> It always puzzled me that internet companies can simply say that the speed is "up to" a certain number.
I always imagine it like this:
Them: "This plan gives you up to 23mb/s."
Me: "So you're saying you guarantee I will not get more than 23mb/s?"
Them: "Right."
Me: "OK. I'll pay you up to $40 a month for that."
> As an ISP how would you _guarantee_ the bandwidth for each endpoint?
When I still lived in Slovenia, I had 20/20 FTTH. Fiber went directly into a router in my bedroom. My bandwidth was always exactly 20/20. No matter what.
Now I have Comcast. Speedtest says I get 80/6. On Friday and Saturday evenings Netflix and Facebook and many other things often experience issues. Now I can't confirm any of this. If you run speedtest, it's fine. If you ping something, there's no packet loss. But it just doesn't feel very fast and reliable under normal use.
> if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2 Mbps, they can expect to pay a whopping $90.
This is the worst internet in america? Wow. That is amazing! I'm incredibly impressed at how fast the worst place for internet in america is.
In highschool (Class of 2011) I dealt with 5 mbps just because my parents didn't want to pay for more. It was tolerable as long as you didn't want to watch youtube in HD. Honestly, I have little sympathy for people with 12mbps.
>people would leave that ISP for another one that didn't throttle Netflix
That assumes people have a choice for their ISP.
If I want high speed internet I have two choices. Both of them are huge national companies.
If they decide to go the throttle route, where do I go?
>Secondly, why are they throttling this service? Because they can't charge effectively for it.
That's an interesting take considering how they offered a product at a certain bandwidth and I agreed to pay for that bandwidth. If I use it to capacity, the services I receive from third parties are somehow 'exploiting' the model? I don't think so.
If the post office offers to ship anything under 10lbs for a flat rate, is a company taking advantage if they offer, say, a 10 lbs cheese of the month package using that USPS service?
> Having upload as such a small fraction of the download can be a pain sometimes.
I pay for 900 megabits and get 20. Upload, of course.
None of the other plans even offer upload speeds this high - so not only does paying for 900 get you only 20, but to get only 20 you have to pay for 900. That's nuts.
> Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per month, there's no point to having internet any faster.
What? I definitely care how fast my internet is regardless of my bandwidth cap. For most people, internet consistency and speed is a more noticeable metric than data caps. Speed effects video/audio call quality, page load times, etc.
Look, i get annoyed at data caps. I've taken multiple comcast employees to task over it. But the idea that speed is irrelevant when caps are present strikes me as pearl clutching.
> I was paying for 3.5 Mbps., sometimes was only up to 1.5 Mbps
> he had been hounding the company about the estimated time of arrival for their fiber optics
I suspect he has an ADSL connection and is far from the central office. Normally, I'd say the choices are wait for fiber, check with the cable company, or use 4/5G. I'll give him credit for running that ad, but I feel like some ISP would run fiber in an urban area for that kind of money. This feels just a little like complaining to AOL that your dialup is slow.
>Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting.
I don't think this is universally true. I have a gigabit line via a residential ISP ($60/mo) in Europe and it will max out 24/7 without throttling.
What I don't have is access to the same support and service guarantees that would be included in a business plan.
> Is that a realistic scenario that cannot be solved by just building out capacity?
Have you ever wondered why most home internet speeds top out at 35Mbps? It goes back to legacy spectrum stuff, they never needed upload to get cable to you, so the reserved spectrum was small, on docsis 3.x it tops out at 35Mbps.
The internet backend isn’t some wonder of engineering, it’s tubes held together with duct tape and bubble gum. A lot of old ways of doing things.
There is a very real practical limit to “just building out capacity”. Because of exisitint equipment, legacy standards, etc.
Running fiber to everyone directly, wouldn’t fix things. Beyond specs and standards, it would become a space, power, and heat limitation at these isps, and this is all totally ignoring cost.
If it were equivalent, you could take any random person's 100 or 200 or 400 mbps service that has a 1 TB per month cap and replace it with 3 mbps uncapped and they would not care.
As someone currently on 400 mbps plan with a 1 TB cap, I can assure you that I would care, and would strenuously object to any such replacement.
I don't have 400 mbps so that I can download more than I could when I had slower plans. I have 400 mbps so I don't have to wait as long for downloads to finish.
If you don't have a SLA, you're not paying for X/s. The cheap consumer plans only advertise the speed as a potential maximum with no guarantee. Moreover, they explicitly state that overuse will result in slower speeds.
So if you want X/s, then you'll need a stricter contract, and will have to pay a lot more than what you're doing now. Or, the ISP can request that upstream services subsidize the bandwidth for downstream customers and that way you won't have to pay more.
If 250GB/month is unreasonable, then those people should not be signing up for a 250GB/month service plan. There's nothing stopping him from getting a business plan, for example, with a larger cap or no cap at all. It's not reasonable for this user to expect to dictate both the bandwidth limits _and_ the low price point. Even if we stipulate that internet access is a human right, I don't think it's reasonable to assert that everybody is entitled to unlimited bandwidth to the internet, at somebody else's expense.
> How do my internet habits interfere with your internet habits?
As far as I know, at some point this guy's connection is going through a shared resource, whether that is a switch or router or hub or whatever. Those gadgets only have so much bandwidth available, which is shared amongst all the connections going through it. Sure, most of the time the limit of that hardware vastly exceeds the demands of those connections, but there _is_ a limit, and it is possible (albeit, perhaps, unlikely) that one guy, uploading _terabytes_ of data, could impede his neighbor's ability to enjoy the internet.
> I literally laugh at providers attempting to convince me to get whatever with 10 or 20Mbit uplink speeds, in 2022l Yes, they exist.
Meanwhile here in Silicon Valley, the fastest connection I can get at home (sonic.net) is 22Mbps/1.7Mbps. In the office I have Comcast Business which is a bit faster (don't recall exactly) but certainly well below 100Mbps.
So yes 1Gbps sounds quite insane. 10Gbps is out of this universe.
> As a cable subscriber, I expect that when paying for N Mbps of bandwidth, I'm entitled to N Mbps of bandwidth of the content of my choosing
100% of the time ? not going to happen
So let's say I'm an ISP and I bring a fiber to your home, and gives you a gigabit ethernet port. You cannot expect all current and future customers to be able to use 1 Gbit/s at the same time. You would need a big non blocking switch with as many ports as subscribers, the technology for this does not exist once you reach a large customer base.
Now do you want me to shape your link to 0.1Mbit/s, because that's the only thing I can guarantee if all customers uses their link at the same time ? Or you'd rather have the 1Gbit/s possible bandwidth ?
Which one is better:
1) guaranteed 0.1Mbit/s for 10$, 5Mbit/s for 100$, 1Gbit/s for 4000$
2) possible 1Gbit/s for 20$ ?
If you take the globalized approach, you cannot have business like Netflix, they destabilize the equation.
> It’s also a case of not knowing what you’re missing until you have it, like getting glasses for the first time. I would accomplish so much less if I had to consider a 100mb speed limit.
Not really, I have access to fast internet and feel like I do just fine at 1/10th the speed.
> It might be good to replace "up to 75Mbps" with "guaranteed 50-75Mbps and 5-15ms ping to nearest public internet junction, 95% of the time during peak hours.
Hell yeah. I would happily pay extra for a decent service that advertised it’s minimum speeds instead of its maximum because in reality, the theoretical maximum speed of my connection is really not a useful metric unless I’m hitting it 99% of the time. I have a fast connection but I still typically get a good 50 Mb/s less than advertised (which luckily still leaves me with 200 Mb/s or so) making the advertised amount completely inconsequential and useless. Telling me the lowest I should expect, on the other hand, is actually helpful and allows me to do some rudimentary capacity planning to see if it’s suitable for me or not.
I always imagine it like this:
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