This has little to nothing to do with net neutrality, which refers to back end L1 and L2 network interconnections.
Comment on I have unlimited cellular data on my phone but not if I use it as a hotspot.
tacostrange@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
This is why we need net neutrality
TWeaK@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Uranium3006@kbin.social 3 months ago
what are you talking about? that makes no sense
TheBeege@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It was a bad explanation, assuming you had knowledge of network infrastructure things, but it does make sense. I’ll explain things if you’re interested.
Net neutrality is the idea that ISPs must treat all content providers equally. Your phone is not a content provider (most likely. You could run a web server on your phone, but… no). YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, TikTok, and your weird uncle’s WordPress site are content providers. Without net neutrality, ISPs can say, “Hey YouTube, people request a ton of traffic from you on our network. Pay up or we’ll slow down people’s connections to you.” The “neutrality” part means that ISPs must be neutral towards content providers, not discriminating against them for being high demand by consumers.
For the L1 and L2 part, that’s the networking infrastructure. The connection to your home is just tiny cables. I don’t recall how many layers there are, but it’s just “last mile” infrastructure. The network infrastructure between regions of the country or across the ocean are giant, giant cables managed by internet service providers you’ve never heard of. They’re the kind of providers that connect AT&T to Comcast. These are considered L1 or L2 providers. The data centers of giant companies, like Google for YouTube’s case, often pay these L1 or L2 providers to plug directly into their data centers. Why? Those providers are using the biggest, fastest cables to ferry bits and bytes across the planet. You might be pulling gigs from YouTube, but YouTube is putting out… shit, I don’t even know. Is there a terabyte connection? Maybe even petabyte? That sounds crazy. I dunno, I failed Google’s interview question where they asked me to estimate how much storage does Google Drive use globally. Anyway, I hope that gives you an idea of what L1 and L2 providers are.
I’m not a network infrastructure guy, though. If someone who actually knows what they’re talking about has corrections, I’d love to learn where I’m wrong
TWeaK@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Net neutrality is about service to last mile customers, but it is based upon interconnection agreements across the L1 and L2 level.
ISP’s pay for a connection to L1 and L2, so their users (who pay ISP’s) can access content on those networks. Websites pay for a connection to L1 and L2 so their content can be available on those networks.
ISP’s want to also charge websites for access into their networks of users, in spite of the fact their users already pay them for access to the website content. If some websites don’t pay, then ISP’s will provide a lower service to their users for those websites. Net neutrality says ISP’s should not do this.
Differentiating between locally used data and hotspot data has nothing to do with this. Hotspot data is about the device the data is going to, not where the data is coming from, and typically (or at least traditionally, maybe not so anymore) a PC will use more data than a phone. A PC is more likely to have large multi-gigabyte downloads (eg games), although these days video streaming is perhaps the main bandwidth hog and is generally equal across all devices.
It is more reasonable for an ISP to only provide data to the phone you’re paying for than it is for them to throttle websites you already paid for. However, really both are kind of bullshit - usage limits in general are completely disproportionate to actual costs.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
That’s not what net neutrality does, and I’m disturbed by this being the number one comment.
nao@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Are you talking about net neutrality in general, or a specific campaign that used the term? Net neutrality means all bits are equal. It does not matter where a bit is coming from, where it is going to or what it is part of.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
No portion of any net neutrality bill anywhere calls for hotspot data to not be capped by a cell carrier. It doesn’t eliminate any caps for anything at all. Net neutrality means they can’t change the speeds dependant on what sites you’re accessing and that they can’t block any sites, give free data to access some sites and not others, or put them behind a pay wall. It has nothing to do with general hot spot data caps, or cell phone data caps.
Nurgle@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Sorry how would net neutrality do anything but make them reword the policy??
tacostrange@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
The ISP shouldn’t care what kind of traffic is going through the network and show it down by type. It should be neutral to it
TWeaK@lemm.ee 2 months ago
They can care about what device they’re providing internet to. Net neutrality is about where content is coming from.
nao@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The provide internet to the phone. What the phone does with it (e.g. provide a hotspot), is another story.
Nurgle@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Right… they can still impose data caps. They’ll just do the cap at the plan level, like most already do. OPs just on a cheap plan.
Uranium3006@kbin.social 3 months ago
100% this
rainynight65@feddit.de 2 months ago
Net neutrality isn’t going to do a thing about this kind of stuff. In a best case scenario, you’ll end up with overall data usage limitations - no more ‘unlimited mobile data’.
ISPs meter data usage because it’s pretty much the only way they can impose some form of limitation on a finite capacity to provide such data to you and other customers - other than data rate limits (read: slower speeds). They can’t guarantee data rates in almost any setup, because ultimately, while ‘data usage’ is a bit of an artificial construct and ‘data’ is not in any way finite, the pipes that deliver the data certainly are of finite capacity. Mobile data capacity - and in fact, any wireless medium - is a shared medium, the more people try to use it simultaneously, the less pleasant it’s going to be for each individual user. Ask Starlink users in many US areas how overselling limited capacity impacts the individual user.
Mobile data usage also has different usage patterns than if you’re hotspotting your PC. You’re not going to download massive games or other bandwidth hogs to your mobile. You probably won’t be running a torrent client either. So they can give you unlimited mobile data because you’re simply not going to put as much of a strain on the infrastructure with pure on-device usage than you will with hotspotting.
This isn’t a defense of what AT&T is doing. But net neutrality isn’t going to force them to suddenly be all ethical. It’s not going to make them provision infrastructure that doesn’t fall over at the first signs of higher-than-usual load. And it certainly can’t change the physical realities of wireless data communication. In an ideal world ISPs wouldn’t be so greedy and/or beholden to greedy shareholders to be cutting corners, and instead provide sufficient infrastructure that can handle high demand.
And to those who are talking about their workarounds: you may not like it but you’ve signed a contract. That contract stipulates acceptable use, and if you’re found to be breaching the contract terms, the other party is within their rights to terminate the contract. Again, in an ideal world these contract terms would be more balanced towards the needs of the customer, but in the meantime your best recourse against unfavourable contract terms is to take your business elsewhere. And if you can’t do that, everything else is at your own risk.
tacostrange@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
If they didn’t have the bandwidth, I don’t think T-Mobile would offer home Internet and advertise it as much as they do
rainynight65@feddit.de 2 months ago
But where are they offering it? Big cities and densely populated areas where people have options and therefore won’t swarm to the product? Or are they offering it in small, remote towns where there’s not a lot of competition?
Where I live, mobile home internet is not available outside of metro areas and larger cities, and in the regions mobile towers are chronically underprovisioned and overloaded.
Zachariah@lemmy.world 3 months ago
And more competition.
Ioughttamow@kbin.run 3 months ago
Nationalize the tubes
tyler@programming.dev 3 months ago
T-Mobile hasn’t done this for years. Att is just shit
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 3 months ago
Uh?
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wander1236@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
When T-Mobile moved to unlimited with the ONE plans, they gave You “unlimited” tethering at “3G speeds”, which turned out to be 0.5Mbit/s, an unusably slow speed in 2018.
The Magenta plans gave you 5GB-50GB of full-speed tethering before dropping you to “3G speeds”. The current Go5G plans are similar, with a limited amount of usable tethering data before you’re, for all practical uses, cut off.
Before the ONE plans, there technically was no hotspot usage limit, but since you had a limited amount of high-speed data, your hotspot was effectively limited to whatever your plan gave you.
All the US carriers limit hotspot usage, partly to prevent someone hooking up a computer to download 50TB of pirated movies while clogging up the bandwidth for everyone else on that tower, and (moreso) partly because they’re greedy.
Serinus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
If it were just bandwidth issues, they’d only limit you during times of congestion.
It’s pure greed.
tyler@programming.dev 2 months ago
3g speeds are fine, no clue what you’re talking about. I literally tether all the time and when I hit the limit it’s still completely usable, even for YouTube. And getting to that limit is well above the 5gb from ATT. Like I said, att is shit, T-Mobile doesn’t do this and hasn’t for years.
Literally every carrier on the planet limits hotspot data in some manner. This isn’t a US thing.
thesystemisdown@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I have T-Mobile. They absolutely do.
tyler@programming.dev 2 months ago
I have T-Mobile, they absolutely don’t.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Lol. They totally do. Their best plan without going arm and a leg for unlimited gives you 50GB a month before dropping to near nothing. Up to a year ago it was 40GB.
tyler@programming.dev 2 months ago
50gb is not even close to 5gb and 3g speeds are not even close to 128kbs so no, T-Mobile doesn’t do this.