3 ms·

It wouldn't be that hard for them to sell connections as something like "guaranteed 20Mbps, peak 100Mbps" and, if they have to impose limits, impose them at the

It wouldn't be that hard for them to sell connections as something like "guaranteed 20Mbps, peak 100Mbps" and, if they have to impose limits, impose them at the point where the "guaranteed" would be running constantly. The problem is they don't want to do that, because it's much snazzier to just market the peak speed.

kazen44 4y ago
that is the problem with oversubscribing though. making it possible to say "you have a guaranteed bandwith of X% of the total capacity" is a hard problem to solve, especially inside the core layers of the network, where traffic gets aggregated. How are you going to make sure every tenant gets its share of bandwith equally? It requires traffic engineering (like RSVP-TE, which in term requires an MPLS network.) and a proper QoS setup. both of which are not trivial to implement at scale. Going further down the network towards to aggregate layer is far more doable (between switches etc), but doing it across core links it is actually quite difficult to guarantee bandwith.
jabbany 4y ago
To be fair most, residential ISPs I've used do only advertise something like "up to X Mbps" [https://imgur.com/a/Qvp8i61 https://imgur.com/a/Qvp8i61] and some will have asterisks that further lead to documentation about things like "soft data caps" after a certain amount of TB transferred per month etc. Also residential ISPs generally don't even have SLAs so you could have days without Internet... probably also why they do not try to even hint at any guaranteed bandwidth. Depending on the situation, you might have none :)
- NullPrefix 4y ago
  "up to X Mbps" would imply "up to $y"
  - jabbany 4y ago
    Hah. If only corporations were that nice lol.