5 ms·

Sounds like false advertising to me...

wmf 13y ago
Let's just imagine for a moment what "truthful advertising" would look like. Probably something like "1 Mbps for $50/month"; when ISPs are already offering 15 Mbps for $50 today there's no way to get there from here.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  The fact that ISPs have oversold their services and painted themselves into a corner with misleading, if not downright false advertising is entirely their problem. Get a law passed and let them whine about it and then deal with it.
  - lambda 13y ago
    So, what would you prefer? Would you prefer fixed lower bandwidths; everyone gets exactly 1 Mbps all the time, for the same price you're paying now for 50 Mbps? Then you're going to have a ton of bandwidth going unused all the time, while everything will load slower. Or would you prefer the famously unpopular bandwidth caps and overage charges? Saying "unlimited bandwidth" but selling it as a residential (ie, non-commercial) plan seems like a fairly reasonable solution to the problem. It gives actual non-commercial residential customers what they want, the ability to have spikes of high bitrate transfers without having to worry about overage charges or being throttled, while actually allowing that pool of bandwidth to be shared reasonably fairly. The problem is if you divide shared resources like upstream bandwidth (or in the case of hosting, resource like disk or RAM) in precise amounts such that you could support 100% of the capacity you sold at any time, you would be wasting the vast majority of your resources. Most customers can't predict in advance exactly how much they need, and are quite averse to any kind of overage charges. Now, for some (mostly business) customers and workloads, precise metering works well, and for some completely dedicated bandwidth works well. But for the average residential customer, who has extremely spiky bandwidth demands and is quite averse to overage charges, neither of those work well.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      I would prefer minimum service guarantees rather than maximum usage allowances. If I want to maximize my use of my connection, the only thing my ISP should do is reduce my throughput when someone else is trying to check their email, so that I do not get in their way. Other than that Internet connections should be a free-for-all. The real problem here is that ISPs are so grossly overselling their networks' capacities that they cannot provide any guarantee beyond dialup speeds unless people take turns. Rather than admit this, they try to assign blame to people who foolishly think that "Up to 20Mbps!!!" means "up to 20Mbps" when in fact the ISPs want it to mean "up to 20Mbps in occasional short bursts, and only for the things we think you should be doing." I am not asking for commercial-grade service. I am asking that my neighbors be able to stream videos while I am seeding Debian torrents. Nobody expects some kind of Internet-connection-utopia, but it is not wrong or unreasonable to expect to be allowed to use my Internet connection as I wish, particularly when I am paying more and receiving less than my overseas friends.
      - nemothekid 13y ago
        Following the thread here, I think what you are asking for is unreasonable given the current infrastructure or massively unpopular. In the current environment what you are asking for is completely possible. Comcast will give you your speeds, but if they see you are seeding your debian torrents for too long, they will throttle your connection. Now they could advertise this, but we know how unpopular connection throttling is. However in a way, a connection throttle is your minimum service guarantee - your speed will never go below the throttle. Now I don't know anything about laying internet pipe, but lets say we gave everyone minimum service guarantees, how much do you think that would cost, and how much would you be willing to pay for a given speed? It may be completely possible that Comcast is fine with your seeding as long as you limit your speed to percentage of that number. This doesn't really refute your point, but given these two constraints its easy to see why ISPs may choose to go the "up to XMbps" route rather than the "minimum allowed route." Would it really change anything for you if you found out that your minimum service guarantee was 768kbps at your current price point?
        13y ago
- rch 13y ago
  I had always assumed the advertised speeds were likely (according to an unregulated definition), but not guaranteed. Even if the ISP gave me an SLA (maybe they did?), they couldn't make promises regarding the performance of any external network anyway. Maybe they should be required to report a sharing ratio in addition to bandwidth and latency within the ISP's own network. Any thoughts on how that would look, or what formula might make sense?
- betterunix 13y ago
  How about this: for $50/mo you get a guarantee of at least 1Mbps of continuous throughput (or at least a best effort at that), with no restriction on your usage beyond that? Why does it need to be black or white? Why not just dynamically adjust the throughput for "heavy users" so that nobody sees speeds below some level regardless of how others are utilizing the network? Oh, wait, these connections are so grossly oversold that the only such guarantee that could be made would be on the order of dialup speeds. Why should we feel pity for ISPs that create such a situation, when they are charging us more and providing us with less than what people pay and enjoy in other countries?
  - wmf 13y ago
    That would be fine except for path dependence. You're talking about taking essentially the same service but making it sound much worse than it currently sounds.
  - maxsilver 13y ago
    For what it's worth, this is exactly how we're planning to handle shared connections. Our typical "small office" connection is advertised as "60x60 bursting on top of a dedicated T1 connection". Which comes out to most people getting around 50x50 about 85% of the time, but always having a dedicated 1.5mbps waiting for you (so it can never drop below that speed, even if every subscriber maxed out their line at the same time). We also do 'dynamically adjust the throughput for heavy users'. The problem is the heavy users are typically us, the folks on Hacker News who complain when their torrent seeds get slowed down. These are the users who complain about internet being 'oversold' when in reality, they alone account for 80% of their entire neighborhoods backhaul costs. - - - I encourage you, if you feel ISP's connections are so oversold, please try to start your own ISP. I'd love to offer everyone awesome dedicated connections, and I'll be your best friend if you can show me a way to do things cheaper :) But I suspect you'll find out that it's not exactly the easiest business in the world to run, especially if your bootstrapping it.
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      You are bringing transparency to your pricing. That is huge. What HN get annoyed about is not torrents slowing down. But torrents being slowed down for arbitrary reasons. We know that a person's email and voice calls are more important than getting a Debian distro 4 seconds earlier. QoS shaping does not violate network neutrality the way I understand it.
parfe 13y ago
In the same way that Olive Garden falsely advertises Unlimited Soup Salad and Bread Sticks when they prevent you from stocking your food truck with their "unlimited" items.
- lotu 13y ago
  That's brilliant I will have to reuse this line.
jlgreco 13y ago
Imagine if cars were sold this way: "Unlimited high-speed Italian sports-car, leases starting at only $250/mo! <ultra-fine-print>By the way, we're also giving keys to your neighbors, and if you drive the car too often we're going to deactivate your copy of the keys</ultra-fine-print>"
- dasil003 13y ago
  Of course comparing apples to oranges leads to absurdities; not all things have the same attributes as all other things.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    How about this: if I rent a car for one day, and the rental describes itself as "unlimited mileage", I expect to be able to use it for 24 hours straight. If I get fined for using it for the full 24 hours because that puts wear and tear on the car that the car rental business did not anticipate, then I am going to accuse them of false advertising. I don't care if everybody doing that would ruin their business; if they don't want me to use as many miles as I please during the rental period, then they shouldn't call it "unlimited". "We only offered it to you at that rate because we counted on you not actually using it that much" doesn't fly with me. Seriously, Hertz offers unlimited miles on most of their rentals. Do you think they would get pissed if I put 1500 miles on one of their cars next Saturday? No, I doubt it, even though if everybody did that their car would be on it's last legs in mere months. That is exactly the sort of thing that ISPs get bitchy over though. I don't think this is apples and oranges in the slightest.
    - dasil003 13y ago
      That's a much better analogy, yes.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      They work on the basis the almost nobody will rent a car and drive it for 24 hours straight unless you are planning to use it for a le-mans style event. They will have clauses in the rental agreement that prevent you from using it to enter a le-mans style event.
lambda 13y ago
I'm not sure what would be preferable. They could sell you metered bandwidth; but everyone always complains about metered bandwidth, and no one wants to accidentally have their 14 year old nephew who comes to visit for a week blow out your caps and cost you tons of money because they left Bittorrent seeding a bunch of popular movies. They could just sell you lower bitrates. But then everyone would suffer, as they wouldn't get the short bursts of quick bandwidth they need to browse the web or download files. Or they could do what they're doing, which is sell under separate residential and business plans. The residential plans are sold under the assumption that you'll be using them for ordinary personal use by you and your family, and that you're not going to build a data center in your basement and start reselling bandwidth to people colocating servers in your basement. "Business" and "residential" have fairly well established meanings. There are already plenty of zoning laws that make business vs. residential, or residential vs. commercial vs. industrial distinctions. Selling a residential plan that includes in its terms of service "you may not use this for commercial purposes" is not unreasonable. Now, I do object to residential plans that unilaterally block ports without recourse, or disallow any running of "servers", as there are lots of valid reasons why someone would run a server for personal, as opposed to commercial, purposes. But I can't find a good way to allow everyone to share a larger pool of bandwidth at a lower price for home use, without allowing some people to take advantage of it for profit, without making the business/residential distinction. And sure, there will always be grey areas. What if you work remotely? What about personal uses that are abusive? These are things that need to be dealt with on a case by case basis, or spelled out clearly in the ToS. You can't really include the entire complexity of the ToS in a single ad, so I'm not sure you can claim false advertising just because there are a few terms in the ToS which weren't unambiguously stated in any "advertising" about the service.
- betterunix 13y ago
  Really the only difference between "residential" and "commercial" plans should be service guarantees. I do not expect Comcast's residential cable service to have any particular guarantee of service; if I had a commercial contract, I would certainly demand some sort of guarantee about available bandwidth and uptime. That is what we have now, more or less. To put it another way, suppose nobody gets any service guarantee with their residential connection. Why should it be acceptable to say, "How dare you maximize your use of this, when it reduces availability for everyone else?!?" Nobody gets a guarantee of service at all. Now, if we do get guarantees about our minimum service level, then there is an easy solution, which is to just reduce throughput for "heavy users" to the point where everyone else is getting their minimum guaranteed service. That would not be so bad at all: minimum service guarantees rather than maximum service limits. Of course, once you start making guarantees like that, people start expecting you to follow through and your ability to grossly oversell your network's capacity is constrained (what a tragedy).
lolwutf 13y ago
How does no one understand that what he's saying is that the product regular ISPs market is 'internet w/ fine print (i.e. no servers, etc)', versus uncapped, open 20x20mb line, without fine print? The point is exactly that everything advertised by Comcast comes with an asterisk and fine print which you must agree to, to use their service (making it not false advertising).
- judk 13y ago
  Comcast advertising doesn't doesn't include Comcast contracts.
  - lolwutf 13y ago
    But they include a little line that says 'terms and conditions may apply', or similar.

wmf 13y ago

Let's just imagine for a moment what "truthful advertising" would look like. Probably something like "1 Mbps for $50/month"; when ISPs are already offering 15 Mbps for $50 today there's no way to get there from here.

Karunamon 13y ago
The fact that ISPs have oversold their services and painted themselves into a corner with misleading, if not downright false advertising is entirely their problem. Get a law passed and let them whine about it and then deal with it.
- lambda 13y ago
  So, what would you prefer? Would you prefer fixed lower bandwidths; everyone gets exactly 1 Mbps all the time, for the same price you're paying now for 50 Mbps? Then you're going to have a ton of bandwidth going unused all the time, while everything will load slower. Or would you prefer the famously unpopular bandwidth caps and overage charges? Saying "unlimited bandwidth" but selling it as a residential (ie, non-commercial) plan seems like a fairly reasonable solution to the problem. It gives actual non-commercial residential customers what they want, the ability to have spikes of high bitrate transfers without having to worry about overage charges or being throttled, while actually allowing that pool of bandwidth to be shared reasonably fairly. The problem is if you divide shared resources like upstream bandwidth (or in the case of hosting, resource like disk or RAM) in precise amounts such that you could support 100% of the capacity you sold at any time, you would be wasting the vast majority of your resources. Most customers can't predict in advance exactly how much they need, and are quite averse to any kind of overage charges. Now, for some (mostly business) customers and workloads, precise metering works well, and for some completely dedicated bandwidth works well. But for the average residential customer, who has extremely spiky bandwidth demands and is quite averse to overage charges, neither of those work well.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    I would prefer minimum service guarantees rather than maximum usage allowances. If I want to maximize my use of my connection, the only thing my ISP should do is reduce my throughput when someone else is trying to check their email, so that I do not get in their way. Other than that Internet connections should be a free-for-all. The real problem here is that ISPs are so grossly overselling their networks' capacities that they cannot provide any guarantee beyond dialup speeds unless people take turns. Rather than admit this, they try to assign blame to people who foolishly think that "Up to 20Mbps!!!" means "up to 20Mbps" when in fact the ISPs want it to mean "up to 20Mbps in occasional short bursts, and only for the things we think you should be doing." I am not asking for commercial-grade service. I am asking that my neighbors be able to stream videos while I am seeding Debian torrents. Nobody expects some kind of Internet-connection-utopia, but it is not wrong or unreasonable to expect to be allowed to use my Internet connection as I wish, particularly when I am paying more and receiving less than my overseas friends.
    - nemothekid 13y ago
      Following the thread here, I think what you are asking for is unreasonable given the current infrastructure or massively unpopular. In the current environment what you are asking for is completely possible. Comcast will give you your speeds, but if they see you are seeding your debian torrents for too long, they will throttle your connection. Now they could advertise this, but we know how unpopular connection throttling is. However in a way, a connection throttle is your minimum service guarantee - your speed will never go below the throttle. Now I don't know anything about laying internet pipe, but lets say we gave everyone minimum service guarantees, how much do you think that would cost, and how much would you be willing to pay for a given speed? It may be completely possible that Comcast is fine with your seeding as long as you limit your speed to percentage of that number. This doesn't really refute your point, but given these two constraints its easy to see why ISPs may choose to go the "up to XMbps" route rather than the "minimum allowed route." Would it really change anything for you if you found out that your minimum service guarantee was 768kbps at your current price point?
      - 13y ago
rch 13y ago
I had always assumed the advertised speeds were likely (according to an unregulated definition), but not guaranteed. Even if the ISP gave me an SLA (maybe they did?), they couldn't make promises regarding the performance of any external network anyway. Maybe they should be required to report a sharing ratio in addition to bandwidth and latency within the ISP's own network. Any thoughts on how that would look, or what formula might make sense?
betterunix 13y ago
How about this: for $50/mo you get a guarantee of at least 1Mbps of continuous throughput (or at least a best effort at that), with no restriction on your usage beyond that? Why does it need to be black or white? Why not just dynamically adjust the throughput for "heavy users" so that nobody sees speeds below some level regardless of how others are utilizing the network? Oh, wait, these connections are so grossly oversold that the only such guarantee that could be made would be on the order of dialup speeds. Why should we feel pity for ISPs that create such a situation, when they are charging us more and providing us with less than what people pay and enjoy in other countries?
- wmf 13y ago
  That would be fine except for path dependence. You're talking about taking essentially the same service but making it sound much worse than it currently sounds.
- maxsilver 13y ago
  For what it's worth, this is exactly how we're planning to handle shared connections. Our typical "small office" connection is advertised as "60x60 bursting on top of a dedicated T1 connection". Which comes out to most people getting around 50x50 about 85% of the time, but always having a dedicated 1.5mbps waiting for you (so it can never drop below that speed, even if every subscriber maxed out their line at the same time). We also do 'dynamically adjust the throughput for heavy users'. The problem is the heavy users are typically us, the folks on Hacker News who complain when their torrent seeds get slowed down. These are the users who complain about internet being 'oversold' when in reality, they alone account for 80% of their entire neighborhoods backhaul costs. - - - I encourage you, if you feel ISP's connections are so oversold, please try to start your own ISP. I'd love to offer everyone awesome dedicated connections, and I'll be your best friend if you can show me a way to do things cheaper :) But I suspect you'll find out that it's not exactly the easiest business in the world to run, especially if your bootstrapping it.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    You are bringing transparency to your pricing. That is huge. What HN get annoyed about is not torrents slowing down. But torrents being slowed down for arbitrary reasons. We know that a person's email and voice calls are more important than getting a Debian distro 4 seconds earlier. QoS shaping does not violate network neutrality the way I understand it.

parfe 13y ago

In the same way that Olive Garden falsely advertises Unlimited Soup Salad and Bread Sticks when they prevent you from stocking your food truck with their "unlimited" items.

lotu 13y ago
That's brilliant I will have to reuse this line.

jlgreco 13y ago

Imagine if cars were sold this way: "Unlimited high-speed Italian sports-car, leases starting at only $250/mo! <ultra-fine-print>By the way, we're also giving keys to your neighbors, and if you drive the car too often we're going to deactivate your copy of the keys</ultra-fine-print>"

dasil003 13y ago
Of course comparing apples to oranges leads to absurdities; not all things have the same attributes as all other things.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  How about this: if I rent a car for one day, and the rental describes itself as "unlimited mileage", I expect to be able to use it for 24 hours straight. If I get fined for using it for the full 24 hours because that puts wear and tear on the car that the car rental business did not anticipate, then I am going to accuse them of false advertising. I don't care if everybody doing that would ruin their business; if they don't want me to use as many miles as I please during the rental period, then they shouldn't call it "unlimited". "We only offered it to you at that rate because we counted on you not actually using it that much" doesn't fly with me. Seriously, Hertz offers unlimited miles on most of their rentals. Do you think they would get pissed if I put 1500 miles on one of their cars next Saturday? No, I doubt it, even though if everybody did that their car would be on it's last legs in mere months. That is exactly the sort of thing that ISPs get bitchy over though. I don't think this is apples and oranges in the slightest.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    That's a much better analogy, yes.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    They work on the basis the almost nobody will rent a car and drive it for 24 hours straight unless you are planning to use it for a le-mans style event. They will have clauses in the rental agreement that prevent you from using it to enter a le-mans style event.

lambda 13y ago

I'm not sure what would be preferable. They could sell you metered bandwidth; but everyone always complains about metered bandwidth, and no one wants to accidentally have their 14 year old nephew who comes to visit for a week blow out your caps and cost you tons of money because they left Bittorrent seeding a bunch of popular movies. They could just sell you lower bitrates. But then everyone would suffer, as they wouldn't get the short bursts of quick bandwidth they need to browse the web or download files. Or they could do what they're doing, which is sell under separate residential and business plans. The residential plans are sold under the assumption that you'll be using them for ordinary personal use by you and your family, and that you're not going to build a data center in your basement and start reselling bandwidth to people colocating servers in your basement. "Business" and "residential" have fairly well established meanings. There are already plenty of zoning laws that make business vs. residential, or residential vs. commercial vs. industrial distinctions. Selling a residential plan that includes in its terms of service "you may not use this for commercial purposes" is not unreasonable. Now, I do object to residential plans that unilaterally block ports without recourse, or disallow any running of "servers", as there are lots of valid reasons why someone would run a server for personal, as opposed to commercial, purposes. But I can't find a good way to allow everyone to share a larger pool of bandwidth at a lower price for home use, without allowing some people to take advantage of it for profit, without making the business/residential distinction. And sure, there will always be grey areas. What if you work remotely? What about personal uses that are abusive? These are things that need to be dealt with on a case by case basis, or spelled out clearly in the ToS. You can't really include the entire complexity of the ToS in a single ad, so I'm not sure you can claim false advertising just because there are a few terms in the ToS which weren't unambiguously stated in any "advertising" about the service.

betterunix 13y ago
Really the only difference between "residential" and "commercial" plans should be service guarantees. I do not expect Comcast's residential cable service to have any particular guarantee of service; if I had a commercial contract, I would certainly demand some sort of guarantee about available bandwidth and uptime. That is what we have now, more or less. To put it another way, suppose nobody gets any service guarantee with their residential connection. Why should it be acceptable to say, "How dare you maximize your use of this, when it reduces availability for everyone else?!?" Nobody gets a guarantee of service at all. Now, if we do get guarantees about our minimum service level, then there is an easy solution, which is to just reduce throughput for "heavy users" to the point where everyone else is getting their minimum guaranteed service. That would not be so bad at all: minimum service guarantees rather than maximum service limits. Of course, once you start making guarantees like that, people start expecting you to follow through and your ability to grossly oversell your network's capacity is constrained (what a tragedy).

lolwutf 13y ago

How does no one understand that what he's saying is that the product regular ISPs market is 'internet w/ fine print (i.e. no servers, etc)', versus uncapped, open 20x20mb line, without fine print? The point is exactly that everything advertised by Comcast comes with an asterisk and fine print which you must agree to, to use their service (making it not false advertising).

judk 13y ago
Comcast advertising doesn't doesn't include Comcast contracts.
- lolwutf 13y ago
  But they include a little line that says 'terms and conditions may apply', or similar.