Anyone else?
I'm currently using EE's 4G, capped at 1Tbyte/month and getting 80M down, 40M up. Starlink's £90pm instead of £70, and still no fixed IPV4, skulking behind CGNAT. Boo.
>>27784 Not wildly rural, but openreach can deliver a sporadic 100kbps and have no plans to upgrade, and cable will never reach here. FTTP would involve probably 10km of trenching, and I can't really justify that when 4G is adequate.
>>27783 I don't know what the fuck any of that nerd speak nonsense means, but why not just pay as you go for £35 and hotspot it off a cheap phone? It might get hot and explode I guess.
>>27786 I've got the grownup version of that. EE 4G router widget (which has proper ethernet sockets, so I can plug switches in, rather than pissing about with wifi - I need to reach far enough that wifi would get complicated). £70 per month contract rather than PAYG, as PAYG comes out far more expensive.
Tethering to a phone just doesn't work well, long term. Proper routers just keep working.
Ddn't Elon Musk recetly offer the opportunity for regular people to place satellites in orbit?
What's stopping anyone from creating their own information network?
>>27789 That is, a global satellite network is hard and expensive. Rolling out a wireless or fibre network between places you care about, is a much lower bar to aim for.
This is only a bit related as people were talking about pay as you go and sims and I don't want to start a whole thread for it.
Is it possible to just pick up a pay as you go SIM in a shop these days and pay with cash? Completely understand it's not possible during the pandemic at the moment, but it seems like this option is being phased out in recent years and is forcing more people to sign up with names and addresses. I barely use my phone, I just want an easy to get SIM I can top up with a tenner once or twice a year and continue my hermit life.
I imagine even if the big networks decided to voluntarily sign on to tighter controls you'd always be able to get a SIM from a convenience store for one of those networks that the ethnics use.
There's an ongoing battle between govts wanting to make it more difficult to hide your comms and people hiding their comms.
The Trump Insurrection seems like it was predominantly organized over Telegram, wrong'uns will use the platform more now since they were all banned from Twitter, and Amazon deplatformed Parler. Telegram incidentally, has long been the platform of choice for this Conservative Govt when they want to communicate, but not leave a paper trail.
I remember a bunch of chatter a few years ago about governments trying to make decent (currently uncrackable) cryptography military grade and there was a bit of a legal cunt-off about it all.
Following the recent Myanmar Coup, China flew a bunch of IT experts into Myanmar and the internet was shut down shortly after. People switched to proper decentralised messaging apps like Zello and Bridgefy, and China subsequently shipped in a bunch of RF signal jammers disguised as seafood [citation needed].
It's definitely a pain in the bum for coppers to have to deal with burner phones, and it is definitely worth their time to make it akward for people to anonymize their comms.
Personally, I refuse to communicate in any manner other than semaphore or mental telepathy for the previously stated reasons.
The war of drugs is pointless. But it's easier to shake down the local weed dealer than to get the local oligarch to fork out some readies to pay fair taxes.
Human trafficking is more difficult following legalization and regulation. It doesn't go away, but the Sex Workers in Holland have a Trade Union for example, and instead of drug and sex trade being 100% illegal, it becomes mostly illegal and makes things more competitive and less attractive to career criminals.
