"Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.
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!
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.
"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.
BTW the FCC recently introduced "nutrition labels" for ISPs. https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
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.
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.
> 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.
They started charging me overage fees. I called them up and asked them to explain why they were charging me overage fees on an unlimited bandwidth account.
Their explanation was that the bandwidth was unlimited in when I could use it, not in how much I could use.
Fortunately for me, there were other providers in the market that I could switch to. So I did.
My ISP lets me use the service all of the days of the month, not just one. His ludicrously low limit is unfathomable.
I gave Cox over $2000 explicitly for unlimited data and still got nastygrams from them for uploading 4TB of my original digital photos to S3 for backup.
It’s effectively illegal to start new ISPs in America, that’s why this shit happens.
It has nothing to do with speed/bandwidth.
Just like "unlimited text" plans don't charge per text message. But there is still a physical limit for how many texts you can send.
Then the cherry on top was they wouldn't even put me back on my old plan because it "wasn't offered any more". So they tried to charge me an extra $15/month for half the speed I was getting before. I switched to a local wireless ISP that ended up being even more expensive for even slower service -- but at least they weren't liars and when I had a problem I could talk directly with the owner if it wasn't sorted (and no data caps).
I won the fiber lottery where I live, and I will never go back to cable (I had a choice). Let's just call the rejected cable choice a "30 Rock episode".
And that same cable provider eventually was called out for advertising a "10G Plan!". Yeah.
Meanwhile my fiber provider advertises options based on symmetric upload/download speeds. And I think this is the key in these days when we send a lot of outbound data with video call and offline backups.
Put in place a rule that only the lowest speed can be advertised by providers.
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?
I don’t know what Cox is going on about, they need to get with the program.
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.
And a residential ISP would still be able to massively overcommit despite such a guarantee.
We truly fucked ourselves by giving these national ISPs so much power. In return, they abuse us, they collude to make sure other ISPs do not compete against each other to justify high prices and low bandwidth, and hire lobbyists to implement/push stupid laws in various states to prevent municipal ISPs (eg, Texas).
Why did you give them so much power? Maybe you should have asked questions, drawn up better agreements.
It's built on a limited number of RF channels in a certain segment that have many modems all going to a single "port" on a DOCSIS CMTS (cablemodem termination system).
There is a great deal of absurdity in their claims to be selling a gigabit service product using coax-based technology, when the oversubscription ratio is INSANE. If you had more than a few customers on a segment trying to actually make use of gigabit speeds at one time (just 2 or 3 people downloading a torrent of a popular linux ISO at 980 Mbps will eat a huge amount of the total aggregate capacity of that coax segment).
Cox and Comcast and RCN and similar operators are squeezing every last dollar possible for the ROI out of legacy copper coaxial last mile stuff. Only in places where the local phone company or another operator is building proper FTTH (GPON/XGSPON) are they starting to overbuild their own network with their own FTTH. Comcast is doing it in the Seattle area, for instance, in areas where the local telco (Ziply or Centurylink) offers a symmetric 1 Gbps product based on single strand FTTH/GPON.
Your average coaxial cable tv last mile operator like Cox is a telecom industry dinosaur.
The article here was published in early 2020 during peak covid19 lockdown but the general technology problem of copper/coaxial last mile stuff from 25+ years ago is exactly the same today.
For GPON that's 2.5 Gbps for downstream and 1.25 Gbps for upstream. So with a 32 split it's the same story of 2-3 people downloading a popular Linux ISO at 980 Mbps still eat up the entire fiber line for all 32 people.
The difference on the fiber, outside the better upload symmetry we already see, is it will be able to scale a lot more in the future. Some places already have 10G PON (which, unlike GPON, is usually actually said speed) such as where ATT offers 2G and 5G symmetric service. The next step will be 25G PON (again, about the actual nominal speed).
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.
The truth is that only some cable companies make these investments - you can look up “fiber node size” for respective performance across different companies. A fiber node being the place where optical is terminated and switched to coax. These have been getting smaller everywhere, but it only makes sense to invest there when the upstream infrastructure can support it. So from a consumer perspective, your “Linux isos” will be slow to download in any case until the upstream network is upgraded and your node is split to offer higher performance.
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!
FCC Map - https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=...
Vice article - https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-north-dakota-has-the-bes...
New America article - https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/united-states-broadba...
While I have not yet run into any caps with my gigabit plan I am painfully aware of how limited the so called "unlimited" gigabit plan is. During COVID it was particularly egregious. I was paying about what Mike was paying except from the hours of 11am to around 9pm my download would be capped at 10Mbps or so and my upload halved from whatever it is to around 2Mbps. Cox didn't have the common courtesy to tell anyone that they were QoSing entire city blocks because their "infrastructure couldn't handle it". I only learned this by isolating the network and running my own tests. After what felt like 30 escalations with their tech support and a large portion of my night they all but confirmed they were doing this to handle the "streaming services". I work from home - this was a major problem. Despite this I was simply upsold yet another super-duper plan rather than given anything I could work with.
I get regular outages with them and run my own tests on the coax. Despite having noise levels that are pretty good for the most part their service still doesn't work right all the time. Despite my insistence calling a tech out their labyrinthine tech support tree all but prevents you from talking to anyone but a moron with a flowchart where all roads lead to "reset the modem" or "upsell hardware" and a hands free phone.
I used to run my own modem as I prefer to control my hardware. When I upgraded to gigabit years ago I was forced to lease a modem from them as prior to this they refused to service my house with third party hardware installed. All problems were always blamed on my modem, or my router, or anything they could point to that wasn't them. Dealing with their technical support or on-call techs was worse than pulling teeth. It was like performing dental surgery with a sledgehammer.
I won't get into what it was like cancelling my cable TV. Yet another mess made more complicated by the same situation. At least it was easy to drop off the set-top boxes at the local store.
I hate the amount of control ISPs have over us with the last-mile laws. Companies like Cox can more-or-less do whatever they want in my town because they're the biggest players with the most pipes. The result is as expected - terrible service, fine print bear traps, and high cost.
Support is challenging when you need it. You usually have to talk to multiple people before your problem is resolved. For example, last time I got a new modem I had to be handed off twice before I got to a level where they could 'reset my registration,' and I definitely got the figurative stink eye over the phone for not renting their modem (which, is probably why it didn't "just work"). They usually try to sell you something like wiring insurance as well, and really like to emphasize the potential cost to you if they feel like they have to roll a truck. Fortunately, I've only had perhaps 3 support engagements (1 truck) in that 15+ years. Otherwise I'd be a lot less satisfied.
I'm hopeful that the various fiber providers 'coming soon to my area' will help with this. AT&T is here but not cheaper - they force you to rent their equipment - and I don't want to be an AT&T customer. At the very least it might stop Cox from raising rates $3-$6 a year.
And it's not like they put you on slow speeds once you expire it, no, they charge you $10 per 50GB (!). Automatically. You cannot opt out.
Oh, and their counter isn't real-time...
Further, having a ton of eyeballs pulling downstream gives Cox a ton of leverage in negotiating settlement-free peering that for instance a pure wholesale carrier would not have. Cox is also a carrier, so the eyeballs are valuable beyond just their subscription fees.
for example, it’s crazy to me that we allowed companies to redefine “unlimited” to mean “limited”.
when people pontificate on how we seem to be heading towards dangerous levels of low trust society—this is a great place to start. few things reach as many people as marketing. we can’t trust so much of what we’re being sold. that’s not good, at all.
I am kidding, Cox is probably their only choice. They better write a letter to apologize as a neighborhood for their bad behavior.
https://www.atr.org/senators-demand-bead-program-accountabil...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/kamala-harris-announces-plan-...
They way HFC (cable internet) works you would have to cap upload speed for everyone on the network, as it uses time multiplexing for uploads.
No different than when they change their speed plans and roll out new tiers.
Just like prop 65 warnings don't help when everything has them.
I have a 2.5 Gbps link which I would never saturate continuously no matter what because I have generic equipment at home (despite self-hosting a lot).
I tried a few times to saturate it and whatever I managed to pull was never slow. This is probably because the ISPs allocate some realistic amount of people to the group of people who use the 10 Gbps provided to that group.
"If your ISP isnt in the business of servicing internet, they should rethink their business model"
https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/cox-called-out...
FTTC would avoid this scenario at least where a heavy user brings down the whole neighborhood.
But perhaps the bandwidth through the last 10 feet of DSL/cable/5G isn't enough to upsell customers to convince them the switch or modem equipment is too big to fit at the curb.
little popups (like viasat did) that say something like "your internet will continue to suck until your neighbor at $address stops torrenting the 100gb h0rse archive"
and then they can get extra fees for "anonymous" as well as "unlimited"...
Can’t tell if this is serious or not. People here are doing basement and house work without any permits, without any gas line indicators, while being filmed. Neighbors are leaving because they fear a gas line puncture will lead to an explosion. The city won’t bother addressing it. Nobody, absolutely nobody gives a single infinitesimal fuck about a pipsqueak neighbor “naming and shaming” them over download limits. Laughable.