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a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month "Unlimited data" should me

a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month "Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.

beloch 2y ago
I used to have an "unlimited bandwidth" account with Shaw Cable in Canada, back before Rogers bought them. "Unlimited" was very much front and centre in all the advertising, etc.. They started charging me overage fees. I called them up and asked them to explain why they were charging me overage fees on an unlimited bandwidth account. Their explanation was that the bandwidth was unlimited in when I could use it, not in how much I could use. Fortunately for me, there were other providers in the market that I could switch to. So I did.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Did you ask them what times you are allowed to use a non-unlimited account?
thunky 2y ago
"Unlimited data" means that you can use as much as you want/can without being charged more based on usage. Otherwise there would be a cap and you are charged extra when you go over it. It has nothing to do with speed/bandwidth. Just like "unlimited text" plans don't charge per text message. But there is still a physical limit for how many texts you can send.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
In NZ if you buy x mbps then you must get x mbps, at all times.
ReverseCold 2y ago
I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. The internet is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more. E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like > I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down. Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!
- jpambrun 2y ago
  Because it's none of our business as customers. This oversubscription rate is a risk they calibrate on their side. Given the marketing material, if all customers decide to use more bandwidth, it up to the utility to upgrade their infra to match in a timely manner. This is the risk they took and competed on.
- nixosbestos 2y ago
  Edit: removing an apparently quite inaccurate comment. Apologies.
  - FredFS456 2y ago
    It /is/ how it works with PON based fibre networks. See https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-up-the-bandwidth/ https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-u...
    - ta1243 2y ago
      Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.
      - namibj 2y ago
        That said, the classic case of game release can be handled with a bit of P2P if the oversubscription happens late enough to have sufficiently many downloads that can share among themselves without causing congestion for others. Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.
        ta1243 2y ago
mindslight 2y ago
Hear hear! Furthermore any plans with "caps" should have to list the average bandwidth as the largest headline, with the peak bandwidth relegated to a subpoint. For example 1TB/month is 386 kB/sec. That's on par with a DSL connection, not 2024 broadband.
- tzs 2y ago
  That would mislead and confuse a lot of consumers. It would suggest that a 5 Mb/s DSL connection with no data limit would be better than a 500 Mb/s cable connection with a 1 TB data limit, when in fact something like 90% of users will not come anywhere near 1 TB of data/month and will be much much much happier on the cable plan.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    It works fine over in the cell phone market, where carriers market themselves in terms of HSPA/4G/LTE/5G while plans are sold in terms of data used. Rough instantaneous bandwidth (and latency!) is fine for knowing what applications will work. 300Mb/s vs 500Mb/s isn't going to make much of a difference for most, and certainly not more than ISPs necessarily massage the numbers when talking about shared mediums like docsis/gpon. The point I am making is that if fixed carriers seemingly no longer want to be selling connections by last-mile bandwidth (with implied statistical oversubscription and a fall-back to best effort), and instead want to move to selling specific amounts of data delivered, then their big-print marketing should have to reflect that! Or alternatively, if they want to stick with selling the instantaneous last mile connection speed, then data quotas should have to raise along with that according to a standard benchmark consumer usage - say 2 hours of nameplate usage per day, meaning a 300Mb/s connection would be ~6TB/month. And then additional data usage should cost the same (or lower) as the monthly plan - for example $120/month for that 6TB/month plan is $20/TB, so 1TB of additional data should cost no more than $20 rather than the current punitive or even unobtainable pricing. Also I'd guess your 90%/1TB figure is quite out of date, which gets to the heart of the problem here - these limits have remained arbitrary and opaque rather than being expressed in the market. It gets even more rotten when talking about national policy where these ISPs have been able to claim they're providing modern "broadband" while their backhaul networks have been seemingly frozen in time for a decade+. Although, a disclaimer: I only read these threads to gawk at the train wreck and check if the Internet access market is really still this bad. I've got municipal gpon at 1Gb/s symmetric, no caps (I've asked multiple times), with a fixed price every month. Which really just underscores the absurdity of talking about this topic in a negative-sum parceling out of bits and bytes, which mostly stems from Ma Coax wanting to continue milking their captive markets on aging infrastructure.
sneak 2y ago
They can lie all they want; they are integrated with the government and they have no consequences for fraud. I gave Cox over $2000 explicitly for unlimited data and still got nastygrams from them for uploading 4TB of my original digital photos to S3 for backup. It’s effectively illegal to start new ISPs in America, that’s why this shit happens.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I would absolutely forward those to my state's public utilities commission.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    Who do you think the telcos are lobbying?
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Then it’s extra important to remind the regulators that the telcos are blowing smoke up their ass. If they’re only hearing the telcos’ side, they might be under the mistaken impression that it’s the truth.
      - sgarland 2y ago
        You’re under the impression that the regulators give a shit about their constituents, rather than campaign donations.
        kstrauser 2y ago
        I only have so much cynicism to go around. For my own mental health, I have to presume that at least some people in charge want to do the right thing, and I act accordingly.
  - sneak 2y ago
    Ain’t nobody got time for that.
kristopolous 2y ago
A number of years ago one of the isps, might have been att dsl, argued that "unlimited" was a branding name for a tier. They had meant an affectation of limitless possibilities as a marketing term similar to "plus", "extreme" or "pro" and not that there was no cap on the data. I always ignore that word now and look for the actual terms
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
And this is a gigabit customer using 4% of their maximum. What the heck?
kstrauser 2y ago
Put another way, if they're saying 12TB is their unadvertised effective data cap, he's only allowed to use his connection for 1 day a month. My ISP lets me use the service all of the days of the month, not just one. His ludicrously low limit is unfathomable.
throawayonthe 2y ago
[dead]
datahack 2y ago
How is this nonsense still legal? It’s straight up nothing but deceptive advertising.
exabrial 2y ago
So call it 300tb/month, not unlimited, and quit lying?

beloch 2y ago

I used to have an "unlimited bandwidth" account with Shaw Cable in Canada, back before Rogers bought them. "Unlimited" was very much front and centre in all the advertising, etc.. They started charging me overage fees. I called them up and asked them to explain why they were charging me overage fees on an unlimited bandwidth account. Their explanation was that the bandwidth was unlimited in when I could use it, not in how much I could use. Fortunately for me, there were other providers in the market that I could switch to. So I did.

userbinator 2y ago
Did you ask them what times you are allowed to use a non-unlimited account?

thunky 2y ago

"Unlimited data" means that you can use as much as you want/can without being charged more based on usage. Otherwise there would be a cap and you are charged extra when you go over it. It has nothing to do with speed/bandwidth. Just like "unlimited text" plans don't charge per text message. But there is still a physical limit for how many texts you can send.

fennecfoxy 2y ago

In NZ if you buy x mbps then you must get x mbps, at all times.

ReverseCold 2y ago

I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. The internet is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more. E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like > I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down. Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!

jpambrun 2y ago
Because it's none of our business as customers. This oversubscription rate is a risk they calibrate on their side. Given the marketing material, if all customers decide to use more bandwidth, it up to the utility to upgrade their infra to match in a timely manner. This is the risk they took and competed on.
nixosbestos 2y ago
Edit: removing an apparently quite inaccurate comment. Apologies.
- FredFS456 2y ago
  It /is/ how it works with PON based fibre networks. See https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-up-the-bandwidth/ https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-u...
  - ta1243 2y ago
    Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.
    - namibj 2y ago
      That said, the classic case of game release can be handled with a bit of P2P if the oversubscription happens late enough to have sufficiently many downloads that can share among themselves without causing congestion for others. Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.
      - ta1243 2y ago

mindslight 2y ago

Hear hear! Furthermore any plans with "caps" should have to list the average bandwidth as the largest headline, with the peak bandwidth relegated to a subpoint. For example 1TB/month is 386 kB/sec. That's on par with a DSL connection, not 2024 broadband.

tzs 2y ago
That would mislead and confuse a lot of consumers. It would suggest that a 5 Mb/s DSL connection with no data limit would be better than a 500 Mb/s cable connection with a 1 TB data limit, when in fact something like 90% of users will not come anywhere near 1 TB of data/month and will be much much much happier on the cable plan.
- mindslight 2y ago
  It works fine over in the cell phone market, where carriers market themselves in terms of HSPA/4G/LTE/5G while plans are sold in terms of data used. Rough instantaneous bandwidth (and latency!) is fine for knowing what applications will work. 300Mb/s vs 500Mb/s isn't going to make much of a difference for most, and certainly not more than ISPs necessarily massage the numbers when talking about shared mediums like docsis/gpon. The point I am making is that if fixed carriers seemingly no longer want to be selling connections by last-mile bandwidth (with implied statistical oversubscription and a fall-back to best effort), and instead want to move to selling specific amounts of data delivered, then their big-print marketing should have to reflect that! Or alternatively, if they want to stick with selling the instantaneous last mile connection speed, then data quotas should have to raise along with that according to a standard benchmark consumer usage - say 2 hours of nameplate usage per day, meaning a 300Mb/s connection would be ~6TB/month. And then additional data usage should cost the same (or lower) as the monthly plan - for example $120/month for that 6TB/month plan is $20/TB, so 1TB of additional data should cost no more than $20 rather than the current punitive or even unobtainable pricing. Also I'd guess your 90%/1TB figure is quite out of date, which gets to the heart of the problem here - these limits have remained arbitrary and opaque rather than being expressed in the market. It gets even more rotten when talking about national policy where these ISPs have been able to claim they're providing modern "broadband" while their backhaul networks have been seemingly frozen in time for a decade+. Although, a disclaimer: I only read these threads to gawk at the train wreck and check if the Internet access market is really still this bad. I've got municipal gpon at 1Gb/s symmetric, no caps (I've asked multiple times), with a fixed price every month. Which really just underscores the absurdity of talking about this topic in a negative-sum parceling out of bits and bytes, which mostly stems from Ma Coax wanting to continue milking their captive markets on aging infrastructure.

sneak 2y ago

They can lie all they want; they are integrated with the government and they have no consequences for fraud. I gave Cox over $2000 explicitly for unlimited data and still got nastygrams from them for uploading 4TB of my original digital photos to S3 for backup. It’s effectively illegal to start new ISPs in America, that’s why this shit happens.

kstrauser 2y ago
I would absolutely forward those to my state's public utilities commission.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Who do you think the telcos are lobbying?
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Then it’s extra important to remind the regulators that the telcos are blowing smoke up their ass. If they’re only hearing the telcos’ side, they might be under the mistaken impression that it’s the truth.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      You’re under the impression that the regulators give a shit about their constituents, rather than campaign donations.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        I only have so much cynicism to go around. For my own mental health, I have to presume that at least some people in charge want to do the right thing, and I act accordingly.
- sneak 2y ago
  Ain’t nobody got time for that.

kristopolous 2y ago

A number of years ago one of the isps, might have been att dsl, argued that "unlimited" was a branding name for a tier. They had meant an affectation of limitless possibilities as a marketing term similar to "plus", "extreme" or "pro" and not that there was no cap on the data. I always ignore that word now and look for the actual terms

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago

And this is a gigabit customer using 4% of their maximum. What the heck?

kstrauser 2y ago

Put another way, if they're saying 12TB is their unadvertised effective data cap, he's only allowed to use his connection for 1 day a month. My ISP lets me use the service all of the days of the month, not just one. His ludicrously low limit is unfathomable.

throawayonthe 2y ago

[dead]

datahack 2y ago

How is this nonsense still legal? It’s straight up nothing but deceptive advertising.

exabrial 2y ago

So call it 300tb/month, not unlimited, and quit lying?