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If you want to sell a 200kbps plan with 50Mbps bursts, market it as a 200kpbs plan with 50Mbps bursts, not as a 50Mpbs plan. If you market something as a 50Mbps

If you want to sell a 200kbps plan with 50Mbps bursts, market it as a 200kpbs plan with 50Mbps bursts, not as a 50Mpbs plan. If you market something as a 50Mbps plan, it should be able to handle 50Mbps all the time. SLAs should contain details that don't fit in your marketing. They should not say something completely different from what your marketing says.

adrianratnapala 8y ago
Also our contracts jurisprudence should take more note of this kind of argument.
rayiner 8y ago
Marketing a 50 mbps plan as 200 kbps just because it cannot "handle 50 mbps all the time" does nothing useful except make pedantic power users happy. It's not actually useful to the consumer. From an engineering point of view, consumer workloads are almost always bursty, with a race to idle, so it makes sense to engineer systems to optimize for such workloads. And the most honest way to market them is by reference to typical behavior under typical workloads. For example, it's a lot more honest for Apple to sell me a Macbook Pro as having "up to 10 hours of battery life" and a "up to 3.5 GHz processor" than one that has 2 hours of battery life and has a 2 GHz processor (under sustained load). Indeed, doing it the way pedants want is actively misleading to consumers because it obscures what they can expect under typical usage. (In the case of laptops, it obscures the massive gains in typical battery life that have resulted from modern processors being much more efficient at idle, even if not so much at load.) Likewise, if you can deliver 50 mbps most of the time for the workloads your users will typically see (sucking down a 5MB page then idling for 30-60 seconds), that's the most honest way to market it.
- therein 8y ago
  I honestly could see both arguments being justified to a certain extent. And that's probably why nobody is too eager to try to regulate it, or a convenient excuse to not regulate.
- blub 8y ago
  No, how can you say that omitting information the "most honest" way to market it? The obvious honest way is to give several performance indicators for the different circumstances. Apple does specify two clock speeds when configuring Macs for instance. Battery life is not a good example, since that's normal and expected to vary under load.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Who is talking about omitting information? The hypothetical here is whether you market something as a "50 mbps" service with the caveat that it's best-effort, or "as a 200kpbs plan with 50Mbps bursts." At the end of the day, you have to pick one metric as the headline and relegate the others to parentheticals, pop-ups, or the TOS.
    - wtallis 8y ago
      > The hypothetical here is whether you market something as a "50 mbps" service with the caveat that it's best-effort It's already been explained to you that the "unlimited" plan at issue was clearly not best-effort after the limit was reached. The throttling that Verizon applied was around-the-clock and resulted in the fire department's device getting a tiny fraction of the speed that personal devices at the same location were getting. The throttling was not happening as a result of congestion, it was an artificial limit on a plan advertised as "unlimited". All theses arguments you're making about best-effort service are irrelevant distractions. A plan that stops being best-effort part way through the billing period cannot be honestly sold as "best-effort" any more than it can be honestly sold as "unlimited".
    - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      I'm fine with selling a 50mbps best-effort plan as "50mbps". A "200kpbs plan with 50Mbps bursts" is not that. If you are throttling people to 200kbps after a short burst, that is not best effort. A best effort plan would vary with the overall congestion, it would not drop off specifically based on your personal use of the connection.
- rmc 8y ago
  One advantage of selling "200kps burst to 50Mbps": When tender for software that's the spec you give. "Your software must work in these cases". Otherwise software will be tuned to what you say you had ("50Mbps")
- bkor 8y ago
  > It's not actually useful to the consumer. It is useful to the consumer. It's not useful if you want to sell it.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  > Marketing a 50 mbps plan as 200 kbps just because it cannot "handle 50 mbps all the time" does nothing useful It's actually very useful in that it correctly tells you what speed you can expect. If "50 Mbps" is the right way to describe a 200 kbps plan that can do 50 Mbps in bursts, what's the right name for a plan that can do 50 Mbps all the time? Really honest to god 50 Mbps?
  - Spivak 8y ago
    "50Mbps dedicated" which just about any ISP will sell you if you're willing to pay business prices.
    - wtallis 8y ago
      That's a step further than necessary. What's needed is for 50Mbps to mean by default that it's a 50Mbps best-effort connection without any artificial throttling below 50Mbps. Congestion is unavoidable and even a "dedicated" line will at some point put your packets onto an oversubscribed link if it's a real Internet connection and not just a point-to-point link. But it's inexcusable to sell something as 50Mbps when it's really "50Mbps for part of the month, then you're screwed".
    - alxlaz 8y ago
      There's a world of difference between "speed will sometimes drop due to congestion" and "speed will definitely drop by throttling", and a dedicated line is way out of this spectrum :-).
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  I'm not expecting 50mbps literally 100% of the time. I am expecting them to make a good faith to deliver 50mbps at all times. If they actively apply throttling after a certain amount of data, that is not making a good faith effort to deliver what you promised me. Short bursts are no longer the normal way for consumers to use bandwidth. Most bandwidth is now used for streaming media. In 2015, it was 70% of American bandwidth at peak hours[1]. It has probably only gone up since then. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/streaming-services-now-account-for-over-70-of-peak-traffic-in-north-america-netflix-dominates-with-37/ https://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/streaming-services-now-ac...
  - rayiner 8y ago
    But that's literally what you said: "it should be able to handle 50Mbps all the time." > If they actively apply throttling after a certain amount of data, that is not making a good faith effort to deliver what you promised me I agree that would be misleading, but who does that? I've never seen a plan that's advertised as e.g. 50 mbps unlimited data that throttles after a certain usage. > Short bursts are no longer the normal way for consumers to use bandwidth. Most bandwidth is now used for streaming media. In 2015, it was 70% of American bandwidth at peak hours[1] Measuring it by a proportion of total bandwidth is misleading,[1] because sustained loads will obviously use more bandwidth in the aggregate than bursty loads. But users likely still spend much more wall-clock time doing bursty activities (web browsing, refreshing facebook, twitter, downloading apps tore apps) than streaming. Given that a web page these days is in the 5MB+ range, it still makes sense to optimize networks primarily for bursts. [1] It's like if you analyzed laptop battery life by looking at the total kilowatt hours used by different tasks. That would overstate the importance of things like gaming, which use more battery life in the aggregate but which users spend less wall-clock time doing than word processing or web browsing.
    - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      > But that's literally what you said: "it should be able to handle 50Mbps all the time." Please be reasonable and apply some common sense. Colloquial statements are usually not intended to be taken to the most extreme level of literalness possible. It is commonly understood that any form of internet service may occasionally experience brief outages or degradation in service because of circumstances outside of the provider's control. It is not commonly understood that any form of internet service will necessarily involve the provider voluntarily causing that degradation in service. > I agree that would be misleading, but who does that? I've never seen a plan that's advertised as e.g. 50 mbps unlimited data that throttles after a certain usage. Verizon has multiple plans with "Unlimited" (some of them with the ridiculous names of "Above Unlimited" and "Beyond Unlimited") in the name that actually have limits once you look at the details. I'm not saying that type of plan is wrong to have, just don't name it something that is a bald-faced lie.

adrianratnapala 8y ago

Also our contracts jurisprudence should take more note of this kind of argument.

rayiner 8y ago

Marketing a 50 mbps plan as 200 kbps just because it cannot "handle 50 mbps all the time" does nothing useful except make pedantic power users happy. It's not actually useful to the consumer. From an engineering point of view, consumer workloads are almost always bursty, with a race to idle, so it makes sense to engineer systems to optimize for such workloads. And the most honest way to market them is by reference to typical behavior under typical workloads. For example, it's a lot more honest for Apple to sell me a Macbook Pro as having "up to 10 hours of battery life" and a "up to 3.5 GHz processor" than one that has 2 hours of battery life and has a 2 GHz processor (under sustained load). Indeed, doing it the way pedants want is actively misleading to consumers because it obscures what they can expect under typical usage. (In the case of laptops, it obscures the massive gains in typical battery life that have resulted from modern processors being much more efficient at idle, even if not so much at load.) Likewise, if you can deliver 50 mbps most of the time for the workloads your users will typically see (sucking down a 5MB page then idling for 30-60 seconds), that's the most honest way to market it.

therein 8y ago
I honestly could see both arguments being justified to a certain extent. And that's probably why nobody is too eager to try to regulate it, or a convenient excuse to not regulate.
blub 8y ago
No, how can you say that omitting information the "most honest" way to market it? The obvious honest way is to give several performance indicators for the different circumstances. Apple does specify two clock speeds when configuring Macs for instance. Battery life is not a good example, since that's normal and expected to vary under load.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Who is talking about omitting information? The hypothetical here is whether you market something as a "50 mbps" service with the caveat that it's best-effort, or "as a 200kpbs plan with 50Mbps bursts." At the end of the day, you have to pick one metric as the headline and relegate the others to parentheticals, pop-ups, or the TOS.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    > The hypothetical here is whether you market something as a "50 mbps" service with the caveat that it's best-effort It's already been explained to you that the "unlimited" plan at issue was clearly not best-effort after the limit was reached. The throttling that Verizon applied was around-the-clock and resulted in the fire department's device getting a tiny fraction of the speed that personal devices at the same location were getting. The throttling was not happening as a result of congestion, it was an artificial limit on a plan advertised as "unlimited". All theses arguments you're making about best-effort service are irrelevant distractions. A plan that stops being best-effort part way through the billing period cannot be honestly sold as "best-effort" any more than it can be honestly sold as "unlimited".
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    I'm fine with selling a 50mbps best-effort plan as "50mbps". A "200kpbs plan with 50Mbps bursts" is not that. If you are throttling people to 200kbps after a short burst, that is not best effort. A best effort plan would vary with the overall congestion, it would not drop off specifically based on your personal use of the connection.
rmc 8y ago
One advantage of selling "200kps burst to 50Mbps": When tender for software that's the spec you give. "Your software must work in these cases". Otherwise software will be tuned to what you say you had ("50Mbps")
bkor 8y ago
> It's not actually useful to the consumer. It is useful to the consumer. It's not useful if you want to sell it.
alxlaz 8y ago
> Marketing a 50 mbps plan as 200 kbps just because it cannot "handle 50 mbps all the time" does nothing useful It's actually very useful in that it correctly tells you what speed you can expect. If "50 Mbps" is the right way to describe a 200 kbps plan that can do 50 Mbps in bursts, what's the right name for a plan that can do 50 Mbps all the time? Really honest to god 50 Mbps?
- Spivak 8y ago
  "50Mbps dedicated" which just about any ISP will sell you if you're willing to pay business prices.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    That's a step further than necessary. What's needed is for 50Mbps to mean by default that it's a 50Mbps best-effort connection without any artificial throttling below 50Mbps. Congestion is unavoidable and even a "dedicated" line will at some point put your packets onto an oversubscribed link if it's a real Internet connection and not just a point-to-point link. But it's inexcusable to sell something as 50Mbps when it's really "50Mbps for part of the month, then you're screwed".
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    There's a world of difference between "speed will sometimes drop due to congestion" and "speed will definitely drop by throttling", and a dedicated line is way out of this spectrum :-).
TheCoelacanth 8y ago
I'm not expecting 50mbps literally 100% of the time. I am expecting them to make a good faith to deliver 50mbps at all times. If they actively apply throttling after a certain amount of data, that is not making a good faith effort to deliver what you promised me. Short bursts are no longer the normal way for consumers to use bandwidth. Most bandwidth is now used for streaming media. In 2015, it was 70% of American bandwidth at peak hours[1]. It has probably only gone up since then. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/streaming-services-now-account-for-over-70-of-peak-traffic-in-north-america-netflix-dominates-with-37/ https://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/streaming-services-now-ac...
- rayiner 8y ago
  But that's literally what you said: "it should be able to handle 50Mbps all the time." > If they actively apply throttling after a certain amount of data, that is not making a good faith effort to deliver what you promised me I agree that would be misleading, but who does that? I've never seen a plan that's advertised as e.g. 50 mbps unlimited data that throttles after a certain usage. > Short bursts are no longer the normal way for consumers to use bandwidth. Most bandwidth is now used for streaming media. In 2015, it was 70% of American bandwidth at peak hours[1] Measuring it by a proportion of total bandwidth is misleading,[1] because sustained loads will obviously use more bandwidth in the aggregate than bursty loads. But users likely still spend much more wall-clock time doing bursty activities (web browsing, refreshing facebook, twitter, downloading apps tore apps) than streaming. Given that a web page these days is in the 5MB+ range, it still makes sense to optimize networks primarily for bursts. [1] It's like if you analyzed laptop battery life by looking at the total kilowatt hours used by different tasks. That would overstate the importance of things like gaming, which use more battery life in the aggregate but which users spend less wall-clock time doing than word processing or web browsing.
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    > But that's literally what you said: "it should be able to handle 50Mbps all the time." Please be reasonable and apply some common sense. Colloquial statements are usually not intended to be taken to the most extreme level of literalness possible. It is commonly understood that any form of internet service may occasionally experience brief outages or degradation in service because of circumstances outside of the provider's control. It is not commonly understood that any form of internet service will necessarily involve the provider voluntarily causing that degradation in service. > I agree that would be misleading, but who does that? I've never seen a plan that's advertised as e.g. 50 mbps unlimited data that throttles after a certain usage. Verizon has multiple plans with "Unlimited" (some of them with the ridiculous names of "Above Unlimited" and "Beyond Unlimited") in the name that actually have limits once you look at the details. I'm not saying that type of plan is wrong to have, just don't name it something that is a bald-faced lie.