"Follow your dreams". Without a backup plan, this will statistically doom the vast majority of those who dream of online gaming, being an influencer, or playing professional sports.
Sure there are people who make a living in all 3 areas, but the odds are definitely not in your favor.
Agreed. I think lag / ping is just as important as throughput in determining subjective snappiness of a connection (unless you're doing large up/downloads.
The FCC loves to attack Potemkin villages. The VOIP provider closes up shop with no assets and there is one less scumbag - a victory, but not in terms of taking money from phone abusers.
Oddly, Cloudflare is part of the Bandwidth Alliance - a consortium of 19 companies who want to reduce bandwidth costs.
Backblaze, an online storage and backup company, is also a member. They charge $.005/GB/month for S3 compatible storage. And if you map and access a bucket through Cloudflare there is no egress fee.
So it's possible to store and access your files at 1/3 the price of Cloudflare alone by using Cloudflare (plus Backblaze).
A friend had an Apple ][+ and an acoustically coupled modem in the early 80s. He had to dial the phone and put the receiver into the cups of the modem. One evening of calling a list of modem numbers for Bulletin Boards and companies (there was no specific law against hacking in 1980), I was hooked.
I saved $2,500 for an Apple //e, printer, and Zoom modem the next summer and it changed my life. Though I had an MA in clinical psychology and was an intern psychologist, through some some roundabout choices I ended up a few years later as one of the first Forensic Computer Examiners at a small federal law enforcement agency. It was the wild west in the late 1990s as I was working as a Special Agent and they offered the job to me as a sworn agent with no official credentials other than the ones I earned within the agency.
Wouldn't have changed a thing. I retired at 51 and am living as an expat.