Small business in Wisconsin cancels its unusably bad internet service from Frontier; Frontier demands $4,300 cancellation fee

Who provides your water? If it is a public utility, lobby them to run optical fiber along their water mains. The internet should be publicly owned and non-profit.

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This is crucial in all speed disputes, because 9x out of 10 the problem is the customer’s crappy wifi or other on-premise equipment, so the ISP will never do anything except demand “pay up” bcause there’s so rarely any concrete evidence that it’s really their fault.

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In many states, counties and municipalities, ISPs have successfully lobbied to make doing that specific thing illegal.

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Given sufficient public outcry, laws can be amended or repealed. Bad legislators can be voted out of office. Where legislators received tangible inducements to favor a particular business, corruption charges can be laid. The problem is that the number of citizens who give a s…t is normally quite tiny.

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Are there water providers that actually do that? If so, i wonder how it’s worked out.

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5g requires repeaters every 100m.

Someone has to install the repeaters.

Between cities and small towns, The repeaters are fed data by cable and fiber.

If these are the same people that will not put a line to a small town, then 5g is no threat to them.

All 5g will do in the internet boonies will enable local in-town wireless to be blazing fast (as in minimal lag for an in-city wan gaming party) and crawling slow internet out of town (i.e: not fast enough to get netflix)

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As long as koch industries didn’t astroturf people into lobbying against it, it worked out pretty well.

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Nope.

It is now pretty much impossible in practice to prosecute US politicians for conflict-of-interest corruption.

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Hm, you actually made me look up the 5G infrastructure design recommendation. It was from July last year and it seems like 5G, just like anything else, does rely on fiber due to current limitations of the small cells and the milimeter-wave spectrum . However, the good thing about 5G is that it could be seen as the last mile which means that running fiber to a macrocell and then connecting small cells to it would be much easier than refreshing the whole copper/fiber network that small ISPs and the ones who have the monopoly will never do. My point was that sometime in the future 5G will improve Internet access in rural areas. If you recall, Verizon and ATT promised years ago a fiber network expansion all over the place which never happened. The reason seems to be their 5G plans and the hope that it will be a good replacement for regular Internet connections.

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Yep. If the legal system chooses to charge anyone with a crime here, it’s a very uphill battle to prove if anyone is acting in unison. The law says that a bunch of agents have to work in unison because they’ve been centrally organized. In response, they’ve decided to work in unison based on what each other do, based on winking at each other to show they’re not interested in competing.

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IANAL, but I think every judge in the world would not consider such a contract valid.

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No, don’t pay for the Pro version unless that’s your actual career. Standard makes more sense, as @ boldeagleuserthing also said. And PingPlotter isn’t the only possibility - just the one I know best.

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National Highways, how about National Internet and while your at it National Healthcare would be a good idea too.

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I need this kind of solution for Android deveices. Any suggestions?

Um, no, although you’re not that far off, in concept. The spec says “as close as 500 feet apart”, which is definitely over 100m ^^’.

Wow! I’m really shocked at how badly the implementation of the internet appears to be in large areas of the US. Over here, in the UK, I’ve got a big old super fat pipe from Virgin Media that is so rarely unavailable that I feel really aggrieved when it is; even though that might be only once or twice over the past five years.

The way that corporations can run up massive debts to fund take-overs, and then pass those debts on to their new acquisition really seems to be a terrible idea for everyone except those Executives who can award themselves massive bonuses for pulling off the deal.

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I don’t know of any direct analogs for Android(on a rooted device comparatively normal Linux rules apply; but unrooted, utilities that depend on reasonably privileged network operations aren’t going to transfer as cleanly).

That said, unless you just want to put some numbers behind “this sucks”, you may well not want something running on Android in any case:

If you want something you can wave at an ISP and have any hope of being taken seriously you want to cut as many variables out of the equation as possible: local wifi conditions, your phone having silent but aggressive power saving behavior, etc. You also want the logs to be as comprehensive as possible.

This makes a dedicated device, hardwired directly to the ISP’s networking gear, preferrable. Assuming you are dealing with a trash connection it doesn’t need to be all that much device; an rPi would probably do for just about any DSL; though is a bit on the feeble side for better than that; but you want it to be gathering stats all the time and doing so from a position where the ISP can’t blame anything on your end, wifi AP, local 2.4 or 5GHz congestion, etc.

Unless your connection actually comes with an SLA of some kind they may still just blow you off; but if you are in the position to get anyone to listen(whether their ‘customer retention’ flacks or a small claims court); you might as well have evidence that can’t be dismissex with a “maybe it was just your microwave and/or shitty router.”

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Some guy on the Internet told me that data can leak out of the fibre in to the water supply, creating what they call “Smart Water”. The Deep State uses Smart Water to track peoples’ movements!

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If you’re on cable and your cable modem has a status page you can get to, that can provide you with very useful connection data. Comcast considers a downstream signal level of -8 to +10 dBmV to be acceptable. Downstream signal-to-noise ratio should be at least 35 dB. Upstream power level should be +25 to +54 dBmV, and upstream S/N and receive power (only available at the head end) should be at least 31 dB and -2 to +2 dBmV, respectively.

My downstream data was useful for getting a bad drop cable replaced, which was done free of charge since it was their side of the infrastructure and not in-house wiring.

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I’ve given up on ADSL because the service is so bad where I live in the centre of a medium size town in southern England.

I can’t get fibre as it hasn’t been plumbed in. Instead, I now have a £20 a month data SIM contract which gives me 120GB through a small MiFi unit. I live next door to the fire station tower where the 4G aerials are mounted, and it’s a good signal on the EE network.

I get better speeds than ADSL, and it’s cheaper, and I can carry the MiFi with me on days out.

Considering the large amounts of computerised business and services, including government items such as passport applications, electoral roll updates, and road tax, network has become vital infrastructure. The anglo-saxon countries which have relied on the free market have fallen badly behind places like Japan and South Korea, where the government has made sure to plumb the whole country with high speed fibre.

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