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by michaelt 525 days ago
If my ISP can only afford to supply me with 1TB of transfer at 1Gbit, that's fine. They can put it in the adverts, the contracts, and the pricing. For customers who want 10TB of transfer, they can offer a higher cost option.

And if they choose to gamble, advertising and entering into contracts promising "unlimited data", which they think will be more profitable across their entire customer base? Then they've got to do supply what they promised in the adverts. They chose to gamble that way, and if they lose money gambling that's their business.
1 comments
Hikikomori 525 days ago
You have that on mobile subscriptions usually, heavy users pay more and low usage users are not subsidizing them.

I take you are fine with paying 10x or even more for your no oversubscription Internet connection then?

Oversubscription is not gambling. The way it works after your last mile connection is that ISPs look at link usage in their network, city level distribution, city to city, transit, peering, etc, once it reaches 60-80% utilization at peak you start looking at adding more capacity. Bad ISPs (most US ISPs) will let this go too far though.

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michaelt 525 days ago
> Oversubscription is not gambling.

Sure it is.

If I promise 30 people they can have a burger at my barbecue, but I only buy 20 burgers, I'm gambling that 20 people or fewer will show up.

It might be a reasonable gamble, based on past barbecues - but the guests left hungry will still be hungry, and I'll have broken my promise to them.

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kalenx 524 days ago
That's not the same thing. A more adequate comparison would be to say that you promised 30 people they can have a burger, but can only produce 5 burgers per minute. If everyone show up at exactly the same time, you won't be able to satisfy them all (they'll have to wait). But overall you can consider that the probability of such thing happening is small enough to take the "gamble".
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Hikikomori 524 days ago
It might be if traffic had sudden jumps of like 30%, but it doesn't and there is headroom available. Traffic increases slowly over time and you have plenty of time to upgrade your network.
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