[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.