The only limit to T-mobile's unlimited 4g (not the tiered plans for which they do state limits) is their network capacity. They prioritize based on usage, but that's not a limit, it's prioritization and, in fact, it improves network performance, even for the deprioritized users, by reducing competition for a scarce resource when there's not enough to go around, allowing lighter users to finish their downloads faster and get off the network sooner.
There is no speed limit here, nor a time or usage limit.
Consider this: If they didn't have the deprioritization policy, excessive congestion on a given tower would result in a completely unusable connection for everyone. Giving a subset of users priority to allow them to get off the network sooner avoids that; it effectively increases the speed limit for everyone by more efficiently utilizing the available bandwidth, which is limited by physics.
If you've never implemented proper QoS on a congested network and seen the immediate impact it had on the traffic flow, this isn't something that is obvious to most people, so i fully understand how you might think it's a limit of sorts, but the reality is that it enables all users to effectively get their data instead of flooding the data with retransmitted packets as everyone attempts to talk over everyone else.
You keep saying "throttle". I'm sorry, I just can't take you seriously when you keep referring to prioritization/deprioritization as throttling, as they're two distinctly different actions. That said, I'll do my best.
It is absolutely no different than an electric company raising rates at certain times of day to discourage people from using too much electricity.
Actually, it's entirely different. If an electric company reduced the availability of power to heavy users when local load was high, well, that'd be no different. In fact, that's precisely what many electric companies are beginning to do with things like HVAC cutoff devices and it's a damned sight better than what some (including my local utility, PG&E) have been doing for years with structured rolling blackouts independent of individual usage.
To flip it around, what you describe is exactly what HughesNet does for their satellite internet service. You pay for between 5GB and 50GB of data each month, which can be utilized 24hr/day, but they make the hours of 2AM to 8AM effectively cheaper by giving you a 50GB bucket of data that is only available during those hours.
If you think T-Mobile and HughesNet are doing the same thing, you're too hopelessly far gone to be saved.
People are complaining that the unlimited 4g plan is throttled after 26GB. People are wrong, though, because it is not throttled after 26GB, just deprioritized. What that means is simple: if bandwidth is available, you get it; if it's not, other people have dibs.
The end result is that lighter users get off of congested towers faster and free up bandwidth for heavier users, rendering everyone's connections faster.
The $48mil fine is the result of idiots not knowing the difference between throttling and deprioritization.
I say this as a T-Mo user who tops 35GB each and every month. No, it is not a throttle; if it was, I'd be throttled at least 25% of the time but, as I'm typically not on overcrowded towers, I've never actually been impacted by the deprioritization. Not once since they implemented it years ago. If they were throttling, I'd be complaining; since they're actually protecting my available bandwidth, I'm not.
The maximum speed allowed by a congested link (this is deprioritization, which has no effect when bandwidth is available; it's not throttling, which would take effect even if you were the only user) approaches zero as more users hop on at the same priority level, for every user.
Deprioritizing the heavier users increases speeds for everyone by allowing the lighter users to finish their downloads faster and get off the network, freeing up bandwidth for the heavier users.
Well, in this case the deprioritization (read: not throttling) isn't a limit imposed by the provider, it's a method of minimizing the number of people affected by the physical limits of the network by deciding who bears the brunt of that impact.
And the end result is less network congestion and better speeds for everyone on the network. Yes, that includes the heavy users who get deprioritized, as it allows the lighter users to finish their downloads and get off the network faster.
Too small of a package; limited thermal profile. In reality, an i5 with a decent GPU will make for a better gaming rig than an i7 with integrated graphics. Too bad no Surface model comes with an even half-way decent GPU.
So the fallout to Apple would seem to be mostly limited to people being able to load alternative firmware, it would be a 'jailbreak' thing. And for a very small number of people law enforcement could access their phone when being 'searched'.
The former of which Apple simply does not want us to be able to do and the latter of which they want us to believe impossible. Oh, and it would be all law enforcement, as well as even the smallest of small-time hackers and data thieves.You do realize that, if the key gets out publicly (you know, since you mentioned people being able to load their own firmware), it's out there for everyone, right? Not just the good guys?
I'm just guessing that Apple wouldn't do something so dumb as permanently burn a public key paired to a potentially (no matter how unlikely) guessable and (more likely) leakable private key into their CPUs, leaving themselves absolutely no way to revoke that key and replace it with a new one if someone cracks it or when someone leaks it.
But, then, I don't know anything about security, I just work in the industry.
That's how Apple, a company with a habit of misleading consumers with regard to how their products actually function, claims it works. I'm not going to argue, because that's what the documentation says, but I also won't have a surprised look on my face (like you will) when it's proven false in a month.
Got a reference for that? The only information I can find on their lineage is that they started with Y Combinator. They likely hold their accounts with Wells Fargo, which is what enables them to do same-day transfers to Wells Fargo customers; my wife and I can do the same thing (individual accounts, not joint) and, well, neither of us are owned by Wells Fargo.
They are headquartered at 225 Bush St., 11th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94104, whereas WF is headquartered at 420 Montgomery Street. San Francisco, CA 94104. I've actually been to WF's HQ a number of times, not always as a customer; hell, I've toured their old HQ in Berkeley from top to bottom, including vaults. I might know a thing or two about the organization.
They sell the account for pennies on the dollar, likely "making" $20 on a $500 debt. $500 in fees is the threshold for closure and sale of an account. They pay about $20 to the employee who opened the account so no, they didn't make any money; they *maybe* covered their costs.
It must be specific people within the organization; they forgave over $7000 of my wife's student loan debt so she could open a checking account 4 years ago. And no, it wasn't just a ploy to get her to deposit money so they could recover the debt; in fact, they've forgiven a handful of overdraft fees on her account in that time and have even offered her a line of credit, which she declined.
I'm not saying there aren't bad eggs, or even that bad eggs are the minority, but neither my wife or I have had any issues and I've been with them nearly a decade now.
WF hasn't offered payday loans for several years now. when they did, they had the most reasonable (eh, least unreasonable?) rates of any payday lender I've encountered.
They're nowhere near the worst. Google Citizens Bank (also, Charter One, a Citizens brand). Charter One fucked me harder in the 2 years I was with them than Wells Fargo, the only bank that would open an account for me after Charter One was done with me, has in the past 6. That is to say, Wells Fargo has actually treated me decently. My only complaint is that, as with most banks, their interest rates completely blow, but that's fine; I hold my savings with a different bank.
Overage fees on an account in my name that I did not open, for which the bank does not have a signature card on file that was signed by me or a copy of my photo identification with an actual photo of me on it? Yeah, not paying those.
Go ahead, send the account to collections where it'll take me all of 30 seconds to prove it's not mine.
you can easily argue that a single more robust wireless solution in some cases would be better as the electrical and phone are going over the same poles
And you can just as easily be wrong. The only instance in which wireless would potentially be more reliable is if a tree falls on the wires feeding your street or house, or someone takes out one of the poles carrying such wires. Both of those are very localized problems, easily solved by walking one block over and asking a neighbor to use their phone; and neither are problems in areas with underground wiring.
A "disaster-level" power outage will not involve distribution poles, it will involve high-tension lines, transformers, and/or generators (e.g. power plants). Basically, the situations in which loss of electrical power will overlap with a life-or-death need for access to a phone all involve electrical generation or distribution equipment that is nowhere near phone lines.
The mandate that every effort be made to keep POTS service up and running means they have battery backups for the immediate outage, with natural gas generators on site for extended outages, and diesel or gasoline generators on the ready in case gas service is disrupted. None of this is mandated for wireless, VoIP, or internet; and, as a result, those are the first services to go down when there is a loss of power.
During the Northeast blackout of 2003, I was the only of my coworkers with AT&T (Cingular at the time) wireless, with the rest being a mix of Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. They all lost service immediately when power went out; I had service for 3 hours, until AT&T's towers lost power. My POTS line was up for the duration of the multi-day outage.
The last half-dozen or so places I've lived where I've had both DSL and cable internet simultaneously, I've consistently observed that my modest UPS outlives the cable plant during an outage, while my DSL line stays up until the UPS dies, at which point I still have a working POTS line and can make and receive calls, while the VoIP service I use for my business died with the cable plant.
<sarc>But yes, POTS is less reliable than wireless or VoIP by literal miles.</sarc>
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Right... You're missing the point entirely.
The only limit to T-mobile's unlimited 4g (not the tiered plans for which they do state limits) is their network capacity. They prioritize based on usage, but that's not a limit, it's prioritization and, in fact, it improves network performance, even for the deprioritized users, by reducing competition for a scarce resource when there's not enough to go around, allowing lighter users to finish their downloads faster and get off the network sooner.
There is no speed limit here, nor a time or usage limit.
Consider this: If they didn't have the deprioritization policy, excessive congestion on a given tower would result in a completely unusable connection for everyone. Giving a subset of users priority to allow them to get off the network sooner avoids that; it effectively increases the speed limit for everyone by more efficiently utilizing the available bandwidth, which is limited by physics.
If you've never implemented proper QoS on a congested network and seen the immediate impact it had on the traffic flow, this isn't something that is obvious to most people, so i fully understand how you might think it's a limit of sorts, but the reality is that it enables all users to effectively get their data instead of flooding the data with retransmitted packets as everyone attempts to talk over everyone else.
It is absolutely no different than an electric company raising rates at certain times of day to discourage people from using too much electricity.
Actually, it's entirely different. If an electric company reduced the availability of power to heavy users when local load was high, well, that'd be no different. In fact, that's precisely what many electric companies are beginning to do with things like HVAC cutoff devices and it's a damned sight better than what some (including my local utility, PG&E) have been doing for years with structured rolling blackouts independent of individual usage.
To flip it around, what you describe is exactly what HughesNet does for their satellite internet service. You pay for between 5GB and 50GB of data each month, which can be utilized 24hr/day, but they make the hours of 2AM to 8AM effectively cheaper by giving you a 50GB bucket of data that is only available during those hours.
If you think T-Mobile and HughesNet are doing the same thing, you're too hopelessly far gone to be saved.
People are complaining that the unlimited 4g plan is throttled after 26GB. People are wrong, though, because it is not throttled after 26GB, just deprioritized. What that means is simple: if bandwidth is available, you get it; if it's not, other people have dibs.
The end result is that lighter users get off of congested towers faster and free up bandwidth for heavier users, rendering everyone's connections faster.
The $48mil fine is the result of idiots not knowing the difference between throttling and deprioritization.
I say this as a T-Mo user who tops 35GB each and every month. No, it is not a throttle; if it was, I'd be throttled at least 25% of the time but, as I'm typically not on overcrowded towers, I've never actually been impacted by the deprioritization. Not once since they implemented it years ago. If they were throttling, I'd be complaining; since they're actually protecting my available bandwidth, I'm not.
They never said 3g speeds, they said 2g speeds from the very first day of their Simple Choice plans.
The maximum speed allowed by a congested link (this is deprioritization, which has no effect when bandwidth is available; it's not throttling, which would take effect even if you were the only user) approaches zero as more users hop on at the same priority level, for every user.
Deprioritizing the heavier users increases speeds for everyone by allowing the lighter users to finish their downloads faster and get off the network, freeing up bandwidth for the heavier users.
Well, in this case the deprioritization (read: not throttling) isn't a limit imposed by the provider, it's a method of minimizing the number of people affected by the physical limits of the network by deciding who bears the brunt of that impact.
And the end result is less network congestion and better speeds for everyone on the network. Yes, that includes the heavy users who get deprioritized, as it allows the lighter users to finish their downloads and get off the network faster.
Too small of a package; limited thermal profile. In reality, an i5 with a decent GPU will make for a better gaming rig than an i7 with integrated graphics. Too bad no Surface model comes with an even half-way decent GPU.
This discussion isn't about Windows, it's about the Surface. Which is not good for games. Actually.
I hear it runs Ultimate Frisbee pretty well. No battery life issues, either.
If only the other DNC could learn from its own memory, too!
Right, but Microsoft wants you to bash on Ubuntu if you're a Windows user.
"So its disclosure would seem to require physical access to the device to compromise it". Note that limits the number of hackers
But it does open the stolen device market back up in a huge way.
and that they are also defeated by remote wiping.
Unless the thief turns the device off. Their hacker friend would then boot into DFU to load the new firmware, overwriting only the /system partition.
I assume law enforcement has some way to tell Apple not to remote wipe.
See above. Replace "thief" with "cop" and "hacker" with "technician".
If you think the impact would be negligible, you aren't very creative, friend.
So the fallout to Apple would seem to be mostly limited to people being able to load alternative firmware, it would be a 'jailbreak' thing. And for a very small number of people law enforcement could access their phone when being 'searched'.
The former of which Apple simply does not want us to be able to do and the latter of which they want us to believe impossible. Oh, and it would be all law enforcement, as well as even the smallest of small-time hackers and data thieves.You do realize that, if the key gets out publicly (you know, since you mentioned people being able to load their own firmware), it's out there for everyone, right? Not just the good guys?
I'm just guessing that Apple wouldn't do something so dumb as permanently burn a public key paired to a potentially (no matter how unlikely) guessable and (more likely) leakable private key into their CPUs, leaving themselves absolutely no way to revoke that key and replace it with a new one if someone cracks it or when someone leaks it.
But, then, I don't know anything about security, I just work in the industry.
That's how Apple, a company with a habit of misleading consumers with regard to how their products actually function, claims it works. I'm not going to argue, because that's what the documentation says, but I also won't have a surprised look on my face (like you will) when it's proven false in a month.
Right, and Foxconn can't add their own signing keys to the devices when they're the ones burning the ROMs that hold them.
Oh...
Wait...
Care to clarify? Of course not, you'd rather just make unsubstantiated claims.
The are owned by WF.
Got a reference for that? The only information I can find on their lineage is that they started with Y Combinator. They likely hold their accounts with Wells Fargo, which is what enables them to do same-day transfers to Wells Fargo customers; my wife and I can do the same thing (individual accounts, not joint) and, well, neither of us are owned by Wells Fargo.
They are headquartered at 225 Bush St., 11th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94104, whereas WF is headquartered at 420 Montgomery Street. San Francisco, CA 94104. I've actually been to WF's HQ a number of times, not always as a customer; hell, I've toured their old HQ in Berkeley from top to bottom, including vaults. I might know a thing or two about the organization.
They sell the account for pennies on the dollar, likely "making" $20 on a $500 debt. $500 in fees is the threshold for closure and sale of an account. They pay about $20 to the employee who opened the account so no, they didn't make any money; they *maybe* covered their costs.
It must be specific people within the organization; they forgave over $7000 of my wife's student loan debt so she could open a checking account 4 years ago. And no, it wasn't just a ploy to get her to deposit money so they could recover the debt; in fact, they've forgiven a handful of overdraft fees on her account in that time and have even offered her a line of credit, which she declined.
I'm not saying there aren't bad eggs, or even that bad eggs are the minority, but neither my wife or I have had any issues and I've been with them nearly a decade now.
WF hasn't offered payday loans for several years now. when they did, they had the most reasonable (eh, least unreasonable?) rates of any payday lender I've encountered.
They're nowhere near the worst. Google Citizens Bank (also, Charter One, a Citizens brand). Charter One fucked me harder in the 2 years I was with them than Wells Fargo, the only bank that would open an account for me after Charter One was done with me, has in the past 6. That is to say, Wells Fargo has actually treated me decently. My only complaint is that, as with most banks, their interest rates completely blow, but that's fine; I hold my savings with a different bank.
Overage fees on an account in my name that I did not open, for which the bank does not have a signature card on file that was signed by me or a copy of my photo identification with an actual photo of me on it? Yeah, not paying those.
Go ahead, send the account to collections where it'll take me all of 30 seconds to prove it's not mine.
No. There was no profit here.
you can easily argue that a single more robust wireless solution in some cases would be better as the electrical and phone are going over the same poles
And you can just as easily be wrong. The only instance in which wireless would potentially be more reliable is if a tree falls on the wires feeding your street or house, or someone takes out one of the poles carrying such wires. Both of those are very localized problems, easily solved by walking one block over and asking a neighbor to use their phone; and neither are problems in areas with underground wiring.
A "disaster-level" power outage will not involve distribution poles, it will involve high-tension lines, transformers, and/or generators (e.g. power plants). Basically, the situations in which loss of electrical power will overlap with a life-or-death need for access to a phone all involve electrical generation or distribution equipment that is nowhere near phone lines.
The mandate that every effort be made to keep POTS service up and running means they have battery backups for the immediate outage, with natural gas generators on site for extended outages, and diesel or gasoline generators on the ready in case gas service is disrupted. None of this is mandated for wireless, VoIP, or internet; and, as a result, those are the first services to go down when there is a loss of power.
During the Northeast blackout of 2003, I was the only of my coworkers with AT&T (Cingular at the time) wireless, with the rest being a mix of Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. They all lost service immediately when power went out; I had service for 3 hours, until AT&T's towers lost power. My POTS line was up for the duration of the multi-day outage.
The last half-dozen or so places I've lived where I've had both DSL and cable internet simultaneously, I've consistently observed that my modest UPS outlives the cable plant during an outage, while my DSL line stays up until the UPS dies, at which point I still have a working POTS line and can make and receive calls, while the VoIP service I use for my business died with the cable plant.
<sarc>But yes, POTS is less reliable than wireless or VoIP by literal miles.</sarc>
Dumbass.
And what if you use an iPad and an Android phone?
Have fun experiencing cognitive dissonance for the first time.