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...we should probably change how they're marketing the service then, it's a little unreasonable to expect consumers to understand ISP tech. If you say you offer

...we should probably change how they're marketing the service then, it's a little unreasonable to expect consumers to understand ISP tech. If you say you offer 100mb/s or whatever, I am going to expect 100mb/s, why should it be my problem the ISP is serving so many customers that they can't maintain the service at the level it was sold to me.

floatingatoll 5y ago
If you purchase consumer service and expect your 95th percentile usage level to be 100mbps, you’re going to discover the difference between consumer and business grades of service and be eternally disappointed. If they say 100mbps, they should be able to peak a connection to that level when necessary. If you’re a residential user, ‘when necessary’ is about 1% of the month or less. Yes, you, a capable HN community member, may have something running in your home datacenter that can continuously saturate 100mbps 24/7/365, but don’t hold your breath expecting that level of service from residential plans. Residential users need stable bandwidth (for remote working) in 10mbit increments (4K video * number of concurrent streaming devices). If you have a family of 10, then you’ll be potentially needing continuous 100mbps service when everyone is streaming at once, and you’ll probably discover at that point that most cheap consumer routers aren’t going to do a very good job with that (especially on the wireless side). For anyone with less than 10 people in their home, it scales down rapidly to a fraction of 100mbps peak, with a much lower 95th percentile than a business would have. In an ideal world bandwidth would be infinite and peak/constant capacity tradeoffs irrelevant. We definitely do not live in that world yet. Measuring this rural residential product against the standard of a business/commercial 95th percentile 100mbps 24/7/365 SLA guarantee is inappropriate. It should be compared to the products it’s competing with, not to the highest expectations possible.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  No, I’m wrong about one point. Comparing it to an ideal world standard is fine, but it’s not the only option. Apologies.
lsaferite 5y ago
But that situation is no different than cable internet. You have a shared access medium that has a bandwidth limit. They constantly oversell the bandwidth because normal consumer behavior is bursty enough that they can mostly get away with it and have few issues.

floatingatoll 5y ago

If you purchase consumer service and expect your 95th percentile usage level to be 100mbps, you’re going to discover the difference between consumer and business grades of service and be eternally disappointed. If they say 100mbps, they should be able to peak a connection to that level when necessary. If you’re a residential user, ‘when necessary’ is about 1% of the month or less. Yes, you, a capable HN community member, may have something running in your home datacenter that can continuously saturate 100mbps 24/7/365, but don’t hold your breath expecting that level of service from residential plans. Residential users need stable bandwidth (for remote working) in 10mbit increments (4K video * number of concurrent streaming devices). If you have a family of 10, then you’ll be potentially needing continuous 100mbps service when everyone is streaming at once, and you’ll probably discover at that point that most cheap consumer routers aren’t going to do a very good job with that (especially on the wireless side). For anyone with less than 10 people in their home, it scales down rapidly to a fraction of 100mbps peak, with a much lower 95th percentile than a business would have. In an ideal world bandwidth would be infinite and peak/constant capacity tradeoffs irrelevant. We definitely do not live in that world yet. Measuring this rural residential product against the standard of a business/commercial 95th percentile 100mbps 24/7/365 SLA guarantee is inappropriate. It should be compared to the products it’s competing with, not to the highest expectations possible.

floatingatoll 5y ago
No, I’m wrong about one point. Comparing it to an ideal world standard is fine, but it’s not the only option. Apologies.

lsaferite 5y ago

But that situation is no different than cable internet. You have a shared access medium that has a bandwidth limit. They constantly oversell the bandwidth because normal consumer behavior is bursty enough that they can mostly get away with it and have few issues.