this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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The hardware the company provides unconditionally needs to be able to handle the full advertised bandwidth.
I know bandwidth is oversold. It's overt fraud. "Up to" is horseshit. "Most of the time" is fraud. Excluding documented weather outages, any scenario where a user is not able to reach the speed listed on the ad (that's not a limitation on the other side) for 5 minutes in a month should be fines so high that it will take years of that customer's subscription to earn it back. It's not possible for selling service you can't provide to not be fraudulent.
Over-subscription is literally how the entire internet works. Most devices spend 21 hours doing a whole lot of nothing and 3 hours either doing really quick bursty things like spending 3 seconds loading a page followed by 3 minutes interacting with it or relatively low speed things like streaming 50Mbps. Having a higher speed just means that when you want something to happen it happens quickly and it happens even if you have 12 other devices doing the same thing.
Normal internet is oversubscribed by about 20x and gives most folks 90% of their plan speed at the modem most of the time. Dedicated bandwidth by definition means that you rent enough capacity for them to serve 1Gbps every second of every day even though you will use almost none of it. For reference 1Gbps for a month is about 327 TB of data. Most people use between 0.1-3TB over the course of a month.
Dedicated connections are a lot more expensive to provide and a lot more expensive to contract for. That 1Gbps connection right now costs about $1000 per month. Your requirement would require ISP to sell only much lower connection speeds for at much higher prices. It would in fact actually break the internet as we know it. It's not exactly shocking to imagine that buying 100–1000 times what you need is expensive. A better standard would be to enforce 90% of plan speed 90% of the time measured at the modem with a week to correct if less than acceptable. Some european company actually makes an app to enforce their particular standard and takes the guess work out of measurement. I like the idea.
Also its impossible to guarantee that customers will in fact even reach those speeds over wifi as its a function of the customers actual space, materials used to build the home, what's in the wall, network hardware, AND wireless clients. You only get really fast connectivity over 5/6Gh which is short range (100-200ft), only with quite modern equipment on both sides.
This means that your 2015 $200 modem/router combo with 2018 clients is probably giving you 300Mbps in your living room and 50Mbps upstairs even if the modem itself is getting 1 Gbps. This is just how wifi is. Your ISP isn't going to be responsible for installing a $1000 worth of hardware so you can get plan speed upstairs on your $20 a month service. There are contractors who WILL do that for you for a hefty price. You'll be paying for the $1000 worth of hardware and a professionals time.
No one is expecting ISPs to have the bandwidth to handle every network at once maxing out their bandwidth.
We're expecting enough bandwidth to have enough overhead that they literally never once fail to meet peak demand. Because every single minute they fail to do so should be a mandatory felony count of fraud against every single member of the board.
A felony per minute is an insane standard. You already can get service with a SLA its much more expensive. Sevice with a felony per minute for meeting demand would be the same 1000 per month. Your ideas are so stupid they would end internet service in America.
Anything short of providing what you're advertising 100% of the time is fraud. It's not even theoretically possible to sell more than you're capable of providing while acting in good faith.
Every customer should be entitled to receive exactly what they're advertised. Stop advertising shit you can't offer. There is no possible excuse that makes you not a scumbag.
A perfectly acceptable alternative seizing the assets of every company scamming their customers and making them the publicly owned utility that they're supposed to be.
Inexpensive internet plans are sold with speeds up to $SPEED. This isn't fraud. More expensive plans are available which either provide $SPEED at all times and others which provide an objective target level of service. The fact that people universally prefer inexpensive up to $SPEED plans is not shocking either.
You cannot legally seize these companies and render them public utilities under current law.
I'm aware of how they're attempting to normalize their deception.
"Up to" is always fraud. No gray areas and no exceptions. If you put a speed on an ad, not providing at any point is not acceptable.
You absolutely can take the lines through the exact same eminent domain that was required for them to exist in the first place. You can pay with the fines for ever single customer they falsely advertised to, which doesn't need new laws. Fine print doesn't validate deceptive practices, and the whole point of the big giant numbers is to pretend that's what you're selling them. Or for failing to meet their contractual obligations for all the various other handouts they received for the sole purpose of providing broadband to everyone and didn't bother doing for 100 years.