Data plans compared to a “tasting menu, a buffet, or unlimited soup and salad.”

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    Except that unlimited soup or salad costs the business money to provide.

    Data doesn’t. It’s simply 1s and 0s.

    It doesn’t cost an ISP any more to provide the 4 trillionth 1 than it does to provide the first one.

    Consuming data also doesn’t deny data availability to someone else, unlike electricity or water.

    If I decide to fire up a hydroponics operation and start using 4000x more electricity and water than my neighbors, that could impact them negatively. If I run a torrent farm? Not so much.

    • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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      13 days ago

      Depending on what kind of line it is and whether it’s dedicated to you or being shared between you and other people, it actually can have a negative effect on other people using the service. Take cable for example, where you’re sharing it with like 32 other neighbors. Another example would be 5G home internet. It works really well, but it can bog down under high utilization. But for dedicated customers such as fiber? Yeah, I don’t see any excuse for this.