this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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Basicslly the more data you use, the lower priority you are
So the person browsing the Web doesn't get slowed down by the person redownloading their entire steam library, but if there's bandwidth for everyone then they all go full speed
The downside is some heavier services need to be as fast as possible for good service, like video calls, while you're not going to really notice if your game takes another 2 minutes to download (and this is the way stuff is prioritized now by default)
You could split the difference, but it doesn't really fix the problem, it just fixes the data limiting nonsense. And we should just make that flatly illegal
Really, they should only be able to sell 50mb/s service if their network can provide that to all of their users on at any point in any average day.
So when GTA6 releases, maybe it's a bit of a slow Internet day, but if they can't provide what they promised every evening when everyone is streaming TV?
Then they need to start giving people some of their money back. That way they'll make sure to upgrade their network proactively
there's actually tools for this I think. packets can designate priority. I think its called Quality Of Service. for example e-mails and your 'civilization' turn say 'don't worry, slip me in when you have a free millisecond, I can wait a minute if you're really fucking impacted', streaming video and other suff with some leeway says 'I got a schedule here' and calls or your 'call of battle strike' game where the thing is badically useless if its late cut to the front of the line.
not every router implements it, and that's fine. unless I just imagined all if this. its been a while, but the people who designed the bones of the internet were smart and forward thinking. for example the problems with address space and stuff ipv6 was implemented to solve was finalized in the 90s. the corporations hadn't ruined everything yet.
You're correct, like I said that's the default. A home router might not have it, but basically every commercial piece of network gear has had it for decades now. It was basically required for things like VOIP back in the day, so it became very standard
All residential ISPs are over subscribed. If they could provide the full bandwidth to all of their customers simultaneously, then most of that bandwidth would go unused.
Well yeah, but there are different kinds of oversubscription. There's the one that makes still sense, because you only run into bandwidth issues on special occasions or short periods during the times with the heaviest loads, and there's the other that is powered by greed and leads to a permanent lack of bandwidth.
Didn't seem like such an issue during COVID when everyone was home 24/7 using their internet. Comcast likes to make this same claim but somehow their network didnt collapse during that time. I understand that cell towers have an upper limit on connections but I dont believe for a second that most are currently operating near their limit. Furthermore, nobody is forcing TMobile, Verizon, or anyone else to advertise their plans as "unlimited" if, as they claim, they aren't able to handle the traffic.
That's why I said the average daily maximum of traffic should be the determining factor here
That gives wiggle room for the GtA6 launch, but it means everyone gets the advertised speed. And if they're not, the company can refund the difference to affected customers each month
I realize they're oversubscribed, but that's exactly the problem. They are not investing properly in infrastructure
But companies hate nothing more than leaving money on the table. It makes their numbers look absolutely offensive to business/finance types... So my suggestion would realign the incentives in a way that would make them proactively expand/upgrade the network as needed
But it also doesn't mean they have to build out a ton of unnessesary bandwidth - they would just have to meet actual peak demand
With basic traffic analysis and statistics, they could easily stay ahead of this
And also that would make residential connections expensive as hell and waste resources on every step on the network. I'm on a relatively small ISP but still have symmetric 1Gbps connection. If every customer even on this small ISP had their full bandwidth available to everything all the time they'd need at least several Tbps combined capacity which would take considerable chunk of all the capacity we have on the whole country to abroad just to serve few thousand houses.