Exactly. In my country, an "Unlimited 4G LTE" data plan costs 12 EUR. But without any "fair usage" policy that would be simply impossible. Nobody would expect to use tens of TBs per month without ever being contacted or heavily throttled.
Obviously that's not as good marketing. Products usually look better if you lie about them to make them look better. But lying in marketing shouldn't be legal. And this shouldn't be controversial.
Maybe because the limits are not fixed and completely depend on the spending of the customer? If a customer is among the top 1% of the biggest users and – at the same time – among the top 1% of the smallest spenders, that simply raises the costs of the service for everyone else. There are only three choices here: a) get rid of the customer; b) make them pay more, or c) raise the prices of unlimited plans for everyone.
For instance, OVH has previously terminated accounts of paying customers simply because it didn't want to do any business with people from an occupied territory[1].
Just don't call the plan "unlimited". Have well-defined limits. They don't have to be hard limits, they can be a gradual speed reduction after some amount of data per month. Just don't lie. I don't understand why you think this is a difficult concept.
BTW, if it was just "we don't want to do business with you any more", that depends on what your contract says. Most consumer ISP contracts allow an ISP to drop a customer for any reason without explanation.
Let's say the provider has a 100 Gpbs upstream, 1000 clients, and offers a cheap plan where you pay for 1 Gbps with no limit. The provider obviously can't provide a sustained 1 Gbps to every client 24/7.
Now, how do you honestly advertise that? Because you can give people 1 Gbps service so long not too many clients do that at the same time. And you can tolerate people downloading 24/7 so long they don't all do it at the same time.
How much you have to crack down will depend on how close to capacity you are, and what your clients are doing.
But a service with a cap also isn't unlimited.
Making a pricing structure which works for the company and is easy to understand for the customer isn't easy. Nobody said it was easy. But I don't understand how you go from that, to arguing in favor of lying to the customer.
In your scenario, 10:1 contention ratio, "up-to" 1Gbps throughput, 1Gbps link-speed.
In the UK British Telecom originally offered 'consumer' ADSL at 50:1 and 'business' (more expensive) at 20:1 contention ratio specifically to deal with the backhaul limitations.
If they advertised "you get a min of 200kbps, that could boost up to 1Gbps" that would be acceptable, as long as you actually got that 200kbps. The problem is they claim it is 1Gbps, then look at you funny if you expect 70% of what they claim.
But the fact that there is a limit at all, means that you can definitely display it somewhere.
Suppose you have two users, John and Jane, John is in the 1% of most valuable customers, Jane signed up last month. The data center has plenty of free capacity in June, but is closer to capacity in July.
Now suppose that each user has their own dashboard for resources.
John:
June - Your bandwidth limit is 200 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it.
July - Your bandwidth limit is 160 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it.
Jane:
June - Your bandwidth limit is 40 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend.
July - Your bandwidth limit is 30 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend.
Limits
Limits are set per customer and are counted across all projects that you created. If you need more resources, just send us a request, and we are happy to adjust them for you.
Outgoing traffic to ports 25 and 465 are blocked by default on all Cloud Servers. Send a request for unblocking these ports. Please note that we generally do not answer questions regarding limit increase on the telephone.
Of course, that's not the world that we live in and "unlimited" offerings will be a mainstay of marketing in the industry, for the better or worse. Probably better for the org and worse for the clients. Kind of why I also hate mobile carriers being dishonest with their data plans. It's like nobody even knows what "unlimited" means.
Words have meanings for a reason.
The meaning of the word "unlimited" is not, in fact, "limited, but we won't tell you what the limit is — you'll get to find it out the hard way".
Whatever the terms of the "fair usage" policy are, that's what should be in the description.
Otherwise, is plain old lying and misreading — which for some reason you are OK with.
I'm proxying traffic through mobile proxies and expect nothing less than unlimited.
What herzer do amounts to false advertising when compared to the mobile traffic examples.