4 ms·

> Why would it be a bad thing for it to be illegal to lie? Just don't call the plan "unlimited", and have clearly stated limits. Maybe because the limits are n

by krn 4y ago

> Why would it be a bad thing for it to be illegal to lie? Just don't call the plan "unlimited", and have clearly stated limits. Maybe because the limits are not fixed and completely depend on the spending of the customer? If a customer is among the top 1% of the biggest users and – at the same time – among the top 1% of the smallest spenders, that simply raises the costs of the service for everyone else. There are only three choices here: a) get rid of the customer; b) make them pay more, or c) raise the prices of unlimited plans for everyone.

mort96 4y ago
What does this have to do with anything? If the user if paying for a service, they should be getting that service. If the operator is offering a service which they can't afford to offer, that's not the user's problem.
- krn 4y ago
  A private operator can choose to stop providing any service to any customer at any time. Especially, if it finds it to be economically unsustainable for their business. For instance, OVH has previously terminated accounts of paying customers simply because it didn't want to do any business with people from an occupied territory[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680251
  - mort96 4y ago
    But what does that have to do with anything? Why can't operators just not lie to their customers? Just don't call the plan "unlimited". Have well-defined limits. They don't have to be hard limits, they can be a gradual speed reduction after some amount of data per month. Just don't lie. I don't understand why you think this is a difficult concept.
    - krn 4y ago
      Again, the limits are not fixed, and therefore cannot be clearly defined. If a customer is spending $5K / month on dedicated servers, Hetzner might earn enough from renting hardware to cover truly unlimited usage of bandwidth. If a customer is spending only $50 / month, that's a completely different case. Such a customer might simply be not valuable enough to keep.
  - wumpus 4y ago
    That case possibly looks like obeying sanctions, although they have failed to explain why they think this customer is in Crimea. For example, OVH may have discovered that the Russian ISP involved was putting fake data into geoip, and if you're aware you can't just pretend you don't know. BTW, if it was just "we don't want to do business with you any more", that depends on what your contract says. Most consumer ISP contracts allow an ISP to drop a customer for any reason without explanation.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits. Let's say the provider has a 100 Gpbs upstream, 1000 clients, and offers a cheap plan where you pay for 1 Gbps with no limit. The provider obviously can't provide a sustained 1 Gbps to every client 24/7. Now, how do you honestly advertise that? Because you can give people 1 Gbps service so long not too many clients do that at the same time. And you can tolerate people downloading 24/7 so long they don't all do it at the same time. How much you have to crack down will depend on how close to capacity you are, and what your clients are doing.
  - mort96 4y ago
    That's a cool story. It sounds like something the marketing and sales departments should probably think pretty hard about. It's not an easy problem. But a service with a cap also isn't unlimited. Making a pricing structure which works for the company and is easy to understand for the customer isn't easy. Nobody said it was easy. But I don't understand how you go from that, to arguing in favor of lying to the customer.
  - iam-TJ 4y ago
    Maybe like ADSL was originally advertised in some markets, with the contention ratio? In your scenario, 10:1 contention ratio, "up-to" 1Gbps throughput, 1Gbps link-speed. In the UK British Telecom originally offered 'consumer' ADSL at 50:1 and 'business' (more expensive) at 20:1 contention ratio specifically to deal with the backhaul limitations.
  - stonemetal12 4y ago
    Probably the way they do processors, say you get N Mhz as a min that is boostable up to M Mhz. If they advertised "you get a min of 200kbps, that could boost up to 1Gbps" that would be acceptable, as long as you actually got that 200kbps. The problem is they claim it is 1Gbps, then look at you funny if you expect 70% of what they claim.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits. But the fact that there is a limit at all, means that you can definitely display it somewhere. Suppose you have two users, John and Jane, John is in the 1% of most valuable customers, Jane signed up last month. The data center has plenty of free capacity in June, but is closer to capacity in July. Now suppose that each user has their own dashboard for resources. John: June - Your bandwidth limit is 200 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it. July - Your bandwidth limit is 160 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it. Jane: June - Your bandwidth limit is 40 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend. July - Your bandwidth limit is 30 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend. As a matter of fact, Hetzner already has something like that under their "Limits" section: Limits Limits are set per customer and are counted across all projects that you created. If you need more resources, just send us a request, and we are happy to adjust them for you. Outgoing traffic to ports 25 and 465 are blocked by default on all Cloud Servers. Send a request for unblocking these ports. Please note that we generally do not answer questions regarding limit increase on the telephone. You don't necessarily have to advertise the fact that your limits will be dependent on lots of variables and will change (though you should disclose it). What you shouldn't do is say that there are no limits, which is clearly lying. Even if the lie only becomes relevant to a very small part of the clientele who'll be affected by this, it's still lying. Of course, that's not the world that we live in and "unlimited" offerings will be a mainstay of marketing in the industry, for the better or worse. Probably better for the org and worse for the clients. Kind of why I also hate mobile carriers being dishonest with their data plans. It's like nobody even knows what "unlimited" means.
stonemetal12 4y ago
So I buy a gallon of milk, but depending on how much I pay for the gallon of milk, I get some percentage of it?

by krn 4y ago

mort96 4y ago

What does this have to do with anything? If the user if paying for a service, they should be getting that service. If the operator is offering a service which they can't afford to offer, that's not the user's problem.

krn 4y ago
A private operator can choose to stop providing any service to any customer at any time. Especially, if it finds it to be economically unsustainable for their business. For instance, OVH has previously terminated accounts of paying customers simply because it didn't want to do any business with people from an occupied territory[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680251
- mort96 4y ago
  But what does that have to do with anything? Why can't operators just not lie to their customers? Just don't call the plan "unlimited". Have well-defined limits. They don't have to be hard limits, they can be a gradual speed reduction after some amount of data per month. Just don't lie. I don't understand why you think this is a difficult concept.
  - krn 4y ago
    Again, the limits are not fixed, and therefore cannot be clearly defined. If a customer is spending $5K / month on dedicated servers, Hetzner might earn enough from renting hardware to cover truly unlimited usage of bandwidth. If a customer is spending only $50 / month, that's a completely different case. Such a customer might simply be not valuable enough to keep.
- wumpus 4y ago
  That case possibly looks like obeying sanctions, although they have failed to explain why they think this customer is in Crimea. For example, OVH may have discovered that the Russian ISP involved was putting fake data into geoip, and if you're aware you can't just pretend you don't know. BTW, if it was just "we don't want to do business with you any more", that depends on what your contract says. Most consumer ISP contracts allow an ISP to drop a customer for any reason without explanation.
dale_glass 4y ago
The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits. Let's say the provider has a 100 Gpbs upstream, 1000 clients, and offers a cheap plan where you pay for 1 Gbps with no limit. The provider obviously can't provide a sustained 1 Gbps to every client 24/7. Now, how do you honestly advertise that? Because you can give people 1 Gbps service so long not too many clients do that at the same time. And you can tolerate people downloading 24/7 so long they don't all do it at the same time. How much you have to crack down will depend on how close to capacity you are, and what your clients are doing.
- mort96 4y ago
  That's a cool story. It sounds like something the marketing and sales departments should probably think pretty hard about. It's not an easy problem. But a service with a cap also isn't unlimited. Making a pricing structure which works for the company and is easy to understand for the customer isn't easy. Nobody said it was easy. But I don't understand how you go from that, to arguing in favor of lying to the customer.
- iam-TJ 4y ago
  Maybe like ADSL was originally advertised in some markets, with the contention ratio? In your scenario, 10:1 contention ratio, "up-to" 1Gbps throughput, 1Gbps link-speed. In the UK British Telecom originally offered 'consumer' ADSL at 50:1 and 'business' (more expensive) at 20:1 contention ratio specifically to deal with the backhaul limitations.
- stonemetal12 4y ago
  Probably the way they do processors, say you get N Mhz as a min that is boostable up to M Mhz. If they advertised "you get a min of 200kbps, that could boost up to 1Gbps" that would be acceptable, as long as you actually got that 200kbps. The problem is they claim it is 1Gbps, then look at you funny if you expect 70% of what they claim.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits. But the fact that there is a limit at all, means that you can definitely display it somewhere. Suppose you have two users, John and Jane, John is in the 1% of most valuable customers, Jane signed up last month. The data center has plenty of free capacity in June, but is closer to capacity in July. Now suppose that each user has their own dashboard for resources. John: June - Your bandwidth limit is 200 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it. July - Your bandwidth limit is 160 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it. Jane: June - Your bandwidth limit is 40 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend. July - Your bandwidth limit is 30 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend. As a matter of fact, Hetzner already has something like that under their "Limits" section: Limits Limits are set per customer and are counted across all projects that you created. If you need more resources, just send us a request, and we are happy to adjust them for you. Outgoing traffic to ports 25 and 465 are blocked by default on all Cloud Servers. Send a request for unblocking these ports. Please note that we generally do not answer questions regarding limit increase on the telephone. You don't necessarily have to advertise the fact that your limits will be dependent on lots of variables and will change (though you should disclose it). What you shouldn't do is say that there are no limits, which is clearly lying. Even if the lie only becomes relevant to a very small part of the clientele who'll be affected by this, it's still lying. Of course, that's not the world that we live in and "unlimited" offerings will be a mainstay of marketing in the industry, for the better or worse. Probably better for the org and worse for the clients. Kind of why I also hate mobile carriers being dishonest with their data plans. It's like nobody even knows what "unlimited" means.

stonemetal12 4y ago

So I buy a gallon of milk, but depending on how much I pay for the gallon of milk, I get some percentage of it?