[Scoundreller]

> infrastructure is spread, expensive, and the cost gets passed down.

The overwhelming profitability of Canadian télécoms suggests some other factors are at play.

The initial infrastructure build may be expensive, but it is in other countries too. Canada at least allows telcos to throw up a big ugly tower wherever they please. Try finding one in Paris. The marginal costs of bandwidth are practically zero. Yet we still see vast portions of the population on 1 or 2gb plans.

There’s massive amounts of excess OTA capacity, but enabling it may cause grandma to cancel their home internet, and we can’t be having that.

My beef is how app developers just assume I have massive amounts of data to spare.

The NPR app decided to pre-fetch 500mb over data when I turned it on for a 30 minute car ride while trying to preserve data.

The economist apps just plain fail to background download over wifi.

[ghaff]

Easy with the grandma comments. [BTW, for anyone objecting to this comment, I don't really think generational warfare contributes to the quality of discussion.]

Part of testing really needs to be over bandwidth constrained networks. Just because it seems great on some dev's gigabit connection doesn't mean it actually is great.

[frosted-flakes]

It's not generational warfare, it's recognising that there are a lot of people paying a lot of money for home Internet service when a cellular data plan would be good enough if it was priced fairly. Most of those people are older.

[ghaff]

>It's not generational warfare

It's stereotyping. How would you and others feel if I were to rephrase that to something along the lines of "Almost no one really needs wired Internet except for all those teens and twenty-somethings who do nothing but watch video on their phones 20 hours a day"?

A lot of older people have a heck of a lot more hands-on experience with using computers than those whose experience is mostly limited to smartphones and tablets.

My overall point is that broad brush generalizations about age groups are often not useful.

[reificator]

> How would you and others feel if I were to rephrase that to something along the lines of "Almost no one really needs wired Internet except for all those teens and twenty-somethings who do nothing but watch video on their phones 20 hours a day"?

Entirely neutral emotionally and in agreement.

Demographics who grew up with the internet use it more and for higher bandwidth things. Seems pretty intuitive and non offensive to me.

My grandfather in particular has had home computers since the 70s. There are exceptions. But that doesn't invalidate the point being made. My mother for instance, is slightly ahead of the average for her age technologically. (In some ways at least.). But she's literally done exactly what the post that started this describes. When I moved out and stopped paying the internet bill a few months later, she had no interest in starting her own. Hasn't had anything but mobile since.

[ghaff]

I don't actually disagree with the general premise. I'm fairly certain that older people do not, as a whole, use as much Internet bandwidth as younger people--if only because they don't have the habit of watching YouTube a lot, may very well still have cable TV, etc.

I would just prefer that discussions here avoided casual stereotypes about "grandmas" or, for that matter, Millennials. A comment along the lines of "Many casual Internet users--which includes quite a few older people--don't need wired Internet if they have or could get good mobile service" would be totally unobjectionable.