Industry_Pro
@rr.com
 from:
John Galt 
| reply to AtomicZero
Well, I don't know. My company hasn't used the word "unlimited" since, I think it was about 1997 or so. In the dialup business, we used to advertise "unlimited active use" meaning, you had to be sitting there. We had restrictions against using any software that acted as a keep alive to get around the 10 minute idle timeout. The timeout had to be 10 minutes becuase some email programs default to a 10 minute time between checking mail. So if your timeout is 15, some customers, even thought they did nothing to cause it, will never idle out.
At any rate, people only heard the word "unlimited" and forgot the "active use" part of it. There were often claims that they had nothing on their computer that was causing it to stay online. They would also say that "unlimited" meant you could stay on 24/7.
So we just dropped the word and have never used it again and I have to say, before you sit in judgement of the "evil" marketing types, try working the sales desk when caller after caller after caller would ask if the service was "unlimited" and we would say "No, it's 300 hours." You would just hear a kind of sigh or a silence, and they would say in a disappointed voice, "Oh - I thought it was unlimited. OK thank you!" and hang up. Which actually was OK with us, in our case - we pretty much had as many modems as we were ever going to buy and were out of growth mode pretty early on.
If you wanted to get out there and compete for customers, it would be wise to find a way to use the word "unlimited" - certainly you cannot be the only honest guy and have all your competitors laugh at you because you are telling the truth - and no one with sign up with you as a result.
In the DSL/Broadband/high speed access business I really kind of agree with the user who said, "It's all a scam." Because in a big, huge way, it is indeed all a scam. Huge numbers are mentioned for dowload speed. Yet, the slow upload is ignored in advertising and marketing. The speed is "70 faster than a modem" (roadrunner) only when you are downloading. They advertise, let's say 1.5 megabits for ADSL but in fact, that is not a guaranteed bit rate and all traffic is at most, "best effort". They fail to mention the level to which you are *sharing* that 1.5 megs or 5 megs or what have you. It's not like everyone has a personal fractional T3 from their house to the backbones and router meeting rooms. But you would never know that looking at the advertising that is being put out there. People are shown in the advertising doing all kinds of simultaneous high bandwidth things, when in fact if a high percentage of customers actually did all that, the network would just start to melt down and crawl. They don't mention that part of it.
There is a great deal of confusion in the marketplace as a result. Services with guaranted bit rates and SLA's are not valued in great volume by the market. They just aren't. Most people and even companies want a cheap "best effort" type service, then it's OK most of the time and they get to gripe about something the other percentage when it sucks.
So, in large part I blame the human nature of retail customers for the use of the word "unlimited" - they demand it against all rationality. It's not a rational or reasonable word as they've pointed out many times on BBR. And, I do think it's basically all a scam, but I also think a scam is what people want to hear. I truly think that most customers would rather gripe about their account not being truly "unlimited" than buy an account that advertises that it is not "unlimited." Also it should be pointed out, as the consumers and the FCC and all are apparently giving total encouragement to the market going to ONLY the cable company or ONLY the local Bell - well you can just expect the scams to continue unabated. These people know how to do it, and how to stay just on the edge of illegality. At a minimum they know how to judge risk where they can just pay off any fine that results as a cost of business. And since you will have no choice between ISP's - other than the cable companies and the Bells, there is no hope of anyone opening the marketplace to honest talk about how things really are.
I might add, I believe that the "broadband bill of rights" stuff where they government takes over ISP's and tells them how to run their business - I believe that is going to damage any chance of having any independent ISP's left in a few years. Other than backbone guys, and VPN guys, I mean. No last mile consumer type independents. The people behind this want to force the Bells and Cablecos to carry their VoIP traffic without toll, basically giving them a free ride on the network. But what the idea does is make all ISP's identical - every ISP carries the same exact traffic as every other ISP.
THAT will be the true death-knell for the independents. There will be no way to differentiate yourself from Bell except through pricing. If Bell and the MSO's would start jacking with their networks and making all kinds of channelized, filtered psuedo-'internet' access and disallow competitive VoIP and what have you, (assuming for argument that's even possible) then the independents would have a real selling point for their services. But if every ISP is just like every other ISP, well, it's a race to the basement. |
