3 ms·

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 usag

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.

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.