Turns out it would have been a waste of money anyway. Turns out 90% we went with the motorhome you couldn't even get an FM radio signal :)
I wish there was some way I could share the privilege I had to do so with more people here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's partially the population distribution; we have a paltry 35mil people in the 2nd geographically largest land area in the world. Now, much of the population is clustered, but still - infrastructure is spread out, expensive, and the cost gets passed down. Plus the competition is sparse and companies like their profit if they can get it.
In short, none of us would historically dream of downloading large stuff through mobile data. My data roaming is permanently off, and I only download through wifi. Some people even have phones with no data plans, or a paltry 50MB. 1GB was considered extra large data plan until recently.
(As a tangent, it's also been a historically painful process just to get started here too; in Europe, I'd land, go to the nearest shop, get a SIM card for $20, and I'm off to the races. In Canada, you need to sign a long term contract with 3 years of obligations, go through a credit check, give ethem all sorts of personal info, and pretty much blood and DNA samples... ;-( )
It's a discrepancy people have been waking up to last couple of years and starting to exert pressure, so it's getting better - but very very very slowly.