If I pay for 100GB internet a month, that should equal a quota of 1.2TB a year.
That, or you reduce the amount I pay if I don't use my quota, and you reduce it further if your download speed is not what was advertised. Fuck these guys!
Also recall that consumer agreements for Internet service never include a "CBR" or "committed bit rate". If you want your ISP to live up to a service contract, for availability and guaranteed download speeds, then you'll go to their Business-class unit and sign a contract for commercial service.
And you can prove that this is true: your ISP doesn't care if you can connect to anything except their head end. They will troubleshoot your modem, restart it, and work on the wiring between you and them, but they couldn't give a rat's ass if you can reach example.com or not.
They should be more transparent about what to expect, but realistically it's out of their control. They don't control Netflix's outbound traffic, for example.
The difference between 1,000mbps and 970mbps can (partially) be explained by protocol overheads.
There's a difference here though. The ISP isn't being nefarious if you don't get the advertised speed because they can't control anything outside of their network. The butcher, OTOH, presumably knows how to read a scale and can charge the appropriate price.
I currently pay for 300Mbps symmetrical and actually achieve on the wire always greater than their advertised rates (for both down and up). And while I was doing the tests (today) multiple others were streaming and playing video games, so it's even more than I am seeing above.
If you use gigabit ethernet out of the modem/ont then yes you will not see full gigabit speeds due to overhead. This is of course dependent on the type of connection you have and the equipment they use, so your broad statement is inaccurate.
Good to watch out for, though!
Not true of all ISPs.
And at some point, even if they are only advertising signaling rates, it's inconsequential.
I'm paying I think $70/mo for symmetrical gigabit. I just ran a speed test and got 922 mbps down, 910 mbps up. I'm not going to complain about that.
Does speedtest.net include packet headers in its speed? Assuming 40 bytes of a 1500 byte packet is from headers, leaving only 1460 bytes is available for application data, that means that a minimum if 2.7% of my bandwidth is packet headers.
So if speedtest.net is only counting application data and not compensating for the bandwidth used by headers, then I should at most see 973 mbps on my gigabit connection.