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(i.e. "unlimited means I should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long!!").

Yes, that sounds like unlimited to me.

A buffet is unlimited. A small 90lb old lady will eat maybe half a plate. Then come some big 400lb fellas who clean off 8 or 9 plates full. Either one should be accommodated when it's called "unlimited". Otherwise, call it what it is: service with a high limit.

Nope that's what YOU think it means. See my answer above. We never charged anyone for extra hours, but we did not _guarantee_ that you could get online and stay online as much as you want.

Take your buffet example: You can eat all you want from what is on the tables, no matter how much that is, but there's no guarantee of an infinite supply of food. If you eat all the pancakes, they are not _obligated_ to supply you with more.

They mean:

Unlimited WiFi usage. Since EVERYTHING is routed through wifi whenever possible, you can call, text, browse without any alternative usage patterns.

Also no overages. However if you are a very heavy user, they will terminate your contract in favor of just directing you to another plan.

Here's the kicker: This may be good enough for say 30% of people. So why not. It may not be for you, or it may.

They can't be clearer, because, I suspect they don't know themselves.

I imagine they will analyze usage patterns and decide which 10% or so of customers they want to get rid of every so often, based on a per-user P&L type of analysis.

> It doesn't work for the 10% of heavy usage customers, or the folks who think the provider should be held to their own personal definition of "unlimited" (i.e. "unlimited means I should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long!!").

How is that their own personal definition? Isn't that what the word "unlimited" means? It is the carriers and ISPs who have started using their own definitions of "unlimited", whereby it actually means "limited".

I get that ISPs need to establish limits. I just wish they would say so. It should be considered false advertising to market any service as "unlimited" when it's not.

This is exactly what I mean.

Unlimited meant that there were no preset limits to the number of hours you were allowed to use, and there was no surcharge for hours used. It did _not_ mean that you were _guaranteed_ to be allowed access 24/7 all month long. I think that's a fair definition of "unlimited".

We were very clear about this, and said so in our ad fine print, and very prominently during the sign-up process.

"Preset" is a red herring, limits are contrary to "unlimited" whether they're set in advance or decided on the fly.

Certainly there's no guaranteed access, but if you're artificially limiting their access, as opposed to just having equipment difficulties or whatever, then that's hardly unlimited. If you're kicking off heavy users, I think that's not at all a fair definition of unlimited.

I appreciate that you were up front about the policy and think that's exactly what you should be doing, but disagree with characterizing this as somehow compatible with "unlimited". If "unlimited" is allowed to have these limits, then what exactly does it mean?

You are free to interpret the word in your own way I guess, but I don't think our definition was unfair or inaccurate.

I think you are confusing "unlimited" with "infinite". By your argument, one could say that we didn't offer "unlimited" service because there are a maximum of 744 hours in a month and hey that's not equal to "unlimited".

Again this comes back to different valid interpretations of a word, and since we provided the service, ours won.

Try going to McDonalds and each time you're there arguing that their "large" fries don't meet your definition of "large". Maybe bring a "large" garbage bag and say "THIS is what large means" and ask them to fill that up, and see how far you get.

Anyways, you aren't making any new arguments that customers didn't give me 15 years ago..

I don't think your 744 hours argument makes sense. That's not your limit. Interpret it as "all you can eat"; if I can't eat anymore, that's not really a limit with the service.

Again, I don't see how your interpretation is a valid one. You limit the service based on usage. This is not "unlimited". If your cut the service off after one hour per month, would that be unlimited? I imagine you wouldn't consider it to be so. So what's the difference, aside from degree?

I don't imagine I'm putting forth new arguments. But I still don't understand: why call it "unlimited" when it's not? It seems clear enough that people don't expect your definition of the word when they see it, and haven't for at least 15 years, so why keep using it when it's known to be misleading?

First: Marketing. We had to sell accounts and you can't really fit a big complicated explanation in an advert, nor would you want to.

Second: We were fair. Compared to our competition we offered a damn good service. You're right, cutting someone off after an hour would be shitty, but we had very few customers who didn't end up using more or less as many hours as they wanted to (back to the buffet example)..

We had a well-tuned system that calculated a rolling total of your connected time over the last 7 days and ONLY if you exceeded a specific threshold (if no one exceeded it, no one got disconnected), and ONLY during peak times (5pm to 10pm weeknights), and ONLY if all the lines were in use, would we selectively disconnect high-usage customers to make space for others.

If there was the odd high-usage customer (it was about 5% of our unlimited accounts at most) that couldn't get online between 5pm and 10pm on weeknights here and there because we were limiting their access to allow other customers on, BUT they can hop back on at 10pm and stay connected until 5pm the NEXT DAY, I think we were offering a pretty good deal.

So like your buffet example, the majority of our customers had no problem with our unlimited service, and the very few outliers who got limited, well they were getting a good deal anyways, and at the end of the day were actually costing us money, so if they cancelled as dissatisfied customers for not being able to essentially have a dedicated dial-up phone line for under 25$/month, we didn't lose any sleep over it.

So in the end, it was effectively unlimited service for 95%+ of our customers, and near-unlimited for the rest.

Sounds like a good deal, I agree. But, not unlimited. My issue is not with how you treated your customers, which sounds fine, but with your strange complaining that your customers should have somehow known about your not-quite-unlimited definition of the word "unlimited", and that they were the ones using unusual definitions of the word, rather than you.

All other advertisers manage to find room for caveats when they make overarching claims, even if it's in weaselly fine print or fast speech. I don't see why we should treat ISPs any differently. If it's unlimited*, where the asterisk means "not quite", that asterisk and explanation need to be present, and people who don't see it and assume that "unlimited" takes on its common meaning aren't in the wrong.

unlimited: adj- without limits or bounds