DreamlandLividity comments on T-Mobile illegally imposed 50GB cap on low-income home Internet plan, NY says: Law requires 25Mbps home Internet. T-Mobile lowers speed to 600Kbps after 50GB cap.

[–] DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago* (6 children)

There are good reasons to use bits for engineers, but residential internet consumers are not engineers. In no other context do you market incomprehensible engineering details, just here because higher number is better marketing. Almost everyone I know is confused why the speeds they pay for don't match the speed of downloads in Chrome. Marketing in bits is anti-consumer, since average consumer does not understand what actual download speed they will get when buying.

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[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world -2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (5 children)

Marketing in bits is anti-consumer, since average consumer does not understand what actual download speed they will get when buying.

It’s not anti-consumer to advertise a product’s capabilities in the most accurate way possible. When you pay for internet bandwidth you’re not paying for download speed, you’re paying for a transmission rate. Advertising internet plans based on the speeds you get in Chrome would not be possible and therefore any attempt to do so would be deceptive to the customer.

Almost everyone I know is confused why the speeds they pay for don't match the speed of downloads in Chrome

The Internet bandwidth they pay for will never match the speed of downloads in Chrome, even if you convert bits to bytes.

What you’re missing here is that you want the number you pay for from your ISP and the number you can measure downloading a file at to match. But they never will, because they’re two completely different concepts. One of those number is a constituent part of the other number. They’re not interchangeable.

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[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 point 1 hour ago (1 child)

Why wouldn't it be possible? Convert Mbit/s to a reasonable real-world mb/s estimation for download/upload to a reasonably close location, with some losses built into the estimate.

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[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 point 1 hour ago*

You’re asking why it’s not possible, and then explained a work around that would be needed because it’s not possible.

What you’re suggesting is that instead of selling a service to you based on a quantifiable number based on things within their control that you can reasonably hold them accountable for, they should sell their service to you based on a series of educated guesses about what you could potentially get based on a number of factors entirely outside of their control.

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[–] DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 0 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

You can give an accurate enough estimate. Yes, you may have to make some assumptions on protocol and server. And yes, you will be a few percent off. But so what? It is much more informative to the average consumer than transmission rate. In the first place, transmission rate is also a meaningless metric without information on overprovisioning, latencies, etc. Except instead of an understandable but slightly inaccurate download speed estimate, you have one engineering parameter that is unhelpful to an engineer anyway without more information as well as not understandable to the average consumer.

PS: I am not saying I can't include engineering parameters, but it shouldn't be the main marketing number.

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[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 point 1 hour ago* (last edited 54 minutes ago) (1 child)

Accurate enough for who? It wouldn’t be accurate enough for me. And it certainly wouldn’t be accurate enough for the consumer who you described as expecting that estimate to match reality. And worst of all, it wouldn’t be enough for any consumer protection agencies or remedies. So many assumptions would have to be made based on factors entirely outside of their control in order to sell to you based on your file download speed. And if you allow them to sell you a product based on assumptions of things outside of their control, then you then have no recourse to hold them accountable. I don’t want companies to sell me a product based on a number offered via a shrug. I want a promised number I can measure against what I’m getting.

Transmission rate is the only metric with any meaning in this context, because the transmission rate is the product they’re selling to you. The overprovisioning and etc is actually accounted for in the transmission rate they’re selling you. Thats why they almost always overprovision your connection based on what you’re paying for.

It’s as if you’re asking for a car dealer to sell you vehicles based on how many how many people you can move between two locations per hour, instead of the number of seats it has and the speed it can go. They would have to start making guesses based on the average waistline of people in your area, the speed limits of the roads in your town, your driving ability, what routes you like to take, etc. that might be sorta handy because you don’t have to do that math yourself now, but it’s not going to be all that accurate to you specifically, and if that number of people is lower than what they estimated, it’s kinda on you because they don’t know if your friends are petite or 600 lbs, etc etc. But if they sell you a car that seats 5 people of normal healthy size and it can go 100mph, and they deliver you something that seats 4 with a top speed of 80, they’re accountable for that.

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[–] DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 1 point 5 minutes ago*

ISPs are not delivering the transmission rate either. They are over-provisioning, unless you have some special business grade contract. You are making convincing sounding excuses, but they are excuses. Completely divorced from reality.

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