>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)
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.