No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.
> can't really sell something unlimited and then call who's taking benefit of that "abusers"
Colloquial versus contract. It's sold as unlimited, because for most people, it is. Similar to how salt and pepper at restaurants is practically unlimited, even if you can't demand they hand you all the salt in their kitchen.
In practice, marketing as unlimited to suss out the use distribution before capping it where it becomes uneconomic seems to be a valid strategy. (The fraction of users curtailed plays into perceptions of fairness.) With that framing, this story has no bad guy.
> such a literal interpretation attempts to create and exploit a loophole for one's own benefit at extreme cost to the provider, by refusing a common sense interpretation of 'Unlimited within reason'.
It's not a "loophole" to use 80% of the capacity that was advertised and sold to you. If they want to sell "unlimited within reason" capacity, they should advertise "unlimited within reason", instead of "unlimited".
-1 for blaming users to acually use what they pay for.
If the company isn't able provide unlimited plans, it shouldn't have offered those in the first place. It's more honest to clearly communicate the real volume limit from the very beginning, instead of making false promises.
> It doesn't work for the 10% of heavy usage customers, or the folks who think the provider should be held to their own personal definition of "unlimited" (i.e. "unlimited means I should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long!!").
How is that their own personal definition? Isn't that what the word "unlimited" means? It is the carriers and ISPs who have started using their own definitions of "unlimited", whereby it actually means "limited".
I get that ISPs need to establish limits. I just wish they would say so. It should be considered false advertising to market any service as "unlimited" when it's not.
> Sometimes it seems that HN and HN-like users like to argue for the sake of arguing.
Sometimes. But sometimes, they actually disagree with the official/majority/whatever opinion, and this is this case. I disagree that the way "unlimited" is used in marketing is honest, or desirable, or should be allowed.
> Everyone knows what unlimited means in the dictionary definition and in the marketing definition.
Not everyone. That's literally the point of using this kind of language - some people will not know that marketers have their own dictionary that's different from the one normally used, and the way most of those people will use the service will not reveal the difference, so it's one of the cheapest lies the marketers can tell to pull in extra customers. It's a lie nonetheless.
> The first is a lot of mobile US carriers. They have unlimited plans, but after n amount of data, your throughput is throttled. You don't even have to do something crazy like use your data plan as an ISP for you and your neighbors in your apartment. It's as plain as day when you sign up.
It is, or it isn't. Where I came from, there are plans that offer you e.g. X GB of Internet, and then you're throttled. It's plain as day, says right so on the offer. Then there are other plans, that say "Unlimited", where what they really mean is ~5X GB of Internet and then you're throttled. It's dishonest, especially because those offers are created to make them look more competitive against real ISPs who do offer actual, unlimited Internet, usually by cable.
> I understand why people want to be so skeptical about unlimited offerings, but are you really doing yourself any favors by intentionally spitting in the face of an offered service?
It's called "voting with your wallet". Doesn't really work at scale, but still, it sends some market signal.
> Yep, if you use the word unlimited, and that's not what you're actually providing, you're a liar. Pure and simple.
Then by definition nothing is unlimited... The whole universe has limits... there's a finite amount of atoms... even saying you have unlimited access to my comment would be lying because one day, you'll die, or the storage will die, or this comment will be forgotten...
I think if you sell an unlimited 200 Kbps connection, it's implied that it's a 65 GB one. Putting a limit on the bandwidth would be to offer LESS than what the other limits imply.
Saying unlimited 100 mbit/s but throttling it at 1 mbit/s sure, that is clearly false advertising because you actually get unlimited 1 mbit/s.
> unlimited, should the typical person really expect that to be taken away?
Absolutely. The word "unlimited" has been misused by so many companies (especially ISP and mobile) that anyone who has their eyes open should expect it to mean limited.
Also if there is a deal that is exceeding better than other options, don't be surprised when the rules change later.
> In this case, the unwritten expectation was that they weren't going to meter you and you didn't have to worry about overage charges, but that the 1Gbps should be thought of more as a burst rate than a 24/7 sustained rate.
Actually the written expectation was "unlimited" - without limitation. These so called "unwritten limitations" exist solely in your head, and are not suitable for companies to assume users inherently know.
> perhaps 'unlimited' could be read as a class of user that encompasses the vast majority of cases, as opposed to a literal resource quota. Is this reasonable or deceptive?
Depends on the facts and circumstances. When cellular providers throttled unlimited plans, I felt like it was deceptive. In this case, I do not. I am curious if those cut off genuinely feel they were deceived.
"marketing departments that take a broad look at the numbers their network can ideally handle and conclude that [...]"
"the power users or edge cases to these hypothetical usage models break down that service offering"
I don't see how you can write the former and then get the culpability
so wrong in the latter. It's not the "power users" or "edge cases"
that broke the model, it's that the model was wrong. AT&T thought
they could offer "unlimited" service at a certain price, and they were
wrong. And rather than honor it and lose money, or change their
pricing and lose customers, they are cheating with a throttle.
I'm sorry, but that is malicious. They're playing with the dictionary definition of "unlimited" instead of offering their customers the service they promised.
Yes, but there is such a thing as not placing a limit on the usage of a resource. I don't see it as deceptive if that's actually what they're doing. Sometimes "unlimited" is just a marketing term, other times it seems like a genuine statement of intent from the provider. Obviously I could be a dick and try to prove them wrong, but why?
> Why would it be a bad thing for it to be illegal to lie? Just don't call the plan "unlimited", and have clearly stated limits.
Maybe because the limits are not fixed and completely depend on the spending of the customer? If a customer is among the top 1% of the biggest users and – at the same time – among the top 1% of the smallest spenders, that simply raises the costs of the service for everyone else. There are only three choices here: a) get rid of the customer; b) make them pay more, or c) raise the prices of unlimited plans for everyone.
No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.
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