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A comment on Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless. Parent comment

Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by toomuchtodo on Thursday February 07, 2019 @09:46PM (#19111053)
The physical RF spectrum is the local road. There are no more roads to take. No amount of economic policy supporting competition is going to bend the laws of physics, unless you're willing to shovel herculean amounts of resources into microcells (even smaller than 5G cell sites) to reduce contention (essentially replacing fiber and wifi).
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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by Retric on Friday February 08, 2019 @04:20AM (#19112651)
Cell companies can more or less directly translate $ = bandwidth with no meaningful limit.

You have effectively unlimited RF bandwidth assuming ever smaller cell locations. Bluetooth is the equivalent of a new cell in under every 10 meters. And that’s with a tiny slice of the RF spectrum.

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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by bb88 on Saturday February 09, 2019 @03:14PM (#19124330)
> The physical RF spectrum is the local road.

But how does that affect the anticompetive argument? I don't think it does. It still holds if you're the only game in town.

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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by dzhiurgis on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:18PM (#19111487)
National network + eSIM. Retailers compete on providing better internwtional traffic (pretty much as it is now with broadband in many countries).
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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by toomuchtodo on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:23PM (#19111506)
Your suggested solution does not address the local cell network contention issue zero rating attempts to mitigate.
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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by Firadeoclus on Friday February 08, 2019 @06:29AM (#19113257)
How does zero rating "attempt to mitigate" local contention issues? Zero rating does not reduce local network traffic.
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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by toomuchtodo on Friday February 08, 2019 @10:40AM (#19115182)
Forcing lower bandwidth versions of video and audio streams reduces local spectrum use. Do I really need anything above 480p on my iPhone? Probably not, so the carrier incentivizes me with zero rating.
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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by gsich on Friday February 08, 2019 @03:45AM (#19112482)
And how do you know there is congestion? The ISP won't tell you.
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