It’s so weird that that phrasing is even accepted as the norm. It would be unacceptable if a grocery store charges you for ‘up to’ 2 liters of soda, and then tells you to go fuck yourself when they give you only 0.5 liter.
I just checked my agreement, and it says something like this:
Stated Speeds not guaranteed and are affected by many factors. In all cases, actual speed will likely be lower than speed indicated during peak hours.
But the marketing says nothing about “up to” like it does with typical cable and DSL services (we use a small, local ISP), and I’ve honestly never seen my speed go below the advertised limit. Every time I test it (and I’ve tested during peak hours as well), I get pretty much exactly what’s advertised.
That said, the agreement I’m reading is kind of funny:
Random stupid stuff in my agreement
Pinging or other network probing is prohibited.
Yet when I call support, they ask me to do a ping test. I know what they’re intending to say (it’s talking about hacking, such as nmap-ing some remote service), but the wording is awkward.
And this:
You may not use {service} to advertise, solicit, transmit, store, post, display, or otherwise make available obscene or indecent images or other materials.
So I guess they don’t like porn. It goes on to talk about stuff involving minors, but this wording seemed broad.
You may not use the Service to transmit, post… language that encourages bodily harm, destruction of property or harasses another.
I guess I can’t troll.
You may not advertise, transmit, … any software product, product, or service that is designed to… spam, initiation of pinging, flooding, mail bombing, denial of service attacks, and piracy of software.
So I can’t recommend lemmy I guess, since people here like piracy. Oh, and I also can’t tell people how to check their network connection by using ping…
Blah, blah, blah, I’ve probably violated a half-dozen of those provisions. I’m guessing most of them won’t stand up in court, and they’d have a hard time proving anything since everything should be TLS encrypted.
Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn’t seem to care what I do with it.
I’m a developer that likes to mess around with hobby projects, and that tends to look a lot like illegal/stupid stuff. For example, I’ll port scan my cloud services I maintain (explicitly against the rules) to verify it’s configured properly. I’ll create persistent connections to enable automatic deploys from home (again, explicitly against the TOS). I’ll use torrents to download legitimate Linux ISOs (again, against TOS), and I’ll use Tor to mess around with onion sites (again, against TOS). I’m building a P2P app, so there’s a lot of unfamiliar packets flying about.
I’m an enthusiast, but I’m a respectful enthusiast, so I do my shenanigans off peak hours. If I did illegal stuff, I would hide it so the ISP doesn’t find out.
Most consumer internet providers have clauses in their agreements which prohibit things like hosting a website, or serving content. Both of which are things done pretty regularly by hobby level selfhosters.
Now, I’ve never actually heard of an ISP actioning on such clauses, but they are there none the less.
This is BS by the ISP. My ISP advertises they give 140 Mbps, I get 140 and sometimes 150 Mbps. Maybe during peak hours I may get slightly less, like 130. But it’s not supposed to be drastically low, like 80-90.
However, the user must also consider that some issues are beyond the ISP’s control, like how loaded the destination server is.
Very rarely your are paying for 100Mbps. You are paying for “up to” 100Mbps.
It’s so weird that that phrasing is even accepted as the norm. It would be unacceptable if a grocery store charges you for ‘up to’ 2 liters of soda, and then tells you to go fuck yourself when they give you only 0.5 liter.
It is however acceptable at the supermarket when a product says “Made with 100% white meat chicken”
I just checked my agreement, and it says something like this:
But the marketing says nothing about “up to” like it does with typical cable and DSL services (we use a small, local ISP), and I’ve honestly never seen my speed go below the advertised limit. Every time I test it (and I’ve tested during peak hours as well), I get pretty much exactly what’s advertised.
That said, the agreement I’m reading is kind of funny:
Random stupid stuff in my agreement
Yet when I call support, they ask me to do a ping test. I know what they’re intending to say (it’s talking about hacking, such as nmap-ing some remote service), but the wording is awkward.
And this:
So I guess they don’t like porn. It goes on to talk about stuff involving minors, but this wording seemed broad.
I guess I can’t troll.
So I can’t recommend lemmy I guess, since people here like piracy. Oh, and I also can’t tell people how to check their network connection by using
ping…Blah, blah, blah, I’ve probably violated a half-dozen of those provisions. I’m guessing most of them won’t stand up in court, and they’d have a hard time proving anything since everything should be TLS encrypted.
Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn’t seem to care what I do with it.
Found the guy that either does illegal things, or embarrassingly stupid things with his ISP connection.
I do neither.
I’m a developer that likes to mess around with hobby projects, and that tends to look a lot like illegal/stupid stuff. For example, I’ll port scan my cloud services I maintain (explicitly against the rules) to verify it’s configured properly. I’ll create persistent connections to enable automatic deploys from home (again, explicitly against the TOS). I’ll use torrents to download legitimate Linux ISOs (again, against TOS), and I’ll use Tor to mess around with onion sites (again, against TOS). I’m building a P2P app, so there’s a lot of unfamiliar packets flying about.
I’m an enthusiast, but I’m a respectful enthusiast, so I do my shenanigans off peak hours. If I did illegal stuff, I would hide it so the ISP doesn’t find out.
Most consumer internet providers have clauses in their agreements which prohibit things like hosting a website, or serving content. Both of which are things done pretty regularly by hobby level selfhosters.
Now, I’ve never actually heard of an ISP actioning on such clauses, but they are there none the less.
This is BS by the ISP. My ISP advertises they give 140 Mbps, I get 140 and sometimes 150 Mbps. Maybe during peak hours I may get slightly less, like 130. But it’s not supposed to be drastically low, like 80-90.
However, the user must also consider that some issues are beyond the ISP’s control, like how loaded the destination server is.