I'm not sure if the FCC reclassifying broadband as a "telecommunications service" will fix all of our problems but it may be the best short term option.

ISPs don't need to throttle certain types of traffic. They need to throttle individual customers who use more than their share of the pipe. They also need to redesign their sales structure as most companies sell broadband in terms of peak capacity, which makes very little sense as they are basically selling a promise that can't be kept. That would be like Ford selling all of their vehicles by how much they can tow, not letting you see, drive or read any other facts about the car before your purchase and not even giving a warranty that the car can actually move while towing the stated towing capacity.

A potential means of measuring cable internet would be to create a test organization that rates the ISP's performance in transferring data from a list of sites, aggregating and obfuscating the data so that ISPs can't play favorites with test sites.

 Regulations need to be written for how an ISP labels their product and what they can specifically do if a user goes over some limit clearly stated and enforced by the ISP. Throttling all of their traffic down to the point that they can still view standard image and text sites but nothing more (60kbps?). I don't think someone should be taken completely offline for overuse of their internet connection as that would restrict their freedom of speech.

Listen to industry, listen to independent engineers and listen to people who are just web surfers and figure out how to regulate the internet in a fair and reasonable way.

Thank you.

 

I just sent the above to the FCC chairman Julius Genachowski  via this website: http://www.savetheinternet.com/.

I hope some of you will do the same. Don't forget about congress either because this really should be their job.

 

I'm genuinely curious. I've tried ignoring everything but the valid points and they just kept going on with the nonsense like they were winning at poker. I've tried shooting down everything they said regardless of whether it had any merit and they just kept making more wild and unfounded statements.

I'm starting to think that I should just let these people live in their lives filled with lies they've told themselves but my empathy is making it really hard. I REALLY want people to be informed and make good decisions but is it worth all of the work that it seems to take.

I guess this really only applies to people who were never taught logical deduction correctly so maybe those people are just lost. I've had plenty of logical conversations with people who I disagree with, it's the ones that can't argue logically that frustrate me so much.

I recently bought a used car from a dealer who was kind enough to give me a 1 month bumper to bumper warranty. Well, unfortunately for him, I actually used it.

I gave them a list of about 7 things that were wrong with the car. Most of them were trivial things like "missing passenger seatbelt mount cover" or "power outlet isn't connected" but one of them is giving them grief and they wanted to blame me for the problem. The only two, possibly major issues were "AC does not blow cold air" and "power steering seems to turn off at severe steering angles". They didn't like the latter issue.

Apparently the underlying problem with the power steering was that somehow the power steering system got filled with coolant, which normally goes into the AC system. Strangely the power steering was working pretty well. That also made me wonder if that is why the AC wasn't working. That maybe it had power steering fluid in it...

Anyways, the mechanic working on the car said that his shop most definitely did not make such a horrendous mistake because they were all certified mechanics and therefore it had to be me or someone I might have loaned the car to. I never loaned out the car as I have never done that in the past and I have only owned it for three weeks. So I told him that and his response was basically that he "knew" that it didn't happen on their side so... He trailed off. I finally said "well, whatever you want to do. Just let me know how much it's going to cost before you go ahead." and that was the end of the conversation.

After thinking about it for a while I decided to be a little more forceful. I called him back and told him that I knew I hadn't done anything to the car and that no one else had either since I had bought it. Furthermore, I explained to him that not everyone working at his company was a certified mechanic and that it could have been one of their salesman. Finally, even if that weren't the case, everyone is capable of making a mistake, no matter their credentials.

I thought about telling him about one of my friends who was on track to getting certified as a mechanic at the local community college with a 2.5 gpa, which really didn't give me a whole lot of confidence in his certifications. I didn't want to piss him off though so instead I went with the example of my being an engineer who can still make simple mistakes and has on occasion. He mumbled something about talking to his boss and hung up.

I'm hoping that means it's getting fixed right now and not getting billed for it :).