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It’s ridiculous how simple and fair the rules for this could be, if only they’d been implemented in law to cover certain scenarios that ensure honesty. An exam
by makecheck 10y ago
It’s ridiculous how simple and fair the rules for this could be, if only they’d been implemented in law to cover certain scenarios that ensure honesty.
An example set of rules could be:
1. Periodic monitoring of connection speeds is to be expected, and any action requires a minimum of X samples (say, X=10). Measurements may be performed by any party and the measurement method must be fully disclosed. If more than 30% of samples are failing to meet advertised Internet speeds by at least 5%, or any one sample is more than 50% below advertised speed, customer is entitled to a one-day refund of Internet fees. If more than 5 total occurrences in a single calendar month are failing, customer is entitled to a 15-day refund of Internet fees.
2. If the Internet becomes unusable for more than 10 minutes at a time in a single month and the outage can be traced to ISP-given equipment, customer is entitled to a one-day refund of Internet fees. If Internet is unusable multiple times, customer is entitled to a 5-day refund.
3. If company has cause to adjust Internet delivery expectations (such as, too many additional customers to serve original speeds on pipe to same area), existing customers are all immediately released from any contracts and may terminate service immediately with no penalties. In additional, ISP is liable for crediting customer monthly bills for the remainder of service, proportional to the difference in service speed with a 10% penalty for violation of original contract by the ISP.
4. Internet is considered a separate service and may not be bundled with anything else.
And it doesn’t even have to say this much to be a huge improvement. The point is that companies have been getting away with lousy services FOR YEARS and appear to be largely unpunished, while meanwhile the number of customers overpaying and not receiving stable and promised service numbers in the millions.
- jaredklewis 10y agoI haven't thought this completely through perhaps, but I've often thought one extremely simple regulation that might have a lot of good effects would be this: ISPs must charge customers per byte transferred. In other words, no all you can eat plans allowed, usage based pricing only. This has the benefit of aligning consumer and ISP goals in the sense that providing fast service allows ISPs to make more money, so they are incentivized to provide high quality service built on high quality infrastructure. If the Internet is not working, they make no money. If it is slow, they make less. On the consumer side, it incentivizes efficient use of bandwidth. Of course, this is only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is that most ISPs have a defacto monopoly in their region. Not sure how we can solve this one. This is partially caused by bad decision by municipal governments, industry collusion, and it seems in part by just the nature of running physical utilities to homes and businesses (many regions also have electric, water, sewage, and gas monopolies).
- nosuchthing 10y agoCharging by the byte would disincentive users from exploring the Internet. That effectively kills the Internet as we know it.
- Diamons 10y agoSeriously. It amazes me how ignorant some people are to what the Internet actually is.
- jaredklewis 10y agoWell, sure.I for one think it is great for people to travel to far away places, but I still support charging plane fare based on the distance traveled. Like fuel and clean air, radio spectrum and fiber wires are both physically limited resources and it makes sense to incentivize efficient use of them. You can browse thousands of web pages of text for the same bandwidth cost as 1 HD video. The way we use bandwidth today (animate gifs, ugh) is wasteful and makes everyone's internet more expensive.
- nosuchthing 10y agoThe bandwidth capacity already exists from all the dark fiber installed nearly 20 years ago. The issue is mainly with monopolies and Oligopolies of the ISP and telecoms providers.