Which also, of course, explains why throttling it all the time is not necessary and certainly not optimal.
It is a super straight forward model, but obviously much more expensive to provide. I imagine most users would be happy to pay 1/10 of the cost to get a service that might drop to 10% performance in the worst case, as long as it doesn't happen too frequently.
Because that is not how wireless communication works. E.g. in LTE the user is scheduled both in frequency and time. The operator has a certain frequency spectrum that gives a certain maximum transmission rate (one user getting all frequencies and time).
The scheduling happens based on (amongst other things) signal to noise ratio and priority of each user and their traffic types (voice, data, etc). The goal of the operator is to maximize the overall capacity of the network. This is beneficial for the user as well.
I think the problem in the US is the lack of competition. Not net neutrality issues. In places where this works well you just change operator if you are not happy with your current one. This way the provider is free to experiment with how to run their network and everyone benefits.
I think it's because most NN advocates have a bias that regulation is a good thing, so of course regulating ISPs will be the right way to make the internet better.
However keep in mind that it is regulators who have granted the last mile monopolies to their crony firms and who have helped prevent last mile competition.
Notably one thing the FCC has done of late is to remove restrictions on reconfiguring wires on utility poles that benefitted incumbents. Now under the new rules, an ISP who is adding lines to existing utility poles is authorized to move/modify the equipment already on the pole when doing the installation.
Previously the rules allowed incumbent firms months to schedule a technician to go out to move the equipment around, which caused many delays for new firms trying to compete.
My internet service is pretty bad (XFinity) and Net Neutrality is not the solution, the solution is more ISPs to choose from. I'd much rather have three or four fiber providers to choose from than the (bad) choice between XFinity and AT&T. There are only two choices because of regulators, not in spite of them.
A guaranteed 1 gig circuit is on the order of thousands USD month. An oversubscribed consumer fiber provider like Google Fiber is an order of magnitude cheaper because they can oversubscribe based on consumer traffic models that cover 99% of users.
Also keep in mind that your model isn't really straightforward at all. The ISP can only provide you guarantees within the lines they control. There could be any number of choke points at IXPs that mean the user can't reach site X at their guaranteed rate. So ISPs never even offer hard guarantees on connections to the wider Internet. The most you will be able to buy is dedicated circuits to their core, an IXP, some branch office, etc.
Are you okay with gyms selling more unlimited memberships than the number of machines they have?
Yes, but with a gym, you can switch if you keep seeing overcrowdedness. Not so with an ISP that has a monopoly.
Oversubscribing is a vastly preferable economic solution in this case. Everyone who can pay a small amount gets access to the network, and most of the time they get the bandwidth they need.
Selling a limited number of tickets at a massively increased price, or selling a massive number of tickets each with a dedicated data rate that was almost always idle are both strictly inferior solutions by very wide margins.
That throttling is essential to network management is undisputed. There were even carve outs in the old NN refs for it. The problem is if the “throttling” is not just limited video streams in general during peak times, but actually just limiting just certain services’ streams.
And this is the real problem.
The U.S. should require access-network sharing (at least for fixed-line, mobile seems to limitations here), like most other countries do ...
Then you wouldn't need to over-regulate how ISPs operate ... you could let the market decide.
The latter is a much better solution. You don't seem to appreciate the realities at play here.
The economics of ISPs suck which means ISPs will suck pretty much as a rule.
How in the world would you guarantee that when you might not receive a strong/clear enough signal?
So the offer could look like this: "Up to 50Mbps, with 20Mbps offered at least 50% of the time between 06:00 and 22:00. Limited to 200GB/mo after which the speed is dropped to 1Mbps."
Also throttling and prioritizing types of traffic makes sense when you reach capacity. But if you suddenly find more capacity for someone paying extra by throttling others more or throttle indiscriminately and lift the limits for a price then you are not doing network management, you are are squeezing for money. And this should also be clearly stated when advertised and while doing the throttling.
As a customer paying the requested price I want some SLAs. I want to know what to expect for the service and be compensated for not getting it. I want to know realtime if my traffic or service is being throttled or not when I use it.
But this still suffers from exactly the same problem, just in a statistical way. i.e., what if someone's frequently in a place that has poor signal? How are you going to predict what percentage of the time they'll be in such a situation?
I don't intend to go into the technicalities because they're irrelevant. The point is they should offer a quality level at least "statistically".
Best effort is when your taxi driver tries to take you to the airport as fast as possible but traffic gets in the way and you're late. When he stops in a tunnel and requests more money because he has to drive through his lunch break, or else he'll just inch forward that's not best effort. That's what I said before: squeezing for money.
Reading the article helps: this is not network congestion, this is artificially limiting the speed.
And what is that context? Well, “unlimited” has always meant the opposite of time or usage limited service. I.e. you don’t pay extra for exceeding a certain usage. If you asked me in 1997 what "unlimited" means, I wouldn't have pulled out the dictionary and said "unlimited means 'not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.'" I would've said "that means you don't have to pay extra for AOL after your 20 hours is up." All this supposed confusion seems entirely contrived to me.
As per the links posted above:
> Santa Clara Fire paid Verizon for "unlimited" data but suffered from heavy throttling until the department paid Verizon more.
I'm an engineer so maybe I have a different definition for what an artificial limitation means. If you can pay for it and instantly get it then maybe it was there all along, just artificially limited. Physical limitations don't get removed with when your payment is cleared. And I'm paying for access to a network which has some intrinsic parameters. One of them is the number of towers, not the potential number of towers. I care about the actual physical speed and capacity describing the actual network.
We also seem to have different definitions of what "misleading" means since you obviously believe saying nothing about the limitations or their true nature while selling an untouchable maximum and even a patently false claim of "unlimited" is in line with "not resorting to dictionary definitions and ignoring context and history". Your explanation above is nonsensical. Nothing else gets judged by 1997 standards. VW should get a free pass for pollution in the context of "this was clean in 1997". EVs can claim they have unlimited range. Can't ignore that history. Maybe you also accept to be paid in 1997 dollars so when you charge a customer $80.000 they can just give you $50.000 and call it even. And some day you might even buy a 50TB HDD that will only have 50GB and some lawyer on the internet will tell you that in '97 people were happy with 5GB and you can remove that "physical limitation" with a paid FW upgrade.
The reason "unlimited" takes different meanings in these cases is that some countries are actually lead by lobbyists and when they say "jump" you ask "how high?". Not because you can ever reasonably argue "unlimited" means 20 hours because 1997. The proof? In many civilized countries such claims are illegal.
And I will say it again: actually reading the article would help you make some important distinctions.
Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> saying nothing about the limitations or their true nature while selling an untouchable maximum and even a patently false claim of "unlimited"
> this is not network congestion, this is artificially limiting the speed
> they should offer a quality level at least "statistically"
> I want to know what to expect for the service and be compensated for not getting it. I want to know realtime if my traffic or service is being throttled or not when I use it.
> Informing the users properly is the the least they could do. Today they willingly mislead consumers
Changing the word "unlimited" is just one thing that would help clear up the confusion that you are getting unlimited data. That's one of many things they could be required to at least disclose (if not discontinue completely) in a clearer way especially since these usually involve multi-year contracts based on that misdirection. Basically exactly what's expected or required from most other companies' advertisements.
I honestly thought this would feel like common sense to anybody...
P.S. AT&T or Verizon have the following lines in their offers:
AT&T may temporarily slow data speeds when the network is congested
During times of congestion, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic
This is disingenuous as it implies that they never do it unless the network is congested and that they don't carefully throttle only specific types of traffic from specific sources. That has been proven a false claim repeatedly.
This is fantastically well put.