5 ms·

I’m down with a consumer coffee maker not working as well as an industrial coffee maker, but 100Mbps is a well defined thing, and I don’t understand how it isn’

I’m down with a consumer coffee maker not working as well as an industrial coffee maker, but 100Mbps is a well defined thing, and I don’t understand how it isn’t criminal that my internet speeds never even approach the advertised rates. This isn’t an issue of my “use case” not requiring honesty, this is an issue of me paying for something and simply not getting it.

tjoff 5y ago
I've never heard or experienced anyone not getting their advertised speed (apart from DSL that varied depending on quality of the cables etc. or wireless services). There are indeed laws that guarantee that, depending on where you live. But you can't really expect to max out 100/100 24/7 all year long on a consumer pipe. It is overprovisioned and assumes that most won't be utilizing theoretical maximum all the time. Just as the coffee maker.
mrtksn 5y ago
It's not only about the bandwidth but other factors like latency between regions etc. Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting. The moment you have guarantees on the speed, your prices and speeds are adjusted to make it feasible(the same hypothetical ISP can have 2 customers at 100Mbps, 30 at 10Mbps and 500 at 1Mbps with guaranteed speeds and vastly different prices). In many places you can definitely pay a lot of money and have a connection that is not pooled with your neighbour. It's the same difference as with the shared hosting and a dedicated machine hosting.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time Consumers should be free to violate any and all assumptions with no negative consequences. Especially unstated ones that only people familiar with their business model would know about. If an ISP advertises 1 gigabit/second internet, consumers should be able to fill that pipe with 1 gigabit of data every second. In practice only a minority is going to do that but it should be possible with no punitive throttling of bandwidth whatsoever.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    Right, if they think customers need less then they can just advertise less. They shouldn't get the benefit of advertising a big number while providing a small number just because most customers can't tell. That will make it impossible to fairly compare them with their competitors.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    Sure, customers can do that. That's how you get quotas, fair usage limits, higher prices when the average usage pattern diverges from the intended use cases before the technology or infrastructure upgrades catch up.
  - buran77 5y ago
    The one caveat is that today all ISPs advertise their plans as "up to" a certain speed very prominently in all marketing material. It's no even fine print or byline. The "fair usage" clause is the kind of thing that's buried deep to hide that they may employ throttling. Think of a "service" you provide. If your employer was expecting you to deliver peak performance 8h per day, 5 days per week, for the rest of your employment with no exception, would you still accept the salary you get now, or would ask an order of magnitude more? It's just that your employment contract and law introduce some "fine print" to allow downtime, and the chance to make mistakes or run at lower efficiency with no (immediate) termination. Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for?
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      > Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for? ...because it could be described and measured precisely. And it's not.
      - buran77 5y ago
        My friend, there are very few things that we can describe precisely, from a legal standpoint or even for technical specs. It's all about "ranges". And the higher the precision and the guarantee, the higher the price, or the converse. Which was my point, in case I couldn't manage to make it clear enough even when putting it next to something an average person could relate to. There's leeway built into any legal or technical framework and the contract terms should follow. Your "precisely defined and measured" SATA3 6 Gbit/s interface never delivers the 6.000Gbps to you by design (8b/10b encoding). So are all SSDs and motherboards in breach? SSDs rarely hit any of the advertised speed. By comparison their endurance is defined far clearer for the consumer. Whether it's an SSD or an internet connection they come with clear predefined conditions that are legal* and the customer agrees to. Everything else is high consumer expectations meeting low consumer willingness to pay, or even to understand the relationship. *Of course there are plenty of illegal and abusive clauses but giving a stated 900Mbps average speed with a 1Gbps contract, or selling an SSD with stated low DWPD don't really fit that description.
- eertami 5y ago
  >Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting. I don't think this is universally true. I have a gigabit line via a residential ISP ($60/mo) in Europe and it will max out 24/7 without throttling. What I don't have is access to the same support and service guarantees that would be included in a business plan.
  - tzs 5y ago
    Question: Will it still not throttle if all the other customers of your ISP are also trying to max out their gigabit lines at the same time?
    - eertami 5y ago
      I can't say for certain because I do not work there, but in practice even at the busiest times I've never seen speeds drop.
buran77 5y ago
The big difference between the consumer and the industrial grade product of the same specs is usually in the guarantee of reaching those specs consistently, and in more extreme conditions. A consumer laptop screen might do just well in the dashboard of a car but it might also turn yellow. You can't complain because it wasn't meant to be used like that (like operating in 80+C temperatures). Your vacuum cleaner would certainly not last long if you started vacuuming water and construction debris, the kind of stuff an industrial vacuum is built for. A consumer SSD is not designed to be used for this kind of mining. Regular consumers are more price sensitive and ignore other aspects because they're not tech educated. Many don't even understand what this "mining" entails, just that they could make some money. There's a minority of consumers who went for the cheap stuff and now want to make money off of it by pushing it beyond the stated limits. I honestly don't think they have a leg to stand on. It's a good thing that not all products are made to meet all expectations because they would cost all the money, all the time.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Agreed for SSD, but some consumer 1Gbps broadband never reaches 900Mbps. Its spec should be corrected rather than "best effort".
  - buran77 5y ago
    This is why the law is there. In many countries the advertised speed has to be within a certain range of the average, or hit that speed a certain percent of the time. So 800-900Mbps average, or hitting 1Gbps 60% of the time could very well fit a "1Gbps connection" tier from a legal perspective. This is why ISPs advertise "up to" a certain speed and then go on to detail the exact conditions in the terms. It's ironic OP doesn't complain about SSDs never reaching the theoretical and advertised interface speed. Which is no different from internet speeds not reaching the network interface speed as many others here call an example of being cheated. SSD endurance is far better described than it's performance for the average consumer: warranty expires after "this much" data written in "this much" time.
    - 5y ago
Causality1 5y ago
You should contact your provider. My ISP has always provided at least as much bandwidth as advertised.
saiya-jin 5y ago
Household internet speed are the maximum possible if at 2am nobody is downloading anything in whole building for example. Company pay for guaranteed bandwidth, and premium level troubleshooting from provider. The prices are astronomical. My employer with 400 onsite employees (in noncovid situation) has provably worse transfer speed & latency than my household with our consumer 1 Gbps connection. I expect them to pay at least 100x more for it. But its a bank, they can't do differently - they never had connection issue in last 10 years I work there. If they ever had, the team of experts would have fixing it as their top priority.

tjoff 5y ago

I've never heard or experienced anyone not getting their advertised speed (apart from DSL that varied depending on quality of the cables etc. or wireless services). There are indeed laws that guarantee that, depending on where you live. But you can't really expect to max out 100/100 24/7 all year long on a consumer pipe. It is overprovisioned and assumes that most won't be utilizing theoretical maximum all the time. Just as the coffee maker.

mrtksn 5y ago

It's not only about the bandwidth but other factors like latency between regions etc. Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting. The moment you have guarantees on the speed, your prices and speeds are adjusted to make it feasible(the same hypothetical ISP can have 2 customers at 100Mbps, 30 at 10Mbps and 500 at 1Mbps with guaranteed speeds and vastly different prices). In many places you can definitely pay a lot of money and have a connection that is not pooled with your neighbour. It's the same difference as with the shared hosting and a dedicated machine hosting.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time Consumers should be free to violate any and all assumptions with no negative consequences. Especially unstated ones that only people familiar with their business model would know about. If an ISP advertises 1 gigabit/second internet, consumers should be able to fill that pipe with 1 gigabit of data every second. In practice only a minority is going to do that but it should be possible with no punitive throttling of bandwidth whatsoever.
- shawnz 5y ago
  Right, if they think customers need less then they can just advertise less. They shouldn't get the benefit of advertising a big number while providing a small number just because most customers can't tell. That will make it impossible to fairly compare them with their competitors.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Sure, customers can do that. That's how you get quotas, fair usage limits, higher prices when the average usage pattern diverges from the intended use cases before the technology or infrastructure upgrades catch up.
- buran77 5y ago
  The one caveat is that today all ISPs advertise their plans as "up to" a certain speed very prominently in all marketing material. It's no even fine print or byline. The "fair usage" clause is the kind of thing that's buried deep to hide that they may employ throttling. Think of a "service" you provide. If your employer was expecting you to deliver peak performance 8h per day, 5 days per week, for the rest of your employment with no exception, would you still accept the salary you get now, or would ask an order of magnitude more? It's just that your employment contract and law introduce some "fine print" to allow downtime, and the chance to make mistakes or run at lower efficiency with no (immediate) termination. Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for?
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for? ...because it could be described and measured precisely. And it's not.
    - buran77 5y ago
      My friend, there are very few things that we can describe precisely, from a legal standpoint or even for technical specs. It's all about "ranges". And the higher the precision and the guarantee, the higher the price, or the converse. Which was my point, in case I couldn't manage to make it clear enough even when putting it next to something an average person could relate to. There's leeway built into any legal or technical framework and the contract terms should follow. Your "precisely defined and measured" SATA3 6 Gbit/s interface never delivers the 6.000Gbps to you by design (8b/10b encoding). So are all SSDs and motherboards in breach? SSDs rarely hit any of the advertised speed. By comparison their endurance is defined far clearer for the consumer. Whether it's an SSD or an internet connection they come with clear predefined conditions that are legal* and the customer agrees to. Everything else is high consumer expectations meeting low consumer willingness to pay, or even to understand the relationship. *Of course there are plenty of illegal and abusive clauses but giving a stated 900Mbps average speed with a 1Gbps contract, or selling an SSD with stated low DWPD don't really fit that description.
eertami 5y ago
>Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting. I don't think this is universally true. I have a gigabit line via a residential ISP ($60/mo) in Europe and it will max out 24/7 without throttling. What I don't have is access to the same support and service guarantees that would be included in a business plan.
- tzs 5y ago
  Question: Will it still not throttle if all the other customers of your ISP are also trying to max out their gigabit lines at the same time?
  - eertami 5y ago
    I can't say for certain because I do not work there, but in practice even at the busiest times I've never seen speeds drop.

buran77 5y ago

The big difference between the consumer and the industrial grade product of the same specs is usually in the guarantee of reaching those specs consistently, and in more extreme conditions. A consumer laptop screen might do just well in the dashboard of a car but it might also turn yellow. You can't complain because it wasn't meant to be used like that (like operating in 80+C temperatures). Your vacuum cleaner would certainly not last long if you started vacuuming water and construction debris, the kind of stuff an industrial vacuum is built for. A consumer SSD is not designed to be used for this kind of mining. Regular consumers are more price sensitive and ignore other aspects because they're not tech educated. Many don't even understand what this "mining" entails, just that they could make some money. There's a minority of consumers who went for the cheap stuff and now want to make money off of it by pushing it beyond the stated limits. I honestly don't think they have a leg to stand on. It's a good thing that not all products are made to meet all expectations because they would cost all the money, all the time.

fomine3 5y ago
Agreed for SSD, but some consumer 1Gbps broadband never reaches 900Mbps. Its spec should be corrected rather than "best effort".
- buran77 5y ago
  This is why the law is there. In many countries the advertised speed has to be within a certain range of the average, or hit that speed a certain percent of the time. So 800-900Mbps average, or hitting 1Gbps 60% of the time could very well fit a "1Gbps connection" tier from a legal perspective. This is why ISPs advertise "up to" a certain speed and then go on to detail the exact conditions in the terms. It's ironic OP doesn't complain about SSDs never reaching the theoretical and advertised interface speed. Which is no different from internet speeds not reaching the network interface speed as many others here call an example of being cheated. SSD endurance is far better described than it's performance for the average consumer: warranty expires after "this much" data written in "this much" time.
  - 5y ago

Causality1 5y ago

You should contact your provider. My ISP has always provided at least as much bandwidth as advertised.

saiya-jin 5y ago

Household internet speed are the maximum possible if at 2am nobody is downloading anything in whole building for example. Company pay for guaranteed bandwidth, and premium level troubleshooting from provider. The prices are astronomical. My employer with 400 onsite employees (in noncovid situation) has provably worse transfer speed & latency than my household with our consumer 1 Gbps connection. I expect them to pay at least 100x more for it. But its a bank, they can't do differently - they never had connection issue in last 10 years I work there. If they ever had, the team of experts would have fixing it as their top priority.