Like this, at any of our local ISP offices:
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Like this, at any of our local ISP offices:
yes, BK's internet bill may or may not increase, I understand net neutrality, don't need a fast food chain to tell me, but I can't imagine that would be a huge hit to the bottom line...they use it for CC processing and keeping a website up that showcases their menu and specials of the month. No streaming or other large data packs going in and out millions of times day. BK's other expenses dwarf any internet bill, I would think.
Odd that a struggling fast food franchise would have the time/money/effort to try and explain net neutrality to everyday low cost burger shoppers. Will this get them more sales? I'd think a better menu, higher class of employees, updated stores, better store locations would be top of the list. I could care less if my local fast food joint supports net neutrality. I want my cheap, greasy, delicious meal. Keep that the main focus and I'll keep coming back.
my.02
Odd that a struggling fast food franchise would have the time/money/effort to try and explain net neutrality to everyday low cost burger shoppers. Will this get them more sales? I'd think a better menu, higher class of employees, updated stores, better store locations would be top of the list. I could care less if my local fast food joint supports net neutrality. I want my cheap, greasy, delicious meal. Keep that the main focus and I'll keep coming back.
my.02
lumbee1
Native American
Obviously it's a BK sales tactic. Anyone who wonders what the reason is for BK doing this campaign a moron, they want to sell more burgers. They found another hot button topic to draw attention to their stores with.
I did not post that link up to discuss BK's business tactics, or how good their food tastes (remember, I don't eat meat or cheese), I posted it up to help others understand what net neutrality is. I'm glad you understand what net neutrality means @onemanarmy, and I hope that more people now do because of this discussion.
I did not post that link up to discuss BK's business tactics, or how good their food tastes (remember, I don't eat meat or cheese), I posted it up to help others understand what net neutrality is. I'm glad you understand what net neutrality means @onemanarmy, and I hope that more people now do because of this discussion.
BK_all about benjamins baby...
GTI, GTI, GTI, GTI, GTI - say it with me. Manual at that!
GTI, GTI, GTI, GTI, GTI - say it with me. Manual at that!
Their ad campaigns are like the snotnosed whiny kid that loves making snarky comments to get laughs in the back of the classroom. I think they were also taking a lot of heat for moving north, and getting pressure from the public since all these other companies are reinvesting dollars and tax revenue back stateside. I havent eaten at a BK in decades, and when they did their lil tax inversion deal to save billions, that was the nail in the coffin.
With regards to NN, there is a place for it, and unfortunately, it needs to be placed at the federal level. Individual states trying to mandate their own NN standards will totally stifle competition, and more importantly, make isp's and telecoms think twice about building out the infrastructure required to meet those NN demands.
We are at a crossroads with the way Americans entertain themselves. Broadcast TV is hanging on primarily because of local newscasts. Most local stations are part of larger broadcast carriers, and they bundle other programming on alternate over the air channels (MeTV, flashback, etc). Local ad revenue is sufficient to keep them on the air.
Cable TV is a farce. Cable carriers negotiate carriage fees with networks to broadcast over their system. The catch is, the networks want you to carry every single channel they offer, most of which are absolutely never going to have a positive return on investment. You want ESPN? Sure, they had one of, if not the highest cost per subscriber carriage fee in the business. With ESPN, you get every other ESPN channel, and its up to the carrier to decide if they want to bundle them in with standard or enhanced subscriber packages. Same with FOX Sports, you have to negotiate and/or pay for every FOX channel. NBC is the same. You get all the channels. Havent even mentioned the infomercial channels. They dont care how many viewers they get on those, because the cost is low, and usually bundled in with other channels.
So now, enter the interwebbers. Used to take hours, or overnight to download a simple 30 second video file (remember those days?) Now, your home internet connection is more powerful than most businesses use. You can download a 4gb movie in minutes, while videoconferencing grandma, getting your stock feeds, and more news than you can believe is occuring. Throw in original content on youtube, and any other streaming services (netflix, amazon, hulu, spotify, pandora, etc, etc etc. You can do all of that on your cell phone too....and most people think its like getting meat at the grocery store...its just there.....ALL of that traffic crosses the internet backbone, which is comprised of fiber optic cable and hardware that telecoms installed on their dime. This was to replace the old copper based backbone, and upgrade the older fiber backbone. People in rural areas want gigabit ethernet at their house, yet when they find out the local company will put it in if they pay the high price to put fiber in the ground, install equipment at the premise and central office, they scream foul. Companies will only place hardware in existing neighborhoods if they can cost effectively put fiber in or above ground, and have a place they can mount their local hardware to feed enough homes to make the return on investment.
Networks are now offering direct subscriptions for their content (over the top is the industry moniker). So, instead of paying your cable company 150.00 a month for 200 channels, you ditch them, and end up paying 10 for netflix, 10 for hulu, and roughly 10 a month per channel you want over the top. The carriers are now screaming at the networks, because its now a twofold hit on them. they lose subscribers, yet are bound to the terms of the contract, based upon x number of subscribers. They also now have their telecom backbone being consumed with those same networks' over the top content.
People try to equate it to roads and highways. The vast majorities of roads and highways are paid for by fed and state govts, and are "public". Some you have to pay a toll to drive on, and that toll varies by the size of the vehicle. They also offer discounts for prepay(speedpass transponder), and corporate discounts for high volume consumers (trucking companies, etc).
The information superhighway is the exact opposite. Most roads and highways are privately owned by the telco's/ISP's, and some are privately owned. Very few are city owned municipality based networks. If I spent millions or billions of dollars placing the internet backbone, as well as most of the spokes leading out to the various neighborhoods in cities, whether placing the poles myself, or spending big money to lease space on electric poles, underground conduits, etc, why would i want to give my competitor equal access (in some cases them wanting it for free), to directly undercut my cost and go after my customers? I would express reservations on them gaining access to my poles, or hanging their wire/fiber alongside or under mine. Damage, intentional or accidental happens often enough that there are policies in place for every telecom for that. That takes time, that costs money..
While it is possible that there will be cost changes if NN goes to the furthest extreme. Would it be directly on your internet bill? Well, if you use 200gb of data a month in an apartment complex that shares a single node, while your neighbors use 1/10th of that, shouldnt your bill go up? Where it would most likely be seen would be at the content provider level, Netflix may charge more, ESPN may charge more, etc. Because they have to now negotiate not in number of concurrent subscribers, but amount of content that they house and distribute. This would be the only real place where "fast lanes" could occur. Notice, i said Could, not necessarily would. Depending on the content produced and pushed, an ISP/provider may or may not have a competing in house product. That would be about the only place where they could throttle their own app traffic over a competitor. Guess what, most customers have monitoring and performance tools that would indicate latency across their pathways, as the telcos/isp's do. Telco standards are usually about 150 ms guaranteed response time for data circuits. Most response times are in the 10-70ms time range, depending on circuit size.
It will be very difficult to have multiple ISP's and Multiple cellular carriers, and multiple cable companies to blanket the country. Each have kind of found their niche areas, and are trying to build them out in ways that make them cost effective to do so. Cellular carriers have gotten onboard with leasing tower space, because it made much better sense for them vs owning and maintaining the towers. Better column in the spreadsheet for the shareholders. I would expect to see something similar with the interwebbers.
Actually, Golf R is likely next. My business partner and I buy/lease in pairs. So 2 of them. But PDK, its faster and stronger, can handle the
400+HP. I do love GTIs, the insurance on a GTI with a teenager is eye watering ass pain.
My old GTI overtaking and spaking a Ferrari430, about 30 seconds in. After the heat, the driver came up to see how this little car drove so fast around the track. I do love them, and love tracking them more than any other car I have driven.
I'll give you credit Steve, you know more than most about the telecommunications industry. Is it fair to assume that you work for a telecommunications company, or have a vested interest in the success of one? I stand completely opposite of your opinion, but respect the fact that you have an informed opinion.
My opinion is that the internet should be treated, and regulated, as a utility, just like power and water. Unlike cable TV, the internet is rapidly becoming a necessity to exist in the modern world for the generation of income. It's not something most can live easily without. Yes, ISPs paid to put in the infrastructure, but they make that money back each month in fees gladly paid by subscribers, so let's not pretend they're doing us any favors. The question of net neutrality is not the question about data speed (maximum achievable speed on a given link), or amount of data used (total data used in a given time period) but a question about which data (websites) your ISP is allowing you to see.
Your conjecture about where fast lanes will be used is just that, conjecture. Using the argument that fast lanes won't really affect most people doesn't hold water, because there is no way of knowing how they'll be implemented. Here is a real example of what an internet plan could look like in the US in a few years. Mexico does not have net neutrality laws. The Uber line says "You can order 3 Uber rides for free, no data use, with us!". This is an example of a mexican cell phone internet plan, but the same concept applies to home internet, with data caps and allowed websites. Is this how you want your internet service plan to look like?
The point I'm trying to make is as follows; I will (and do) pay a premium to support the ISP's infrastructure through a service subscription that enables me to achieve a maximum throughput of 1gbps at my POP, and consume unlimited data. I have the choice to pay less to use less data, at a lower speed, with net neutrality in place. That premium is access to "the internet" at a given speed. I do not want the ISP to know or care how I'm using that service. I use my ISP for work and for entertainment.
I don't have to tell my water company, or my electric company, or my gasoline supplier, how I'm using the product I buy from them, nor do I have to pay more or less depending how I use that product. Why should I have to tell my ISP? I'm buying a product from them and I should be free to use it how I see fit, without any sort of repercussion, financial, quality or otherwise.
My opinion is that the internet should be treated, and regulated, as a utility, just like power and water. Unlike cable TV, the internet is rapidly becoming a necessity to exist in the modern world for the generation of income. It's not something most can live easily without. Yes, ISPs paid to put in the infrastructure, but they make that money back each month in fees gladly paid by subscribers, so let's not pretend they're doing us any favors. The question of net neutrality is not the question about data speed (maximum achievable speed on a given link), or amount of data used (total data used in a given time period) but a question about which data (websites) your ISP is allowing you to see.
Your conjecture about where fast lanes will be used is just that, conjecture. Using the argument that fast lanes won't really affect most people doesn't hold water, because there is no way of knowing how they'll be implemented. Here is a real example of what an internet plan could look like in the US in a few years. Mexico does not have net neutrality laws. The Uber line says "You can order 3 Uber rides for free, no data use, with us!". This is an example of a mexican cell phone internet plan, but the same concept applies to home internet, with data caps and allowed websites. Is this how you want your internet service plan to look like?
The point I'm trying to make is as follows; I will (and do) pay a premium to support the ISP's infrastructure through a service subscription that enables me to achieve a maximum throughput of 1gbps at my POP, and consume unlimited data. I have the choice to pay less to use less data, at a lower speed, with net neutrality in place. That premium is access to "the internet" at a given speed. I do not want the ISP to know or care how I'm using that service. I use my ISP for work and for entertainment.
I don't have to tell my water company, or my electric company, or my gasoline supplier, how I'm using the product I buy from them, nor do I have to pay more or less depending how I use that product. Why should I have to tell my ISP? I'm buying a product from them and I should be free to use it how I see fit, without any sort of repercussion, financial, quality or otherwise.
my entire argument was I don't see the ROI or how it is a smart financial decision for a low rent burger joint to get in the argument about net neutrality and spend millions of dollars on a TV ad campaign.
make a better product and people will come...regardless of their stance on NN. I, or anyone else really, don't go to fast food places because of any stance the company is making.
and it's all conjecture now anyway, we have yet to see what will become of NN.
make a better product and people will come...regardless of their stance on NN. I, or anyone else really, don't go to fast food places because of any stance the company is making.
and it's all conjecture now anyway, we have yet to see what will become of NN.
Johnny, there are a lot of points I agree with, and there are some I disagree with my employer about.
the average person sees the words net neutrality, and they think their entire existence on the internet is going to cease to exist, or it will cost them their entire paycheck. It honestly isnt the case. I agree with you that an ISP should not block access to content (although I'm on the fence about illegal content, because if the ISP allows illegal content to be hosted/accessed thru them, will they be held liable for that access?, also where do you draw the line of what is legal, yet icky (or not favorable/moral/"allowable") content.
Look at cellphones. in their infancy, you paid 39.99 up to who knows what $$$$ for "access" to the cellular network, then paid per minute peak, off peak, and roaming. then you got x number of local minutes per month on your plan... then nights and weekends became free. then ATT/ATT Wireless dropped the mother of all bombs in the telecom world, with digital one rate. All you could yap for x dollars per month...it commoditized wireless talking. data started to emerge at that time, texts were 10 cents a pop. imagine a fathers bill if his teenagers text then like they do now! Texting became commoditized. data useage increased, with the advent of SMS/pictures/voice messages/video messages. Each generation of cell transport created more data, less range from tower to tower. Data has now been commoditized. The original all you can cram down your gullet data buffet had only a handful % of users when it first came out. Now, everyone and their mother tries to get as much junk on their phone as possible. So cell companies upgrade towers and hardware, add more towers (with NIMBY...not in my back yard people screaming at the top of their lungs about no towers near them....ironically,they are the ones that complain the most about coverage....go figure).
It would be a stretch to turn phone service, cell phone service, and internet into true utilities. Even our electrical grid isnt an honest to goodness utility. Duke Power does what they want, when they want, and how they want....they just asked for a 20+% rate increase here in GSO. I dont have any other power options, and since they got legislation amended that a home HAS to have a meter, i couldnt go totally off the grid if i wanted.
Most telcos have low income high speed internet/tv available. It may only be 6mb DSL, but you know what, thats what ive been running on at home for many years. I cant justify jumping to another plan. Id rather have the money go elsewhere (like a toyota or lexus gas tank)....
There are also a myriad of low cost/no cost cell phone companies and plans out there. Guess who pays for those? You and I through tax payer funded programs, or as a fee in our bill.
I mentioned that there needs to be NN at the federal level. It can be very basic. Carriers have to provide best effort equal routing of packets, whether customers or their own offerings. Tools are in place already that can provide stats for traffic amounts, traffic performance, etc. Basic QOS (Quality of Service) to prioritize traffic type (E911, VOIP, Browsing, IM, etc)... and an agreed upon level of service between the carrier and the customer at the enterprise level. That stuff is all standard in contracts for business or residential service (moreso on the business side).
Issues can be reviewed by looking at stats from the customers' tools, the ISP in question's tools, and any other carriers tools for passthru traffic. It would be easy to see if provider A was screaming fast from the data center to the cloud, and provider B is maintaining that performance across its backbone, but company C is choking down the data, causing the resident at the end of provider D's last mile to get garbled funny cat videos... If the review doesnt show a bonafide network issue, whether an outage or some reason for the latency, then company C gets dinged.
The problem, like with all things that get political...Basic ideas become bogged down with all of the other crap that tries to get crammed in with it...most of which has no business being there.
the average person sees the words net neutrality, and they think their entire existence on the internet is going to cease to exist, or it will cost them their entire paycheck. It honestly isnt the case. I agree with you that an ISP should not block access to content (although I'm on the fence about illegal content, because if the ISP allows illegal content to be hosted/accessed thru them, will they be held liable for that access?, also where do you draw the line of what is legal, yet icky (or not favorable/moral/"allowable") content.
Look at cellphones. in their infancy, you paid 39.99 up to who knows what $$$$ for "access" to the cellular network, then paid per minute peak, off peak, and roaming. then you got x number of local minutes per month on your plan... then nights and weekends became free. then ATT/ATT Wireless dropped the mother of all bombs in the telecom world, with digital one rate. All you could yap for x dollars per month...it commoditized wireless talking. data started to emerge at that time, texts were 10 cents a pop. imagine a fathers bill if his teenagers text then like they do now! Texting became commoditized. data useage increased, with the advent of SMS/pictures/voice messages/video messages. Each generation of cell transport created more data, less range from tower to tower. Data has now been commoditized. The original all you can cram down your gullet data buffet had only a handful % of users when it first came out. Now, everyone and their mother tries to get as much junk on their phone as possible. So cell companies upgrade towers and hardware, add more towers (with NIMBY...not in my back yard people screaming at the top of their lungs about no towers near them....ironically,they are the ones that complain the most about coverage....go figure).
It would be a stretch to turn phone service, cell phone service, and internet into true utilities. Even our electrical grid isnt an honest to goodness utility. Duke Power does what they want, when they want, and how they want....they just asked for a 20+% rate increase here in GSO. I dont have any other power options, and since they got legislation amended that a home HAS to have a meter, i couldnt go totally off the grid if i wanted.
Most telcos have low income high speed internet/tv available. It may only be 6mb DSL, but you know what, thats what ive been running on at home for many years. I cant justify jumping to another plan. Id rather have the money go elsewhere (like a toyota or lexus gas tank)....
There are also a myriad of low cost/no cost cell phone companies and plans out there. Guess who pays for those? You and I through tax payer funded programs, or as a fee in our bill.
I mentioned that there needs to be NN at the federal level. It can be very basic. Carriers have to provide best effort equal routing of packets, whether customers or their own offerings. Tools are in place already that can provide stats for traffic amounts, traffic performance, etc. Basic QOS (Quality of Service) to prioritize traffic type (E911, VOIP, Browsing, IM, etc)... and an agreed upon level of service between the carrier and the customer at the enterprise level. That stuff is all standard in contracts for business or residential service (moreso on the business side).
Issues can be reviewed by looking at stats from the customers' tools, the ISP in question's tools, and any other carriers tools for passthru traffic. It would be easy to see if provider A was screaming fast from the data center to the cloud, and provider B is maintaining that performance across its backbone, but company C is choking down the data, causing the resident at the end of provider D's last mile to get garbled funny cat videos... If the review doesnt show a bonafide network issue, whether an outage or some reason for the latency, then company C gets dinged.
The problem, like with all things that get political...Basic ideas become bogged down with all of the other crap that tries to get crammed in with it...most of which has no business being there.
Your point is starting to wander off, or at least I'm not following you. You're talking more about pricing and speed, not about net neutrality. Speed, data caps, availability, all that will work itself out through the market, and is only indirectly related to the net neutrality discussion. I understand what you're saying, but that's been how ISPs have worked since the internet's inception, and that's perfectly acceptable. I can chose a 6mb DSL connection if I wanted that level of service, and I'm free to move to a different ISP if I feel like it.
I do agree, net neutrality should exist at the federal level, at the FCC, as our last FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler set in place. I don't care how much more access would cost, it would be a tragedy if anyone had to pay a penny more to continue using the product they pay for, in the same way they have been.
I do agree, net neutrality should exist at the federal level, at the FCC, as our last FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler set in place. I don't care how much more access would cost, it would be a tragedy if anyone had to pay a penny more to continue using the product they pay for, in the same way they have been.
Sorry, I rambled, because of the 32 emails I got from freaked out people about NN that know where I work. Also had a rambling conference call i was stuck on....so i guess they rubbed off on me.
It doesnt have to be complicated, but it will be...because thats how washington works.
It doesnt have to be complicated, but it will be...because thats how washington works.
RedHeadedStepChild
Proudly wearing my MC1R mutation!
@Izzyandsue you don't want Michael in a high HP small car. Too risky. Do the loving thing and put him in 110 Santana with a nice turbo diesel.
I wish. I told him about that, but I understand kids will have their own tastes. Showed him old cruisers and land rovers, he shrugged. Just came back from testing a few things, the VW Tiguan fit him like a glove. The Golf, his show sole actually hit the accel and brake, so he wasnt comfortable with that. His size 15 EEE sneakers are big, like water fins for me.
Why not, he deserves it
NCFJ
Supporting Vendor
RedHeadedStepChild
Proudly wearing my MC1R mutation!
Holly s***!
He's already Seamus &Aaron's hero. That would push them right over the edge.
Now he is Batman!
Anyone has an extra Carfax they won’t miss, let me know. Looking for one
Anyone has an extra Carfax they won’t miss, let me know. Looking for one
