No.

People have one ovary and one testicle on average.

Yeah, I think China, in particular, will want to ensure there's as little incentive as possible for people to want to smuggle Dishy McFlatface's into China.

I'm going to assume that you read the article summary at least. Which means that after the US Gov't has paid for Starlink to launch their satellites, you think the maintenance costs of Starlink will surpass subscriptions?

I don't think you're really thinking this through. I think, once again, Elon has secured the bag.

My understanding is that the "two different types of stats" are actually early sats and newer sats, and that all of the newer satellites would be linked by lasers so that a ship in the middle of the Pacific could hit a London ground station if it came to that.

I clearly asked a question without making a statement, and clearly excluded fees (contracts for bandwidth) as well as infrastructure/maintenance costs. Let's pretend that one entity owned all the networks. In that case, what would be the difference in cost, since we know the networks are built to handled orders of magnitude larger amounts of data.

I'm sure there's some miniscule difference in cost (electricity usage?). But my point is that, on an established network, it's built to a certain capacity and if you stay under that capacity, it doesn't much matter if you're transferring a single byte, or a million bytes. It certainly doesn't cost a thousand times more to transfer a GB vs. a MB. That seems absurd to me. Am I looking at this wrong? Am I missing something? You didn't explain the reason for the increase in costs (other than fees).

The costs that you describe are arbitrary and they're the business model that has evolved over time. If ATT had decide to go a different route (pun intended), they might actually own the entire New York to Los Angeles network and there would be no interconnect fees or other arbitrary costs.

Great points. But I'll say the same thing I said to someone else: This is a valid business model, but lying to your customers with a silly and incorrect analogy isn't the way to implement it.

There are better business models, too. My ISP charges according to bandwidth, not data consumed. If you throttle someone's speed, that will also put a data cap in place without needing to cap it. You can't download more than will flow through your pipe. And I feel you on the bandwidth costs. I pay $150 a month for 50/10. That's 7 or 8 times what the city folks are paying for their gig fiber connections. But I get it. No matter what time of day I check, my bandwidth is available to me. I schedule my large downloads to happen between 1am and 5am, because I'm a nice guy, but my ISP ensures that I always get the bandwidth that I pay for.

And I disagree that you can't keep capacity around doing nothing. You absolutely can. Most (good) ISPs do. There's not really any way around that. You're going to get peak usage between 4pm and midnight every single day no matter what, and it's just going to get worse as more people cut the cable.

When electric distribution was deregulated, we saw lots of goofy business models pop up along with some goofy companies. Some of the same business models that we've seen before in telecommunications popped back up. Free nights and weekends, peak pricing, etc... There's a reason for those and I suspect we'll start to see them in ISPs sooner rather than later.

Now you're questioning my English? You're a trip.

What?

Why in the world would you say that. It's absolutely a business model that has some validity.

What we're talking about is the ridiculousness of the analogy. Why don't you sit down and let the adults talk now.

Other that businesses arbitrarily using a business model that involved fees, can you describe the actual cost involved in moving a byte from New York to Los Angeles? Sure, all the networks have to pay for the initial infrastructure and the electricity and tech support to keep it running, but what's the additional cost to move a byte from one place to another? Tell me how 10 GB costs more than 10 MB to transfer.

But it's a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad and incorrect point. You either have enough bandwidth for peak usage, or you don't. Data caps don't do anything to alleviate peak usage. And you can't bank bandwidth during off peak times (like you can electricity). It's just a horrible analogy that doesn't work to describe this situation. At all.

Is it another way to charge for their service so that they can fund further expansion of their network? Sure, it's a disincentive for heavy users, as well as an additional source of income, but don't lie about what that extra charge is actually for.

That's just even further away from the analogy, so thanks for reinforcing my point. If we want to talk about the layers of networks involved, then we'd have to talk about the layers of electrical generation/grid/distribution.

The fact is that an ISP doesn't generate data for you to consume. Bandwidth isn't consumed. There's an amount that is available for use. You either have enough or you don't. There's nothing that has to be generated by your ISP for you to continually have bandwidth on their network.

Would someone please come up with a car analogy for these guys?

I can't believe I'm reading this here. If I saw this on a non-tech site, it wouldn't surprise me, but not here. I'm not sure if it's ignorance of networks, or ignorance of electrical generation/distribution, but this is incredibly ignorant.

An ISP doesn't need to generate data. It's not like they have to have a huge data plant that is roiling and boiling and steaming to produce data for their customers.

Electricity has to be generated and that costs money. Data is, well, let's just say it's not generated by the ISP. The ISP pays NOTHING for the data. All it has to do is provide the network on which the data is transferred.

The iPhone came out in 2007, and Android in 2008.

I think you're misremembering the state of smartphones in 2007. In 2007, what percentage of people had smartphones? In 2008, right before Android phones were released, what percentage of people had smartphones. And today, what percentage of people have smartphones?

The first iPhone OS didn't support an app store, but the device definitely ran apps, and supported the app store once iPhone OS 2 came out. To say it was just an iPod with links is, well, it's completely wrong.

I'm no fan of Apple, but they definitely changed the world when it comes to the smartphone market.

Uh, didn't they CREATE the smart phone market? I mean, sure, there were some lame blackberries and Palm Pilots with cellular links, but wasn't the iPhone what really made the smartphone market?