Streaming is so popular sirusxm launches new satellite...?

[EarDemon]

15 GB is a decent chunk, but the last thing I would want to to actually have to keep track of usage. I can't stand when people at work ask me for the wifi password so they can connect their phones so they 'don't use all of their data'. Don't care, not my problem, pay for unlimited, pay the overages or don't use the stupid thing at work. Myself, at work all day I stream SiriusXM, podcasts or audiobooks from Audible from my phone, using T-Mobile's data network with my phone paired to a Bluetooth speaker. While driving around, I stream podcasts, when I'm in areas with decent reception. I NEVER EVER EVER use any sort of public wifi for anything and I don't connect personal devices to my work network. It's nice not having to keep on eye on usage, and it's nice not caring. I download big files, usually ISOs, on my phone at work all the time. 150 Mbps is a lot faster than my 50 Mbps at work, and I'm not impacting the rest of the organization. 10 years ago, when I used to drive for a living, I would routinely use 20 - 30 GB/month thanks to aGPS and streaming Pandora all day with my phone connected to a cassette adaptor in my work truck.

Having data limits on a cell phone is a completely foreign concept to me.

 

[comfortably_numb]

I'm under wifi coverage 90% of the time. I am the IT person at my office and I don't care if staff use our wifi. We have a 750/50 pipe from Comcast.

If I'm on a public wifi network I flip on my VPN.

 

[LocutusOfBorg]

I have unlimited data but I don't keep track of my cell data usage. Haven't had a problem with throttling yet though. I took a peek at my data usage and so far my family has used 24 GB this billing cycle. It might be more next month since I'm doing a lot of streaming and mirroring to my new Pioneer radio when driving around.

 

[LocutusOfBorg]

I'm under wifi coverage 90% of the time. I am the IT person at my office and I don't care if staff use our wifi. We have a 750/50 pipe from Comcast.

If I'm on a public wifi network I flip on my VPN.

I have 500 Mb up/down with my ISP with 1 Gb available. My VPN is on all the time no matter if I'm at home or on public wifi (rarely) or when using cell data.

 

[EarDemon]

I have 50 Mb symmetrical enterprise DIA fiber at work, and while bandwidth usage is a concern so is security. I'm sorry, but unless you have a separate network or a VLAN, it's just stupid to allow users to connect personal devices to a production network. A couple years ago I moved to IP address reservations only. Both of my DHCP scopes have the entire range of IP addresses from .1 - .255 excluded from distribution. Any device that connects to the network has to go through me so I can assign a reserved IP that correlates to the MAC of your device. If it's not a company issued device, no connectivity for you.

Let's be honest, even at 50 Mb (just upgraded from 25), a few users streaming SiriusXM or Spotify isn't going to bring the network to a grinding halt, but the point is work devices should be used for work only. Services provided by the company should be used for work only. I am a big stickler for that. We don't pay for internet access for you to stream music all day. I've been having problems renewing my own personal subscription to Symantec Endpoint which I purchased through CDW. CDW is a vendor of ours at work, but because I'm contacting them for something personal, I won't use my desk phone to call customer service, I use my own cell phone. That's how much I believe in keeping work and personal things separate.

When I'm away from home with my laptop, it connects to the mobile hotspot on my phone. I do not believe in asking people for their wifi password, because I don't give mine out to anyone, so I expect the same.

 

[comfortably_numb]

it's just stupid to allow users to connect personal devices to a production network

Our environment is really small. I judge my risk to be minimal. Would I allow it in a large corporate environment? No, at least not without a separate walled off network.

And while we're being honest, not all IT managers get to make the decision about wifi access. If my boss says I must provide it for personal employee use, I'm going to comply.

 

[TRG]

Our environment is really small. I judge my risk to be minimal. Would I allow it in a large corporate environment? No, at least not without a separate walled off network.

Most larger corporations have a guest network for just that purpose. My Netgear Orbi mesh network at home allows for that too.

 

[Juan]

Not necessarily. Myself and my daughter are on VZW Prepaid with 15gb monthly limits. Neither of us have ever exceeded them.

No hotspot probably

 

[comfortably_numb]

No hotspot probably

Hotspot allowance is up to the 15gb plan allotment, then it throttles back.

 

[EarDemon]

Our environment is really small. I judge my risk to be minimal. Would I allow it in a large corporate environment? No, at least not without a separate walled off network.

And while we're being honest, not all IT managers get to make the decision about wifi access. If my boss says I must provide it for personal employee use, I'm going to comply.

And that is why people should not be in charge of things they know little to nothing about. My boss is the company CFO, he can barley spell IT. This is the guy who told me 'The G5's are going to change everything so make sure we get quotes on G5 services when our contract with Spectrum is almost up.' I may not have a fancy college degree and I certainly don't know the difference between a debit and a credit, but I know you can't host friggen public facing Exchange Server and FTP site on a connection that relies on carrier grade NAT and then there's the VPN. Our parent organization overseas had a pretty bad malware situation a few years ago because an employee brought in a personal laptop that was infected and connected it to the corporate network. Ever since then my boss has let me have near full control of everything IT related admitting that he is a finance guy not an IT guy and told me do what I need to do to clamp down on things.

When I first started, we went at it over guest/non business related use. The end result which we both agreed on was I brought in a second WAN connection for guest and non-business related employee use, just normal bottom of the barrel 10 x 1 business class modem service connected feeding multiple bottom of the barrel Cisco SMB access points. It got to be too much of a pain in the ass to maintain. Everything from 'I got a new phone, and need the Guest wifi password' to 'can we have another access point put in because the signal is weak here' . My job is not to provide your personal devices with reliable internet access. When I'm looking over why a server back up failed while dealing with a site outage while resetting a users password because they suddenly can't remember it while trying to find someone a spare mini wireless mouse because a full size one is too big while getting a phone call that someone's printer is low on toner the last thing I want or need is some dipstick moaning they can't stream Pandora on their phone.

Before I implemented the DHCP reservations, I took down some no longer needed wireless access points in our manufacturing plant, I heard one of the guys on the shop floor say 'The IT Nazi is taking away our free wifi' when I walked by I just smiled and same 'damn right I am'. A few months later I was at work late and one of the machinists on second shift came up to me and pulled out a $100 bill and asked if he can have the wifi back and was was serious about it too. The next day I did the appropriate thing and reported him to HR.

 

[comfortably_numb]

The next day I did the appropriate thing and reported him to HR

That's a slippery slope there. I don't invoke HR unless it is absolutely necessary.

 

[rad]

My job is not to provide your personal devices with reliable internet access.

In my former life in IT networking I had to keep an eye on internet traffic (this was in the very early days and all we had was two T-1's from two different ISP's for diverse routing). That's when you were paying close to $1K/month just so the telco could install the local loop. I also had to keep an eye on the folks dialing into our network via 800 numbers, we had four loaded USRobotics dial access systems and folks would use us for their internet access vs getting AOL. More then once I had to scan the firewall logs and send friendly reminders that you weren't supposed to be using the system to do shopping or check scores for sports. I was so happy when management finally decided that the internet made business sense and got two DS-3's.

 

[LocutusOfBorg]

In my former life in IT networking I had to keep an eye on internet traffic (this was in the very early days and all we had was two T-1's from two different ISP's for diverse routing). That's when you were paying close to $1K/month just so the telco could install the local loop. I also had to keep an eye on the folks dialing into our network via 800 numbers, we had four loaded USRobotics dial access systems and folks would use us for their internet access vs getting AOL. More then once I had to scan the firewall logs and send friendly reminders that you weren't supposed to be using the system to do shopping or check scores for sports. I was so happy when management finally decided that the internet made business sense and got two DS-3's.

Ah, the good old days. Interesting that employers didn't want employees to use the company resources for personal use but they wanted employees to use their home internet access (at the employees expense) to conduct company business.

 

[rad]

Ah, the good old days. Interesting that employers didn't want employees to use the company resources for personal use but they wanted employees to use their home internet access (at the employees expense) to conduct company business.

If we had work at home staff we paid for their internet access. If you weren’t work at home you always had the option to go into the office vs connecting from home, nobody was forced.

 

[harshness]

Let's not overlook the fact that most "unlimited" plans have decisive caps in addition to throttling during high-usage periods. "Unlimited" is the big lie of the 2020s.

There are plans that supposedly don't throttle, but they aren't the norm.

 

[EarDemon]

Ah, the good old days. Interesting that employers didn't want employees to use the company resources for personal use but they wanted employees to use their home internet access (at the employees expense) to conduct company business.

Not the case for me. While I can rant forever about where I work, this is not one of those cases. All employees that are expected to be available off hours get their internet reimbursed by the company. We're only allowed to expense the cost of the standard service, so the company pays me $70 out of the $120 I pay for internet since I have gigabit service, I also worked it out so they pay $50 of my HughesNet bill, since my motivation for having a backup WAN connection was being able to work from home during winter weather and driving bans if I were to have a cable or power outage.

 

[EarDemon]

Let's not overlook the fact that most "unlimited" plans have decisive caps in addition to throttling during high-usage periods. "Unlimited" is the big lie of the 2020s.

There are plans that supposedly don't throttle, but they aren't the norm.

T-Mobile's new Magenta Plans are 50 GB with Essentials, 100 GB with Magenta and no deprioritization with Magenta Max. With the older One Plus plan, I'm at 50 GB and have never experienced issues when I went over 50 or 60 GB in a billing cycle, still get my same 150 Mbps - 300 Mbps depending on the tower. I think AT&T de-prios after 100 GB, not sure about Verizon. Sprint was 35 GB.

 

[comfortably_numb]

TMO still has a long way to go with regards to their coverage area before I'll take them seriously, regardless of their generous unlimited plans. I need my phone calls to work during my entire 45 minute commute and only Verizon can deliver that.

 

[TheKrell]

Speaking of T-Mobile, I have a family plan with 4 lines. They sent me a text message saying that for customers in my category that they were giving us all unlimited data for free. I'll have to recover that text message and see what it actually said... I don't see "unlimited" listed anywhere in my online account.

 

[LocutusOfBorg]

Not the case for me. While I can rant forever about where I work, this is not one of those cases. All employees that are expected to be available off hours get their internet reimbursed by the company. We're only allowed to expense the cost of the standard service, so the company pays me $70 out of the $120 I pay for internet since I have gigabit service, I also worked it out so they pay $50 of my HughesNet bill, since my motivation for having a backup WAN connection was being able to work from home during winter weather and driving bans if I were to have a cable or power outage.

That may be today but not so in the 90's and early 2000's. My co-workers & I traveled a lot and we weren't given remote access to the company's network via DID but we could access the company network after dialing into our personal ISP account and then connect. We never got reimbursed for it. I worked for a Fortune 500 company.......