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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.