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You are free to interpret the word in your own way I guess, but I don't think our definition was unfair or inaccurate. I think you are confusing "unlimited" wi

by sbarre 15y ago

You are free to interpret the word in your own way I guess, but I don't think our definition was unfair or inaccurate. I think you are confusing "unlimited" with "infinite". By your argument, one could say that we didn't offer "unlimited" service because there are a maximum of 744 hours in a month and hey that's not equal to "unlimited". Again this comes back to different valid interpretations of a word, and since we provided the service, ours won. Try going to McDonalds and each time you're there arguing that their "large" fries don't meet your definition of "large". Maybe bring a "large" garbage bag and say "THIS is what large means" and ask them to fill that up, and see how far you get. Anyways, you aren't making any new arguments that customers didn't give me 15 years ago..

mikeash 15y ago
I don't think your 744 hours argument makes sense. That's not your limit. Interpret it as "all you can eat"; if I can't eat anymore, that's not really a limit with the service. Again, I don't see how your interpretation is a valid one. You limit the service based on usage. This is not "unlimited". If your cut the service off after one hour per month, would that be unlimited? I imagine you wouldn't consider it to be so. So what's the difference, aside from degree? I don't imagine I'm putting forth new arguments. But I still don't understand: why call it "unlimited" when it's not? It seems clear enough that people don't expect your definition of the word when they see it, and haven't for at least 15 years, so why keep using it when it's known to be misleading?
- sbarre 15y ago
  First: Marketing. We had to sell accounts and you can't really fit a big complicated explanation in an advert, nor would you want to. Second: We were fair. Compared to our competition we offered a damn good service. You're right, cutting someone off after an hour would be shitty, but we had very few customers who didn't end up using more or less as many hours as they wanted to (back to the buffet example).. We had a well-tuned system that calculated a rolling total of your connected time over the last 7 days and ONLY if you exceeded a specific threshold (if no one exceeded it, no one got disconnected), and ONLY during peak times (5pm to 10pm weeknights), and ONLY if all the lines were in use, would we selectively disconnect high-usage customers to make space for others. If there was the odd high-usage customer (it was about 5% of our unlimited accounts at most) that couldn't get online between 5pm and 10pm on weeknights here and there because we were limiting their access to allow other customers on, BUT they can hop back on at 10pm and stay connected until 5pm the NEXT DAY, I think we were offering a pretty good deal. So like your buffet example, the majority of our customers had no problem with our unlimited service, and the very few outliers who got limited, well they were getting a good deal anyways, and at the end of the day were actually costing us money, so if they cancelled as dissatisfied customers for not being able to essentially have a dedicated dial-up phone line for under 25$/month, we didn't lose any sleep over it. So in the end, it was effectively unlimited service for 95%+ of our customers, and near-unlimited for the rest.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    Sounds like a good deal, I agree. But, not unlimited. My issue is not with how you treated your customers, which sounds fine, but with your strange complaining that your customers should have somehow known about your not-quite-unlimited definition of the word "unlimited", and that they were the ones using unusual definitions of the word, rather than you. All other advertisers manage to find room for caveats when they make overarching claims, even if it's in weaselly fine print or fast speech. I don't see why we should treat ISPs any differently. If it's unlimited*, where the asterisk means "not quite", that asterisk and explanation need to be present, and people who don't see it and assume that "unlimited" takes on its common meaning aren't in the wrong.

by sbarre 15y ago

mikeash 15y ago

I don't think your 744 hours argument makes sense. That's not your limit. Interpret it as "all you can eat"; if I can't eat anymore, that's not really a limit with the service. Again, I don't see how your interpretation is a valid one. You limit the service based on usage. This is not "unlimited". If your cut the service off after one hour per month, would that be unlimited? I imagine you wouldn't consider it to be so. So what's the difference, aside from degree? I don't imagine I'm putting forth new arguments. But I still don't understand: why call it "unlimited" when it's not? It seems clear enough that people don't expect your definition of the word when they see it, and haven't for at least 15 years, so why keep using it when it's known to be misleading?

sbarre 15y ago
First: Marketing. We had to sell accounts and you can't really fit a big complicated explanation in an advert, nor would you want to. Second: We were fair. Compared to our competition we offered a damn good service. You're right, cutting someone off after an hour would be shitty, but we had very few customers who didn't end up using more or less as many hours as they wanted to (back to the buffet example).. We had a well-tuned system that calculated a rolling total of your connected time over the last 7 days and ONLY if you exceeded a specific threshold (if no one exceeded it, no one got disconnected), and ONLY during peak times (5pm to 10pm weeknights), and ONLY if all the lines were in use, would we selectively disconnect high-usage customers to make space for others. If there was the odd high-usage customer (it was about 5% of our unlimited accounts at most) that couldn't get online between 5pm and 10pm on weeknights here and there because we were limiting their access to allow other customers on, BUT they can hop back on at 10pm and stay connected until 5pm the NEXT DAY, I think we were offering a pretty good deal. So like your buffet example, the majority of our customers had no problem with our unlimited service, and the very few outliers who got limited, well they were getting a good deal anyways, and at the end of the day were actually costing us money, so if they cancelled as dissatisfied customers for not being able to essentially have a dedicated dial-up phone line for under 25$/month, we didn't lose any sleep over it. So in the end, it was effectively unlimited service for 95%+ of our customers, and near-unlimited for the rest.
- mikeash 15y ago
  Sounds like a good deal, I agree. But, not unlimited. My issue is not with how you treated your customers, which sounds fine, but with your strange complaining that your customers should have somehow known about your not-quite-unlimited definition of the word "unlimited", and that they were the ones using unusual definitions of the word, rather than you. All other advertisers manage to find room for caveats when they make overarching claims, even if it's in weaselly fine print or fast speech. I don't see why we should treat ISPs any differently. If it's unlimited*, where the asterisk means "not quite", that asterisk and explanation need to be present, and people who don't see it and assume that "unlimited" takes on its common meaning aren't in the wrong.