This is not so much a recreation of the Nokia 8110 that was in the movie as it is an "homage". It's a completely new, designed-from-the-ground-up piece of hardware (AND software) that just happens to bear a resemblance to the original and takes some design cues from it.
Not only that, but neither the original 8110 nor this new version actually have a button-triggered, spring-loaded release for the keypad cover. That was something designed specifically for the movie, and IIRC the phones in the movie were not even functional: they were props that had been gutted of any real functionality and then fitted with the spring-loaded mechanism which, given the era, was impossible to fit into the phone while leaving the actual phone guts intact.
There was a Nokia model, the 7110, that actually had a spring-load keypad cover that vaguely resembled what we saw in the movie, though it was not as "exciting".
I'm not trying to speak for turp182, and (s)he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I read the post this way:
I generally have no reason or desire to have filters apply to the movies I watch, but I support VidAngel's right to do what they are doing and I respect them for taking the stand that they have. Therefore, to demonstrate my solidarity, I threw a few bucks their way and rented a movie. When you rent a movie, you are also given the option of donating to their defense fund, and I did that as well. It used to be the case that when you streamed the video content from them, you could elect to apply anywhere between 0 and n filters to the movie, but that has since changed and now you must apply between 1 and n filters. I chose to apply one of the more common filters that is applicable to almost any contemporary movie in order to satisfy the requirement to choose at least one.
AC is correct, and if I could vote up his/her post I would. T-Mobile never called HSPA+ "LTE", they called it 4G. LTE was never enabled on the N4 out-of-the-box; it always required a hack to get running (it has a baseband chip capable of LTE but Google never intended to use the LTE support in the chip). And HSPA+ was never disabled in the Nexus 4 via firmware update or any other mechanism. You are getting the two things confused.
Have not RTFA yet, but this sounds a lot like Matt Gemmell's talk on "Making Mistakes Impossible", which is really good and which you can view here: https://vimeo.com/84322659
Ignoring for the moment the question of Are You Human or Are You Troll, that is a terrible analogy. Digital and analog television are encoded and transmitted completely differently over the air; in contrast, from the phone's link layer perspective, any two GSM carriers are indistinguishable from one another, especially if both carriers are transmitting in the same radio band, and ESPECIALLY if both carriers are in fact one and the same from a physical network perspective, as AT&T and the MVNO Straight Talk are!
My situation with the phone would be more like having a digital television set that was programmed by its manufacturer to only allow you to watch specific channels and lock others out, even though the television set is physically and in all other ways capable of allowing you to watch the non-whitelisted channels: it's simply an arbitrary software lockout. The "unsupported" channels aren't doing anything funky or being encoded and transmitted some other way.
Or it might be more like an IP router -- for the sake of this example, let's say it's a boring sub-$100 consumer-grade router/switch/wireless-AP thing -- that will only allow you to use it with certain internet service providers, even if another "unsupported" ISP encapsulates and delivers its traffic to you in exactly the same way the "approved" ISPs do. Let's say the ISP expects the customer's gear to speak direct IP-over-Ethernet to it (and not IP-over-ATM, PPPoE, or any number of other possibilities), and that the "supported" and "unsupported" ISPs both also run DHCP servers. The "unsupported" ISP fails to work with the router, not because it is doing anything out of the ordinary when compared against the set of standards that the router was manufactured to support, but rather because although the router accepts the DHCP responses from both ISPs, it willfully ignores the default route passed to it and overrides it in the routing table with a hard-coded IP address that it knows the "supported" ISP will have a gateway responding on.
That's what's happening here with the phone: it's overriding the APN settings with the AT&T values and not allowing me to change them. Since it is an unlocked phone, I not only consider the fact that AT&T's iOS carrier profile is the agent "doing" (in the loosest sense of the word) the APN overriding immaterial (after all, Apple's the one who handed those keys over to them...AT&T wouldn't have that ability unless Apple engineered it into the system and said "here you go"), but Apple *specifically* shouldn't be giving their carrier partners that kind of control over *unlocked* models.
You and the other two respondents raise a fair point: console makers have been doing this for a long time. So I guess you could say that in my mind I have made a distinction -- illogically or no -- between "general-use computing" devices and specific-use devices, such as a game consoles. I would also say, though, that I think what the console manufacturers do is just as much BS as what Apple has been doing.
I'm not sure why you say "they aren't doing MORE than what everyone else in the industry is doing." They were one of the (if *not* THE) first to come up with a general computing platform that has a digital distribution mechanism for client apps full of DRM *that happens to be the only way to install third-party software on the platform*. By Apple's mandate, there is no sanctioned sideloading of apps. And jailbreaking/rooting doesn't count because that's simply people exploiting security holes in the system that Apple constructed to keep non-App Store apps off the platform.
Sure, everybody else is doing it now, but Apple pioneered that trend. The others followed suit after they saw the success of their platform.
Even if you want to develop a little utility of your own to run on your own device and not sell or distribute to anyone else, you *still* have to pay Apple $99/year for the privilege of loading *your own* software on *your own* device.
Given what I've been through recently with Apple on my iPhone (http://www.anderson-net.com/~nathan/apple-broke-my-phone), and also recent stories such as this one (http://www.telecoms.com/54319/apple-vetting-operators-on-lte-network-performance/), I'd have to say, "yup."
I agree with you in principle, which is partially why I asked the question. But note that my question wasn't "how can we get these companies to change their ways while still remaining their customers." I'm not suggesting that I'm looking for a scenario where I can continue to eat the cake that I already have, and I am perfectly willing to end my relationship as a customer with them. My point is that for every 1 of me out there who cares enough to do that, there are 999,999 other people that don't care about my problem, don't have any complaints about the way Apple (or any other company like them) does things because they themselves haven't been negatively impacted by these policies personally yet, and so these people will continue to pour money into Apple's coffers. Thus, me taking a stand and "voting with my wallet" isn't going to amount to a hill of beans, and when other companies see the success that Apple is having and they chalk that success up (either correctly or incorrectly) to some of these (bad) policies that I'm lamenting, those other companies will follow suit and copycat Apple not just in their industrial designs, but also in their policies. And I will be left with 0 alternatives at the end of the day.
In fact, I would argue that we are already seeing this happening now. What percentage of Android manufacturers ship their phones with either easily-unlocked bootloaders or bootloaders that are unlocked by default?...yeah, exactly. Oh, and how many app stores can you use on Windows Phone? Just the one, you say? These are industry trends that Apple set the tone for, and now inertia has taken over for the entire industry.
Finally, I should point out that voting with one's wallet takes a different form depending on whether you are dealing with a company that sells goods or a company that sells services. If Apple were mostly a services company (like, say, my cell phone carrier), I can vote with my wallet by cancelling my subscription. That act has an immediate effect and sends a clear message. In the case of Apple, though, they sold me an iPhone several months ago, and I was mostly happy with it until this happened. During the time between when I purchased the iPhone and when I saw the harmful effect their policies can have on me as an end-user, Apple was not receiving any additional income from me; thus, I wasn't an "active customer" in the same way that one can be an active customer in good standing of a service provider, and therefore it's not as straightforward to apply your criticism of me "clearly proclaiming that [I] support what they [Apple] do" as you make it out to be. The order of things was that first, I made my purchase, and THEN I recognized the problem when it bit me in the butt AFTER that. It's not like there's anything I can threaten to cut off in terms of my "financial support" of them at this point. I could say to Apple, "hey, I'm not going to buy your phones anymore." And they would come back with, "uh, well, so what? We had no assurance you were going to buy more phones from us anyway...you haven't made a purchase in X months."
As a customer of theirs, I'm sure I'm well in the minority in terms of how I use my devices, and as long as most of their customers have no problem with how they do business and they continue to rake in money hand-over-fist, Apple losing me as a customer is a mere drop in the bucket for them. If the loss of my money and goodwill as a prior customer is not enough, and other people continue to desire and to buy their products, how can we communicate to companies like Apple that the "open" way is a better way, and do so in a language they can understand and respond to?
...that is, TRUE PtP is expensive. Most rural wireless providers are going to be running most of their residential & SMB customers off of PtMP systems: one antenna, multiple customers. Even better, these systems are all half-duplex.
True PtP is a really cost-prohibitive option. It doesn't scale well for the provider since there is only so much spectrum and tower space for antennas to go around, so the customers that actually need a dedicated, high-bandwidth option with an SLA are the only ones who are going to be willing to pay what it costs for an actual PtP connection with an antenna dedicated to them on the ISP's tower.
That's not to say that PtMP cannot work, or work well. But it is important for everybody to keep in mind that it is a shared-resource kind of connection, not unlike DOCSIS.
Listen to this guy. I work in the industry, too, for a regional ISP in a very rural area, and I have a couple of things to add.
To begin with, I know it hurts to hear this, but sometimes reality bites: the residential ISP business model is BASED on oversubscription. Period. Anybody else who tells you otherwise is lying or doesn't know what they are talking about. When an ISP sells a residential or SMB customer a 3Mbit/s down asynchronous connection at under $100/mo, it's guaranteed they don't have the bandwidth to back this up for you and everybody else they have sold a connection to. All of the usage models for scaling up bandwidth are based on bursty usage by their customers. They simply cannot afford to have every single customer of theirs pulling down their 3 megs all simultaneously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thus all of the "up to" language that was surely a part of your "contracted" rate.
But thanks to recent inventions such as Bittorrent and Netflix, certain customers *are* constantly filling their pipe 24/7. And people wonder why ISPs are in such a hurry to institute pay-per-use models...I mean, what other industry that resells scarce, shared-resource services sells it to you at flat-rate all-you-can-eat pricing? Electricity? Water? Telephone? Fuel? None of those.
Now, it absolutely could be argued that if you are seeing 100-200kbit/s down at certain times of the day, they aren't keeping up their end of the bargain because they haven't scaled up their upstream bandwidth to cope with increased demand (especially if they are continuing to install new customers). A successful last-mile ISP will be watching their usage, constantly running the numbers, and making sure that they still have enough capacity to meet demand at any given time. Of course, this is all still done within the assumption of "bursty" usage models, so if they have 10 customers each provisioned at 3Mbit/s down, their models are not going to suggest to them that they need to have 30Mbit/s of total capacity available. So if all of those customers are filling their connections 24/7, then that creates a problem.
And the problem is a real economic problem. The previous poster was correct in saying that the ISP is not making money off of you hand-over-fist. If they are strictly an ISP, I guarantee you they are barely squeaking by. (If they are a regulated incumbent telco with an ISP side-business, like a Verizon or Frontier or CenturyLink, that's another whole story...) ESPECIALLY if they are a rural ISP. Verizon/Frontier sells, what, 3Mbit/s DSL for around $30/mo to residential users? That's great. I *guarantee* you that IF we are talking about a rural ISP, they are LUCKY if they are paying a rate of $30-per-MEG-per-month to their upstream. That would be CHEAP. And you expect them to turn around and sell you a 3 MEG all-you-can-eat circuit for $30/mo? That would mean you are paying them 1/3rd of what that kind of bandwidth actually costs them to get for you. That's called a money-losing proposition.
So, to the OP: by all means, complain to your ISP. For all we know, your problems are not related to constrained throughput as a result of peak usage, and are instead being caused by a physical problem with your circuit. But keep in mind that there's a reason that to this day, getting a connection with an actual contracted SLA is not cheap. There's a reason why you can still find yourself paying $300-500/mo or more to a telco for a T1 (~1.5Mbit/s synchronous) circuit where that throughput is guaranteed. If you actually need 3 megs down guaranteed to you 24/7, then you're going to have to pay dearly for it.
The problem is that nobody is willing to pay what it actually costs.
I'm not exactly the most vocal contributor here, but as you can probably see, I've been around for a while, and believe-you-me your presence will be missed.
Ah. Sorry. I misread the beginning of that second sentence as you offering a second point in favor of the Nexus S (as in, "they're the most dev friendly, AND they're supported pretty well, too").
As part of iPhoneOS (now iOS) 3.0, in June *2009*, Apple announced that hardware manufacturers would be able to have their hardware directly interface with their iPhoneOS applications, either through the dock connector OR through bluetooth. They have an official set of APIs built into the OS specifically to facilitate this.
I think it was cool that they did this over a YEAR AGO, but hey, that story doesn't make for as sexy a headline as "OMG Apple suddenly loosening their Death Grip on their iPhone hardware?!?!?!"
-- Nathan
P.S. -- No Apple apologist here; in fact, I'm generally very critical of the locked-down nature of the iDevices. But come on...let's strive for accuracy here.
First, I don't think it's about BES (at least exclusively). If BES doesn't also go through RIM's servers (As in: your provider's Exchange server BES gateway Blackberry servers Blackberry phone), then why do all of the articles about this India scuffle to-date talk about "RIM's network"? (Yes, I read TFA.)
Second, if it was about BES and BES worked the way you imply it does, then it seems to me that RIM still shouldn't need to get involved. Sure, the communication over-the-air is all encrypted, but since BES (according to you) is simply a gateway to your corporate Exchange/Notes/Groupwise server, why not simply ask the owner of the server for direct access to its contents rather than dragging RIM into this? Or are you trying to tell me that IMAP4+SSL users or encrypted Exchange users on other phones that don't need to be tied down to a proprietary network will give the Indian government the same kinds of headaches?
See, this is exactly why device manufacturers shouldn't be making devices that are entirely reliant upon an external "cloud" service that is also controlled by the device manufacturer. If Blackberry was merely making devices that could be configured to talk to any server(s) using industry-standard protocols, they wouldn't get themselves into the kind of situation where 1 million deployed devices could have been turned into doorstops overnight. (Maybe my understanding of the way that Blackberries work is misinformed, and so my rant here could be completely groundless -- and just for the record, I'm open to correction -- but I am under the impression that Blackberries need to be in constant communication with the BIS servers that Blackberry themselves run in order to function.)
This is also why the whole push notification system that Apple came up with for the iPhone is stupid. If something goes wrong with servers that Apple controls, then suddenly that feature across every single phone that has shipped to-date is dead. Device features should not be wholly reliant upon a service that the device manufacturer controls...all you are doing is making a single point-of-failure when you do that.
So, I see all of the posts coming to the defense of CSIRO, and I get them. I truly do.
However, there is still one thing I do not get: Why is CSIRO going (and why have they been allowed to go) after the companies selling the final piece of complete, end-user hardware in a shrink-wrap box, rather than the chipset manufacturers themselves? Isn't it Broadcom, Atheros, Intel, Ralink, Realtek, etc., who failed to license the technology? It seems to me that the company who takes the chipset and slaps their name on the front of a plastic box that contains it has become an unwitting victim in all of this. Most of these companies don't even really have their own designs. The original Broadcom reference design was tweaked by Gemtek and then rebranded by Linksys, Buffalo, and many, many others, for example...most of these companies buy their stuff from an ODM and barely do any of their own actual engineering and are just sales and marketing warehouses.
So why are all the actual chipset manufacturers getting off scott-free?
Slashdot Mirror
This is not so much a recreation of the Nokia 8110 that was in the movie as it is an "homage". It's a completely new, designed-from-the-ground-up piece of hardware (AND software) that just happens to bear a resemblance to the original and takes some design cues from it.
Not only that, but neither the original 8110 nor this new version actually have a button-triggered, spring-loaded release for the keypad cover. That was something designed specifically for the movie, and IIRC the phones in the movie were not even functional: they were props that had been gutted of any real functionality and then fitted with the spring-loaded mechanism which, given the era, was impossible to fit into the phone while leaving the actual phone guts intact.
There was a Nokia model, the 7110, that actually had a spring-load keypad cover that vaguely resembled what we saw in the movie, though it was not as "exciting".
-- Nathan
I'm not trying to speak for turp182, and (s)he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I read the post this way:
I generally have no reason or desire to have filters apply to the movies I watch, but I support VidAngel's right to do what they are doing and I respect them for taking the stand that they have. Therefore, to demonstrate my solidarity, I threw a few bucks their way and rented a movie. When you rent a movie, you are also given the option of donating to their defense fund, and I did that as well. It used to be the case that when you streamed the video content from them, you could elect to apply anywhere between 0 and n filters to the movie, but that has since changed and now you must apply between 1 and n filters. I chose to apply one of the more common filters that is applicable to almost any contemporary movie in order to satisfy the requirement to choose at least one.
-- Nathan
My phone has a large enough screen and a high enough resolution that I just prefer to browse the full site. Can we stop the "mobile web" shit?
Yes. Can all of it, starting with Slashdot's own mobile site.
AC is correct, and if I could vote up his/her post I would. T-Mobile never called HSPA+ "LTE", they called it 4G. LTE was never enabled on the N4 out-of-the-box; it always required a hack to get running (it has a baseband chip capable of LTE but Google never intended to use the LTE support in the chip). And HSPA+ was never disabled in the Nexus 4 via firmware update or any other mechanism. You are getting the two things confused.
Why not just run / fork (okay, fine, "spork") Darwin?
-- Nathan
Have not RTFA yet, but this sounds a lot like Matt Gemmell's talk on "Making Mistakes Impossible", which is really good and which you can view here: https://vimeo.com/84322659
-- Nathan
Not to put this kid down, but that looks awfully similar to the MindCuber design that David Gilday came up with: http://www.mindcuber.com/
-- Nathan
Ignoring for the moment the question of Are You Human or Are You Troll, that is a terrible analogy. Digital and analog television are encoded and transmitted completely differently over the air; in contrast, from the phone's link layer perspective, any two GSM carriers are indistinguishable from one another, especially if both carriers are transmitting in the same radio band, and ESPECIALLY if both carriers are in fact one and the same from a physical network perspective, as AT&T and the MVNO Straight Talk are!
My situation with the phone would be more like having a digital television set that was programmed by its manufacturer to only allow you to watch specific channels and lock others out, even though the television set is physically and in all other ways capable of allowing you to watch the non-whitelisted channels: it's simply an arbitrary software lockout. The "unsupported" channels aren't doing anything funky or being encoded and transmitted some other way.
Or it might be more like an IP router -- for the sake of this example, let's say it's a boring sub-$100 consumer-grade router/switch/wireless-AP thing -- that will only allow you to use it with certain internet service providers, even if another "unsupported" ISP encapsulates and delivers its traffic to you in exactly the same way the "approved" ISPs do. Let's say the ISP expects the customer's gear to speak direct IP-over-Ethernet to it (and not IP-over-ATM, PPPoE, or any number of other possibilities), and that the "supported" and "unsupported" ISPs both also run DHCP servers. The "unsupported" ISP fails to work with the router, not because it is doing anything out of the ordinary when compared against the set of standards that the router was manufactured to support, but rather because although the router accepts the DHCP responses from both ISPs, it willfully ignores the default route passed to it and overrides it in the routing table with a hard-coded IP address that it knows the "supported" ISP will have a gateway responding on.
That's what's happening here with the phone: it's overriding the APN settings with the AT&T values and not allowing me to change them. Since it is an unlocked phone, I not only consider the fact that AT&T's iOS carrier profile is the agent "doing" (in the loosest sense of the word) the APN overriding immaterial (after all, Apple's the one who handed those keys over to them...AT&T wouldn't have that ability unless Apple engineered it into the system and said "here you go"), but Apple *specifically* shouldn't be giving their carrier partners that kind of control over *unlocked* models.
-- Nathan
You and the other two respondents raise a fair point: console makers have been doing this for a long time. So I guess you could say that in my mind I have made a distinction -- illogically or no -- between "general-use computing" devices and specific-use devices, such as a game consoles. I would also say, though, that I think what the console manufacturers do is just as much BS as what Apple has been doing.
-- Nathan
I'm not sure why you say "they aren't doing MORE than what everyone else in the industry is doing." They were one of the (if *not* THE) first to come up with a general computing platform that has a digital distribution mechanism for client apps full of DRM *that happens to be the only way to install third-party software on the platform*. By Apple's mandate, there is no sanctioned sideloading of apps. And jailbreaking/rooting doesn't count because that's simply people exploiting security holes in the system that Apple constructed to keep non-App Store apps off the platform.
Sure, everybody else is doing it now, but Apple pioneered that trend. The others followed suit after they saw the success of their platform.
Even if you want to develop a little utility of your own to run on your own device and not sell or distribute to anyone else, you *still* have to pay Apple $99/year for the privilege of loading *your own* software on *your own* device.
-- Nathan
Pretty sure he's referring to this:
http://blog.chpwn.com/post/13572216737
-- Nathan
Perhaps this is Richard Stallman already answering my Ask Slashdot question?
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3278789&cid=42118329
Given what I've been through recently with Apple on my iPhone (http://www.anderson-net.com/~nathan/apple-broke-my-phone), and also recent stories such as this one (http://www.telecoms.com/54319/apple-vetting-operators-on-lte-network-performance/), I'd have to say, "yup."
-- Nathan
I agree with you in principle, which is partially why I asked the question. But note that my question wasn't "how can we get these companies to change their ways while still remaining their customers." I'm not suggesting that I'm looking for a scenario where I can continue to eat the cake that I already have, and I am perfectly willing to end my relationship as a customer with them. My point is that for every 1 of me out there who cares enough to do that, there are 999,999 other people that don't care about my problem, don't have any complaints about the way Apple (or any other company like them) does things because they themselves haven't been negatively impacted by these policies personally yet, and so these people will continue to pour money into Apple's coffers. Thus, me taking a stand and "voting with my wallet" isn't going to amount to a hill of beans, and when other companies see the success that Apple is having and they chalk that success up (either correctly or incorrectly) to some of these (bad) policies that I'm lamenting, those other companies will follow suit and copycat Apple not just in their industrial designs, but also in their policies. And I will be left with 0 alternatives at the end of the day.
In fact, I would argue that we are already seeing this happening now. What percentage of Android manufacturers ship their phones with either easily-unlocked bootloaders or bootloaders that are unlocked by default? ...yeah, exactly. Oh, and how many app stores can you use on Windows Phone? Just the one, you say? These are industry trends that Apple set the tone for, and now inertia has taken over for the entire industry.
Finally, I should point out that voting with one's wallet takes a different form depending on whether you are dealing with a company that sells goods or a company that sells services. If Apple were mostly a services company (like, say, my cell phone carrier), I can vote with my wallet by cancelling my subscription. That act has an immediate effect and sends a clear message. In the case of Apple, though, they sold me an iPhone several months ago, and I was mostly happy with it until this happened. During the time between when I purchased the iPhone and when I saw the harmful effect their policies can have on me as an end-user, Apple was not receiving any additional income from me; thus, I wasn't an "active customer" in the same way that one can be an active customer in good standing of a service provider, and therefore it's not as straightforward to apply your criticism of me "clearly proclaiming that [I] support what they [Apple] do" as you make it out to be. The order of things was that first, I made my purchase, and THEN I recognized the problem when it bit me in the butt AFTER that. It's not like there's anything I can threaten to cut off in terms of my "financial support" of them at this point. I could say to Apple, "hey, I'm not going to buy your phones anymore." And they would come back with, "uh, well, so what? We had no assurance you were going to buy more phones from us anyway...you haven't made a purchase in X months."
-- Nathan
What can we do to incentivize hardware manufacturers to be less "evil"? I have an iPhone, and Apple has screwed me over; this is my story: http://www.anderson-net.com/~nathan/apple-broke-my-phone (also see http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/23/apples-stick-in-the-mud-routine-is-getting-old). I know, I know...you can say "I told you so" if you want to.
As a customer of theirs, I'm sure I'm well in the minority in terms of how I use my devices, and as long as most of their customers have no problem with how they do business and they continue to rake in money hand-over-fist, Apple losing me as a customer is a mere drop in the bucket for them. If the loss of my money and goodwill as a prior customer is not enough, and other people continue to desire and to buy their products, how can we communicate to companies like Apple that the "open" way is a better way, and do so in a language they can understand and respond to?
-- Nathan
...that is, TRUE PtP is expensive. Most rural wireless providers are going to be running most of their residential & SMB customers off of PtMP systems: one antenna, multiple customers. Even better, these systems are all half-duplex.
True PtP is a really cost-prohibitive option. It doesn't scale well for the provider since there is only so much spectrum and tower space for antennas to go around, so the customers that actually need a dedicated, high-bandwidth option with an SLA are the only ones who are going to be willing to pay what it costs for an actual PtP connection with an antenna dedicated to them on the ISP's tower.
That's not to say that PtMP cannot work, or work well. But it is important for everybody to keep in mind that it is a shared-resource kind of connection, not unlike DOCSIS.
-- Nathan
Listen to this guy. I work in the industry, too, for a regional ISP in a very rural area, and I have a couple of things to add.
To begin with, I know it hurts to hear this, but sometimes reality bites: the residential ISP business model is BASED on oversubscription. Period. Anybody else who tells you otherwise is lying or doesn't know what they are talking about. When an ISP sells a residential or SMB customer a 3Mbit/s down asynchronous connection at under $100/mo, it's guaranteed they don't have the bandwidth to back this up for you and everybody else they have sold a connection to. All of the usage models for scaling up bandwidth are based on bursty usage by their customers. They simply cannot afford to have every single customer of theirs pulling down their 3 megs all simultaneously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thus all of the "up to" language that was surely a part of your "contracted" rate.
But thanks to recent inventions such as Bittorrent and Netflix, certain customers *are* constantly filling their pipe 24/7. And people wonder why ISPs are in such a hurry to institute pay-per-use models...I mean, what other industry that resells scarce, shared-resource services sells it to you at flat-rate all-you-can-eat pricing? Electricity? Water? Telephone? Fuel? None of those.
Now, it absolutely could be argued that if you are seeing 100-200kbit/s down at certain times of the day, they aren't keeping up their end of the bargain because they haven't scaled up their upstream bandwidth to cope with increased demand (especially if they are continuing to install new customers). A successful last-mile ISP will be watching their usage, constantly running the numbers, and making sure that they still have enough capacity to meet demand at any given time. Of course, this is all still done within the assumption of "bursty" usage models, so if they have 10 customers each provisioned at 3Mbit/s down, their models are not going to suggest to them that they need to have 30Mbit/s of total capacity available. So if all of those customers are filling their connections 24/7, then that creates a problem.
And the problem is a real economic problem. The previous poster was correct in saying that the ISP is not making money off of you hand-over-fist. If they are strictly an ISP, I guarantee you they are barely squeaking by. (If they are a regulated incumbent telco with an ISP side-business, like a Verizon or Frontier or CenturyLink, that's another whole story...) ESPECIALLY if they are a rural ISP. Verizon/Frontier sells, what, 3Mbit/s DSL for around $30/mo to residential users? That's great. I *guarantee* you that IF we are talking about a rural ISP, they are LUCKY if they are paying a rate of $30-per-MEG-per-month to their upstream. That would be CHEAP. And you expect them to turn around and sell you a 3 MEG all-you-can-eat circuit for $30/mo? That would mean you are paying them 1/3rd of what that kind of bandwidth actually costs them to get for you. That's called a money-losing proposition.
So, to the OP: by all means, complain to your ISP. For all we know, your problems are not related to constrained throughput as a result of peak usage, and are instead being caused by a physical problem with your circuit. But keep in mind that there's a reason that to this day, getting a connection with an actual contracted SLA is not cheap. There's a reason why you can still find yourself paying $300-500/mo or more to a telco for a T1 (~1.5Mbit/s synchronous) circuit where that throughput is guaranteed. If you actually need 3 megs down guaranteed to you 24/7, then you're going to have to pay dearly for it.
The problem is that nobody is willing to pay what it actually costs.
-- Nathan
I'm not exactly the most vocal contributor here, but as you can probably see, I've been around for a while, and believe-you-me your presence will be missed.
Thanks for /.
-- Nathan
How do you know that he did this, out of curiosity?
-- Nathan
I did as well. Do no evil, Larry Ellison edition...
You misspelled know.
You misspelled "now."
Ah. Sorry. I misread the beginning of that second sentence as you offering a second point in favor of the Nexus S (as in, "they're the most dev friendly, AND they're supported pretty well, too").
Nexus S is Samsung, not HTC.
This is a non-story, at least how it is written.
As part of iPhoneOS (now iOS) 3.0, in June *2009*, Apple announced that hardware manufacturers would be able to have their hardware directly interface with their iPhoneOS applications, either through the dock connector OR through bluetooth. They have an official set of APIs built into the OS specifically to facilitate this.
I think it was cool that they did this over a YEAR AGO, but hey, that story doesn't make for as sexy a headline as "OMG Apple suddenly loosening their Death Grip on their iPhone hardware?!?!?!"
-- Nathan
P.S. -- No Apple apologist here; in fact, I'm generally very critical of the locked-down nature of the iDevices. But come on...let's strive for accuracy here.
First, I don't think it's about BES (at least exclusively). If BES doesn't also go through RIM's servers (As in: your provider's Exchange server BES gateway Blackberry servers Blackberry phone), then why do all of the articles about this India scuffle to-date talk about "RIM's network"? (Yes, I read TFA.)
Second, if it was about BES and BES worked the way you imply it does, then it seems to me that RIM still shouldn't need to get involved. Sure, the communication over-the-air is all encrypted, but since BES (according to you) is simply a gateway to your corporate Exchange/Notes/Groupwise server, why not simply ask the owner of the server for direct access to its contents rather than dragging RIM into this? Or are you trying to tell me that IMAP4+SSL users or encrypted Exchange users on other phones that don't need to be tied down to a proprietary network will give the Indian government the same kinds of headaches?
-- Nathan
See, this is exactly why device manufacturers shouldn't be making devices that are entirely reliant upon an external "cloud" service that is also controlled by the device manufacturer. If Blackberry was merely making devices that could be configured to talk to any server(s) using industry-standard protocols, they wouldn't get themselves into the kind of situation where 1 million deployed devices could have been turned into doorstops overnight. (Maybe my understanding of the way that Blackberries work is misinformed, and so my rant here could be completely groundless -- and just for the record, I'm open to correction -- but I am under the impression that Blackberries need to be in constant communication with the BIS servers that Blackberry themselves run in order to function.)
This is also why the whole push notification system that Apple came up with for the iPhone is stupid. If something goes wrong with servers that Apple controls, then suddenly that feature across every single phone that has shipped to-date is dead. Device features should not be wholly reliant upon a service that the device manufacturer controls...all you are doing is making a single point-of-failure when you do that.
-- Nathan
So, I see all of the posts coming to the defense of CSIRO, and I get them. I truly do.
However, there is still one thing I do not get: Why is CSIRO going (and why have they been allowed to go) after the companies selling the final piece of complete, end-user hardware in a shrink-wrap box, rather than the chipset manufacturers themselves? Isn't it Broadcom, Atheros, Intel, Ralink, Realtek, etc., who failed to license the technology? It seems to me that the company who takes the chipset and slaps their name on the front of a plastic box that contains it has become an unwitting victim in all of this. Most of these companies don't even really have their own designs. The original Broadcom reference design was tweaked by Gemtek and then rebranded by Linksys, Buffalo, and many, many others, for example...most of these companies buy their stuff from an ODM and barely do any of their own actual engineering and are just sales and marketing warehouses.
So why are all the actual chipset manufacturers getting off scott-free?
-- Nathan