Overselling

percepts · 9th April 2008, 10:03 AM

Ha, looks like quite a few ISP's are coming unstuck for overselling bandwidth.

BBC NEWS | Technology | BBC and ISPs clash over iPlayer

TygerTyger · 9th April 2008, 11:38 AM

Well it's not just an overselling problem. But I must say, I think the ASA has been unbelievably lax in taking issue with ISPs who use the word unlimited in their copy. I don't understand why.

aos101 · 9th April 2008, 11:44 AM

All ISPs effectively oversell their bandwidth unless they run with a 1:1 contention ratio (and people don't want to pay for that).

I think it's ridiculous that Tiscali want the BBC to help support their failing business model. As an ISP it is their job to sell bandwidth to the consumer, and if they can't manage that they are failing as an ISP. I don't get why Tiscali have such a problem with this. If the customer uses more bandwidth, charge them more money to reflect the fact it costs them more to provide it. I think the problem must be Tiscali have used the "unlimited" term for so long on their packages, they hate the thought of having to get rid of it.

percepts · 9th April 2008, 12:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aos101

All ISPs effectively oversell their bandwidth unless they run with a 1:1 contention ratio (and people don't want to pay for that).

I think it's ridiculous that Tiscali want the BBC to help support their failing business model. As an ISP it is their job to sell bandwidth to the consumer, and if they can't manage that they are failing as an ISP. I don't get why Tiscali have such a problem with this. If the customer uses more bandwidth, charge them more money to reflect the fact it costs them more to provide it. I think the problem must be Tiscali have used the "unlimited" term for so long on their packages, they hate the thought of having to get rid of it.

Their problem is that they can't get rid of it without losing customers. They could stop selling it to new customers but whose going to sign up with a company that gives unlimited bandwidth to existing customers but not to new customers who are paying the same money. But that's their problem.

pursuit · 9th April 2008, 02:45 PM

i dont see unlimited BB offer is a problem in itself, provided there's a 'fair use applies', which is clearly defined in ts&cs.

galahad · 9th April 2008, 04:34 PM

I have an interesting story to report about "unlimited" space which we were offered by a certain hosting company- obviously I can't name them, let's just say they begin with W.

Basically they offered unlimited space, and when we actually dared to start using it for any major image or video content (okay so there was about 1Gb but they explicitly offered "unlimited") they deleted the content- oh and the site that housed it- without warning, suspended the entire account and wouldn't restore the site or apologise...

Needless to say we're in the process of migrating everything we have with them (thankfully not much) away.

Bizarrely when I spoke to one of their 1st-line support drones, he admitted that "yes it was unlimited" but "we couldn't use it for files".

Go figure!

UH-Matt · 9th April 2008, 09:04 PM

Unlimited space is far far worse than unlimited bandwidth.

At least a provider can buy X commit in bandwidth and know they can readily increase capacity if required to XX.

With space the disks in a server etc are fairly set in stone, nobody has an unlimited space hard disk yet and there is a limit to how many disks can go in a server yada yada..