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by ghba66 2960 days ago
>- Year-long locked in contracts. No trial period.

Here we get a 14-day trial period.

>- Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency.

Technically impossible to give such a guarantee.

>- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on.

How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...?

>- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract.

That's normal, otherwise they'd lose tons of money. I mean here you can get 300/300 really cheap, that's more than enough for, let's say, 10 neighbours. But then how do you expect them to cover the investment?

4 comments

>>- Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency.

> Technically impossible to give such a guarantee.

Not at all. You pick the right oversubscription ratios, monitor the network and give guarantees on the 95%/99% percentiles. It's done in datacenters all the time.

>>- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on.

> How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...?

Just like in many other fields: external verification, rewards for employee and customers reporting malpractices and so on.

Also, encourage your customers to use DNS over HTTPS, VPNs, Tor instead of saying nothing or even discouraging it.

>>- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract.

> That's normal, otherwise they'd lose tons of money.

That's not an argument. The large majority of goods and services in existence can be shared and, very often, even re-sold and there are specific laws against contracts for exclusive use.

It's up to the ISPs to find ways to bill people accordingly (and it's easy to look at what carriers and datacenters ISP do...).

> >- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on.

> How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...?

Spell it in the contract and put people in jail if they break it.

>Technically impossible to give such a guarantee. //

The guarantee is that you won't be charged for service outside of the specifications. That is, an SLA.

In UK airlines and train companies are bound to national SLAs such that if your aeroplane (this might be global?) is delayed by a significant amount [as defined by the SLA] or your train is late you get compensated.

No reason not to have that for ISPs.

The government would need to pair it with a requirement that the ISP can't ordinarily refuse service.

> Technically impossible to give such a guarantee.

Every other service provides five nines or whatever or your money back…