If you're not selling me a gigabit connection with unlimited bandwidth than don't tell me that's what you're selling. Put in your bandwidth caps if you need to. Just don't tell me what I can do with my bandwidth that I bought.
This bandwidth is oversold. Of course it's oversold. 1000 Mbit of Internet connectivity costs a lot more than you're paying Google for it, never mind the last-mile cost of connecting your home. You can't seriously expect to run a business on a residential connection sold at residential prices, right? Like it or not, this has been the status-quo since the earliest days of broadband in the late 1990s.
Now, that said, Good Guy Google would give every Google Fiber customer a GAE instance on which to run their servers. By doing this, they move the servers to network infrastructure that's actually designed for running servers.
I don't believe in restricting what a customer can do with their connection to internet, but I also don't want to someone to consume more resources than they are reasonably paying for.
In my ideal world, I want to sell a connection to the internet that is as fast as I can reasonably deliver. I don't even want to make the distinction between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. I don't want speed to be factor. Just fast.
Is there a better way to phrase the service offering instead of 'unlimited'?
When I read this back to myself, it sounds like I want to have my cake and eat it to. Lots of contradictions in my mind.
Your first off-peak gig per month costs X USD whether you use it in one day or 28, et cetera.
That's how all utilities are measured, and it's totally reasonable, I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
How does everyone feel about metering in general?
The power costs per GB sent/received are negligible, the money goes towards maintenance of the network and ethernet cable doesn't degrade based on how many bits pass through it. If too many people utilise the network, then just throttle them and start dropping connections from the more aggressive ones.
Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.
Edit: about "that's how all utilities are measured". They aren't. Road tax is flat, but I can drive on the road for as long as I like as fast as the rules permit. Except it's slower when too many people do it at once. I want my internet to be like a road. (disclaimer: maybe road tax isn't flat where you live, but it is in many parts of the world, so please imagine we're talking about them for the purpose of the analogy. you may also need to pay a higher tax to use the highway, but it's still flat. it may also vary per type of vehicle but it's still flat.)
I wouldn't. Never interfere with my packets (except dropping when buffers are too full, of course). Throttle me to 1mbps if you need to, but you shouldn't even know how many TCP connections I have open.
I guess we're saying mostly the same thing, just worded differently.
In the case of electricity (etc.) there's an actual amount of work that goes into each KWh and that's what you pay for. With internet, there's just the upfront cost of connecting a router and paying a sysadmin team to support it; after that, operating it is a flat cost no matter how many packets pass through it.
You have to dig fibers at some point - at a cost of ~$15-100 per meter.
Feel free to join my "unmetered" internet. I've connected my routers via 56k lines to eachother, but we never even throttle a single customer. Of course given the chances of even a single packet ever reaching it's destination are so low you probably shouldn't even bother connecting to the network at all ...
Wouldn't that be solved with a simple ticker giving you the current spend. This way you wouldn't have "overage" charges that suddenly leap up, your spend would match usage, watch one more movie and it will cost you a small fraction extra to what it cost last month when you watched 23 movies, say.
Not all utilities are measured, domestic water is often unmetered FWIW.
"You pay X/mo up to Y MB; after Y MB you pay Zc/MB." Set Z to be slightly more than what you pay.
I think most people understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Don't promise one; just promise an honest pricing scheme that lets you make reasonable amounts of money and gives your customers what they want.
- X Mbps guaranteed, unmetered, do whatever you want (including servers). X here is not oversold: you need to have enough bandwidth for everyone to use the bandwidth you've sold them simultaneously.
- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, X TB/month (pay more if you use more), do whatever you want (including servers). Here, the minimum Mbps is the non-oversold level, and the burst takes advantage of available bandwidth that others aren't using. You need the transfer limit here to prevent a small handful of users saturating their ports and crowding out all other users; if they want to do that, they can pay for it.
- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, unmetered, best-effort based on the usage of other customers, ToS-limited to the types of activity that won't continuously saturate all available bandwidth (e.g. no continuous torrents beyond the minimum Mbps, no high-traffic servers). Here, you're not charging for additional bandwidth, but you're also telling people not to run anything that will saturate more than the amount you're guaranteeing them. Your remedy for users violating the ToS is to limit them to only the guaranteed bandwidth, effectively moving them to the first type of connection.
The first two options are standard with business-class Internet connections. The third option is what consumer Internet connections normally offer. You could offer a hybrid of the first and third options, where you can use X Mbps continuously for anything you want, but only burst to the full port speed intermittently.
- Xup/Ydown MBps for connections within the country (i.e. ones for which we can guarantee the infrastructure)
- X2up/Y2down MBps for connections farther away (i.e. subject to more variables)
- If you exceed N simultaneous TCP sessions, we reserve the right to drop some of them when the network is under load.
Basically, see how much you're getting from your provider and in how many pieces you can slice it and how much it will cost to buy fatter pipes when you have more users.
Give mid-bounds for speed - tell the customer their speed is usually this, but might be less under very heavy load (rare) or more when the network has spare capacity. But do sell slower/faster connections. This way you can sell better connections more expensively to people with more money.
Never put limits on how much data a user can down/upload. That is limited by their speed.
Make sure your equipment won't die if someone really does start an http server and posts the link on /. with "an experimental raspberrypi http server that can serve 100k simultaneous connections; do your worst :)".
Basically, I want my connection to have low latency, 99.999% reliability and you want me to pay as much money as I'm comfortable.
The only way you could sell flat rate unrestricted internet service is to increase the price and force your most profitable users to subsidize your least profitable users (biting the hand that feeds you). Bandwidth usage based metering would help fix this, but there is an extreme aversion to usage metering among even low usage customers.
From a (former) network engineer's standpoint: people who are upset that they can't keep their $50/month 20Mbps connection at line rate 24/7 make me think of people who want to fill shopping bags at a buffet.
Some people have bigger [data] appetites than others. Would you be in favor of a rule against fat people or really wired skinny people? And the shopping bag analogy is rather broken: if you were paying for 24/7 access to a buffet it wouldn't matter if you walked out with extra food to eat yourself.
(I'm ignoring any kind of food/bandwidth resale, I don't object to that being outlawed by the TOS.)
A fat person may eat 2-3 times what a normal person does. Not 10,000 times. The analogy is about abusing normal expectations. You are trying to make it fit too tightly. If you really want to extend it to 24/7 access to a buffet it would mean taking up all the plates/silverware so no one else can eat there. Then becoming indignant when asked to leave 'you said it was unlimited!' But I have no desire to play analogy ping pong.
Someone that uses a lot of bandwidth isn't doing it to be a jerk. And if they inconvenience others the network is frankly set up badly. Normal users will saturate a connection some of the time, and networks need to handle it. And if a network can handle saturation for one hour without problems, it can handle saturation all the time without problems.
Which is why they should be legally forbidden from advertising that they are slling 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth.
How hard is that? Don't advertise what you're not selling. When you say "unlimited use 1GB synchronous connection" and that's not what you're selling? That's illegal. It's called false advertising. Sure no one gets nailed for it any more, but that doesn't make it right. Advertise that you are actually selling a "restricted 1GBit synchronous connection with limits on what ports you may listen on, limits on upstream use, limits on what applications you may use on the network", etc.
Many ISPs offer "up to XX Mb/s" with no caps. In the event of unsustainably high use by some customer, that customer might have their maximum speed lowered to ensure the network quality of other customers.
It's impossible to provide unlimited data anyway, because the maximum amount of data per month is bounded by (length of month * permitted data rate)
They're not advertising that. The closest thing they say on their web page is "no data caps," which doesn't imply that you can use the connection to run any service you please. Besides, I'm willing to bet that they have more detailed terms of service that must be agreed upon before receiving service.
We know they don't mean that, and they know we know they don't mean that, but I don't think we should let companies get away with lies like that just because everybody's used to the lying.
edit: Wow, down-voted for out pedanting the pedants. That's some cognitive dissonance there.
What, if anything, does this mean to you?
But I believe ISPs should be forced to publish in detail what their acceptable use" thresholds and limits are, and ban advertising any connection as "unlimited". Otherwise consumers have no way of accurately comparing the offers. "Unlimited but we can ban you for an unknown amount of heavy use" is designed to avoid competition via confusion.
An ISP I used was very clear about it: 100Mbit max speed, but you are throttled to 5Mbit after 3GB of traffic during 4-8pm each night.
And internationally, where we are dependant -mostly- on undersea cables, the capacity just isn't there.
Using the term "server" is open-ended and it gives ISPs unnecessary discretion over cutting users' connections. If the rationale is that customers whom are operating commercial businesses out of their home internet connection are abusing their internet connection, then put the goal-post there.
Using the term "server" allows ISPs to change the goal-post when its convenient for them, and that's unfair.
Also, a moving goalpost isn't really unfair at all in this situation (Assuming it is, in fact, a moving goalpost). They have every right to make changes to their network to ensure good quality service to everyone.
ETA: If you're going to downvote, you should explain yourself.
There is the problem.
Can I run a server from my home?
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.
Maybe it is clear to some lawyer somewhere, but it is not clear to me, the consumer.
This shit is vague. It may be clear to you, but it isn't categorically.
Edit: OK I'm not really in a Google Fiber area, but I do pay for Comcast "business" internet for my house. I currently use about 5x more data than their residential cap allows, for 1.2x the price.
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and
encouraged.
So, thanks for telling us that your TOS doesn't actually mean what it says, but no thanks for not actually telling us what it does mean.
Or how about a similar thing for email. Your email remains on a machine in your home, but you can access it from anywhere. Uptime should be pretty much always.
Or how about a commercial scenario? You realize your employer has huge overhead, and that you could undercut their price and offer your skills directly to customers over the Internet. So you start using your home Internet connection to do business. Not running a server, but violating the noncommercial usage policy. Running a business connection would just artificially replace your employer with Google and raise your overhead until it matched the employers, protecting the entrenched centralized business model (which the Internet should be destabilizing and destroying).
e.g. If someone uses the service to download & upload 100gb+ of data a day, and somehow it's actually for personal use, I suspect that Google would restrict them.
If so, the spirit of the terms isn't as much to delineate between types of use as much as it is to delineate between amounts of use.
What? They absolutely can do that.