, we used to offer free hosting to high volume services to balance out the peering numbers and reduce our peering fees because our downloads were much, much more than uploads.
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10 GB? WTF?
The highest data plan I've been able to find in Germany sits at 8 GB. The average plan is 500 MB to 1 GB monthly.
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so just 1 os update and you are over? WTF!
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The simple fact you have to bring piracy here shows the kind of interesta you seem to have on the subject. You are doing the same as ISPs are: being all judgmental on what's a fair internet use, and telling your own version of how decent people should use the internet. Big problem is you or nobody else shouldn't get to police around everyone else's type of use.
ISPs just assumed everyone would play the game where they get rich providing a bad service which gets cheaper with every tech bump, but they could st
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There was an OR statement not an AND statement. I thought this was a site for geeks.
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Wait what? "believe it or not"? That's the only OR on your sentence. What are you implying?
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Not if this is a translation error. I don't speak Portuguese so can't go check, but is it possible the ISP is naming data cap tiers something like Messaging (200-500 MB/month), Social Networking (500-1000 MB/month) and Video (1 GB+/month)?
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It used to be, here in Portugal we had international vs national traffic quotas for at least 10y, and it was one of the main showstoppers of our internet usage patterns. This particular distinction was actually the most relevant back then. It was starting to become universally acknowleged as a censorship policy by unsavy users, and then big com corp had to change plans, especially since external ISPs (e. g. Vodafone) started entering the market and bringing international standards around. People wised up,
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I'm gonna give tou 2 examples on how this affected Portuguese use patterns:
P2P, online gaming, streaming video and music users users would concentrate use overnight in order to abuse the "happy hour" of international traffic de-cap that plans allowed. This is an example of what pundits will call "bad use so good riddance",which imho is hipocrisy.
Now I'll give you the example where there was impact to good practices: software as a service, such as cloud storage or remote machines never caught traction in Por
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Of course, you have to boil the frog slowly.
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Not the first (Score:3)
I remember Australian mobile phone providers starting with the social networking craze by offering "Free Facebook" as part of their crappy packages. Sucks if you're a Facebook competitor.
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I'm from Portugal. This week I accidentally activated samsung cloud backup on my phone. Needless to say my photos and videos ate through my home data cap and now I get 2001 speeds until after tomorrow. Yet if I had used my provider's cloud backup plan, which just happens to be MEO, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FREE TRAFFIC. Now imagine I'm a user or a company that relies on backups for everyday tasks and is willing to pay for it, which service you think I will be purchasing since all I have is this ISP...
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Cellular is still a luxury internet connection (due to it being a finite resource) and i think people forget that.
Depends where you live. Once you used to something it's no longer luxury.
Where I live we've had great cellular wireless for years, and is considered as essential as roads and electricity. Some other places might not be as advance so to them it still is. I know when I travel I feel like going back in time because some so called 'developed' countries still don't have ubiquitous 4G everywhere.
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Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Based on what I can gather, the way this plan works is that they offer some amount of bandwidth to the base plan for the general internet, then for a small amount, you can have more bandwidth specifically for particular services at a discounted rate vs. the normal overage rate. This will inevitably lead to fully walled gardens, but it isn't quite there yet. I suspect that they are trying to prevent people from using random peer to peer streaming services that put a strain on every available upstream link, and instead trying to limit where the excessive bandwidth is coming, so they can manage things better. It isn't about access exactly, but billing and cost.
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It is about access. From a Portuguese who is forced to use MEO in a not that secluded rural area, and has no other internet link available, it is nothing short of censorship.
But city cats will never understand because of their evolved ways of life on fiber optics. It's really easy to close your eyes to bad policy making in the comfort of your 200mbps 20 bucks plan.
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^ and THAT is the Net Neutrality discussion in a nutshell.
Misleading "stunning facts" spun in a very narrow context when they aren't outright lies.
I don't have a dog in this fight; I think both sides are guilty of spinning the shit out of this issue.
Personally, I believe the moment these ISPs start reviewing content, they should be treated no longer as 'common carriers' and thus no longer protected from the consequences of such content.
Right now, telephones are common carriers: we don't sue AT&T because
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The prices don't seem too unreasonable:
Smart net (the packaging at issue) gives you 10GB for 4.99 Euro
General bandwidth appears to be 2GB for 9.99 Euro or up to 30GB for 30 Euro
Clearly the "special" access plans are cheaper, but it isn't unreasonable the prices for the bandwidth without the smart packages.
First it was an idea. (Score:3)
meo makes you .. (Score:2)
I've, erm, encountered a German company called Meo too.
meo.de if you're feeling curious.
Unbundling cable (Score:2)
So, we demand that cable become unbundled so we don't have to get the channels we don't want, but when a mobile service offers what is essentially unbundling (cheaper access to just the sites you regularly use, still no restrictions on everything else) we complain we're getting screwed over.
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First, the economies of scale and the technical aspects of landline vs mobile are very different. Mobile is still a premium service for something that is actually easier to deploy to ISPs.
Second, this isn't unbundling. These smart plans are actually addons. You will need to have either a standalone monthly phone plan or a 5-play service with triple play at home, phone and mobile data, which usually costs 70e around here for, say 100 channels, 100mbs at home, 2gb mobile and unlimited national calls. So this
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It's not a data plan, it's an add on. You will have to pay a hefty plan for a mere 1-2gb before you even get access to these "smart" add ons
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Actually my fellow countryman, the average might be that, but the paycheck 20% of the population gets is minimum wage (~500). They expect 20% of the population to pay their 30bucks phone+data plan with 2gb undiscriminate allowance, then force them to pay one of these add ons. And maybe after that they still have money for food, electricity, rent or mortgage. God forbid if you have kids that also need a data plan.
Looks more like a "Lack of Competition" issue (Score:2)
This kind of problem can only exist when there are functional monopolies.
Is this only being done by Portugal Telecom or is Sonaecom doing it as well? (I can't read Portuguese).
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Everyone is doing it, but PT started doing it originally with their Meo Cloud, Meo Music and other services that never got traction when plans were cheaper and had more data.
Vodafone and NOS (SONAECOM) started doing this because PT has 50%chunk on mobile and a quasi-monopoly in rural areas, so they started playing their game and also using outrageously aggressive promotions in order to cope with ANACOMs protection of PT.
VODAFONE offers free Spotify premium on 12bucks/month mobile+data plans (unlimited calls
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Actually, this whole shenanigans started with national vs overseas traffic a decade ago. When more players entered the market and ate through PTs monopoly since they didn't havr that cap, that's when ANACOM started protecting the (back then) state owned PT and allowing unfair game such as this. PT is no longer state owned (no majority nor golden share), but the buyers not only got solid protectionist clauses with the discount purchase, they also happen to be tight friends with the Portuguese pollitician com
You mean better choices for consumers??? (Score:2)
It seems like once again, Slashdot NN proponents do not have the slightest clue what they are talking about.
Those plans are to choose which services you would like to not count against your data plan - you can still use ANY service you like even if you choose none.
Wouldn't it be nice if you planned to watch a lot of video to say, yes for $4.99/month don't count that against my data allowance? How is tha in any way a bad thing to let the consumer have more flexible access and payment?
If that's what the wor
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Wouldn't it be nice if you planned to watch a lot of video to say, yes for $4.99/month don't count that against my data allowance? How is tha in any way a bad thing to let the consumer have more flexible access and payment?
What criteria does a video provider not on the list, such as your cousin's MediaGoblin server, need to meet in order to be added to the list?
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Sufficient customer demand.
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Making people WANT something is very easy when you control the prices of access to that something
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Regulation is to be made by entities without conflict of interest, such as for-profits or owners of competing service in the included traffic.
If "video" traffic is screwing uo the medical and educational industry, or even the IRS systems, it has to be the state to mandate limits in "video" traffic. Is thay fair and clear enough for you?
Fake news ... (Score:2)
Everyone with a few brain cells knows: Portugal is in the EU.
So yes: they have net neutrality, facepalm.
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In case you didn't know, communication technologies is one of the few things the EU has no direct control because it depends on ratification by individual states's communication regulatory authority (analogous to the FCC for the US).
In Portugal, I have seen first hand ANACOM giving the finger to European Comission AND the EU members regulatory association at the same time. One example is roaming charges, which thr EU will say Portugal no longer has, but we basically have a fraction of our mobile plans when
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Technologies is ot the same as net neutrality.
No idea about your roaming charges ... if you still have them, you should sue in an eu court.
Net Neutrality == Free Market (Score:4, Insightful)
Only on a level playing field new players can join, increasing competition and offering the experience of a truly free market. Anyone opposing net neutrality necessarily opposes a free market.
A little reversal...silver lining? (Score:2)
Sweet Christmas, pay me $20/mo not to use FB or Youtube on my mobile? I'm already doing that, please sign me up and send me the cheques!!
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Not portuguese (Score:2)
This company was bought by the French ISP Altice who introduced sweeping changes to everything and fired people etc.
Re: Bologna. (Score:2)
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Trumpflakes get all fired up and confused when confronted with facts.
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Before you say without government subsidies, read my comment "juicy tale from a local"
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Oh and you missed a tibit there: you can only have these smart plans when already paying a monthly subscription that costs upwards of 25 bucks (for a miserable 3gb) with a 2y contract, or 50 for the same. So no, it's noy a mobile plan for 5 bucks... It's an add on
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Caríssimo, antes de vires mandar postas informa-te da sociedade em que vives
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And the difference is what now? If you get unlimited data to $content_provider_A and not even the option to pay for it for $content_provider_B, which one will you use?
Imagine you could get Netflix on an unmetered link but any content you get from Amazon Prime counts against your contingent. So which one will you get?
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If that's an option to you, you're one of the lucky few.
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Had you experienced first hand Internet service in Portugal, you would very much know that this is discrimination of traffic.
We have data caps for traffic types. Before it used to be for international vs national traffic on land lines, now it's by io range or domain for "privileged" services.
Now, even someone reading Portuguese wouldn't get this from the article, but you come here and bash it so Im assuming you're an interested party
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Not yet. It's still being worked on. And fought tooth and nail by, well, you guessed who.
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Exactly, and Portuguese ISPs are top lobbyists in EU policy. Recently we had a big long cry about how the end of roaming charges would affect Portuguese economu the most. Somehow we did get roaming charges abolished, but somehow national ISPs got away with making plans behave MUCH different while abroad vs while in Portugal. Which is exactly the opposite of what was intended with the non-roaming charges bill...
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Yeap, these plans go leaps and bounds to not look discriminatory. But as I said elsewhere, communications still is something the EU tries to make universally policed, but in practice isn't. National regulators still have final say, with power so broad even local government has issues policing them. I am actually quite sure recent efforts to make it so are one of the top reasons so many britons ganged up for the brexit, but this is speculation
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I'm guessing the VPN Package is the most expensive.
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Putting a discount price in discriminatory traffic is exactly the same as making indiscriminate plans prohibitive. Why does every single argument here states "oh but you have 60euro plans that will give you the same traffic for whatever service and not just those services?" Do you think the average portuguese makes 2k like in the US? We have a 2digit poverty rate and the paycheck you see the most people is the minimum wage (~500 euro). I think about 20% of employed populatiob makes minimum wage despite the
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It's a "smart" plan? Didn't you visit the link? It's for smart people that only need youtube and video streaming, and are smart enough that they get more by paying cheap. You can't be smart for every service though, because thay would require buying all plans for a lot of buck, and you can't also be non-standard because only those services are supported. Smart is falling in line these days, as defined by big com corps
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Let's go a bit farther back and re-read that glorious book. Say it with me: nineteen eighty four.
It's amazing how easy media manipulation is making us forget the classics. And I mean classic basic human rights