5 ms·

Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.

by littlecranky67 6mo ago

embedding-shape 6mo ago
They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
- pixl97 6mo ago
  I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting. For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests. Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    > I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).
    - mcmcmc 6mo ago
      What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your service contract multiplied by the length of the contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap
      - organsnyder 6mo ago
        Of course. You're always capped by rate. But you're not capped by the cumulative amount (other than as a function of rate and time).
      - bombcar 6mo ago
        The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s connection, and your access to that connection is unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some point, and your access isn't cut off - there are no limits on your access. Of course there are practical limits as you can't make your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc). Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a endlessly consumable resource, like storage.
        mcmcmc 6mo ago
        I’ll be honest I think “unlimited” should just be banned from advertising. The literal definition a layman would understand is never what’s in the fine print. Every good or service has some kind of limit, whether it’s artificially put in place by the seller or a law of physics. Any way you can interpret “unlimited” to where it means “unlimited, except those limits” is false advertising.
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      In almost all services this tends to get an asterisk that says "unless your usage interferes with other users" which in itself is poorly defined. But typically means once their system gets closer to its usage limit, you're the first to get booted off the service.
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        No ISP I've had in my adult life had such conditions, it truly is "Whatever you manage to do with the bandwidth we give you". I've done hundreds of TBs for months without any impact to my bandwidth (transferring ML datasets among other things), and I'm pretty sure a ISP in my country would break some law if they'd limit a typical broadband home connection based on data transfer quotas.
willis936 6mo ago
And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7. Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
- littlecranky67 6mo ago
  > And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7 I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually make use of that. Second question would be, how long they would allow you to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the point the person I replied to was making: If you truly make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it is not a faithful offer in the first place.
- deno 6mo ago
  Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that. Residential network access is oversold as everything else. The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use. But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
  - cestith 6mo ago
    Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time. Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
  - salawat 6mo ago
    Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
hypercube33 6mo ago
If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.
- dboreham 6mo ago
  In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".
- BobaFloutist 6mo ago
  They mean that they're not going to limit the total amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural limit implied by the maximum rate. When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.
mikepurvis 6mo ago
Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works. Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
  - lelandfe 6mo ago
    Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern... My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him. A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      > Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards... > A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
      - lelandfe 6mo ago
ThatMedicIsASpy 6mo ago
Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering
LaGrange 6mo ago
It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.

Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.

embedding-shape 6mo ago

They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".

pixl97 6mo ago
I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting. For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests. Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).
  - mcmcmc 6mo ago
    What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your service contract multiplied by the length of the contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap
    - organsnyder 6mo ago
      Of course. You're always capped by rate. But you're not capped by the cumulative amount (other than as a function of rate and time).
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s connection, and your access to that connection is unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some point, and your access isn't cut off - there are no limits on your access. Of course there are practical limits as you can't make your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc). Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a endlessly consumable resource, like storage.
      - mcmcmc 6mo ago
        I’ll be honest I think “unlimited” should just be banned from advertising. The literal definition a layman would understand is never what’s in the fine print. Every good or service has some kind of limit, whether it’s artificially put in place by the seller or a law of physics. Any way you can interpret “unlimited” to where it means “unlimited, except those limits” is false advertising.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    In almost all services this tends to get an asterisk that says "unless your usage interferes with other users" which in itself is poorly defined. But typically means once their system gets closer to its usage limit, you're the first to get booted off the service.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      No ISP I've had in my adult life had such conditions, it truly is "Whatever you manage to do with the bandwidth we give you". I've done hundreds of TBs for months without any impact to my bandwidth (transferring ML datasets among other things), and I'm pretty sure a ISP in my country would break some law if they'd limit a typical broadband home connection based on data transfer quotas.

willis936 6mo ago

And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7. Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.

littlecranky67 6mo ago
> And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7 I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually make use of that. Second question would be, how long they would allow you to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the point the person I replied to was making: If you truly make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it is not a faithful offer in the first place.
deno 6mo ago
Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that. Residential network access is oversold as everything else. The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use. But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
- cestith 6mo ago
  Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time. Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
- salawat 6mo ago
  Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"

hypercube33 6mo ago

If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.

dboreham 6mo ago
In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".
BobaFloutist 6mo ago
They mean that they're not going to limit the total amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural limit implied by the maximum rate. When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.

mikepurvis 6mo ago

Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.

embedding-shape 6mo ago
I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works. Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
- lelandfe 6mo ago
  Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern... My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him. A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    > Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards... > A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
    - lelandfe 6mo ago

ThatMedicIsASpy 6mo ago

Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering

LaGrange 6mo ago

It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.