[odshoifsdhfs]

Yes, but the problem is on the ISP side. For example, lets assume a building with 10 apartments has guaranteed 100Mbit connection to the building.

If ISP was honest, they would sell 10Mbit connection to each apartment. What they do (at least here) is sell 100Mbit to each apartment and hope their usage isn't all at the same time since it can't support it.

I ended up paying more for a 200mbit connection straight to my apartment because of this. I was on a 500mbit connection before when working from home, then lockdowns started and everyone started to work from home and during work hours, if I would get 10-20mbit I would be happy. They sold me 500 but never had that capacity, so they 'blame' netflix and not them selling only what they can (like gyms, they sell over capacity and if for some reason all show up, they are screwed)

[imtringued]

Yeah the real problem is that ISPs aren't offering partially dedicated connections like 10mbit/s "guaranteed" * and up to 100mbit/s. ISPs are basically lying to you and they blame the users that actually use what they are owed.

* not oversubscribed

[jmyeet]

I disagree with this. You're touching on two separate issues.

The first is that many US broadband connections are on traditional cable systems (or HFC). And these are a shard bus design, meaning you and your neighbours are competing for bandwidth. This is a common cause of degredated connections.

Compare this to fiber The fiber connection isn't shared at all... until you reach some junction, exchange or node. There are various flavors of fiber (eg FTTH/FTTP, FTTN, FTTC).

This brings us to the second issue: bandwidth beyond the last mile is also oversubscribed and it makes zero sense to do it otherwise. Residential customers in particular just don't use that much bandwidth and they don't use it consistently. I mean a gigabit connection is enough for 30+ 4K streams at once at pretty much max quality. But being able to burst bandwidth for fast downloads is really nice.

[jaywalk]

There isn't a consumer ISP anywhere that doesn't oversubscribe bandwidth. It makes zero sense to give a residential connection dedicated bandwidth.

[Karunamon]

Maybe regulators should look into that? Common practices or not, it’s nothing short of fraudulent to sell something you know you can’t provide.

[jaywalk]

They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to."

The amount of capacity required to guarantee speeds would be massive. And how far does that extend? Does the ISP have to maintain that capacity just within their network? Or would every peering connection also have to be able to handle 100% of subscriber bandwidth?

The whole idea quickly falls apart as soon as you look at it a little deeper.

[Nullabillity]

> They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to."

No, the "up to" is written in such tiny print that it's practically invisible. It's not what people think they are buying.

The ethical thing to do would be to sell it as "X, bursts up to Y", with legislation ensuring that X is displayed at least as prominently as Y.

[hansel_der]

isp contracts usually include something called an Service Level Agreement (SLA) that gives room for this sort of service degredation.

maybe there should be some discussion over statistical properties of that degredation and minimum service levels, because ppl tend to watch tv at roughly the same time.

[noworriesnate]

Instead of regulating the statistical properties of the degradation, what if we just required ISPs to refund customers for times when they tried to use the bandwidth they were sold but couldn’t? Maybe the refunds could be 1.2 times the original price of that bandwidth. So if there’s an outage, you don’t pay for that time. That might line up the incentives better.

[hansel_der]

it's not only about outages.

cable customers routinely see service degredation (reduced bandwitdh, packet loss) at peak usage hours, because the lastmile topology is a shared resource (ring/bus) with an oversubscription ratio >20. (tbf docsis 3.1 did get it somewhat under control)

most (non gamer/tec) customers don't bother/notice unless it's so bad that their voip or netflix craps out. isp support will shift the blame to wifi (also shared resource) and noones the wiser.

[imtringued]

That's an absurd proposition. If you can't guarantee to not oversubscribe at least 10mbit/s on a 100mbit/s plan what's the point of advertising it as such?

[jaywalk]

What are you talking about? I said nothing about specific numbers, don't put words in my mouth.

[hansel_der]

oversubscription is totally normal, the ratio is a matter of discussion thou (imo good isp <10).

shifting blame for congestion events is dishonest thou.

[robbedpeter]

Oversubscription should be regulated and totally transparent to the customer. Something on the monthly statement like:

"You pay for symmetric gigabit internet access. You share this line with 4 customers, and load balancing means your service performance will be equally distributed among the users of the line at any given time. The internet egress point where you leave Honest Joe's network is a 25gbps connection and is shared by 382 other gigabit residential customers. The average load at egress is 14.5gps down, 5 gbps up."

Allowing customers to pay a premium for dedicated access is a net good as well, because that can finance infrastructure improvements.

It's greed and lack of transparency that causes shitty service. It's repeatedly merged isps that are so big that they can afford to not give a shit about the last mile.

The sick joke is the unused fiber capacity. Many of the large isps have residential fiber presence, but don't want to invest in towns under 100k people, so they leave the fiber to rot. A lot of ambitious small isps funded and deployed fiber throughout all sorts of places in small town America but didn't stipulate the use of the fiber when they sold out.