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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

Edit: removing an apparently quite inaccurate comment. Apologies.

  > I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate.

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.

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

Do you really not understand?

That would mislead and confuse a lot of consumers. It would suggest that a 5 Mb/s DSL connection with no data limit would be better than a 500 Mb/s cable connection with a 1 TB data limit, when in fact something like 90% of users will not come anywhere near 1 TB of data/month and will be much much much happier on the cable plan.

I would absolutely forward those to my state's public utilities commission.

They made the choice to name themselves after a bunch of dicks.

In the US you could seek recourse via your state Attorney General. You might hope the FCC would care (but they don’t).

The GP already lost 6 days of work… how much would the likely payoff be to make it work their while to continue dealing with that company?

Wasn't worth it, I just wanted internet.

It costs many thousands of dollars to bring a lawsuit in the US, and you will almost certainly lose against a huge corporation with their own legal team. They can simply outspend you until you give up.

I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down. A Google PM got me on a call and asked me if I wanted 20 gigabit for $200 a month the other day. No restrictions, I could run my business off my $70 if I really wanted to.

I don’t know what Cox is going on about, they need to get with the program.

Specifically the fraud is advertising gb service instead of 10mb99. QoS. It's as ridiculously as selling a prius that can do 200mph as little as 0 percent of the time.

They want to advertise their sevrice as meeting the federal broadband speed without having to actually build a network that can support it. That's fraud.

For a thousand dollars of dedicated bandwidth I'd expect more like 10Gbps.

And a residential ISP would still be able to massively overcommit despite such a guarantee.

Of course not, what a bad-faith argument. They're paying for an unlimited shared connection. If a lot of other people are using it, they'll get lower speeds. But if not, they should get the speed commensurate with the package they purchased, for whatever amount of time there's not enough contention to throttle them. If that means they pull 1Gbps for every second of every day of the month, so be it. If not, that's life.

I pay considerably less that that for colocated 1 Gbps, from a Tier 1 provider, which includes rack space, air conditioning, and power.

I have a solid fiber service from a private company but my town is also building out a municipal fiber network. I’m bummed because the latest expansion zone stopped about 100 yards from my house and they won’t be doing the rest of my street until 2027. Like I said, I already have a pretty good service but muni fiber would save me almost $400 a year for the same speeds and reportedly the same or better reliability.

Is agreement negotiation even a thing in B2C nowadays, especially with any larger companies? I thought it’s all non-negotiable take-or-leave.

They will at the least not be able to claim unlimited data as easily since the label is required to differentiate between unlimited and throttled service.

Any more context on this? We've got copper AT&T DSL as our only option, besides Starlink. Have been trying to work with the county, look for grants, etc to present to a local ISP who's mentioned interest.

Absolutely not. And there's too many trees for any satellite service anyways

An actual Google PM called me up the other day trying to upsell me to $200 a month 20 gigabit. Said they’d give me a router but I’m free to hook whatever I want to the fiber, saturate it as much as I want, no worries. They must have a lot of extra bandwidth if this is a service they’re offering in my neighborhood.

Im not sure Google is GPON (or has passive splitters at all). They were very early to deployments, and their plans are always symmetrical (which doesnt make sense for any standard *PON deployment).

> The FTTH offerings from Ziply, Cox, Comcast, Google, ATT, Centurylink etc are all the same "shared media with high oversubscription" design too.

No, they're really not, you can't compare single strand FTTH XGSPON on singlemode fiber (16:1 or 32:1 contention ratio), something that is built on 10G XGSPON tech, to something that is built on bonded RF channels on coax copper. The aggregate capacity per oversubscribed network segment is radically different.

Now, all of these cable operators also ARE building actual FTTH networks in certain areas because they see the writing on the wall for the longevity of how much more they can squeeze out of the copper. So in some very specific places the Comcast 1 Gbps last mile product is functionally equivalent to the local Verizon, or Ziply, or Lumen (Centurylink, now branded as Quantum Fiber) FTTH product.

> This reads as though the cable companies aren’t aware of the limitations of their tech and that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I know, and you know, that the people doing the more serious engineering for DOCSIS based cable last mile segments are well aware of the limitations of the tech. What I was saying is that they are milking every last dollar of ROI out of the existing physical plant because overbuilding your entire network with XGSPON (it would be dumb to do 2.5G PON in 2024/2025) is a very capital intensive endeavour.

The shareholder value and profits of the company are increased in the short term by continuing to do copper as long as possible, even at the cost of thousands of unhappy customers dragging your company's name into the mud.

It's the fundamental business model problem, and executives at big dinosaur coax operator telecoms that have made the decision to do it this way as long as possible, until the coax/oversubcription situation becomes completely untenable in an area, or until a real XGSPON operator (maybe Lumen, or Ziply, or similar) which overlaps with your historical cable tv network rolls out a better product and you have no choice but to spend the money to keep up with the local competition.

You and I also know that no matter how much they mess about with DOCSIS3.1 and channel sizes and different RF configurations, the aggregate capacity of a few strands of fiber (using even the lowest cost and most rudimentary WDM) is much greater than RF over coax. Squeezing 2048/4096QAM RF stuff into coax is polishing the brass doorknobs on the titanic. It's not a viable long term solution!

Coax can certainly handle a short dedicated link. Or you could run an Ethernet cable into the house. Phone wiring I'd doubt the capacity, and wireless would cost the most and work badly.

Like HoAs weren't already annoying. In this future, the ISPs will deputize the HoAs to have roaving bands of enforcers going door to door to encourage considerate bandwidth practices. Eventually, this will be escalated to authorized drone strikes on the offending addresses. So it will behoove you to ensure your neighbors are not borrowing your bandwidth.

You mean, potentially have shareholders and executives get slightly less money? Preposterous! How would they afford their Aspen home or yacht in Monaco?