There's a fundamental disconnect between what the ISPs are saying and what the users are saying.
Being in a fairly rural area, my options are currently limited to Clearwire, which is a pre-wimax service that advertises 1.5MB/sec for around $40/month.
What actually happens is there is something of a "soft cap". Download more than a few GB a day, and you get a phone call threatening to cut you off (and are forced to pay the contract ETF). So what they are actually selling you is rolling capped service, and what you thought you were buying--what they were advertising, in fact--was throughput-based service. And, FYI, this isn't something that's published anywhere, not even the fine print: just an extremely vague AUP that says something like "Don't use the network too much."
This is on top of the packet shaping and interfering with torrent traffic and (somewhat legitimate) issues like transfer power and crosstalk.
The statement that "If they really had to guarantee bandwidth it would cost way too much" is totally beside the point. What's happening is that consumers are being sold a service with advertising that is false and misleading. I might buy that services that advertise "up to" speeds are fair enough for the normal person to figure out, but when you throw packet shaping and soft caps into the mix, "up to" advertising is flat-out lying. It's fraud.
Being in a fairly rural area, my options are currently limited to Clearwire, which is a pre-wimax service that advertises 1.5MB/sec for around $40/month.
What actually happens is there is something of a "soft cap". Download more than a few GB a day, and you get a phone call threatening to cut you off (and are forced to pay the contract ETF). So what they are actually selling you is rolling capped service, and what you thought you were buying--what they were advertising, in fact--was throughput-based service. And, FYI, this isn't something that's published anywhere, not even the fine print: just an extremely vague AUP that says something like "Don't use the network too much."
This is on top of the packet shaping and interfering with torrent traffic and (somewhat legitimate) issues like transfer power and crosstalk.
The statement that "If they really had to guarantee bandwidth it would cost way too much" is totally beside the point. What's happening is that consumers are being sold a service with advertising that is false and misleading. I might buy that services that advertise "up to" speeds are fair enough for the normal person to figure out, but when you throw packet shaping and soft caps into the mix, "up to" advertising is flat-out lying. It's fraud.