[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.