Following the thread here, I think what you are asking for is unreasonable given the current infrastructure or massively unpopular.

In the current environment what you are asking for is completely possible. Comcast will give you your speeds, but if they see you are seeding your debian torrents for too long, they will throttle your connection. Now they could advertise this, but we know how unpopular connection throttling is. However in a way, a connection throttle is your minimum service guarantee - your speed will never go below the throttle.

Now I don't know anything about laying internet pipe, but lets say we gave everyone minimum service guarantees, how much do you think that would cost, and how much would you be willing to pay for a given speed? It may be completely possible that Comcast is fine with your seeding as long as you limit your speed to percentage of that number.

This doesn't really refute your point, but given these two constraints its easy to see why ISPs may choose to go the "up to XMbps" route rather than the "minimum allowed route." Would it really change anything for you if you found out that your minimum service guarantee was 768kbps at your current price point?

"Now I don't know anything about laying internet pipe, but lets say we gave everyone minimum service guarantees, how much do you think that would cost, and how much would you be willing to pay for a given speed? It may be completely possible that Comcast is fine with your seeding as long as you limit your speed to percentage of that number."

I think the cost of providing such a guarantee depends on the guarantee, and therein lies the problem. Right now, I suspect that a typical cable modem connection would only be able to guarantee dialup speeds, due to how massively oversold the bandwidth is. Of course, most people do not seed torrents or run web servers or whatever else on their home connection, and so we never see service so degraded.

"Would it really change anything for you if you found out that your minimum service guarantee was 768kbps at your current price point?"

Sure: I would have a much higher opinion of my ISP. Frankly, I would have a higher opinion if service classes were based on such minimum service levels rather than maximum levels: I would much rather pay for at least 768kbps than at most 20Mbps, particularly if "at least 768kbps" meant "at least 768kbps, and higher throughput when available."

If you want minimum service guarantees, buy a dedicated line. They generally run somewhere around $2500 a month for symmetric 50 Mbps.

If you don't want to pay that much, but you still do want the option of bursting to 50 Mbps (or more), shared bandwidth, like you get from your average residential plan, is your best bet. And I don't know about your experience, but more often than not, I do get the advertised speeds, at least when I'm connecting to servers that can support that sort of bandwidth.

I mean, I agree with you in theory, it would be great to be able to get dedicated symmetric 100 Mbps for $80 a month; but it's just not economically feasible.

And I agree that ISPs discriminating based on type of traffic (torrent vs VOIP vs HTTP, etc) is not good, but this whole thread is about Google changing from "you can't host servers" to "you can host servers but only for non-commercial purposes", which is, I think, a huge improvement and fairly reasonable given that commercial use tends to be very different than residential use and it doesn't make sense to treat them the same way.

It's not that I want a guarantee of 50Mbps. What I really want is for everyone to have a guarantee of, say, 768kbps, so that when I am sitting here seeding Debian torrents I do not have to worry that the old lady living next door will not be able to video chat with her grandchildren. I also find it somewhat difficult to accept the idea that no such guarantee will be made, yet I will still be punished if I reduce the quality of service for my neighbors -- either there is a guarantee, in which case I should be throttled in a way that ensures everyone enjoys at least that service level, or there is no guarantee in which case consuming lots of bandwidth is simply rude (but not something that should be punished).

Frankly, I think this solution is not so bad: I get lower priority as I consume more bandwidth, until I am getting only the minimum throughput for my service class. Thus people can still get their burst speeds, and I can still seed torrents or run a web server or whatever else.

My real point is that I do not see why people should be punished for using their connection continuously. Comcast did not offer me "burst service," they offered me "always on" service with "speeds up to X." I feel little sympathy for an ISP that massively oversold service and then claimed that it is abusive for customers to actually use what they are paying for.

It's actually pretty difficult, technically, to provide you with a minimum guaranteed amount of bandwidth, without simultaneously limiting everyone else.

The problem is that there are many layers in the networking stack which interact in complicated ways. TCP congestion control algorithms and TCP slow start, which happen at the endpoints. Buffering, which happens at pretty much every intermediate hop in the path. And traffic shaping, which can pretty much only drop packets to limit bandwidth used.

If I'm supposed to guarantee you 768kbps, that means that I need to drop any packets from everyone else that exceeds the capacity minus 768kbps. But if I do this for everybody, I'm back to the case where I'm giving everyone a dedicated 768kbps, and they aren't able to share excess bandwidth at all.

Now, you could imagine a scheme in which I don't limit other people's bandwidth until you actually start using some. But then if it's congested when you start your transfer, you won't actually be able to send data at your full 768kbps at first, so TCP congestion control will kick in and limit you to less than that. So when traffic shaping looks at your stream, it sees something less than being used. Should it then limit everyone else such that it guarantees you your full 768kbps? If it does that every time someone uses their connection, then services that trickle just a small amount of data will essentially guarantee that everyone is always being guaranteed their 768kbps by limiting everyone else, and you're back to the "OK, now everyone has a dedicated 768kbps connection that won't go faster".

Or should it limit everyone else based on the bandwidth that you are currently using? Say, when it notices that you are sending 10 kbps, it throttles everyone else down to allow you 15 kbps; then when you increase to sending 15 kbps, it throttles everyone else down to allow you to send 20 kbps, and so on, until you hit your guaranteed bandwidth. Based on the delays it takes for TCP congestion control to ramp up the speed it tries to send while traffic shaping ramps up the amount it's limiting everyone else to give you the bandwidth you need, and the latencies involved (generally tens to low hundreds of milliseconds round trips) it could be a few seconds before you are actually able to get up to your guaranteed bandwidth.

But those first few seconds are generally the most crucial to be delivered quickly. Most people are browsing the web, where there are lots of short page loads. You want those to be able to kick in quickly and then be done with.

Remember, this is an industry where we've only recently come to understand the effects of buffer bloat on performance. Effective quality of service guarantees, other than giving everyone X guaranteed bandwidth by limiting everyone else to the total minus X bandwidth (which, when the network approaches capacity, becomes not much different than giving everyone an X bandwidth dedicated line), is a hard problem.

  My real point is that I do not see why people should be 
  punished for using their connection continuously. Comcast 
  did not offer me "burst service," they offered me "always 
  on" service with "speeds up to X." I feel little sympathy 
  for an ISP that massively oversold service and then claimed 
  that it is abusive for customers to actually use what they 
  are paying for.

Yes. It's always on service (as in, you can be connected and have the service available 100% of the time) and have speeds up to X available. That's what they promised, and that's what they deliver. They also sold this as a "Residential" service. They have other services for commercial and dedicated lines, that they will sell you for greater utilization.

You are not paying for continuous use of X, you are paying for an always available line that gives you speed up to X, for personal residential use.

Restrictions on not using the network abusively or not running commercial services on a home network are not some creepy abusive plot, they are really the best that the networks can do to provide you with affordable, high-speed broadband.

Do I wish that there were more competition? Sure. Do I wish that I got higher speeds for cheaper? Sure. Do I wish that they would be network neutral and not block ports running on my network? Absolutely. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with selling a residential plan that is for residential purposes, and enforcing that, separately from their commercial plan, and separately from their dedicated plan. It's not that difficult; if you want to use it for commercial purposes, use their commercial plan. If you want guaranteed bandwidth, buy a dedicated line.

And remember, the ISPs have not "massively oversold" their services. If you look at the FCC's report (measured in 2011): http://web.archive.org/web/20130511164730/http://transition.... , you'll see several ISPs that actually exceed their advertised bandwidths even during peak hours. Now, some of them are clearly not doing so well by that metric; Century Link is not even hitting 80% off peak, and barely 50% on peak. I would say you have a good case for false advertising there. But if you notice, Comcast and Verizon FiOS manage to exceed their advertised bandwidth, on average, even on peak. This matches pretty well with my experience over the last 5 years or so. I've had both DSL and Cable. DSL routinely underperformed what was sold, which was already paltry. But cable has generally exceeded what was sold, when connecting to servers that could actually handle the load.

So, I'm not sure I'd call that "massively overselling", other than maybe Century Link (and the other DSL providers don't hold up too well either).

Think of it like a buffet. For efficiency and simplicity, it's an all-you-can eat plan; unlike food, people aren't very good at knowing how much they are going to use and so charging based on usage is much more unpopular, making buffet style plans much more populat. So they do "all you can eat". And the rules are, it's all you can eat, and in one sitting; you can't take a bunch with you and then sell it to someone else, nor can you horde food for takeout because "you're going to eat it later". Would you start complaining and railing that the all-you-can eat buffet massively overselling? No. That's all that they're doing with the internet plan; it's just that there are less social conventions and it's easier to accidentally (or deliberately) massively overuse your fair share of bandwidth than it is to massively abuse a buffet, since it all happens automatically.