You didn't really buy 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth. You bought the right to use up to 1 Gbit of throughput so long as you abide by their T&C/AUP in your usage of that throughput.
This bandwidth is oversold. Of course it's oversold. 1000 Mbit of Internet connectivity costs a lot more than you're paying Google for it, never mind the last-mile cost of connecting your home. You can't seriously expect to run a business on a residential connection sold at residential prices, right? Like it or not, this has been the status-quo since the earliest days of broadband in the late 1990s.
Now, that said, Good Guy Google would give every Google Fiber customer a GAE instance on which to run their servers. By doing this, they move the servers to network infrastructure that's actually designed for running servers.
>You didn't really buy 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth.
Which is why they should be legally forbidden from advertising that they are slling 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth.
How hard is that? Don't advertise what you're not selling. When you say "unlimited use 1GB synchronous connection" and that's not what you're selling? That's illegal. It's called false advertising. Sure no one gets nailed for it any more, but that doesn't make it right. Advertise that you are actually selling a "restricted 1GBit synchronous connection with limits on what ports you may listen on, limits on upstream use, limits on what applications you may use on the network", etc.
> Which is why they should be legally forbidden from advertising that they are slling 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth.
They're not advertising that. The closest thing they say on their web page is "no data caps," which doesn't imply that you can use the connection to run any service you please. Besides, I'm willing to bet that they have more detailed terms of service that must be agreed upon before receiving service.
While obviously intended to only be meaningless marketing speech, I'd say that the "endless possibilities" on their main page ought to imply that you can, in fact, run any service you please.
We know they don't mean that, and they know we know they don't mean that, but I don't think we should let companies get away with lies like that just because everybody's used to the lying.
Actually, if you want to interpret "endless possibilities" literally, that still doesn't indicate you can use it however you wish. Sets can be infinite in size without containing everything there is.
Imagine the integers were all the things you could do with the service. Imagine that those odd ones involved hosting a server, while the even ones didn't. The set of even numbers is limitless, even though it excludes all the odd numbers.
So what? If we are going to be pedants about the literal definition of endless then coming up with mathematical analogies is not in the spirit of pedantry. Limitless may be a definition of endless but it is not the only definition.
edit: Wow, down-voted for out pedanting the pedants. That's some cognitive dissonance there.
To me, that means that the total amount transferred is not capped, if that type of transfer is otherwise allowed by the terms of service. Of course, one can interpret that literally and show that it's clearly not true, since you're capped by your maximum transfer speed, but I think in practice the idea is that the ISP will never say "you are transferring too much bandwidth so we are charging more, canceling service, etc."
Many ISPs offer "up to XX Mb/s" with no caps. In the event of unsustainably high use by some customer, that customer might have their maximum speed lowered to ensure the network quality of other customers.
It's impossible to provide unlimited data anyway, because the maximum amount of data per month is bounded by (length of month * permitted data rate)
I've been thinking a lot about starting a fiber ISP in my hometown and this is a big issue that's come up.
I don't believe in restricting what a customer can do with their connection to internet, but I also don't want to someone to consume more resources than they are reasonably paying for.
In my ideal world, I want to sell a connection to the internet that is as fast as I can reasonably deliver. I don't even want to make the distinction between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. I don't want speed to be factor. Just fast.
Is there a better way to phrase the service offering instead of 'unlimited'?
When I read this back to myself, it sounds like I want to have my cake and eat it to. Lots of contradictions in my mind.
The problem most ISP's face is that a very small fraction of users consume a majority of the bandwidth. It doesn't pay to quibble with users over metering, so you generally just cap or disconnect your unprofitable customers.
The only way you could sell flat rate unrestricted internet service is to increase the price and force your most profitable users to subsidize your least profitable users (biting the hand that feeds you). Bandwidth usage based metering would help fix this, but there is an extreme aversion to usage metering among even low usage customers.
From a (former) network engineer's standpoint: people who are upset that they can't keep their $50/month 20Mbps connection at line rate 24/7 make me think of people who want to fill shopping bags at a buffet.
>From a (former) network engineer's standpoint: people who are upset that they can't keep their $50/month 20Mbps connection at line rate 24/7 make me think of people who want to fill shopping bags at a buffet.
Some people have bigger [data] appetites than others. Would you be in favor of a rule against fat people or really wired skinny people? And the shopping bag analogy is rather broken: if you were paying for 24/7 access to a buffet it wouldn't matter if you walked out with extra food to eat yourself.
(I'm ignoring any kind of food/bandwidth resale, I don't object to that being outlawed by the TOS.)
We discuss these limitations as if it were anything other than expecting someone else to subsidize our bandwidth consumption. People who run afoul of personal use restrictions know exactly what they are doing, and that they could never afford the bandwidth legitimately. They lead the charge against metered usage, then act like it's unfair that ISPs court the low usage customers and cut off the people abusing it. If you want fast connections with no caps and no restrictions then pay per MB. If every bit transferred means dollars the ISPs will be happily courting home server users.
A fat person may eat 2-3 times what a normal person does. Not 10,000 times. The analogy is about abusing normal expectations. You are trying to make it fit too tightly. If you really want to extend it to 24/7 access to a buffet it would mean taking up all the plates/silverware so no one else can eat there. Then becoming indignant when asked to leave 'you said it was unlimited!' But I have no desire to play analogy ping pong.
All I want is for the limitations to be upfront. And if there are 'overage' charges they shouldn't be priced orders of magnitude over cost.
Someone that uses a lot of bandwidth isn't doing it to be a jerk. And if they inconvenience others the network is frankly set up badly. Normal users will saturate a connection some of the time, and networks need to handle it. And if a network can handle saturation for one hour without problems, it can handle saturation all the time without problems.
There are three options that make sense (though you don't necessarily want to offer all of them).
- X Mbps guaranteed, unmetered, do whatever you want (including servers). X here is not oversold: you need to have enough bandwidth for everyone to use the bandwidth you've sold them simultaneously.
- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, X TB/month (pay more if you use more), do whatever you want (including servers). Here, the minimum Mbps is the non-oversold level, and the burst takes advantage of available bandwidth that others aren't using. You need the transfer limit here to prevent a small handful of users saturating their ports and crowding out all other users; if they want to do that, they can pay for it.
- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, unmetered, best-effort based on the usage of other customers, ToS-limited to the types of activity that won't continuously saturate all available bandwidth (e.g. no continuous torrents beyond the minimum Mbps, no high-traffic servers). Here, you're not charging for additional bandwidth, but you're also telling people not to run anything that will saturate more than the amount you're guaranteeing them. Your remedy for users violating the ToS is to limit them to only the guaranteed bandwidth, effectively moving them to the first type of connection.
The first two options are standard with business-class Internet connections. The third option is what consumer Internet connections normally offer. You could offer a hybrid of the first and third options, where you can use X Mbps continuously for anything you want, but only burst to the full port speed intermittently.
On the second option you could replace the cap with per-customer fair queueing to end up with a work-conserving system. It's not clear what the resulting performance would be, though.
Some people prefer the term "unmetered" if you don't charge for traffic but there are limits on the service. You can let your network congest and use a fair queueing box so that the congestion will only be borne by the heaviest customers. Alternately you can sell something like 50 Mbps, 125 MB token bucket service which will allow people to burst to 1 Gbps for 1 second.
Your datapipe will be limited in bandwidth. You WILL have to slice pieces off it for your users. For what it's worth, all ISPs here (south-eastern Europe) word it like this:
- Xup/Ydown MBps for connections within the country (i.e. ones for which we can guarantee the infrastructure)
- X2up/Y2down MBps for connections farther away (i.e. subject to more variables)
- If you exceed N simultaneous TCP sessions, we reserve the right to drop some of them when the network is under load.
Basically, see how much you're getting from your provider and in how many pieces you can slice it and how much it will cost to buy fatter pipes when you have more users.
Give mid-bounds for speed - tell the customer their speed is usually this, but might be less under very heavy load (rare) or more when the network has spare capacity. But do sell slower/faster connections. This way you can sell better connections more expensively to people with more money.
Never put limits on how much data a user can down/upload. That is limited by their speed.
Make sure your equipment won't die if someone really does start an http server and posts the link on /. with "an experimental raspberrypi http server that can serve 100k simultaneous connections; do your worst :)".
Basically, I want my connection to have low latency, 99.999% reliability and you want me to pay as much money as I'm comfortable.
I've wanted to do the same with similar thoughts. I wonder if it would be appropriate to say, if the transit pipes get maxed out, the top residential users are the first to get throttled. So, yea run your server max all the time but during peak you're going to be throttled. Hopefully someone techy enough to max out their connection 24/7 would understand they need business class service if they want unlimited 24/7.
Other options and terms: metering, throttling, and grade of service (QoS). You can sell 'unlimited' to everyone, but give the option of service classes. This is basically QoS, but (mis-)using it to give preferential service to high-paying customers. That's also essentially what 'business-class' is, as others are mentioning in this thread.
I would simply charge per megabyte after some cap.
"You pay X/mo up to Y MB; after Y MB you pay Zc/MB." Set Z to be slightly more than what you pay.
I think most people understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Don't promise one; just promise an honest pricing scheme that lets you make reasonable amounts of money and gives your customers what they want.
There's two big problems with that: 1.) Consumers like the amount they pay to be predictable - they will pay more to avoid surprises. Your scheme sets them up for surprise bills. 2.) There is a material cost for every customer who is surprised and then calls your CSRs to complain. That cost can be more than your entire per-customer profit for one (or several) months. (This is also why cell phone companies love to move to flat rate billing where they don't have to argue about bills as much.)
I have a negative gut reaction to meter. I realize it's fair, but it looms over me. Will I go over if I watch this movie? How much will my bill be this month?
That's how all utilities are measured, and it's totally reasonable, I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
I would not buy a metered connection. It might end up costing me less than an unmetered one, but cognitively it weighs more as you said. I want a flat-charge XMBit/s hard limit, which translates to a total theoretical maximum of ZGB/month.
The power costs per GB sent/received are negligible, the money goes towards maintenance of the network and ethernet cable doesn't degrade based on how many bits pass through it. If too many people utilise the network, then just throttle them and start dropping connections from the more aggressive ones.
Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.
Edit: about "that's how all utilities are measured". They aren't. Road tax is flat, but I can drive on the road for as long as I like as fast as the rules permit. Except it's slower when too many people do it at once. I want my internet to be like a road. (disclaimer: maybe road tax isn't flat where you live, but it is in many parts of the world, so please imagine we're talking about them for the purpose of the analogy. you may also need to pay a higher tax to use the highway, but it's still flat. it may also vary per type of vehicle but it's still flat.)
>Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.
I wouldn't. Never interfere with my packets (except dropping when buffers are too full, of course). Throttle me to 1mbps if you need to, but you shouldn't even know how many TCP connections I have open.
I meant in the case when the network is saturated. If I've bought a link that only guarantees N concurrent connections and I'm over that and the link is being saturated, then I would expect to have some of my packets dropped.
I guess we're saying mostly the same thing, just worded differently.
Kind of. But I'm trying to make a point that limits should always be in terms of packets. The ISP should not even know how many connections I have, let alone limit it. It's not like you can't saturate a line with a single connection.
My point was that internet is not the same as those. Generating the packets costs nothing and moving them down the wire costs nothing. Whether your router is passing packets at top capacity or it's staying almost idle, it's consuming the same amount of electricity and the same amount of upkeep. Your wires don't get damaged by the packets.
In the case of electricity (etc.) there's an actual amount of work that goes into each KWh and that's what you pay for. With internet, there's just the upfront cost of connecting a router and paying a sysadmin team to support it; after that, operating it is a flat cost no matter how many packets pass through it.
Unless you count expansion and upgrades. Bandwidth increases up to 1G are relatively cheap then things become crazy expensive fast. And of course this is assuming you can get unmetered bandwidth as an ISP (only available for dark fibre bundle owners - incumbent telcos exclusively).
You have to dig fibers at some point - at a cost of ~$15-100 per meter.
Feel free to join my "unmetered" internet. I've connected my routers via 56k lines to eachother, but we never even throttle a single customer. Of course given the chances of even a single packet ever reaching it's destination are so low you probably shouldn't even bother connecting to the network at all ...
I was thinking similarly. Like electricity, shut the light off when you leave a room, find the right AC setting that isn't too low, etc. I'd hate to move to a state of "close every browser tab I'm not actively using". Perhaps it could be a hidden pricing system that isn't advertised to the public but is available for those who want it.
>Will I go over if I watch this movie? How much will my bill be this month? //
Wouldn't that be solved with a simple ticker giving you the current spend. This way you wouldn't have "overage" charges that suddenly leap up, your spend would match usage, watch one more movie and it will cost you a small fraction extra to what it cost last month when you watched 23 movies, say.
Not all utilities are measured, domestic water is often unmetered FWIW.
It's of course oversold, anything else would be an incredible waste of network capacity.
But I believe ISPs should be forced to publish in detail what their acceptable use" thresholds and limits are, and ban advertising any connection as "unlimited". Otherwise consumers have no way of accurately comparing the offers. "Unlimited but we can ban you for an unknown amount of heavy use" is designed to avoid competition via confusion.
An ISP I used was very clear about it: 100Mbit max speed, but you are throttled to 5Mbit after 3GB of traffic during 4-8pm each night.
Actually if you study network designs that actually allow full duplex X mbps (independant of what X is as soon as you hit realistic numbers of subscribers) you'll quickly see that it's physically impossible to come up with a network design that actually allows any to any connectivity outside of a datacenter.
And internationally, where we are dependant -mostly- on undersea cables, the capacity just isn't there.
This bandwidth is oversold. Of course it's oversold. 1000 Mbit of Internet connectivity costs a lot more than you're paying Google for it, never mind the last-mile cost of connecting your home. You can't seriously expect to run a business on a residential connection sold at residential prices, right? Like it or not, this has been the status-quo since the earliest days of broadband in the late 1990s.
Now, that said, Good Guy Google would give every Google Fiber customer a GAE instance on which to run their servers. By doing this, they move the servers to network infrastructure that's actually designed for running servers.