[asdkhadsj]

I just wish they'd stop selling unlimited. Everyone.

I want to pay for my bytes, and I want you (carriers) to give me the service I pay for, at an guaranteed rate. A SLA, basically.

Consumers get shafted on these deals. We pay for products with no agreement over what we're actually going to get. It gets tiring :/

[rayiner]

> Consumers get shafted on these deals. We pay for products with no agreement over what we're actually going to get. It gets tiring :/

Consumers greatly benefit from these deals, because they pay a fraction of what it would cost to get service with an SLA. (Put another way, it costs a fraction as much to build a network with over-subscription than it costs to build a network where each user has guaranteed bandwidth.)

Where I work, we pay Cogent almost $1,000 for sub-gigabit, and that's in a building with several competing providers to choose from. I pay a tenth that for consumer gigabit from Verizon. That's because I'm sharing a 2.4 gigabit PON node with 16-32 other users, and Verizon can assume that nobody will be using the full gigabit more than a small fraction of the time. If Verizon was only allowed to sell guaranteed bandwidth, they could only sell a 75 mbps service. Which would suck for the consumer when they went to go download an iTunes movie or a game on Steam.

[zanny]

Until there is legitimate competition in these spaces you will keep getting "up to X mbps" and "for the first 50GB, subject to change" in every providers terms.

It doesn't help that actually pricing out Internet access is more complex than X cents per byte. For most providers data between the hours of 0100 to 0600 would be free because of how little network usage there is, while data from 1700 to 2300 would be most expensive due to that being when everyone is using the network simultaneously. But throughout the years there have been very few time limited unlimited plans.

And even then, its not actually "expensive" to use the Internet in the evening. Its just saturated, and pressures the ISP to either throttle everyone or expand capacity. Expanding capacity is expensive, but just promising "up to X mbps" is easy and I'm surprised at how eager operators are to adopt data caps over simply throttling heavy data users during peak times.

Well, I'm not really surprised, because the former lets you hit people with surprise bills for ludicrous amounts while the later just saturates your useless customer support lines with complaints.

[namibj]

My old university dorm internet was like that. There were 3 or 4 time zones per day, and only the few hours in the middle of the night were unlimited, otherwise iirc 500GB/month, measured by double and iirc. even triple-counting during prime time and such. For some reasons they were rather oversubscribed, offering 1000BASE-T in the dorms (with some L2 crypto auth), but only had 10Gbit/s fiber uplink in a few dorms. Considering they already had active equipment on both sides, this shouldn't be much of a problem though.

[asdkhadsj]

I know, ya'll want unlimited speeds for cheap. I get that. I just want reliability. Currently every internet I've had craps the bed during prime hours. Which hey, is exactly what you're paying for.

[StudentStuff]

Sounds like your on some shifty cable ISP or an older ADSL based ISP. For cable provided internet, its truly shared, and one person plugging a VCR in the wrong way means your speeds may drop significantly.

Meanwhile, older ADSL terminals are often backhauled by a couple T1s, so 6Mbps may be split across more than a few customers, resulting in poor service. Centurylink calls it exhaustion when that occurs.