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In reply to the discussion: New Yorker: "A Clear Violation of Obama's Promise" [View all]jeff47
(26,549 posts)But it does a lot more than net neutrality.
When talking about ISPs, the big loss is making it much more difficult for ISPs to create tiers of service. Doesn't sound like much, right? Who cares if they have to offer everyone the same 10 Mbps?
It matters because we don't get network upgrades. Those cost money. And companies rolled out upgrades in order to support the higher-speed tiers. Those rollouts make the next set of upgrades cheaper - the hardware becomes "common", and they figure out the best way to do the upgrades.
It's kinda like Tesla's model: The insanely-expensive roadster let them figure out how to make the cars cheaper, resulting in the slightly-neruotically-expensive sedan. Which will let them figure out how to make a model that is merely "pricey", and so on.
Time Warner cable used to offer 10Mbps as their service. That was all you could get. Then they started tiered service - if you want to spend a shitload of money, you could get 100Mbps. That required TWC to upgrade their network. That hardware upgrade let them change their 10Mbps "normal" service to 15Mbps. Same cost, or at least cost on the same growth that the 10Mbps service was following.
So is net neutrality worth losing tiers, and thus upgrades?
If "normal" goes from 10Mbps to 15Mbps, then no.
If "normal" goes from 10Mbps to 1000Mbps, then yes - even the throttled data would be much faster.
What speed would we realistically get? Hell if I know. We'd need some coverage that wasn't "OMG!!! FCC SUX!!!!!" to find out what the most realistic result would be. From there we can figure out which route is better for us.
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