if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo.
heztner and OVH and other bottom of the barrel pricing hosting companies are their own special breed of thing.
you're not going to get for $40-50/mo what you would get for $250/mo.
their TOS/AUP almost certainly covers this (you think that a company the size of hetzner didn't run this by real legal experts first?). it's not fraud.
You go with Hetzner knowing you’re getting bargain prices, so they’re cutting corners somewhere. This would be like saying Walmart are committing fraud when it turns out their ham is not “finest quality”.
“We’ll of course they are cutting corners!” doesn’t seem like a defense at all to me.
If the sales page says "1 gigabit unlimited", I don't care about any other considerations. It either is or isn't "1 gigabit unlimited". If any part of that statement is untrue, then the the provider should be honest and say so.
I'm so fed up with the normalization of this slimy behavior.
The way I see it, this conduct is antithetical to the spirit of the free market and harmful to society at large, regardless of whether or not it can be defended in court.
Just to be pedantic, without disputing your broader point about what customers should expect:
Phrases like "finest quality" are known in marketing as "puffery" and companies aren't liable for these claims. From a quick search, specific factual claims like "unlimited 1Gbps" might be held to a different standard, depending on whether "no reasonable person" would take the claim seriously.
> The Second Circuit explained, "Puffery is an exaggeration or overstatement expressed in broad, vague, and commendatory language. Such sales talk is considered to be offered and understood as an expression of the seller's opinion only, which is to be discounted as such by the buyer."
> One type of puffery is a non-specific claim that one product is better than another The Second Circuit explained it as, "a general claim of superiority over comparable products that is so vague that it can be understood as nothing more than a mere expression of opinion."
> Looking at Starbucks's advertising, the court held that statements such as, "Best coffee for the best you," "taste of inspiration," "Starbucks or nothing," and "heart, soul, craft, pride, love; you won't find that in any other cup of coffee" are all puffery. The court wrote, "These statements vaguely assert that Starbucks's coffee is better than its competitors' in a manner best "understood as an expression of the seller's opinion only." They aren't, the court said, specific enough to "misrepresent an inherent quality or characteristic of the defendant's product."
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ac3f3d65-2e97...
'Fraud' is too strong of word. Almost everything in the world has some level of over-subscription. I don't know for sure BUT if every person and business turned all their water taps on full blast, I think we may have a problem.
Words are tools to convey information, if you label everything as fraud, that 'tool' is no longer useful.
Overselling capacity is perfectly fine if most of the time* you go to use the capacity it's there for you. If 95% of users under use capacity and you have the stats for it, it's perfectly reasonable to oversell sell with respect to the expected capacity usage. If those stats change, sure - they should adjust how much they oversell or what they advertise.
It's the same way a bank can't handle everyone pulling their money out all at once. It's perfectly reasonable to plan around practical scenarios.
Now if you rarely get what you paid for, sure, go for their heads over it.
* for some definition of most of the time aka get SLAs
If you bring a world eating champion to an all-you-can-eat buffet, they'll end up being refused service and banned from eating there after a few visits.
Attempting to apply a dictionary-literal reading of 'Unlimited' to a business advertisement of 'Unlimited' is unlikely to get very far in a court of law: such a literal interpretation attempts to create and exploit a loophole for one's own benefit at extreme cost to the provider, by refusing a common sense interpretation of 'Unlimited within reason'.
Saturating 1G ethernet continuously for a month exceeds what I consider reasonable, and I would not expect a court to be convinced otherwise.
it's a very common thing these days to buy something like a 1.5 Gbps average commit of traffic on a 10G 1310 LR hand off port to the ISP, and move traffic in a daily sine wave pattern that varies anywhere between 500 Mbps at 0300 in the morning and 1.5 to 2.5 Gbps in the evening peak.
It's not a "loophole" to use 80% of the capacity that was advertised and sold to you. If they want to sell "unlimited within reason" capacity, they should advertise "unlimited within reason", instead of "unlimited".
I really don't understand your viewpoint.
In the US, it’s unclear if my viewpoint is prohibited, and good luck to anyone filing a lawsuit. I would expect my viewpoint to likely survive a US court case.
Hetzner is based in Germany; I am not familiar with whether DE or EU laws prohibit them from terminating service at will when they feel that “unlimited” service is being abused. If you do research into that, let us know what you find.
The problem is they don't want to do that, because it's much snazzier to just market the peak speed.
How are you going to make sure every tenant gets its share of bandwith equally? It requires traffic engineering (like RSVP-TE, which in term requires an MPLS network.) and a proper QoS setup. both of which are not trivial to implement at scale.
Going further down the network towards to aggregate layer is far more doable (between switches etc), but doing it across core links it is actually quite difficult to guarantee bandwith.
Also residential ISPs generally don't even have SLAs so you could have days without Internet... probably also why they do not try to even hint at any guaranteed bandwidth. Depending on the situation, you might have none :)
1) You have enough slack that your edge case top-end users can utilize what you advertise, and there are enough people not needing it that this is all fine
2) You do not have enough slack that your edge case top-end users can't utilize what you advertise, in which case you are, at best, being deceptive in your advertising practices.
No one cares about the former, and even though the latter is common place, that doesn't mean that it isn't a shitty advertising practice nor should someone making use of a provider have to know that this is common place.
You should be able to reasonably expect to get what a commercial entity is advertising itself as giving as part of your payment to them. Just because this industry has been garbage about it doesn't mean that it should always be garbage about it.
At least in my experience, gigabit fiber is usually $100/mo in fiber markets. I would definitely pay $250/mo if it meant I had a guaranteed line rate, but I can’t. I think a lot of people would take $250 for guaranteed truly unlimited continuously saturated gigabit, actually.
if you found yourself operating a small regional bank branch or similar and wanted a business circuit in some suburb of a major city you'd more realistically be looking at $700-800/mo for a 1Gbps dedicated business DIA circuit on a 36-60 mo term.
Sure? I want stuff that works, damn if it’s cheap lol.