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I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many peopl

I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. The internet is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more. E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like > I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down. Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!

nixosbestos 2y ago
Edit: removing an apparently quite inaccurate comment. Apologies.
- FredFS456 2y ago
  It /is/ how it works with PON based fibre networks. See https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-up-the-bandwidth/ https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-u...
  - ta1243 2y ago
    Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.
    - namibj 2y ago
      That said, the classic case of game release can be handled with a bit of P2P if the oversubscription happens late enough to have sufficiently many downloads that can share among themselves without causing congestion for others. Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.
      - ta1243 2y ago
        Depends on your peer You and your nearest 400 neighbours plug into a non-blocking 1g port network. Find you can do 1g to your neighbours But you need a 400g uplink (and remember to account for resilience), so you go into a switch with 40 400g ports, ok, that's 1.6tbit Scale this up to a small town with 20,000 people and you need 20tbit of backbone to serve your residents with 1G non-blocking, very few will ever use the full 1G Sharing bandwidth makes perfect sense. If you want uncontended (to where? Local IXP, a major IXP? One on the other side of the world?) then get a business line which gives you uncontended connectivity.
        namibj 2y ago
        Uncontended to a dense 1U switch, say 24 downstream ports of 100/200 G QSFP. That's uncontended for 2400/4800 customers with their own 1G links. So about 4~30k people worth, so no, not even up to full city for all but the smallest cities.
throwup238 2y ago
If that’s the case they should market the plan’s throttling upfront. “Unlimited mobile data” comes with very clear fine print that isn’t buried in the TOS about how many gigabytes the customer gets before it drops them to 3g speed.
- userbinator 2y ago
  I believe in those cases even after you pass the throttling limit you can continue to transfer data at however much 3g speeds will get you for the rest of the billing period, and thus they won't cut off your service for using "too much".
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    3G speeds can technically mean as low as 256kbps so it would in fact be literally unlimited since it’s not that much data total even running 24/7.
ahnick 2y ago
It's pretty obvious isn't it? They don't want anyone to understand how the system really works. They should not be allowed to put the words "Unlimited" anywhere in their advertisement. period. It's all deceptive advertising and they should be raked over the coals for it. If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. Cable companies are soul sucking monopolies/duopolies and deserve no quarter.
- nyjah 2y ago
  I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest Competitor services? Starlink aside, I have no options but what I have. I think many people at least in USA are in similar situation.
- internet101010 2y ago
  There usually are no competitors.
  - brewdad 2y ago
    Most people should have at least two choices. Their cable company and their phone company. These choices may be comparable in price and service level or wildly divergent depending on your specific location however.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      I live in San Francisco, and Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 offering (~1Gbps down / 25Gbps up) is my only useful option. AT&T offers DSL, and MonkeyBrains will give me a microwave link (more or less symmetric, but probably would top out at around 100Mbps), but that's it, aside from the LTE/5G providers. I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it would be $20k-$30k to run that fiber to my building. Unfortunately I think my experience is pretty common in the US, though sure, there are plenty of people who can choose between e.g. cable and fiber.
wmf 2y ago
Oversubscription ratios vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Perhaps ISPs could advertise the worst case but that would make their service look worse than it is. And of course no ISP will be the first to disclose. BTW the FCC recently introduced "nutrition labels" for ISPs. https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
- presentation 2y ago
  That’s why I think this has to come through rules and regs - any individual company can be honest, but it would probably come at the cost of dishonest competitors winning customers.
  - mattnewton 2y ago
    It has to be regulated because in most of the US ISPs have a de-facto monopoly on the infrastructure; the market has failed to produce more competitors with permits to dig and place fiber for a bunch of reasons.
userbinator 2y ago
There's two (interrelated) values here --- speed ("flow rate") and volume. "Unlimited data" refers to volume. Gigabit refers to speed. This customer presumably isn't too worried about the speed, but is rightly under the impression that he isn't being charged on volume and can thus use as much as the speed allows.
- SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
  When it first started back in the Before Times, "Unlimited" internet was in contrast to dial-up connections which weren't always on. It's unlimited in time (as long as you're subscribed), not necessarily guaranteed to keep the max speed for the entire time. That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.
    - willcipriano 2y ago
      NetZero and AOL both advertised as unlimited. If you had a extra phone line you could connect and download for as long as you'd like.
      - userbinator 2y ago
        A 56kbps dialup connection saturated 24/7 will get you ~18GB per month.
        pixelatedindex 2y ago
        That was a ton back then! I suppose 300TB/month is a lot too but it doesn’t feel that big anymore
godelski 2y ago
> I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. They typically advertise as "up to" and often hide data limits in small text. This is also common among phone carriers who say "unlimited data" or worse, "unlimited 5G" but then throttle you after you hit a certain data limit. I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to mislead. But it's something to be aware of because they will argue (and frequently some smug person that I guess has a boot fetish) and then blame you for not reading. But I strongly disagree. Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. You can't just hide stuff in legal language. No person has enough time to read all those TOS agreements and even if they did, it's not in normal language that's understandable by the average person. If a contact is fair only if participants are informed and consenting, then I don't think most of these contacts should hold up (they do). But hey, we live in a world where courts have decided that "boneless wings" doing clearly mean "without bones". But I for one don't want to live in a country where that's okay. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors with the legal system and I for one don't think enough people are upset. Apathy isn't working.
- verisimi 2y ago
  > Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. Interpret. Words mean things, you know.
  - godelski 2y ago
    Autocorrect. But surprisingly you can still understand because the context. Language is crazy like that. Kinda like how when you order "boneless wings" you expect to get chicken with no bones, especially considering there's a common counterpart "wings".
sqeaky 2y ago
I have paid for two gigabit connections and I sometimes saturate them for days at time. Doesn't cost that much. If I am not to use it like that then it should say clearly on the paperwork that I have data limits, and I don't have any such notifications.
qaq 2y ago
40Gbit from he is 2K so no it's not 1-2 orders of magnitude more
- TheDong 2y ago
  I think you're trying to imply that it should be $50 for 1Gbit with that comment, but HE fiber and residential fiber aren't comparable. Apples and oranges. HE only has to run relatively short cables within a datacenter, which is designed for running those things, while residential fiber has to be run much further through much more hostile terrain. Residential fiber takes more total land and maintenance and has different customer density per unit laid. Unless HE also offers residential fiber at that rate, don't think it's comparable.
  - qaq 2y ago
    I am implying dedicated lines do not cost 2 orders of magnitude more. he has POPs and provides connectivity to places other than datacenters. Also if you didn't notice many datacenters are for obvious reasons located in the boonies to begin with.
trilbyglens 2y ago
Do you really not understand?
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. But that's something different than what Cox is doing. "Unlimited" and over-subscription aren't incompatible. You have a gigabit connection, the 40Gbps uplink is shared between 1000 other people who each have a gigabit connection, the over-subscription rate is 25:1. That's fine as long as the average usage during peak hours is 4% -- which it might very well be. A 4k Netflix stream is 25Mbps, which is 2.5% of a gigabit connection, so you're not above that even if everybody is streaming in 4k at once. You're even fine if everybody is streaming in 4k at once and then on top of that 15 people want to fully max out their connections. And everybody using their connections at once doesn't really happen. At any given time a lot of people will be using zero. Now, there will be times that are outliers. Maybe a popular video game drops without staggering the release and suddenly 30% of the customers are maxing out their connections at once to download an update and the average speed drops from 1000Mbps to 100Mbps for a couple hours. That's why it says "up to", right? That isn't artificially limiting anyone, that's just everyone getting their pro rata share in a time of atypical demand. But on a typical day with an adequately provisioned network you should be able to get the speed on the label, and there is still no reason to be limiting anyone's speeds during times the network isn't over capacity. The issue is they don't want to over-subscribe their network at only the ratio that would allow them to provide the rated speed on a typical day, they want to promise more than they can deliver and deflect blame onto people who are only using what they were promised.
- bobdvb 2y ago
  That's true, although the reality is that the capacity is much more limited in many providers local infrastructure than you'd like to think. Those 1000 users will only get 10G at best, and remember that both in Cable and FTTH the spectrum allocation on the local segment is asymmetric. You have a finite downlink capacity and a finite uplink capacity, users are not just competing for the same time on the wire, they're competing for spectrum. If everyone was on Ethernet to the home then you'd be right, but FTTH and Cable are in physically contended spectrum in the cabinet/cable itself. Proper fibre ethernet costs more per user than FTTH/Cable because each user needs a port on a switch, instead of using TDMA and everyone being on the same wire at the other end.
jpambrun 2y ago
Because it's none of our business as customers. This oversubscription rate is a risk they calibrate on their side. Given the marketing material, if all customers decide to use more bandwidth, it up to the utility to upgrade their infra to match in a timely manner. This is the risk they took and competed on.

nixosbestos 2y ago

Edit: removing an apparently quite inaccurate comment. Apologies.

FredFS456 2y ago
It /is/ how it works with PON based fibre networks. See https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-up-the-bandwidth/ https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-u...
- ta1243 2y ago
  Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.
  - namibj 2y ago
    That said, the classic case of game release can be handled with a bit of P2P if the oversubscription happens late enough to have sufficiently many downloads that can share among themselves without causing congestion for others. Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.
    - ta1243 2y ago
      Depends on your peer You and your nearest 400 neighbours plug into a non-blocking 1g port network. Find you can do 1g to your neighbours But you need a 400g uplink (and remember to account for resilience), so you go into a switch with 40 400g ports, ok, that's 1.6tbit Scale this up to a small town with 20,000 people and you need 20tbit of backbone to serve your residents with 1G non-blocking, very few will ever use the full 1G Sharing bandwidth makes perfect sense. If you want uncontended (to where? Local IXP, a major IXP? One on the other side of the world?) then get a business line which gives you uncontended connectivity.
      - namibj 2y ago
        Uncontended to a dense 1U switch, say 24 downstream ports of 100/200 G QSFP. That's uncontended for 2400/4800 customers with their own 1G links. So about 4~30k people worth, so no, not even up to full city for all but the smallest cities.

throwup238 2y ago

If that’s the case they should market the plan’s throttling upfront. “Unlimited mobile data” comes with very clear fine print that isn’t buried in the TOS about how many gigabytes the customer gets before it drops them to 3g speed.

userbinator 2y ago
I believe in those cases even after you pass the throttling limit you can continue to transfer data at however much 3g speeds will get you for the rest of the billing period, and thus they won't cut off your service for using "too much".
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  3G speeds can technically mean as low as 256kbps so it would in fact be literally unlimited since it’s not that much data total even running 24/7.

ahnick 2y ago

It's pretty obvious isn't it? They don't want anyone to understand how the system really works. They should not be allowed to put the words "Unlimited" anywhere in their advertisement. period. It's all deceptive advertising and they should be raked over the coals for it. If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. Cable companies are soul sucking monopolies/duopolies and deserve no quarter.

nyjah 2y ago
I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest Competitor services? Starlink aside, I have no options but what I have. I think many people at least in USA are in similar situation.
internet101010 2y ago
There usually are no competitors.
- brewdad 2y ago
  Most people should have at least two choices. Their cable company and their phone company. These choices may be comparable in price and service level or wildly divergent depending on your specific location however.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I live in San Francisco, and Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 offering (~1Gbps down / 25Gbps up) is my only useful option. AT&T offers DSL, and MonkeyBrains will give me a microwave link (more or less symmetric, but probably would top out at around 100Mbps), but that's it, aside from the LTE/5G providers. I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it would be $20k-$30k to run that fiber to my building. Unfortunately I think my experience is pretty common in the US, though sure, there are plenty of people who can choose between e.g. cable and fiber.

wmf 2y ago

Oversubscription ratios vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Perhaps ISPs could advertise the worst case but that would make their service look worse than it is. And of course no ISP will be the first to disclose. BTW the FCC recently introduced "nutrition labels" for ISPs. https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels

presentation 2y ago
That’s why I think this has to come through rules and regs - any individual company can be honest, but it would probably come at the cost of dishonest competitors winning customers.
- mattnewton 2y ago
  It has to be regulated because in most of the US ISPs have a de-facto monopoly on the infrastructure; the market has failed to produce more competitors with permits to dig and place fiber for a bunch of reasons.

userbinator 2y ago

There's two (interrelated) values here --- speed ("flow rate") and volume. "Unlimited data" refers to volume. Gigabit refers to speed. This customer presumably isn't too worried about the speed, but is rightly under the impression that he isn't being charged on volume and can thus use as much as the speed allows.

SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
When it first started back in the Before Times, "Unlimited" internet was in contrast to dial-up connections which weren't always on. It's unlimited in time (as long as you're subscribed), not necessarily guaranteed to keep the max speed for the entire time. That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    NetZero and AOL both advertised as unlimited. If you had a extra phone line you could connect and download for as long as you'd like.
    - userbinator 2y ago
      A 56kbps dialup connection saturated 24/7 will get you ~18GB per month.
      - pixelatedindex 2y ago
        That was a ton back then! I suppose 300TB/month is a lot too but it doesn’t feel that big anymore

godelski 2y ago

> I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. They typically advertise as "up to" and often hide data limits in small text. This is also common among phone carriers who say "unlimited data" or worse, "unlimited 5G" but then throttle you after you hit a certain data limit. I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to mislead. But it's something to be aware of because they will argue (and frequently some smug person that I guess has a boot fetish) and then blame you for not reading. But I strongly disagree. Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. You can't just hide stuff in legal language. No person has enough time to read all those TOS agreements and even if they did, it's not in normal language that's understandable by the average person. If a contact is fair only if participants are informed and consenting, then I don't think most of these contacts should hold up (they do). But hey, we live in a world where courts have decided that "boneless wings" doing clearly mean "without bones". But I for one don't want to live in a country where that's okay. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors with the legal system and I for one don't think enough people are upset. Apathy isn't working.

verisimi 2y ago
> Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. Interpret. Words mean things, you know.
- godelski 2y ago
  Autocorrect. But surprisingly you can still understand because the context. Language is crazy like that. Kinda like how when you order "boneless wings" you expect to get chicken with no bones, especially considering there's a common counterpart "wings".

sqeaky 2y ago

I have paid for two gigabit connections and I sometimes saturate them for days at time. Doesn't cost that much. If I am not to use it like that then it should say clearly on the paperwork that I have data limits, and I don't have any such notifications.

qaq 2y ago

40Gbit from he is 2K so no it's not 1-2 orders of magnitude more

TheDong 2y ago
I think you're trying to imply that it should be $50 for 1Gbit with that comment, but HE fiber and residential fiber aren't comparable. Apples and oranges. HE only has to run relatively short cables within a datacenter, which is designed for running those things, while residential fiber has to be run much further through much more hostile terrain. Residential fiber takes more total land and maintenance and has different customer density per unit laid. Unless HE also offers residential fiber at that rate, don't think it's comparable.
- qaq 2y ago
  I am implying dedicated lines do not cost 2 orders of magnitude more. he has POPs and provides connectivity to places other than datacenters. Also if you didn't notice many datacenters are for obvious reasons located in the boonies to begin with.

trilbyglens 2y ago

Do you really not understand?

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. But that's something different than what Cox is doing. "Unlimited" and over-subscription aren't incompatible. You have a gigabit connection, the 40Gbps uplink is shared between 1000 other people who each have a gigabit connection, the over-subscription rate is 25:1. That's fine as long as the average usage during peak hours is 4% -- which it might very well be. A 4k Netflix stream is 25Mbps, which is 2.5% of a gigabit connection, so you're not above that even if everybody is streaming in 4k at once. You're even fine if everybody is streaming in 4k at once and then on top of that 15 people want to fully max out their connections. And everybody using their connections at once doesn't really happen. At any given time a lot of people will be using zero. Now, there will be times that are outliers. Maybe a popular video game drops without staggering the release and suddenly 30% of the customers are maxing out their connections at once to download an update and the average speed drops from 1000Mbps to 100Mbps for a couple hours. That's why it says "up to", right? That isn't artificially limiting anyone, that's just everyone getting their pro rata share in a time of atypical demand. But on a typical day with an adequately provisioned network you should be able to get the speed on the label, and there is still no reason to be limiting anyone's speeds during times the network isn't over capacity. The issue is they don't want to over-subscribe their network at only the ratio that would allow them to provide the rated speed on a typical day, they want to promise more than they can deliver and deflect blame onto people who are only using what they were promised.

bobdvb 2y ago
That's true, although the reality is that the capacity is much more limited in many providers local infrastructure than you'd like to think. Those 1000 users will only get 10G at best, and remember that both in Cable and FTTH the spectrum allocation on the local segment is asymmetric. You have a finite downlink capacity and a finite uplink capacity, users are not just competing for the same time on the wire, they're competing for spectrum. If everyone was on Ethernet to the home then you'd be right, but FTTH and Cable are in physically contended spectrum in the cabinet/cable itself. Proper fibre ethernet costs more per user than FTTH/Cable because each user needs a port on a switch, instead of using TDMA and everyone being on the same wire at the other end.

jpambrun 2y ago

Because it's none of our business as customers. This oversubscription rate is a risk they calibrate on their side. Given the marketing material, if all customers decide to use more bandwidth, it up to the utility to upgrade their infra to match in a timely manner. This is the risk they took and competed on.