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> stop promising things they aren't willing to deliver on. Very few ISPs offer residential Internet access with SLAs that guarantee performance or even availab

• thedufer 12y ago
  That's a good point. I meant promise in the sense that that's how customers often interpret a bandwidth claim - legally, they're making no such promise (otherwise they'd be in a lot of trouble).
• Spooky23 12y ago
  "Best effort" doesn't mean "Here's your dinner, take it or leave it." ISPs have been successfully managing aggregate network bandwidth growth for over twenty years. I work at a place that has transformed it's utilization of the internet via cloud services -- utilization going from 80-120MB/s to multi-gigabit. Adapting to that change was relatively easy and cheap. With the economies of scale that a large Telco has, it's a drop in the bucket.
• army 12y ago
  Right, and the problem is that their version of best effort doesn't involve trying very hard at all, since they have minimal competition in most local markets.
• BWStearns 12y ago
  I've been speed testing my shitty (Time Warner, yay) internet lately and am getting fully 50% of my 15m/s that I pay a whopping $80+/mo (hard to disambiguate between the 'packaged' cost with TV). I once got a Comcast rep to admit that they basically were unconcerned with providing anything which is at least %60 of the level that they advertise. Unless the entire company is both mentally and physically challenged I seriously doubt that this represents a "best effort" class of service. This is go-fuck-yourself service that a dive bar would be embarrassed by.