8 ms·

If you're not selling me a gigabit connection with unlimited bandwidth than don't tell me that's what you're selling. Put in your bandwidth caps if you need to.

by guelo 13y ago

If you're not selling me a gigabit connection with unlimited bandwidth than don't tell me that's what you're selling. Put in your bandwidth caps if you need to. Just don't tell me what I can do with my bandwidth that I bought.

Kylekramer 13y ago
Why force them to sell one product that is worse (capped) instead of two products with clearly delineated use cases?
- ihsw 13y ago
  Why not make it obvious what the use cases are rather than attacking customers based on the definition of "server"? It's unclear, vague, ambiguous, and a host of other similar synonyms. Using the term "server" is open-ended and it gives ISPs unnecessary discretion over cutting users' connections. If the rationale is that customers whom are operating commercial businesses out of their home internet connection are abusing their internet connection, then put the goal-post there. Using the term "server" allows ISPs to change the goal-post when its convenient for them, and that's unfair.
  - aroch 13y ago
    It isn't particularly vague, see jmillikin's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6201215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6201215 Also, a moving goalpost isn't really unfair at all in this situation (Assuming it is, in fact, a moving goalpost). They have every right to make changes to their network to ensure good quality service to everyone. ETA: If you're going to downvote, you should explain yourself.
  - baddox 13y ago
    I haven't read their terms of service, but I would be willing to bet that their terms leave it up to their own judgement, which is fine, because you have the option of agreeing to that or not.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > clearly delineated use cases? There is the problem.
  - blhack 13y ago
    Give an example of something that falls in a grey area.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      If I have to read fine print, then it is a grey area. If I have to interpret what they currently mean by "server", or what they may mean by "server" in the future, or what they may mean by "server" if I happen to piss them off for some reason, then it is certainly a grey area. Can I run a server from my home? Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However, use of applications such as multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, home security and others which may include server capabilities but are being used for legal and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged. It is nice of them to be explicit with a few hand-picked cases, but that remains grey as fuck as far as I am concerned. What if I run a hairdressing business in my home and happen to blow through several terabytes in a weekend with git-annex? It seems clear to me that this should be acceptable, but I cannot feel confident it would become a problem. Maybe it is clear to some lawyer somewhere, but it is not clear to me, the consumer.
      - androidninja 13y ago
        If you're using the connection for a business in your home, then you are not using the connection for "non-commercial" uses and therefore should be paying for a Business Class of service
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Who the hell defines that? What if I'm doing home accounting on my home computer and ssh into it? What if my accounting includes my spouses small hobby-business that is run from the home? What if I work a normal job but frequently VPN in and work from home? What if the traffic that makes them upset is not the traffic that is business related? This shit is vague. It may be clear to you, but it isn't categorically.
- zipppy 13y ago
  I'm not convinced that use cases determine Google's acceptance of how the service is used. e.g. If someone uses the service to download & upload 100gb+ of data a day, and somehow it's actually for personal use, I suspect that Google would restrict them. If so, the spirit of the terms isn't as much to delineate between types of use as much as it is to delineate between amounts of use.
  - Kylekramer 13y ago
    Well, let's yell at Google when they do that. As it is written it seems go out of the way to address use case. If they just wanted to just go after heavy users indiscriminately, they wouldn't take care to say that they won't ban typical home use that would fall under the vague definition of server.
  - Retric 13y ago
    100gb a day is ~1% of a 1GB connection and probably completely ok with them. My guess is if your serving up multiple tb of upstream bandwidth they might have an issue but I have yet to hear of anyone doing so.
aroch 13y ago
It's 'best effort' bandwidth, not 'unlimited'...
- sp332 13y ago
  "Best effort" is still a lot better than "banned because we didn't like your bits."
chrissnell 13y ago
You didn't really buy 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth. You bought the right to use up to 1 Gbit of throughput so long as you abide by their T&C/AUP in your usage of that throughput. This bandwidth is oversold. Of course it's oversold. 1000 Mbit of Internet connectivity costs a lot more than you're paying Google for it, never mind the last-mile cost of connecting your home. You can't seriously expect to run a business on a residential connection sold at residential prices, right? Like it or not, this has been the status-quo since the earliest days of broadband in the late 1990s. Now, that said, Good Guy Google would give every Google Fiber customer a GAE instance on which to run their servers. By doing this, they move the servers to network infrastructure that's actually designed for running servers.
- trafficlight 13y ago
  I've been thinking a lot about starting a fiber ISP in my hometown and this is a big issue that's come up. I don't believe in restricting what a customer can do with their connection to internet, but I also don't want to someone to consume more resources than they are reasonably paying for. In my ideal world, I want to sell a connection to the internet that is as fast as I can reasonably deliver. I don't even want to make the distinction between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. I don't want speed to be factor. Just fast. Is there a better way to phrase the service offering instead of 'unlimited'? When I read this back to myself, it sounds like I want to have my cake and eat it to. Lots of contradictions in my mind.
  - clebio 13y ago
    Other options and terms: metering, throttling, and grade of service (QoS). You can sell 'unlimited' to everyone, but give the option of service classes. This is basically QoS, but (mis-)using it to give preferential service to high-paying customers. That's also essentially what 'business-class' is, as others are mentioning in this thread.
  - wmf 13y ago
    Some people prefer the term "unmetered" if you don't charge for traffic but there are limits on the service. You can let your network congest and use a fair queueing box so that the congestion will only be borne by the heaviest customers. Alternately you can sell something like 50 Mbps, 125 MB token bucket service which will allow people to burst to 1 Gbps for 1 second.
sigzero 13y ago
" Just don't tell me what I can do with my bandwidth that I bought." What? They absolutely can do that.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  Also, they can go around killing anyone they don't like. That doesn't mean we should approve or shouldn't advocate laws prohibiting it.
baddox 13y ago
You can just read the terms and choose whether or not to pay for the service. Unless they're omitting these things from their terms, I don't see the problem. They're telling you what you can do, and you're choosing whether to pay for it.
- WalterSear 13y ago
  If you read the article, this main issue is that they omit the definition of a 'server'.

by guelo 13y ago

Kylekramer 13y ago

Why force them to sell one product that is worse (capped) instead of two products with clearly delineated use cases?

ihsw 13y ago
Why not make it obvious what the use cases are rather than attacking customers based on the definition of "server"? It's unclear, vague, ambiguous, and a host of other similar synonyms. Using the term "server" is open-ended and it gives ISPs unnecessary discretion over cutting users' connections. If the rationale is that customers whom are operating commercial businesses out of their home internet connection are abusing their internet connection, then put the goal-post there. Using the term "server" allows ISPs to change the goal-post when its convenient for them, and that's unfair.
- aroch 13y ago
  It isn't particularly vague, see jmillikin's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6201215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6201215 Also, a moving goalpost isn't really unfair at all in this situation (Assuming it is, in fact, a moving goalpost). They have every right to make changes to their network to ensure good quality service to everyone. ETA: If you're going to downvote, you should explain yourself.
- baddox 13y ago
  I haven't read their terms of service, but I would be willing to bet that their terms leave it up to their own judgement, which is fine, because you have the option of agreeing to that or not.
jlgreco 13y ago
> clearly delineated use cases? There is the problem.
- blhack 13y ago
  Give an example of something that falls in a grey area.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    If I have to read fine print, then it is a grey area. If I have to interpret what they currently mean by "server", or what they may mean by "server" in the future, or what they may mean by "server" if I happen to piss them off for some reason, then it is certainly a grey area. Can I run a server from my home? Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However, use of applications such as multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, home security and others which may include server capabilities but are being used for legal and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged. It is nice of them to be explicit with a few hand-picked cases, but that remains grey as fuck as far as I am concerned. What if I run a hairdressing business in my home and happen to blow through several terabytes in a weekend with git-annex? It seems clear to me that this should be acceptable, but I cannot feel confident it would become a problem. Maybe it is clear to some lawyer somewhere, but it is not clear to me, the consumer.
    - androidninja 13y ago
      If you're using the connection for a business in your home, then you are not using the connection for "non-commercial" uses and therefore should be paying for a Business Class of service
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Who the hell defines that? What if I'm doing home accounting on my home computer and ssh into it? What if my accounting includes my spouses small hobby-business that is run from the home? What if I work a normal job but frequently VPN in and work from home? What if the traffic that makes them upset is not the traffic that is business related? This shit is vague. It may be clear to you, but it isn't categorically.
zipppy 13y ago
I'm not convinced that use cases determine Google's acceptance of how the service is used. e.g. If someone uses the service to download & upload 100gb+ of data a day, and somehow it's actually for personal use, I suspect that Google would restrict them. If so, the spirit of the terms isn't as much to delineate between types of use as much as it is to delineate between amounts of use.
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  Well, let's yell at Google when they do that. As it is written it seems go out of the way to address use case. If they just wanted to just go after heavy users indiscriminately, they wouldn't take care to say that they won't ban typical home use that would fall under the vague definition of server.
- Retric 13y ago
  100gb a day is ~1% of a 1GB connection and probably completely ok with them. My guess is if your serving up multiple tb of upstream bandwidth they might have an issue but I have yet to hear of anyone doing so.

aroch 13y ago

It's 'best effort' bandwidth, not 'unlimited'...

sp332 13y ago
"Best effort" is still a lot better than "banned because we didn't like your bits."

chrissnell 13y ago

You didn't really buy 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth. You bought the right to use up to 1 Gbit of throughput so long as you abide by their T&C/AUP in your usage of that throughput. This bandwidth is oversold. Of course it's oversold. 1000 Mbit of Internet connectivity costs a lot more than you're paying Google for it, never mind the last-mile cost of connecting your home. You can't seriously expect to run a business on a residential connection sold at residential prices, right? Like it or not, this has been the status-quo since the earliest days of broadband in the late 1990s. Now, that said, Good Guy Google would give every Google Fiber customer a GAE instance on which to run their servers. By doing this, they move the servers to network infrastructure that's actually designed for running servers.

trafficlight 13y ago
I've been thinking a lot about starting a fiber ISP in my hometown and this is a big issue that's come up. I don't believe in restricting what a customer can do with their connection to internet, but I also don't want to someone to consume more resources than they are reasonably paying for. In my ideal world, I want to sell a connection to the internet that is as fast as I can reasonably deliver. I don't even want to make the distinction between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. I don't want speed to be factor. Just fast. Is there a better way to phrase the service offering instead of 'unlimited'? When I read this back to myself, it sounds like I want to have my cake and eat it to. Lots of contradictions in my mind.
- clebio 13y ago
  Other options and terms: metering, throttling, and grade of service (QoS). You can sell 'unlimited' to everyone, but give the option of service classes. This is basically QoS, but (mis-)using it to give preferential service to high-paying customers. That's also essentially what 'business-class' is, as others are mentioning in this thread.
- wmf 13y ago
  Some people prefer the term "unmetered" if you don't charge for traffic but there are limits on the service. You can let your network congest and use a fair queueing box so that the congestion will only be borne by the heaviest customers. Alternately you can sell something like 50 Mbps, 125 MB token bucket service which will allow people to burst to 1 Gbps for 1 second.

sigzero 13y ago

" Just don't tell me what I can do with my bandwidth that I bought." What? They absolutely can do that.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
Also, they can go around killing anyone they don't like. That doesn't mean we should approve or shouldn't advocate laws prohibiting it.

baddox 13y ago

You can just read the terms and choose whether or not to pay for the service. Unless they're omitting these things from their terms, I don't see the problem. They're telling you what you can do, and you're choosing whether to pay for it.

WalterSear 13y ago
If you read the article, this main issue is that they omit the definition of a 'server'.