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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 acciden

by 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).
- lambda 13y ago
  So, let's think back to the analog, circuit-switched telephone network. If you have a telephone line, you generally expect to be able to make a call at any time. But for anyone to be able to make a call at any time across the country, you would need to have one cross-country line for each person on the side with lower number of people (assuming, of course, that you divide the country in half and need to run cross country lines between the two halve; bear with me, this is a bit of a simplified example). Of course, if you built one line for each person, then the vast majority of them would go unused. It would be completely ridiculous to overbuild like this; everyone would be paying for a ton of capacity that's unused. So how about if they build it to comfortably cover 10% more capacity than they've ever had used in the past. This allows for enough headroom for spikes, and when usage starts crossing that line they know that they need to start building out more capacity. But of course, then some disaster strikes, and everyone tries to call their loved ones at once to check in on them. Usage surges to more than 10% higher than their previous high, and they run out of lines. Oops, now they've violated their "minimum service level". So, should they only have sold you long-distance service when they knew that there was less than one line per endpoint? Well, sure, it would have been ridiculously expensive and you wouldn't have bought it to have your own dedicated line the whole way across the country. Now, the considerations in a packet switched network aren't all that much different. You can be more efficient about sharing the same resources because you can even share a single line, with several people sending packets at different times. But if you want to provide some kind of guaranteed minimum service, you need to take whatever you most limited path is, and divide up its cost and bandwidth between all customers who could possibly use it simultaneously. And I guarantee you, that will add up to paying a fortune for a pittance of bandwidth. 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. Because if they do that, people will start leaving that service, saying "it's slow and glitchy, this other service gets much better ratings on SpeedTest.net and all of my friends on this other service say it's more reliable for them", when the reason for that is "this other service" actually has an enforces a ToS against abusive use of the network. Does anybody get a "guarantee of service" to the public roads? Then why should anyone complain if someone else decides to run a private parade on those public roads, blocking everyone else? Or should we all get a "guarantee of service", and then deny anyone the right to have a parade ever? Sometimes, you need to share resources without precise, hard and fast constraints, but instead based on social conventions, definitions of completely egregious behavior, and consequences for that completely egregious behavior.
venomsnake 13y ago
Well metered connection - the problem is the pricing. 10USD per month for contentedness + $1 per terabyte seems like a good deal. And even if my nephew decided to download all the porn of the internet he will run out of space before I run out of money.

by lambda 13y ago

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).

lambda 13y ago
So, let's think back to the analog, circuit-switched telephone network. If you have a telephone line, you generally expect to be able to make a call at any time. But for anyone to be able to make a call at any time across the country, you would need to have one cross-country line for each person on the side with lower number of people (assuming, of course, that you divide the country in half and need to run cross country lines between the two halve; bear with me, this is a bit of a simplified example). Of course, if you built one line for each person, then the vast majority of them would go unused. It would be completely ridiculous to overbuild like this; everyone would be paying for a ton of capacity that's unused. So how about if they build it to comfortably cover 10% more capacity than they've ever had used in the past. This allows for enough headroom for spikes, and when usage starts crossing that line they know that they need to start building out more capacity. But of course, then some disaster strikes, and everyone tries to call their loved ones at once to check in on them. Usage surges to more than 10% higher than their previous high, and they run out of lines. Oops, now they've violated their "minimum service level". So, should they only have sold you long-distance service when they knew that there was less than one line per endpoint? Well, sure, it would have been ridiculously expensive and you wouldn't have bought it to have your own dedicated line the whole way across the country. Now, the considerations in a packet switched network aren't all that much different. You can be more efficient about sharing the same resources because you can even share a single line, with several people sending packets at different times. But if you want to provide some kind of guaranteed minimum service, you need to take whatever you most limited path is, and divide up its cost and bandwidth between all customers who could possibly use it simultaneously. And I guarantee you, that will add up to paying a fortune for a pittance of bandwidth. 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. Because if they do that, people will start leaving that service, saying "it's slow and glitchy, this other service gets much better ratings on SpeedTest.net and all of my friends on this other service say it's more reliable for them", when the reason for that is "this other service" actually has an enforces a ToS against abusive use of the network. Does anybody get a "guarantee of service" to the public roads? Then why should anyone complain if someone else decides to run a private parade on those public roads, blocking everyone else? Or should we all get a "guarantee of service", and then deny anyone the right to have a parade ever? Sometimes, you need to share resources without precise, hard and fast constraints, but instead based on social conventions, definitions of completely egregious behavior, and consequences for that completely egregious behavior.

venomsnake 13y ago

Well metered connection - the problem is the pricing. 10USD per month for contentedness + $1 per terabyte seems like a good deal. And even if my nephew decided to download all the porn of the internet he will run out of space before I run out of money.