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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. Sayi
by close04 8y ago
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.
- mehrdadn 8y ago> 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. But this still suffers from exactly the same problem, just in a statistical way. i.e., what if someone's frequently in a place that has poor signal? How are you going to predict what percentage of the time they'll be in such a situation?
- close04 8y agoThen you compensate that person for not being able to provide the service. Just as you'd expect in any other case when a service is not delivered. And if we're being honest, that's not actually the reason most of us get throttled. Most of the time it's not even network management, it's just a money grab. I don't intend to go into the technicalities because they're irrelevant. The point is they should offer a quality level at least "statistically".
- mehrdadn 8y agoI'm not trying to justify what they're currently doing either. What I'm trying to explain is that making something that legally works the way we all want it to is a different and much tougher problem than merely being able to imagine a world in which the current practices don't exist.
- rayiner 8y agoWireless ISPs don’t advertise any particular speed level. They sell “best effort” service and advertise it that way. What you’re asking for is an SLA (presumably for consumer level prices).
- close04 8y agoUnlimited - not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent. Best effort is when your taxi driver tries to take you to the airport as fast as possible but traffic gets in the way and you're late. When he stops in a tunnel and requests more money because he has to drive through his lunch break, or else he'll just inch forward that's not best effort. That's what I said before: squeezing for money. Reading the article helps: this is not network congestion, this is artificially limiting the speed.
- rayiner 8y agoClearly a connection cannot be “unlimited” in reality, because there are many physical limits. That’s why you introduce the idea of “artificial limits,” but what are those? The number of cell towers in an area is also an “artificial” limit—the provider could build more. So even by your reasoning, you can’t take “unlimited” literally, and have to apply context. (And that is, in fact, the relevant legal consideration. Advertising must not be misleading, but that does not mean you resort to dictionary definitions and ignore context and history.) And what is that context? Well, “unlimited” has always meant the opposite of time or usage limited service. I.e. you don’t pay extra for exceeding a certain usage. If you asked me in 1997 what "unlimited" means, I wouldn't have pulled out the dictionary and said "unlimited means 'not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.'" I would've said "that means you don't have to pay extra for AOL after your 20 hours is up." All this supposed confusion seems entirely contrived to me.