The correct thing is to just token throttle to the max you're willing to offer for the fixed price. Then when a small minority figure out 1Gbps really is like 100Mbps, then whatever.
That's a terrible argument. Would you say the same if they only allowed 100kb of data transfer before switching to a throttled service (@ 1/100th the original speed)?
What you are doing is allowing them to draw a line in the sand and then standing by it and saying it is reasonable. This line should not exist and throttling should only occur when absolutely necessary (when the network is over-saturated). Even then, there should be reasonable expectations of them to not over-subscribe the network based on statistical projections of network use.
Yup, this is exactly right. The way I usually look at is this - if I put 100 customers on a link that had unlimited bandwidth and then watch the max usage on that link, how high will it spike and for how much time? The current situation is that 100 customers won't spike to more than around 400-500 megs for more than a few minutes a day. But that number goes down the more customers you aggregate, to the point that 600 or 700 customers won't spike to more than 1gpbs for more than a few minutes a day. So if you buy a 1gbps link to serve them, you're only slowing things down for a few minutes a day.
The problem is not with throttling per se (it’s a laws of physics after all!) but not disclosing and/or misleading customers to think there is an unlimited stable bandwidth and/or not disclosing in clear words when, how and how much throttling will be triggered.
Do that - and the grief from both sides will be avoided.
Without proper and clear disclosure both sides think the other side is an aholes
So, what would you prefer? Would you prefer fixed lower bandwidths; everyone gets exactly 1 Mbps all the time, for the same price you're paying now for 50 Mbps? Then you're going to have a ton of bandwidth going unused all the time, while everything will load slower.
Or would you prefer the famously unpopular bandwidth caps and overage charges?
Saying "unlimited bandwidth" but selling it as a residential (ie, non-commercial) plan seems like a fairly reasonable solution to the problem. It gives actual non-commercial residential customers what they want, the ability to have spikes of high bitrate transfers without having to worry about overage charges or being throttled, while actually allowing that pool of bandwidth to be shared reasonably fairly.
The problem is if you divide shared resources like upstream bandwidth (or in the case of hosting, resource like disk or RAM) in precise amounts such that you could support 100% of the capacity you sold at any time, you would be wasting the vast majority of your resources. Most customers can't predict in advance exactly how much they need, and are quite averse to any kind of overage charges.
Now, for some (mostly business) customers and workloads, precise metering works well, and for some completely dedicated bandwidth works well. But for the average residential customer, who has extremely spiky bandwidth demands and is quite averse to overage charges, neither of those work well.
Yes, but how bad would you feel if you had been promised 171Mbps for a higher price and you only really attained 70-90 because you had to share the bandwidth with your neighbors? In your case, they could probably offer more than 50MBps, but they're playing it safe with 50MBps.
I don't get it. If you're paying for 1Gbps then why does it matter how much you use up to that amount? If they're overselling their capacity then they should just stop doing that. If they can only handle 80% of the sustained capacity, only sell up to that amount.
You pay for pipe capacity, you don't pay for usage according to sales page. If they want to change their business model they can. It's not my fault that I'm using what I bought to its full capacity
A couple of changes would make this into an actually reasonable policy that I wouldn't mind other ISPs adopting: 1. Define a usage threshold instead of always throttling 1/20th of your customers, and 2. Allow customers to pay a reasonable fee to boost their speeds back up after they hit the throttling.
Personally, I don't. I pay for maximum bandwidth, and if there's a spike it will just throttle. This has its own set of problems of course but at least I don't get surprised by the bill.
They do have "flexible" schemes where the bandwidth can increase as demands grow (of course, you pay accordingly), but that's not the default.
Amortization helps; even if you offer unmetered bandwidth, relatively few people will max it out 24/7. So even if they offer unmetered 100Mbps or unmetered 1Gbps, their net bandwidth won't necessarily be customers * 1Gbps.
The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits.
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.
Another approach is to say "A subscription is $100/month. But, if you like, you can buy another subscription, and then you'll get double the speed."
And as the network gets more congested, then speeds drop, and more and more people are pushed to buying the double speed upgrade, and eventually the triple speed upgrade, etc.
This approach is effectively a real time market for bandwidth in disguise.
A sensible rule would be 98th percentile so 98% of the time every customer can get X bandwidth. This allows for ~10 hours of downtime or congestion a month. They can still over provision, they just can't outright lie.
Some people prefer the term "unmetered" if you don't charge for traffic but there are limits on the service. You can let your network congest and use a fair queueing box so that the congestion will only be borne by the heaviest customers. Alternately you can sell something like 50 Mbps, 125 MB token bucket service which will allow people to burst to 1 Gbps for 1 second.
You don't have to guarantee a minimum speed but you have to advertise the relevant parameters that you can reach at least a certain percentage of the time. Saying just "up to" should only be allowed if you also use it for the pricing and the clients pay what they can. Saying "unlimited" should be allowed only with the dictionary definition. And all "limiting" conditions should be advertised the same way as the main offer, not small font on a buried page.
So the offer could look like this: "Up to 50Mbps, with 20Mbps offered at least 50% of the time between 06:00 and 22:00. Limited to 200GB/mo after which the speed is dropped to 1Mbps."
Also throttling and prioritizing types of traffic makes sense when you reach capacity. But if you suddenly find more capacity for someone paying extra by throttling others more or throttle indiscriminately and lift the limits for a price then you are not doing network management, you are are squeezing for money. And this should also be clearly stated when advertised and while doing the throttling.
As a customer paying the requested price I want some SLAs. I want to know what to expect for the service and be compensated for not getting it. I want to know realtime if my traffic or service is being throttled or not when I use it.
It seems that the greedy ISPs would rather say "$60/mo or nothing" rather than sell a lower cost (at a reduced speed, of course) plan. They already have mechanisms in place to throttle and cap, so why not use them for such cases?
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