Indeed. And much like high-speed highway driving, if my iphone 4s were to use its full internet bandwidth, i would be a mortal danger to my fellow man. Oh wait.
No, but you might negatively impact the user experience of someone else in your cell sector. It's about system design. Your phone is just a way to access AT&T's wireless network. As the designer of that system, AT&T is entitled to control how your devices access it to optimize overall performance.
Then the designer did a shitty job. They should be throttling at the towers if and when doing so is necessary. They shouldn't have devices (which by definition they cannot trust to do the right thing) do the throttling for them -- especially when they don't even have all devices (e.g. Android) set up to do throttling.
>Indeed. And much like high-speed highway driving, if my iphone 4s were to use its full internet bandwidth, i would be a mortal danger to my fellow man. Oh wait.
It would be a total annoyance of your fellow subscribers to the same network. Maybe not a car accident, but a lot like traffic congestion.
I mean, since capacity does not grow on trees, and it is not that easy or cheap to expand it.
You are not going to be using the peak capacity constantly.
If you are listening to music / watching videos, then the rate at which you are downloading is limited to the quality of those streams which is often not close to the peak.
If you are downloading an app, it can use peak bandwidth, but you are done in seconds.
If you are browsing the internet, you are not bothering anyone at all.
The only issue I see is if you are torrenting from your phone. How many people would you see doing that ?
I imagine cars are tested for max speeds much like ropes and carabiners are given weight ratings. The governor probably enforces these ratings because although your car could go faster, things might start breaking. Faster internet speeds aren't going to melt your CPU.
The issue isn't so much throttling as transparency. If you walk into a store as Joe/Jill Consumer and say 'gimme the best phone, whatever it is you like to sell' and they sell you an iPhone, you deserve to be made aware of the limitations imposed on your use of it (and I don't mine in the fine print on page 14 of the contract, or in some vague handwavey disclaimer).
I agree with you in principle, but to be honest, I think this analogy gives people the wrong idea. They're attacking it based on phones being non-lethal, which is probably unproductive to your point.
