[Retric]

I think the biggest difference is going to be raising monthly download caps. 4gig to ~50 gig is huge, but T-mobil has 50 gig caps now. So, I could see most people getting by with 500 gig / month for home internet connections.

Which is going to put a lot of pressure on ISP's to improve.

[jsgo]

I'm genuinely hoping that it puts ISPs in a bad position to have no dominance in the market.

I've been under a "provider" who caps out at 10Mbps with, sadly, about 40% uptime with our neighborhood for about 5 years (constant outages. On a first name/you've got my phone number basis with the contracted technician, as is quite a few people in the neighborhood). I joined the board to get out of it. We're due to get out of it at the end of March, but Spectrum has zero interest of coming in and servicing people. CenturyLink said they'd be willing... but want a 5-7 year contract and everyone in the neighborhood is understandably against that idea.

So yes, bring on the time when mobile bandwidth is such that low caps aren't "needed" and the speed is high enough to get rid of ISPs as an option.

[woah]

What's the difference between an ISP and a cell phone company?

[jsgo]

I can switch to any cell phone provider I wish at any given time. ISPs that isn't the case for the vast majority of the US.

I was originally with Verizon, but the pricing was a bit steep so I left (grandfathered unlimited data plan, but was paying pretty heavily for 2 said plans).

I switched to Sprint and that was working fine, their unlimited data plan was working and the prices were much cheaper. However, the previously mentioned fiasco with our ISP meant that tethering was now important to me as a fallback when needed and Sprint's plan didn't include tethering and it was a bit steep at the time (as a developer, I have to work on things at night sometimes from home and garbage internet won't suffice there. I empathize heavily with the people in the neighborhood who work from home constantly/online classes, I do).

So I switched to T-Mobile with the Simple Choice plan at the time with basically same features, but 14GB tethering per line and added two more lines for the kids at a reasonable rate. January I switched to the One plan and added International Plus (unlimited tethering) and I predominantly tether now and only connect to my actual router that leverages the garbage ISP when I need to use my internal network (and I check the internet at that point and it is still bad). Plus, tethering is typically 3x faster than said ISP. Needless to say, I absolutely love T-Mobile in our location, it isn't great everywhere though from what I hear, and it works fine for me as an outright replacement (I don't do Netflix or other streaming from computer, so my tethering isn't particularly damaging. Plus, not in an area of high congestion).

So there's a ton of difference here: I've been able to move around as needed to get what works best for me when it comes to the cell phone company side of the equation and I've been hamstrung with the ISP side of things. Plus, I don't even dislike Verizon and Sprint, they work well, but it just didn't work for my needs. With ISPs and the limited competition, they have little incentive from their peers to make me like/accept them, case in point the ISP we're stuck with until end of March.

[Retric]

Competition.