You see, for cellular, a tower is truly limited on the bandwidth because it must be shared among all cellular devices connected to it
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”)
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”)