I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. 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.
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!
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.
That reminds me of the way JCPenney had a thing where they would do no promotional pricing in a bid to be honest with the consumer about the actual price of their products... and it backfired massively. People assumed that because they didn't have any sales that they weren't the cheapest prices.
In the end, people go for what they perceive to be the cheapest prices, not necessarily the prices that actually are the cheapest.
There's a difference between a data center connection and a home connection. For 99% of home users, moderately oversubscribed gigabit is perfectly fine, and no one would pay the premium (and it's a big premium) for more. Once 1 GB downloads are slow or the connection can't handle 5 HD streams, it's getting into false advertising territory.
> 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.
I don't think any competitor will give you a dedicated gigabit to you for a reasonable price, especially if everyone suddently starts asking for one.
I pay for a Symmetrical gigabit connection, it’s 60 dollars a month. I record speed tests multiple times a day every day and have ever since I got the service last year. They’re growing gang busters too, my entire neighborhood is on Ziply (90% of household converted from what I understand)
Aside from them adjusting some things due to the rapid unexpected uptake, I have gotten full connection speeds for upload and download every day for over a year. Its been uptime of 99.999% (the adjustment period happened over 2 days and they only slowed service to 300/300 temporarily)
It can be done. It won’t be done by Comcast et. al.
I'm also in Oregon, specifically Portland. DMARCs for fiber are largely shared by providers which is why you can have multiple providers in a given area. That way they don't take up extra pole space and the city can pay a single provider to maintain sections of line.
As long as the DMARC isn't saturated then you're only limited by the other lines also going to the DMARC and the collective activity of subscribers upstream of you between you and the central office. That's to say, you are right that it can be done but only insofar as other posters have indicated: last mile providers need to provision higher capacity lines between the DMARC and the central office.
This doesn't prove anything, it just means that when you're doing a speedtest there aren't other users that are also saturating the connection.
Note that this doesn't means that there are exactly 0 users downloading in those moments. Usually there are multiple gigabits dedicated to a group of users, so that multiple users can navigate at 1Gbps without slowing down others, but not all the group at once. How much bandwidth is allocated to how many users can vary though, and some providers might allocate less total bandwidth to more users.
In practice this works out fine most of the time and most users won't notice slowdowns like you do, but if everyone started a speedtest at the same time you will notice it.
Most people should have at least two choices. Their cable company and their phone company. These choices may be comparable in price and service level or wildly divergent depending on your specific location however.
I live in San Francisco, and Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 offering (~1Gbps down / 25Gbps up) is my only useful option. AT&T offers DSL, and MonkeyBrains will give me a microwave link (more or less symmetric, but probably would top out at around 100Mbps), but that's it, aside from the LTE/5G providers.
I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it would be $20k-$30k to run that fiber to my building.
Unfortunately I think my experience is pretty common in the US, though sure, there are plenty of people who can choose between e.g. cable and fiber.
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.
When it first started back in the Before Times, "Unlimited" internet was in contrast to dial-up connections which weren't always on. It's unlimited in time (as long as you're subscribed), not necessarily guaranteed to keep the max speed for the entire time.
That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.
That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.
Yes, and in the 90s that was a truly incredible amount of data, when most of their customers were probably transferring a few tens of megabytes per month at most.
I don't think I even had 18GB of disk space back then.
I don’t think it’s about people doing it at home, but how we don’t really blink an eye when a terrabyte is mentioned. We will even start getting 60TB drives in a few years.
When I ran an ISP or two back in the dialup days, we advertised unlimited, but we didn't mean anything with that word, it was just what every other ISP also used in their marketing, we were just following along. The same is true today with Cellphones and ISP's, they ALL offer "unlimited", but they all have different interpretations of that word. As far as I can tell, none of the employees understand what "unlimited" means either.
Technically what we offered was shared dialup access to a T1 or a T3 upstream. They just looked for the word "unlimited". Customers didn't know what it meant either, except it was "better".
If you were doing anything we thought of as "abusive" we would hang up on you. You could immediately call back in, and we were fine with that.
Normally after the 2nd or 3rd time we caught you being "abusive", we would call you and have a chat: try to figure out what the heck you were doing and why. Most of the time we would just run their data on one of our machines and save the dialup space. They could telnet in and do what they needed doing on occasion. Dialup lines were expensive compared to process space.
Of course we were also one of the few weirdos that had a "community" linux box with the root password in the login banner, so everyone could create their own account and help maintain the community box. It worked really well for several years, until some meanies found it and ruined it. After that we put the root password in /etc/motd, so every logged in user could do root things if needed. That also worked really well for many years.
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.
I believe in those cases even after you pass the throttling limit you can continue to transfer data at however much 3g speeds will get you for the rest of the billing period, and thus they won't cut off your service for using "too much".
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.
That’s why I think this has to come through rules and regs - any individual company can be honest, but it would probably come at the cost of dishonest competitors winning customers.
It has to be regulated because in most of the US ISPs have a de-facto monopoly on the infrastructure; the market has failed to produce more competitors with permits to dig and place fiber for a bunch of reasons.
> 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.
That's true, although the reality is that the capacity is much more limited in many providers local infrastructure than you'd like to think. Those 1000 users will only get 10G at best, and remember that both in Cable and FTTH the spectrum allocation on the local segment is asymmetric.
You have a finite downlink capacity and a finite uplink capacity, users are not just competing for the same time on the wire, they're competing for spectrum. If everyone was on Ethernet to the home then you'd be right, but FTTH and Cable are in physically contended spectrum in the cabinet/cable itself. Proper fibre ethernet costs more per user than FTTH/Cable because each user needs a port on a switch, instead of using TDMA and everyone being on the same wire at the other end.
There's not really any real tension between "you should know their stated rates are bullshit" and "they should accurately describe the service they are willing and able to provide".
One is a stupid way to run a society and the other isn't.
You're never getting 1G 100% of the time, you're getting a target of 1G and statistically if you do a speed test you probably won't be doing that at the same time as everyone else.
A little knowledge can be dangerous, that's not patronising, it's that accurately describing your network topology to all customers is hard and easy to misunderstand. Some segments of the network will be heavily contended, and others will be under utilised. Being heavily contended might be undesirable but it's pragmatically going to happen.
Where it breaks down with customers, is where the segment is over-contended to the point where they consistently can't meet the product description. But that's not a service description issue, it's an investment problem and if it's not being dealt across the board by the provider, then that provider will be crap.
The bigger issue in this case is a lack of effective competition which drives vendors to have a decent quality of service. Being more transparent won't help with an under provisioned network if you have no choice. In markets with poor competition, poor service provision and capacity usually follows.
> I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate.
They typically advertise as "up to" and often hide data limits in small text. This is also common among phone carriers who say "unlimited data" or worse, "unlimited 5G" but then throttle you after you hit a certain data limit.
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.
Autocorrect. But surprisingly you can still understand because the context. Language is crazy like that. Kinda like how when you order "boneless wings" you expect to get chicken with no bones, especially considering there's a common counterpart "wings".
Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.
That said, the classic case of game release can be handled with a bit of P2P if the oversubscription happens late enough to have sufficiently many downloads that can share among themselves without causing congestion for others.
Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.
You and your nearest 400 neighbours plug into a non-blocking 1g port network. Find you can do 1g to your neighbours
But you need a 400g uplink (and remember to account for resilience), so you go into a switch with 40 400g ports, ok, that's 1.6tbit
Scale this up to a small town with 20,000 people and you need 20tbit of backbone to serve your residents with 1G non-blocking, very few will ever use the full 1G
Sharing bandwidth makes perfect sense. If you want uncontended (to where? Local IXP, a major IXP? One on the other side of the world?) then get a business line which gives you uncontended connectivity.
Uncontended to a dense 1U switch, say 24 downstream ports of 100/200 G QSFP. That's uncontended for 2400/4800 customers with their own 1G links.
So about 4~30k people worth, so no, not even up to full city for all but the smallest cities.
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.
I think you're trying to imply that it should be $50 for 1Gbit with that comment, but HE fiber and residential fiber aren't comparable. Apples and oranges.
HE only has to run relatively short cables within a datacenter, which is designed for running those things, while residential fiber has to be run much further through much more hostile terrain.
Residential fiber takes more total land and maintenance and has different customer density per unit laid.
Unless HE also offers residential fiber at that rate, don't think it's comparable.
I am implying dedicated lines do not cost 2 orders of magnitude more. he has POPs and provides connectivity to places other than datacenters. Also if you didn't notice many datacenters are for obvious reasons located in the boonies to begin with.
> [Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Thank you. Luddite tendencies are as deep within humans as the desire to kill is. It is a personification of the death-drive and all self-destructive tendencies within humans.
It's also the tendency towards the "precautionary principal" AKA Nietzschian "last-man" style thinking applied to the world infinitely.
We should root this kind of thinking out aggressively, at least from the academy.
> I have no idea what code is running on a server I can't access.
That's like... the whole point? You have some kind of hardware-based measured boot thing that can provide a cryptographic attestation that the code it's running is the same as the code that's been reviewed by an independent auditor. If the auditor confirms that the data isn't being stored, just processed and thrown away, that's almost as good as on-device compute for 99.999% of users. (On-device compute can also be backdoored, so you have to trust this even in the case that everything is local.)
The presentation was fairly detail-light so I don't know if this is actually what they're doing, but it's nice to see some effort in this direction.
I do like Apple's attempts to make this stuff better for privacy, but a pinky promise not to leak any information is still just that.
Apple has developed some of the strongest anti tampering compute on existence to prevent people from running code they don't want on hardware they produce. However, that protection is pretty useless when it comes to protection from Apple. They have the means to bypass any layer of protection they've built into their hardware.
It all depends on what kind of auditing Apple will allow. If Apple allows anyone to run this stuff on any Mac, with source or at least symbols available, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. If Apple comes up with NDAs and limited access, I won't trust them at all.
TL;DR: It’s not good to exercise too much with no rest. Your body won’t actually be able to repair itself to how you were before the workout, let alone improve at all. Someone’s coach gave them a training plan that was bad and caused this.
For a highly motivated person in their late teens/early twenties, being coached by professionals, and on the path to competing in the Olympics, it may not be so obvious. The transcript is worth a read.
Yeah... hopefully the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips get integrated properly by someone so there's actual competition. Mobile data in my laptop also sounds like it would be pretty nice. Not holding my breath though, Microsoft may still mess it up on the Windows side :(
Lenovo and/or Qualcomm managed to mess things up enough on the Thinkpad x13s that the cellular connectivity was provided by a M.2 card rather than the Snapdragon SoC.
> * Use delimiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input
> * Specify the desired length of the output
You should do this if you ask a human to write something too, given no other context. Splitting things up with delimiters helps humans understand text. The desired length of the output is also very clearly useful information.
> * Ask the model to adopt a persona
This is maybe a bit more of a stretch but if you hired a writer to write for you, you would tell them who you are so they can have some context right? That’s basically what this is.
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
Yea, if a bug has been open without further discussion for 5 years then i would too take for granted that the issue is no longer an issue and close it.
There are two instances I can think of (I've done it myself) where the bug is important but user does not come back to check on the report after 1 or 2 weeks:
1) Trying out different environment and finding things that do not work. Report a bug with reproducible example and don't check it for a while (months or years) since there is important work to be done in working environment.
2) Find a bug and then find the workaround since work can't wait for external fixes. Report a bug with reproducible example, check the status for a few days with no responses and then ignore the bug since there is important work to be done and workaround has been applied.
Now you know one of the reasons why "legacy" code might look messy - it has workarounds for the bugs that may have been fixed...but who has the time to go back and check, change, and test the "fixed" code which may introduce other bugs.
And if not, the bug is probably not important. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At some point, you have to close things. Chances are they were spurious, have been fixed or made irrelevant (maybe the code no longer exists) or nobody cares.
And if someone does care and it's still an issue, you can reopen. It's not as if you are permanently deleting all the information for the rest of time.
At my last job, this was the attitude we eventually took with tickets that were several years old.
If it's still an issue with our internal customer [0], they can reopen the ticket or open a new one. But we've completely rearchitectured our systems since the ticket was first opened, our internal customer has changed leadership and has had considerable staff turnover, and not a single person has brought it up in our biweekly meetings with our internal customer for ages, so we might as well just close it out.
[0] when I say "customer", I'm talking about a department, not a single individual
because 3D printing arbitrary geometry, especially with arbitrary materials is Really Hard
a human has to look at how it's printed- two very similar shapes might take vastly different times to print and require different amounts of support material, etc.
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!