"Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.
The internet is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more.
E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like
> I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down.
Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!
Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.
You and your nearest 400 neighbours plug into a non-blocking 1g port network. Find you can do 1g to your neighbours
But you need a 400g uplink (and remember to account for resilience), so you go into a switch with 40 400g ports, ok, that's 1.6tbit
Scale this up to a small town with 20,000 people and you need 20tbit of backbone to serve your residents with 1G non-blocking, very few will ever use the full 1G
Sharing bandwidth makes perfect sense. If you want uncontended (to where? Local IXP, a major IXP? One on the other side of the world?) then get a business line which gives you uncontended connectivity.
If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. Cable companies are soul sucking monopolies/duopolies and deserve no quarter.
Competitor services? Starlink aside, I have no options but what I have. I think many people at least in USA are in similar situation.
I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it would be $20k-$30k to run that fiber to my building.
Unfortunately I think my experience is pretty common in the US, though sure, there are plenty of people who can choose between e.g. cable and fiber.
I don't think any competitor will give you a dedicated gigabit to you for a reasonable price, especially if everyone suddently starts asking for one.
I pay for a Symmetrical gigabit connection, it’s 60 dollars a month. I record speed tests multiple times a day every day and have ever since I got the service last year. They’re growing gang busters too, my entire neighborhood is on Ziply (90% of household converted from what I understand)
Aside from them adjusting some things due to the rapid unexpected uptake, I have gotten full connection speeds for upload and download every day for over a year. Its been uptime of 99.999% (the adjustment period happened over 2 days and they only slowed service to 300/300 temporarily)
It can be done. It won’t be done by Comcast et. al.
Note that this doesn't means that there are exactly 0 users downloading in those moments. Usually there are multiple gigabits dedicated to a group of users, so that multiple users can navigate at 1Gbps without slowing down others, but not all the group at once. How much bandwidth is allocated to how many users can vary though, and some providers might allocate less total bandwidth to more users.
In practice this works out fine most of the time and most users won't notice slowdowns like you do, but if everyone started a speedtest at the same time you will notice it.
As long as the DMARC isn't saturated then you're only limited by the other lines also going to the DMARC and the collective activity of subscribers upstream of you between you and the central office. That's to say, you are right that it can be done but only insofar as other posters have indicated: last mile providers need to provision higher capacity lines between the DMARC and the central office.
In the end, people go for what they perceive to be the cheapest prices, not necessarily the prices that actually are the cheapest.
BTW the FCC recently introduced "nutrition labels" for ISPs. https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
"Unlimited data" refers to volume.
Gigabit refers to speed.
This customer presumably isn't too worried about the speed, but is rightly under the impression that he isn't being charged on volume and can thus use as much as the speed allows.
That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.
I don't think I even had 18GB of disk space back then.
Technically what we offered was shared dialup access to a T1 or a T3 upstream. They just looked for the word "unlimited". Customers didn't know what it meant either, except it was "better".
If you were doing anything we thought of as "abusive" we would hang up on you. You could immediately call back in, and we were fine with that.
Normally after the 2nd or 3rd time we caught you being "abusive", we would call you and have a chat: try to figure out what the heck you were doing and why. Most of the time we would just run their data on one of our machines and save the dialup space. They could telnet in and do what they needed doing on occasion. Dialup lines were expensive compared to process space.
Of course we were also one of the few weirdos that had a "community" linux box with the root password in the login banner, so everyone could create their own account and help maintain the community box. It worked really well for several years, until some meanies found it and ruined it. After that we put the root password in /etc/motd, so every logged in user could do root things if needed. That also worked really well for many years.
Different times for sure!
> I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate.
I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to mislead. But it's something to be aware of because they will argue (and frequently some smug person that I guess has a boot fetish) and then blame you for not reading. But I strongly disagree. Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. You can't just hide stuff in legal language. No person has enough time to read all those TOS agreements and even if they did, it's not in normal language that's understandable by the average person. If a contact is fair only if participants are informed and consenting, then I don't think most of these contacts should hold up (they do).
But hey, we live in a world where courts have decided that "boneless wings" doing clearly mean "without bones". But I for one don't want to live in a country where that's okay.
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors with the legal system and I for one don't think enough people are upset. Apathy isn't working.
Interpret. Words mean things, you know.
If I am not to use it like that then it should say clearly on the paperwork that I have data limits, and I don't have any such notifications.
HE only has to run relatively short cables within a datacenter, which is designed for running those things, while residential fiber has to be run much further through much more hostile terrain.
Residential fiber takes more total land and maintenance and has different customer density per unit laid.
Unless HE also offers residential fiber at that rate, don't think it's comparable.
But that's something different than what Cox is doing.
"Unlimited" and over-subscription aren't incompatible. You have a gigabit connection, the 40Gbps uplink is shared between 1000 other people who each have a gigabit connection, the over-subscription rate is 25:1. That's fine as long as the average usage during peak hours is 4% -- which it might very well be. A 4k Netflix stream is 25Mbps, which is 2.5% of a gigabit connection, so you're not above that even if everybody is streaming in 4k at once.
You're even fine if everybody is streaming in 4k at once and then on top of that 15 people want to fully max out their connections. And everybody using their connections at once doesn't really happen. At any given time a lot of people will be using zero.
Now, there will be times that are outliers. Maybe a popular video game drops without staggering the release and suddenly 30% of the customers are maxing out their connections at once to download an update and the average speed drops from 1000Mbps to 100Mbps for a couple hours. That's why it says "up to", right? That isn't artificially limiting anyone, that's just everyone getting their pro rata share in a time of atypical demand.
But on a typical day with an adequately provisioned network you should be able to get the speed on the label, and there is still no reason to be limiting anyone's speeds during times the network isn't over capacity.
The issue is they don't want to over-subscribe their network at only the ratio that would allow them to provide the rated speed on a typical day, they want to promise more than they can deliver and deflect blame onto people who are only using what they were promised.
You have a finite downlink capacity and a finite uplink capacity, users are not just competing for the same time on the wire, they're competing for spectrum. If everyone was on Ethernet to the home then you'd be right, but FTTH and Cable are in physically contended spectrum in the cabinet/cable itself. Proper fibre ethernet costs more per user than FTTH/Cable because each user needs a port on a switch, instead of using TDMA and everyone being on the same wire at the other end.
One is a stupid way to run a society and the other isn't.
A little knowledge can be dangerous, that's not patronising, it's that accurately describing your network topology to all customers is hard and easy to misunderstand. Some segments of the network will be heavily contended, and others will be under utilised. Being heavily contended might be undesirable but it's pragmatically going to happen.
Where it breaks down with customers, is where the segment is over-contended to the point where they consistently can't meet the product description. But that's not a service description issue, it's an investment problem and if it's not being dealt across the board by the provider, then that provider will be crap.
The bigger issue in this case is a lack of effective competition which drives vendors to have a decent quality of service. Being more transparent won't help with an under provisioned network if you have no choice. In markets with poor competition, poor service provision and capacity usually follows.
They started charging me overage fees. I called them up and asked them to explain why they were charging me overage fees on an unlimited bandwidth account.
Their explanation was that the bandwidth was unlimited in when I could use it, not in how much I could use.
Fortunately for me, there were other providers in the market that I could switch to. So I did.
That turns out to be a ~1.6TB/month limit.
Hence why I think both speed and volume limits should be advertised prominently. "Up to 5Mbps (1.6TB/month)" or "Up to 500Mbps (or 1TB/month, whichever comes first)" gives users a clear idea of what their service is.
The point I am making is that if fixed carriers seemingly no longer want to be selling connections by last-mile bandwidth (with implied statistical oversubscription and a fall-back to best effort), and instead want to move to selling specific amounts of data delivered, then their big-print marketing should have to reflect that!
Or alternatively, if they want to stick with selling the instantaneous last mile connection speed, then data quotas should have to raise along with that according to a standard benchmark consumer usage - say 2 hours of nameplate usage per day, meaning a 300Mb/s connection would be ~6TB/month. And then additional data usage should cost the same (or lower) as the monthly plan - for example $120/month for that 6TB/month plan is $20/TB, so 1TB of additional data should cost no more than $20 rather than the current punitive or even unobtainable pricing.
Also I'd guess your 90%/1TB figure is quite out of date, which gets to the heart of the problem here - these limits have remained arbitrary and opaque rather than being expressed in the market. It gets even more rotten when talking about national policy where these ISPs have been able to claim they're providing modern "broadband" while their backhaul networks have been seemingly frozen in time for a decade+.
Although, a disclaimer: I only read these threads to gawk at the train wreck and check if the Internet access market is really still this bad. I've got municipal gpon at 1Gb/s symmetric, no caps (I've asked multiple times), with a fixed price every month. Which really just underscores the absurdity of talking about this topic in a negative-sum parceling out of bits and bytes, which mostly stems from Ma Coax wanting to continue milking their captive markets on aging infrastructure.
My ISP lets me use the service all of the days of the month, not just one. His ludicrously low limit is unfathomable.
I gave Cox over $2000 explicitly for unlimited data and still got nastygrams from them for uploading 4TB of my original digital photos to S3 for backup.
It’s effectively illegal to start new ISPs in America, that’s why this shit happens.
It has nothing to do with speed/bandwidth.
Just like "unlimited text" plans don't charge per text message. But there is still a physical limit for how many texts you can send.