I think it’s misguided. If the cell carrier can’t deliver its service to normal people doing normal things without inconveniencing other customers, it’s the carrier’s fault, not the users’. No way am I going to treat the service I paid for with kid gloves to make Verizon’s job easier.

(Not talking about edge cases like BitTorrent or such. But if a carrier advertises watching streaming video on my phone, I don’t feel guilty downloading an app update. If their tower couldn’t handle that, it’s on them, not me.)

Why is BitTorrent an edge case? I paid for the bandwidth, if I want to host a... Linux ISO, why shouldn't I? What if I pay for, and download 30 movies for offline use onto my phone because I know I'm going somewhere that there is no service? Why is that wrong? What if I backup my entire phone to two separate backup services in the cloud?

ISPs have done a great job shaming people who use their service for what it is supposed to be. It's 2024, and we should all have fiber to the home by now. But no, they're only working on deploying more shitty wireless connections to everybody and letting all the land-based services rot. Fuck them.

I think you are overreacting. They didn’t say either of those things are immoral. They said it was an edge case. It is an edge case. The vast majority of people don’t know what a torrent is much and much less are downloading torrents on to their phones.

What canes123456 said. Also, I was talking in the context of cell connections. I have a vastly different expectation for wired connections: use that sucker up to whatever level you want and can afford. You paid for it, you use it. It's on the ISP to keep their network capacity upgraded to meet demand. (But even then, don't be a freaking sociopath. I have 10Gb fiber with no cap and I use it without a second thought, but don't like have a daemon that deliberately saturates it 24/7 or something. I run backups when it's convenient for me. I stream movies whenever. I download software updates as I please. I don't leave a copy of `iperf3` running just because I could, because that would be using up resources just for the hell of it, and that's never a good look.)

Wireless is a bit different in that there's inherently limited bandwidth. You and I share the same RF fields. If I'm monopolizing them, you can't, and vice versa. Now, if you have a home 5G hotspot, do what thou wilt. Those are advertised to support a household. If they can't, they shouldn't advertise it. However, if I were at a baseball game with 40,000 other people, and I couldn't text my wife because I saw you having 300 torrent connections open on a laptop just because you could, I'd still kinda wanna throw a beer at you. It's like listening to music out loud on the bus. You can; you shouldn't.

Also from the "fuck them" department: I have gigabit at home, and about 1.25TB per month quota. The ISP recently was advertising me to upgrade to 2Gb. I was intrigued, checked it out... exact same quota. My math says that on 2Gbps I could use up the month's quota in 85 minutes (accounting for network overhead let's generously say 2 hours).

Yeah, wtf. Where does this 1.25 number come from. My parents reach that at day 20 from streaming crime dramas all day.

Those bidirectional video streams where neither party is looking at the phone while talking about nothing use way more bandwidth than an audio stream or text message. There's no way for me to tell if it's causing slowness for me, but it certainly can't be helping.

There's no chance the carrier can give every phone in a cell full bandwidth at the same time, they rely on only a handful of people using their connection at any given moment.