this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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That's still a limitation on bandwidth, not data volume. It's still the bandwidth that costs money, not the volume.
The difference between cable and cellular is that in the cellular case it's much more forgivable to have bandwidth collapse when lots of people want to transfer things at the same time, but not because it's a single tower, but because it's a shared EM field. To duplicate bandwidth with cables you can use a second cable, to duplicate bandwidth with cellular a second tower doesn't suffice, you need a new generation of transmission technology.
A fair pricing scheme would operate on a flat fee for your home connection (at a particular speed), plus flat fee for guaranteed speed to the internet, and allow for faster speed if someone else currently isn't using their allotment.
That's it. That's what ISPs are, themselves, paying, and thus what the customer should pay. All this volume nonsense is suited-up business fucks grifting people.
(For completeness' sake: Those guarentees are bound to be asymmetric because downstream the ISP only pays port costs, while upstream the ISP pays port costs plus max bandwidth used in a particular time-frame. Not volume, bandwidth. "What was the fastest speed, in this particular month, at which the data moved through the tubes")
Not really. OFDMA and other modulation mechanisms for doing dense wireless connectivity do have limitations on number of active connections based on frequency (not necessarily data bandwidth) available. Someone communicating constantly will eat up way more slots than their neighbors.
https://www.5gtechnologyworld.com/the-basics-of-5gs-modulation-ofdm/
Wireless is a shared resource that cannot be guarded. This is not the case with cables... Where that bandwidth limitation is never encroached upon (short of the North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe... Shown here:)
In short, someone taking less slots means that service for everyone is better. A cap can keep those slots open as people would be incentivized to use it less.
The alternative is that they install more wireless transmitters but dial the power down so there's more cells. Except this will have alternative problems in penetrating into buildings and such. So that's not really an answer either. And with way more hand-offs you'll run into more problems using your cellphone anyway.