[userbinator]

a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month

"Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.

[ReverseCold]

I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed.

The internet is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more.

E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like

> I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down.

Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!

[ahnick]

It's pretty obvious isn't it? They don't want anyone to understand how the system really works. They should not be allowed to put the words "Unlimited" anywhere in their advertisement. period. It's all deceptive advertising and they should be raked over the coals for it.

If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. Cable companies are soul sucking monopolies/duopolies and deserve no quarter.

[Sophira]

That reminds me of the way JCPenney had a thing where they would do no promotional pricing in a bid to be honest with the consumer about the actual price of their products... and it backfired massively. People assumed that because they didn't have any sales that they weren't the cheapest prices.

In the end, people go for what they perceive to be the cheapest prices, not necessarily the prices that actually are the cheapest.

[nyjah]

I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest

Competitor services? Starlink aside, I have no options but what I have. I think many people at least in USA are in similar situation.

[dehrmann]

There's a difference between a data center connection and a home connection. For 99% of home users, moderately oversubscribed gigabit is perfectly fine, and no one would pay the premium (and it's a big premium) for more. Once 1 GB downloads are slow or the connection can't handle 5 HD streams, it's getting into false advertising territory.

[SkiFire13]

> If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest.

I don't think any competitor will give you a dedicated gigabit to you for a reasonable price, especially if everyone suddently starts asking for one.

[no_wizard]

I have Ziply Fiber in Oregon.

I pay for a Symmetrical gigabit connection, it’s 60 dollars a month. I record speed tests multiple times a day every day and have ever since I got the service last year. They’re growing gang busters too, my entire neighborhood is on Ziply (90% of household converted from what I understand)

Aside from them adjusting some things due to the rapid unexpected uptake, I have gotten full connection speeds for upload and download every day for over a year. Its been uptime of 99.999% (the adjustment period happened over 2 days and they only slowed service to 300/300 temporarily)

It can be done. It won’t be done by Comcast et. al.

[oooyay]

I'm also in Oregon, specifically Portland. DMARCs for fiber are largely shared by providers which is why you can have multiple providers in a given area. That way they don't take up extra pole space and the city can pay a single provider to maintain sections of line.

As long as the DMARC isn't saturated then you're only limited by the other lines also going to the DMARC and the collective activity of subscribers upstream of you between you and the central office. That's to say, you are right that it can be done but only insofar as other posters have indicated: last mile providers need to provision higher capacity lines between the DMARC and the central office.

[SkiFire13]

This doesn't prove anything, it just means that when you're doing a speedtest there aren't other users that are also saturating the connection.

Note that this doesn't means that there are exactly 0 users downloading in those moments. Usually there are multiple gigabits dedicated to a group of users, so that multiple users can navigate at 1Gbps without slowing down others, but not all the group at once. How much bandwidth is allocated to how many users can vary though, and some providers might allocate less total bandwidth to more users.

In practice this works out fine most of the time and most users won't notice slowdowns like you do, but if everyone started a speedtest at the same time you will notice it.

[daeros]

i'm in oregon and those assholes won't provide fiber to the home to my neighborhood on the far western edge of the metro area out near forest grove.

[trilbyglens]

Them none should be allowed to advertise as such

[internet101010]

There usually are no competitors.

[brewdad]

Most people should have at least two choices. Their cable company and their phone company. These choices may be comparable in price and service level or wildly divergent depending on your specific location however.

[kelnos]

I live in San Francisco, and Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 offering (~1Gbps down / 25Gbps up) is my only useful option. AT&T offers DSL, and MonkeyBrains will give me a microwave link (more or less symmetric, but probably would top out at around 100Mbps), but that's it, aside from the LTE/5G providers.

I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it would be $20k-$30k to run that fiber to my building.

Unfortunately I think my experience is pretty common in the US, though sure, there are plenty of people who can choose between e.g. cable and fiber.

[daeros]

They won't even let me pay them the 20k-30k even after I made it clear that it might take me awhile to save it up, but I could feasibly do it.

[saagarjha]

I'm sorry 25 Gbps up?

[userbinator]

There's two (interrelated) values here --- speed ("flow rate") and volume.

"Unlimited data" refers to volume.

Gigabit refers to speed.

This customer presumably isn't too worried about the speed, but is rightly under the impression that he isn't being charged on volume and can thus use as much as the speed allows.

[vlz]

Ok, but you cannot truthfully advertise unlimited volume if you put a limit on the speed which is in turn also limiting the volume.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

When it first started back in the Before Times, "Unlimited" internet was in contrast to dial-up connections which weren't always on. It's unlimited in time (as long as you're subscribed), not necessarily guaranteed to keep the max speed for the entire time.

That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.

[lostlogin]

That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.

[willcipriano]

NetZero and AOL both advertised as unlimited. If you had a extra phone line you could connect and download for as long as you'd like.

[userbinator]

A 56kbps dialup connection saturated 24/7 will get you ~18GB per month.

[plussed_reader]

For as long as you'd pay the phone bill plus isp sub.

[zie]

When I ran an ISP or two back in the dialup days, we advertised unlimited, but we didn't mean anything with that word, it was just what every other ISP also used in their marketing, we were just following along. The same is true today with Cellphones and ISP's, they ALL offer "unlimited", but they all have different interpretations of that word. As far as I can tell, none of the employees understand what "unlimited" means either.

Technically what we offered was shared dialup access to a T1 or a T3 upstream. They just looked for the word "unlimited". Customers didn't know what it meant either, except it was "better".

If you were doing anything we thought of as "abusive" we would hang up on you. You could immediately call back in, and we were fine with that.

Normally after the 2nd or 3rd time we caught you being "abusive", we would call you and have a chat: try to figure out what the heck you were doing and why. Most of the time we would just run their data on one of our machines and save the dialup space. They could telnet in and do what they needed doing on occasion. Dialup lines were expensive compared to process space.

Of course we were also one of the few weirdos that had a "community" linux box with the root password in the login banner, so everyone could create their own account and help maintain the community box. It worked really well for several years, until some meanies found it and ruined it. After that we put the root password in /etc/motd, so every logged in user could do root things if needed. That also worked really well for many years.

Different times for sure!

[throwup238]

If that’s the case they should market the plan’s throttling upfront. “Unlimited mobile data” comes with very clear fine print that isn’t buried in the TOS about how many gigabytes the customer gets before it drops them to 3g speed.

[userbinator]

I believe in those cases even after you pass the throttling limit you can continue to transfer data at however much 3g speeds will get you for the rest of the billing period, and thus they won't cut off your service for using "too much".

[MichaelZuo]

3G speeds can technically mean as low as 256kbps so it would in fact be literally unlimited since it’s not that much data total even running 24/7.

[wmf]

Oversubscription ratios vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Perhaps ISPs could advertise the worst case but that would make their service look worse than it is. And of course no ISP will be the first to disclose.

BTW the FCC recently introduced "nutrition labels" for ISPs. https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels

[presentation]

That’s why I think this has to come through rules and regs - any individual company can be honest, but it would probably come at the cost of dishonest competitors winning customers.

[mattnewton]

It has to be regulated because in most of the US ISPs have a de-facto monopoly on the infrastructure; the market has failed to produce more competitors with permits to dig and place fiber for a bunch of reasons.

[AnthonyMouse]

> So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed.

But that's something different than what Cox is doing.

"Unlimited" and over-subscription aren't incompatible. You have a gigabit connection, the 40Gbps uplink is shared between 1000 other people who each have a gigabit connection, the over-subscription rate is 25:1. That's fine as long as the average usage during peak hours is 4% -- which it might very well be. A 4k Netflix stream is 25Mbps, which is 2.5% of a gigabit connection, so you're not above that even if everybody is streaming in 4k at once.

You're even fine if everybody is streaming in 4k at once and then on top of that 15 people want to fully max out their connections. And everybody using their connections at once doesn't really happen. At any given time a lot of people will be using zero.

Now, there will be times that are outliers. Maybe a popular video game drops without staggering the release and suddenly 30% of the customers are maxing out their connections at once to download an update and the average speed drops from 1000Mbps to 100Mbps for a couple hours. That's why it says "up to", right? That isn't artificially limiting anyone, that's just everyone getting their pro rata share in a time of atypical demand.

But on a typical day with an adequately provisioned network you should be able to get the speed on the label, and there is still no reason to be limiting anyone's speeds during times the network isn't over capacity.

The issue is they don't want to over-subscribe their network at only the ratio that would allow them to provide the rated speed on a typical day, they want to promise more than they can deliver and deflect blame onto people who are only using what they were promised.

[bobdvb]

That's true, although the reality is that the capacity is much more limited in many providers local infrastructure than you'd like to think. Those 1000 users will only get 10G at best, and remember that both in Cable and FTTH the spectrum allocation on the local segment is asymmetric.

You have a finite downlink capacity and a finite uplink capacity, users are not just competing for the same time on the wire, they're competing for spectrum. If everyone was on Ethernet to the home then you'd be right, but FTTH and Cable are in physically contended spectrum in the cabinet/cable itself. Proper fibre ethernet costs more per user than FTTH/Cable because each user needs a port on a switch, instead of using TDMA and everyone being on the same wire at the other end.

[maxerickson]

There's not really any real tension between "you should know their stated rates are bullshit" and "they should accurately describe the service they are willing and able to provide".

One is a stupid way to run a society and the other isn't.

[bobdvb]

You're never getting 1G 100% of the time, you're getting a target of 1G and statistically if you do a speed test you probably won't be doing that at the same time as everyone else.

A little knowledge can be dangerous, that's not patronising, it's that accurately describing your network topology to all customers is hard and easy to misunderstand. Some segments of the network will be heavily contended, and others will be under utilised. Being heavily contended might be undesirable but it's pragmatically going to happen.

Where it breaks down with customers, is where the segment is over-contended to the point where they consistently can't meet the product description. But that's not a service description issue, it's an investment problem and if it's not being dealt across the board by the provider, then that provider will be crap.

The bigger issue in this case is a lack of effective competition which drives vendors to have a decent quality of service. Being more transparent won't help with an under provisioned network if you have no choice. In markets with poor competition, poor service provision and capacity usually follows.

[sqeaky]

I have paid for two gigabit connections and I sometimes saturate them for days at time. Doesn't cost that much.

If I am not to use it like that then it should say clearly on the paperwork that I have data limits, and I don't have any such notifications.

[godelski]

  > I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate.

They typically advertise as "up to" and often hide data limits in small text. This is also common among phone carriers who say "unlimited data" or worse, "unlimited 5G" but then throttle you after you hit a certain data limit.

I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to mislead. But it's something to be aware of because they will argue (and frequently some smug person that I guess has a boot fetish) and then blame you for not reading. But I strongly disagree. Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. You can't just hide stuff in legal language. No person has enough time to read all those TOS agreements and even if they did, it's not in normal language that's understandable by the average person. If a contact is fair only if participants are informed and consenting, then I don't think most of these contacts should hold up (they do).

But hey, we live in a world where courts have decided that "boneless wings" doing clearly mean "without bones". But I for one don't want to live in a country where that's okay.

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors with the legal system and I for one don't think enough people are upset. Apathy isn't working.

[verisimi]

> Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt.

Interpret. Words mean things, you know.

[godelski]

Autocorrect. But surprisingly you can still understand because the context. Language is crazy like that. Kinda like how when you order "boneless wings" you expect to get chicken with no bones, especially considering there's a common counterpart "wings".

[nixosbestos]

Edit: removing an apparently quite inaccurate comment. Apologies.

[FredFS456]

It /is/ how it works with PON based fibre networks. See https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-u...

[ta1243]

Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.

[namibj]

That said, the classic case of game release can be handled with a bit of P2P if the oversubscription happens late enough to have sufficiently many downloads that can share among themselves without causing congestion for others.

Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.

[ta1243]

Depends on your peer

You and your nearest 400 neighbours plug into a non-blocking 1g port network. Find you can do 1g to your neighbours

But you need a 400g uplink (and remember to account for resilience), so you go into a switch with 40 400g ports, ok, that's 1.6tbit

Scale this up to a small town with 20,000 people and you need 20tbit of backbone to serve your residents with 1G non-blocking, very few will ever use the full 1G

Sharing bandwidth makes perfect sense. If you want uncontended (to where? Local IXP, a major IXP? One on the other side of the world?) then get a business line which gives you uncontended connectivity.

[jpambrun]

Because it's none of our business as customers. This oversubscription rate is a risk they calibrate on their side. Given the marketing material, if all customers decide to use more bandwidth, it up to the utility to upgrade their infra to match in a timely manner. This is the risk they took and competed on.

[qaq]

40Gbit from he is 2K so no it's not 1-2 orders of magnitude more

[TheDong]

I think you're trying to imply that it should be $50 for 1Gbit with that comment, but HE fiber and residential fiber aren't comparable. Apples and oranges.

HE only has to run relatively short cables within a datacenter, which is designed for running those things, while residential fiber has to be run much further through much more hostile terrain.

Residential fiber takes more total land and maintenance and has different customer density per unit laid.

Unless HE also offers residential fiber at that rate, don't think it's comparable.

[qaq]

I am implying dedicated lines do not cost 2 orders of magnitude more. he has POPs and provides connectivity to places other than datacenters. Also if you didn't notice many datacenters are for obvious reasons located in the boonies to begin with.

[trilbyglens]

Do you really not understand?

[beloch]

I used to have an "unlimited bandwidth" account with Shaw Cable in Canada, back before Rogers bought them. "Unlimited" was very much front and centre in all the advertising, etc..

They started charging me overage fees. I called them up and asked them to explain why they were charging me overage fees on an unlimited bandwidth account.

Their explanation was that the bandwidth was unlimited in when I could use it, not in how much I could use.

Fortunately for me, there were other providers in the market that I could switch to. So I did.

[userbinator]

Did you ask them what times you are allowed to use a non-unlimited account?

[kristopolous]

A number of years ago one of the isps, might have been att dsl, argued that "unlimited" was a branding name for a tier. They had meant an affectation of limitless possibilities as a marketing term similar to "plus", "extreme" or "pro" and not that there was no cap on the data. I always ignore that word now and look for the actual terms

[mindslight]

Hear hear! Furthermore any plans with "caps" should have to list the average bandwidth as the largest headline, with the peak bandwidth relegated to a subpoint. For example 1TB/month is 386 kB/sec. That's on par with a DSL connection, not 2024 broadband.

[tzs]

That would mislead and confuse a lot of consumers. It would suggest that a 5 Mb/s DSL connection with no data limit would be better than a 500 Mb/s cable connection with a 1 TB data limit, when in fact something like 90% of users will not come anywhere near 1 TB of data/month and will be much much much happier on the cable plan.

[userbinator]

It would suggest that a 5 Mb/s DSL connection with no data limit

That turns out to be a ~1.6TB/month limit.

Hence why I think both speed and volume limits should be advertised prominently. "Up to 5Mbps (1.6TB/month)" or "Up to 500Mbps (or 1TB/month, whichever comes first)" gives users a clear idea of what their service is.

[mindslight]

It works fine over in the cell phone market, where carriers market themselves in terms of HSPA/4G/LTE/5G while plans are sold in terms of data used. Rough instantaneous bandwidth (and latency!) is fine for knowing what applications will work. 300Mb/s vs 500Mb/s isn't going to make much of a difference for most, and certainly not more than ISPs necessarily massage the numbers when talking about shared mediums like docsis/gpon.

The point I am making is that if fixed carriers seemingly no longer want to be selling connections by last-mile bandwidth (with implied statistical oversubscription and a fall-back to best effort), and instead want to move to selling specific amounts of data delivered, then their big-print marketing should have to reflect that!

Or alternatively, if they want to stick with selling the instantaneous last mile connection speed, then data quotas should have to raise along with that according to a standard benchmark consumer usage - say 2 hours of nameplate usage per day, meaning a 300Mb/s connection would be ~6TB/month. And then additional data usage should cost the same (or lower) as the monthly plan - for example $120/month for that 6TB/month plan is $20/TB, so 1TB of additional data should cost no more than $20 rather than the current punitive or even unobtainable pricing.

Also I'd guess your 90%/1TB figure is quite out of date, which gets to the heart of the problem here - these limits have remained arbitrary and opaque rather than being expressed in the market. It gets even more rotten when talking about national policy where these ISPs have been able to claim they're providing modern "broadband" while their backhaul networks have been seemingly frozen in time for a decade+.

Although, a disclaimer: I only read these threads to gawk at the train wreck and check if the Internet access market is really still this bad. I've got municipal gpon at 1Gb/s symmetric, no caps (I've asked multiple times), with a fixed price every month. Which really just underscores the absurdity of talking about this topic in a negative-sum parceling out of bits and bytes, which mostly stems from Ma Coax wanting to continue milking their captive markets on aging infrastructure.

[kstrauser]

Put another way, if they're saying 12TB is their unadvertised effective data cap, he's only allowed to use his connection for 1 day a month.

My ISP lets me use the service all of the days of the month, not just one. His ludicrously low limit is unfathomable.

[sneak]

They can lie all they want; they are integrated with the government and they have no consequences for fraud.

I gave Cox over $2000 explicitly for unlimited data and still got nastygrams from them for uploading 4TB of my original digital photos to S3 for backup.

It’s effectively illegal to start new ISPs in America, that’s why this shit happens.

[kstrauser]

I would absolutely forward those to my state's public utilities commission.

[sgarland]

Who do you think the telcos are lobbying?

[kstrauser]

Then it’s extra important to remind the regulators that the telcos are blowing smoke up their ass. If they’re only hearing the telcos’ side, they might be under the mistaken impression that it’s the truth.

[sgarland]

You’re under the impression that the regulators give a shit about their constituents, rather than campaign donations.

[kstrauser]

I only have so much cynicism to go around. For my own mental health, I have to presume that at least some people in charge want to do the right thing, and I act accordingly.

[sneak]

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

[kstrauser]

I did for something analogous: https://honeypot.net/2024/04/08/i-fought-state.html

[thunky]

"Unlimited data" means that you can use as much as you want/can without being charged more based on usage. Otherwise there would be a cap and you are charged extra when you go over it.

It has nothing to do with speed/bandwidth.

Just like "unlimited text" plans don't charge per text message. But there is still a physical limit for how many texts you can send.

[exabrial]

So call it 300tb/month, not unlimited, and quit lying?

[datahack]

How is this nonsense still legal? It’s straight up nothing but deceptive advertising.

[fennecfoxy]

In NZ if you buy x mbps then you must get x mbps, at all times.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

And this is a gigabit customer using 4% of their maximum. What the heck?