Amazon looking to launch 3,236 low-orbit satellites

You see,

There is no point in providers limiting the Internet they give to people.

5G. Low-earth orbit satellite. Or wired. Ten years from now, the only selling point each will have is that they are able to give MORE of it to you than the competition.

This is not going to be a fight over how slow or limited they can be in order to eke out cash. All winners will be very fast and completely unlimited. The only fight will be between very fast and extremely goddamn fast.



*except when limited by governments, which in the case of satellite will be interesting

Well, when the government discovers that they can take a slice of the money as well, they'd definitely limit it.

They can't. The communication is to a satellite, instead of the local phone company which they operate or regulate.

gonna be hella interesting

They are going to expect me to check email when I am in the boonies

Well, let's wait and see how far they're willing to go to regulate things further.

By the way, is the do we have the fastest internet connection in the whole world?

"We" being America? Definitely not.

Just think, only a couple years ago we were number 14, and now were all the way up to number 20. Yay team! USA! USA!

We care about Mbps because we were told that was the number to care about, and I suppose in one sense it is the best available metric.

But if you have a 6 lane driveway connected to a 2 lane road, the 6 lanes aren't very interesting...

And if the road has 6 lanes but only goes to Schenectady that isn't very interesting...

If you only have one car, and the speed limit is 15, the number of lanes is entirely irrelevant.

Streaming HD video takes about 5Mbps, Ultra HD takes about 25Mbps, nothing else that is transferred takes that level of bandwidth for an extended period of time.

So, in 2019, if you have 25Mbps and are only using it yourself, there will be zero difference to you if you move to a 1000Mbps connection. The experience will be identical.

You may have to buy 1000 to get 25, though.

Because the ISPs backbone is also not being upgraded as it is elsewhere in the world.

Long before benefits of higher speed can be realized, first those higher speeds must be available.

Using your logic, we should all still be using 2 Mb DSL. Since that also did everything we needed fast enough. Since that even permitted 'movies on demand' in the 1980s. Proof that we never needed any faster internet then or today. Clearly high speed internet has been a scam.

Using your logic, we do not need 5G phones. 3G has always been more than sufficient. It is good that Huawei has wasted all that money to become the world leader in mobile phones. Nobody needs it.

Nobody needs more than 140 characters to make valid statements. Trump proves it. It must be true.

Hey, those countries that have more bandwidth than us, what are they doing with it that we aren't doing with ours?

*crickets*

~

In the past, there were always times where you could say, "If only everybody had 10 times the bandwidth, we'd be able to give them X". In 1995 we said that about images on web pages. In 1998 we said that about large images on web pages. In 2003 we said that about streaming audio. In 2010 we said that about streaming video. But in 2019, we don't say that about anything in particular.

Funny thing, innovation. Doesn't always go in a straight line.

~

Think about it, porn always leads the way in communication technologies. But there is nobody (AFAIK) offering any porn that's more bandwidth-consuming than your average Netflix.

My friend has gigabit internet from FIOS, he actually HAS 10 times the bandwidth than we do. Where is his porn app that uses all that bandwidth? There isn't one! What does he do with his gigabit service? Same thing we all do, and he uses the same amount of bandwidth doing it.

I have 100 up and down from Verizon because I subscribed to 75 up and down, but they decided to move everyone with 75 up to 100 at the same price.
Sam Knows tells be it hasn't dropped below 98 in the last six months.

Evidently this throttling has not become a noticeable problem so far, all hail the wise toad. However, it bothers me that they have this in their arsenal, why would they spend millions fighting this restriction if they weren't going to use it? Just to have it as an option? Just because they fight any and all regulation?

I had to laugh at the commercials for online gambling in NJ. They have various supposedly real players telling you it's safe and honest yada yada yada. Then one woman comes up with,"It's regulated by the state". :facepalm:

I hear ya. I just wish my streaming videos wouldn't auto-drop in quality every couple of minutes while the buffering catches back up. It goes blurry for 10 seconds at a time and it's annoying. First world problems, I know.

They want to stream games now, but the main problem there is latency, not bandwidth.