Friday, May 9, 2014

ISP to FCC: Pay Up Or Stick with Slow 28.8kbps Lane

Source: Arstechnica.

The FCC abandoning net neutrality (essentially a U-turn from its previous position has many big and small companies protesting the move.  It's good for broadband dumb pipe operators like Comcast (currently trying to buy Time Warner Cable to gobble up more bandwidth) and Verizon but not for end-users.

So, while most companies like Google and Netflix are content with sending letters and lobbyists, one ISP decided to act.  So, it's taken FCC's IP addresses and throttle all connections down to dial-up speed of 28kbps.  I think that is kinda cruel considering 56K should be enough but I'm a gentle person at the end of the day.

The ISP, Neocities, And they're quite funny about it too. They're giving the FCC a special "Ferengi plan" (obviously Star Trek fans there):  pay the $1000 a year (they'll accept most payments including digital currencies but not Latinum) and Netcities will remove the throttle.

I think that's brilliant.  Maybe Google and others should consider doing something similar.  After all, I can see ISPs begin to charge the government access to the fast lane which means the tax payers, you and me, will have to fork over even more money to the greedy cable and DSL providers.

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