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> “Consider the set of people such that they need more bandwidth than is available in the pre-existing copper/fiber cabeling to the premises." Close. I'm sayin

> “Consider the set of people such that they need more bandwidth than is available in the pre-existing copper/fiber cabeling to the premises." Close. I'm saying 'Considering the set of people that need more bandwidth than is available regardless of the pre-existing infrastructure. It's a subtle difference, but it matters. Your next point is a good example of why : > Here in Austin, we have 8x4 DOCSIS3 to the building. That’s about 340MBit/s down. Pause here, this is a faulty assumption. Yes, your buildings line is capable of 340Mbit/s down. But your line is (probably) never maxed out like that. For a provider to offer you 340Mb dedicated to your building, they'd have to pay for a dedicated 340mb to your building. I don't know the prices in Austin, but in Urban Michigan, just getting a 200x200mb backhaul connection costs roughly about $2,000 to $2,600/month. If there are ten units in your building, to let your building share 200x200 would mean your ISP would have to have a backhaul cost of $200 to $260 per unit, just on backhaul alone! (That doesn't include the cost to have copper in the building, or the cost for the ISP to get that backhaul from their data center to your buildings demark, or the cost to have your traffic routed / shaped nicely, or the cost for a telephone operator to offer you support, ect) I presume your buildings units are residential; if that's true, there's no way your paying $300 or more per unit for home internet, so your ISP likely can't even afford to provide a 200mbit line to your building. They likely have a line capable of 300+, but with service only capable of around 100mbit at the highest. That also assumes you can even get all the units to subscribe to the ISP service. Comcast / Charter / Time Warner / ect can make that assumption because they have a monopoly. But any players smaller than them, can't make that assumption. We might only get 20-50% of the units in a building to switch, which (if we're still delivering 200mb to the building) doubles the per-unit expenses to about $400/month each. Remember, your not just sharing the line, your also sharing the backhaul (the ISP's connection to the internet at large). >This seems absurd to me, to the point of being unbelievable..., connecting an arbitrary business to a fully-connected residential network will always be cheaper than connecting an arbitrary residence to a fully-connected business network. This might in theory be true if you have a government blessed monopoly. (Even then, the margins on business service are much higher and cover the lower margins on residential) But if your ISP is any smaller than Comcast, you probably don't have this. So you won't get every house in a residential area. Which means you'll be paying for a fully-connected residential network, but only collecting revenue on 20-50% of those houses. Which means you'll be paying for lines connected to hundreds of homes which you collect zero revenue on. (Remember, each foot of that network is 33cents, regardless if it's in use, regardless of whether you've subscribed service on it). Businesses subsidize residential use. The degree to which that happens fluctuates wildly (Comcast for instance, can also use high-margin HBO and TV / pay-per-view / other subscriptions to subsidize their residential costs. "Pure ISPs" cant do that). > Can I run an HTTP server? I have no idea. Can I use 2TB a month? No clue. If you don't understand the agreement you signed, call your cable company. They will very clearly tell you "no" and suggest you buy a business class service (which should spell out the extra restrictions you've removed -- or at least, Comcast Business Class does here) > if you think being "clear" and "fair" is standard business practice for ISPs in the United States you need a real reality check. We're arguing two different things here. Your saying "my ISP is evil, they use X, Y, Z to do evil, therefore, X, Y, and Z are evil" I get that. I'm not defending Comcast / AT&T / other shitty ISP's. I'm fully aware that Comcast crazy oversells backhaul in many markets, or is super overzealous on what they allow home users to do. (I live with this reality every day -- Comcast is the only ISP at my home). But those things aren't evil because Comcast / AT&T use them for evil. If Comcast hops into an fast car and hits a bunch of pedistrians, that doesn't make "fast cars" evil. It makes Comcast evil. Bandwidth caps aren't inherently evil, they're a useful way for low-volume users to save cash on their connection. Shared connections aren't inherently evil, they're a useful way for home users to get faster burst speeds that they normally couldn't afford. Does Comcast use those restrictions to do evil things? Absolutely. Does Comcast lie about their restrictions, or purposly mislead folks around them. Certainly. Should ISP's be infinitely more transparent about their pricing and services? Absolutely! (and some already are). Should we abolish these things just because Comcast uses them for evil? Not at all.

drewcrawford 13y ago
> but with service only capable of around 100mbit at the highest. I can tell you from my direct personal knowledge, that my neighbors' and my combined speed through this ISP can exceed 200mbit, and there is another ISP available in this building that can exceed 110mbit. We are getting a third ISP in 2014 that is several orders of magnitude faster, so that will be at least 3 lines to this 10-unit building that have objectively-measured speeds exceeding 100mbit. It is entirely possible that this 200mbit+ backhaul is shared over multiple buildings, but if that is the case, I do not notice. I move on the order of 25GB a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and consulting 2 years of router logs suggests that I have never dropped below 30mbit (e.g., assuming both endpoints are up). That is sufficiently close to the performance of a dedicated line that moving any closer is irrelevant for any application I would ever have. What I am saying is that this shared line is managed very well. And it is reasonable expectation for a user of a shared line that it is managed well. It is a reasonable expectation that the user achieve advertised speeds most of the time, and if this is unachievable, then the ISP should advertise achievable speeds. My ISP is perfectly capable of advertising 200mbit (since it is objectively achievable) but instead they advertise 35mbit. It is true that they do not always achieve 35mbit, but the performance is sufficiently close. For example, it is at this very moment a peak time for a residential area. A speed test suggests I can achieve 33mbit down (94% advertised speed) and 5.5 mbit up (110% advertised speed). This is well within the margin of "close enough" for people who aren't doing high-frequency trading. > So you won't get every house in a residential area. Neither will you get every business in a business area. You have not presented a basis upon which to believe that it is more likely for an ISP in a competitive market to get a business customer than a residential customer. So if we assume the fill rate for a residence is 50%, we should assume a similar fill rate for businesses, and the geometric argument I presented still holds. > If you don't understand the agreement you signed, call your cable company. It's not a matter of me "not understanding" the agreement. It's a matter of it being objectively unclear. The cable company is not the arbiter of what the agreement I signed means. The meaning of the agreement is objectively determined by either a judge or the AAA, the application of contract law in the State of Texas, and a good dictionary. Based on my knowledge of the forgoing, I believe that I could host an extremely high-traffic personal website within the terms of the agreement. Would they like it? No. Will they threaten to cut me off as a customer? Possibly. Is it a violation of the agreement I signed? No. So here we have a situation where the real rules of the road (e.g., they will stop serving me as a customer if I do this) are not in fact the agreement I signed when I signed up for the service, but are arbitrary and unwritten decisions that are subject to the whim of some person at the ISP. I am saying that your claim that most ISPs have clear and fair written rules is objectively false, because there is no rule in my agreement that prevents me from saturating my connection all the time, and yet there are unwritten rules that prevent me from doing so.

drewcrawford 13y ago

> but with service only capable of around 100mbit at the highest. I can tell you from my direct personal knowledge, that my neighbors' and my combined speed through this ISP can exceed 200mbit, and there is another ISP available in this building that can exceed 110mbit. We are getting a third ISP in 2014 that is several orders of magnitude faster, so that will be at least 3 lines to this 10-unit building that have objectively-measured speeds exceeding 100mbit. It is entirely possible that this 200mbit+ backhaul is shared over multiple buildings, but if that is the case, I do not notice. I move on the order of 25GB a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and consulting 2 years of router logs suggests that I have never dropped below 30mbit (e.g., assuming both endpoints are up). That is sufficiently close to the performance of a dedicated line that moving any closer is irrelevant for any application I would ever have. What I am saying is that this shared line is managed very well. And it is reasonable expectation for a user of a shared line that it is managed well. It is a reasonable expectation that the user achieve advertised speeds most of the time, and if this is unachievable, then the ISP should advertise achievable speeds. My ISP is perfectly capable of advertising 200mbit (since it is objectively achievable) but instead they advertise 35mbit. It is true that they do not always achieve 35mbit, but the performance is sufficiently close. For example, it is at this very moment a peak time for a residential area. A speed test suggests I can achieve 33mbit down (94% advertised speed) and 5.5 mbit up (110% advertised speed). This is well within the margin of "close enough" for people who aren't doing high-frequency trading. > So you won't get every house in a residential area. Neither will you get every business in a business area. You have not presented a basis upon which to believe that it is more likely for an ISP in a competitive market to get a business customer than a residential customer. So if we assume the fill rate for a residence is 50%, we should assume a similar fill rate for businesses, and the geometric argument I presented still holds. > If you don't understand the agreement you signed, call your cable company. It's not a matter of me "not understanding" the agreement. It's a matter of it being objectively unclear. The cable company is not the arbiter of what the agreement I signed means. The meaning of the agreement is objectively determined by either a judge or the AAA, the application of contract law in the State of Texas, and a good dictionary. Based on my knowledge of the forgoing, I believe that I could host an extremely high-traffic personal website within the terms of the agreement. Would they like it? No. Will they threaten to cut me off as a customer? Possibly. Is it a violation of the agreement I signed? No. So here we have a situation where the real rules of the road (e.g., they will stop serving me as a customer if I do this) are not in fact the agreement I signed when I signed up for the service, but are arbitrary and unwritten decisions that are subject to the whim of some person at the ISP. I am saying that your claim that most ISPs have clear and fair written rules is objectively false, because there is no rule in my agreement that prevents me from saturating my connection all the time, and yet there are unwritten rules that prevent me from doing so.