> stop promising things they aren't willing to deliver on.
Very few ISPs offer residential Internet access with SLAs that guarantee performance or even availability. They mostly promise only a 'best effort' class of service.
"Best effort" doesn't mean "Here's your dinner, take it or leave it."
ISPs have been successfully managing aggregate network bandwidth growth for over twenty years.
I work at a place that has transformed it's utilization of the internet via cloud services -- utilization going from 80-120MB/s to multi-gigabit. Adapting to that change was relatively easy and cheap. With the economies of scale that a large Telco has, it's a drop in the bucket.
I've been speed testing my shitty (Time Warner, yay) internet lately and am getting fully 50% of my 15m/s that I pay a whopping $80+/mo (hard to disambiguate between the 'packaged' cost with TV). I once got a Comcast rep to admit that they basically were unconcerned with providing anything which is at least %60 of the level that they advertise. Unless the entire company is both mentally and physically challenged I seriously doubt that this represents a "best effort" class of service. This is go-fuck-yourself service that a dive bar would be embarrassed by.
That's a good point. I meant promise in the sense that that's how customers often interpret a bandwidth claim - legally, they're making no such promise (otherwise they'd be in a lot of trouble).
Right, and the problem is that their version of best effort doesn't involve trying very hard at all, since they have minimal competition in most local markets.
ISPs have been successfully managing aggregate network bandwidth growth for over twenty years.
I work at a place that has transformed it's utilization of the internet via cloud services -- utilization going from 80-120MB/s to multi-gigabit. Adapting to that change was relatively easy and cheap. With the economies of scale that a large Telco has, it's a drop in the bucket.