33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
Copyright © 2015 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.

The Telecom Digest for Feb 2, 2015
Volume 34 : Issue 20 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday (tlvp)
Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday (Bill Horne)
Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday (John David Galt)
Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday (Garrett Wollman)

I can never join with my voice in the toast which I see in the papers attributed to one of our gallant naval heroes. I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong. Fiat justitia, pereat coelum. My toast would be, may our country always be successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right.  - John Quincy Adams

See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details.

Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 21:44:37 -0500 From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday Message-ID: <1nrgv5l7dwc7b.1in9d0ouo0jq9.dlg@40tude.net> On Fri, 30 Jan 2015 20:59:47 -0500, Barry Margolin wrote: > When enough people use it in the formerly wrong way, it becomes > "right" Sorry: no matter how many sales 'droids intend "unlimited" to mean "throttled each month to 100 Kbps after the first 500 MB in traffic", that is not now, was never, and never will be, what "unlimited" means :-) . Cheers, -- tlvp -- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2015 10:19:55 -0500 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday Message-ID: <20150201151955.GA3689@telecom.csail.mit.edu> On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 09:44:37PM -0500, tlvp wrote: > On Fri, 30 Jan 2015 20:59:47 -0500, Barry Margolin wrote: > > > When enough people use it in the formerly wrong way, it becomes > > "right" > > Sorry: no matter how many sales 'droids intend "unlimited" to mean > "throttled each month to 100 Kbps after the first 500 MB in traffic", > that is not now, was never, and never will be, what "unlimited" means > :-) . Yes, but ... ... what, exactly, does "unlimited" mean? This might seem like an obvious question. It's not. Does "unlimited" mean "without limits"? Obviously not: there are limits imposed by the technology which is currently deployed, by Claude Shannon, by government regulation, and by such mundane factors as battery capacity, transmitter power, and the human capacity to process and absorb information. Does "unlimited" mean "all the bandwidth we have anytime you want it"? Obviously not: some of the bandwitch has to be reserved for control signals, for voice calls, for E911 position reporting, and for other "unlimited" users whom are surfing the net at the same time. Does "unlimited" mean "Not subject to rate caps"? Obviously not: any shared-use system has to have rate caps. That's the only way to avoid bandwidth hogs and the Tragedy of the Commons. There's no way around it: "unlimited" is "impossible". Bill -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly)
Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2015 10:19:26 -0800 From: John David Galt <jdg@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday Message-ID: <malqne$hbv$1@blue-new.rahul.net> On 2015-02-01 07:19, Bill Horne wrote: > Does "unlimited" mean "Not subject to rate caps"? Yes. That may be an unrealistic promise, but the companies that offer it have promised it anyway. > Obviously not: any shared-use system has to have rate caps. That's the > only way to avoid bandwidth hogs and the Tragedy of the Commons. > > There's no way around it: "unlimited" is "impossible". And so we can assume that Real Soon Now, all those companies will withdraw their dishonest "unlimited" offers and start telling people, in their ads, exactly what the limit is and exactly what will happen (whether that is throttling, or extra charges, or both) to customers who go over that limit. Then we'll finally have honest competition, and the bidding by high-use customers for the additional capacity they want can begin in earnest. (Perhaps resulting in the building of more capacity, if it will pay to build it.) This is why the TracFone ruling is a major Good Thing for consumers.
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2015 17:29:46 +0000 (UTC) From: wollman@bimajority.org (Garrett Wollman) To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday Message-ID: <malnqa$2jcc$1@grapevine.csail.mit.edu> In article <20150201151955.GA3689@telecom.csail.mit.edu>, Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> wrote: >Does "unlimited" mean "Not subject to rate caps"? > >Obviously not: any shared-use system has to have rate caps. That's the >only way to avoid bandwidth hogs and the Tragedy of the Commons. Actually, no, that's not the case. Obvious counterexample: TCP, which has rate control, but no rate cap. In an uncongested channel, given time,[1] TCP will send at the maximum rate, and if sharing with other (correct) TCP implementations, it will automatically find the "fair share" transmission rate (which is the maximum rate that does not induce congestion). This has actually been formalized: there's a class of rate-control algorithms known variously as "TCP friendly" or "TCP compatible" which have this convergence property provided that the vast majority (doesn't have to be all) of competing traffic employs a similar rate-control algorithm. It's entirely possible that there exist other classes of rate-control algorithms with the same property within-class but that don't play nice with TCP. (And by "TCP" here, we're specifically referring to the post-Van Jacobson TCP with congestion avoidance.) -GAWollman [1] Sometimes, it takes too much time, and a great deal of recent work on TCP has gone into finding the channel capacity faster and more accurately without losing the fairness property over congested links. --
Garrett A. Wollman
wollman@bimajority.org
Opinions not shared by
my employers.
What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
repeated, than the story of a large research program
that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993

TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom- munications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to Usenet, where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'.

TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit educational service offered to the Internet by Bill Horne.

The Telecom Digest is moderated by Bill Horne.
Contact information: Bill Horne
Telecom Digest
43 Deerfield Road
Sharon MA 02067-2301
339-364-8487
bill at horne dot net
Subscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=subscribe telecom
Unsubscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=unsubscribe telecom

This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the oldest e-zine/mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Copyright © 2015 E. William Horne. All rights reserved.


Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself. Thank you!

All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization.


End of The Telecom Digest (4 messages)

Return to Archives ** Older Issues