Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse.
Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a sustainable way.
> It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses
Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.
And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
US cellular data plans? Where it's throttled after soft cap?
Although I will say it's been nice to have them give more transparency around their actual soft cap numbers.
That’s an example of where unlimited can work (because the limit is a number of hours of degraded service which is quantifiable).
Storage was already a hairy beast with the original setup, and it would be much better if they had defined limits you could at least know about (and pay for).
Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
Google does not have unlimited. I had to pay to increase my storage.
Google Drive reneged on unlimited storage for Education accounts once they realized that universities also contain researchers who need to store huge amounts of data.
Google forced everyone off their deprecated G Suite for Business plan (which had unlimited storage) and onto a Workspace plan.
I had to give up and delete plenty of data because of this. That data was important to me, but not important enough to pay their ransom.
YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
We all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is coming, someday.
YouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.
You can only do it during growth phases or if there’s complimentary products with margin. The story I was told about Office 365 was the when they were using spinning disk, exchange was IOPS-bound, so they had lots of high volume, low iops storage to offer for SharePoint. Google has a similar story, although neither are really unlimited, but approaching unlimited with for large customers.
Once growth slows, churn eats much of the organic growth and you need to spend money on marketing.
Telegram?
>and "unlimited" is required to compete.
And there speaks marketing.
Or they're selling their product to a market where the purchaser doesn't understand how much they would need to pay if they were paying by the gigabyte (or even how to check how much they would need). Telling those people they don't need to worry about that "detail" is a key selling point. Backblaze has a product for people who understand the limitations of their consumer product and don't find them acceptable: B2, which is priced by the gigabyte.
> And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
Doing a bait-and-switch on a percentage of your paying customers, no matter how small the percentage is, may be "viable" for the company, but it's a hostile experience for those users, and companies deserve to be called out for it.
On the other hand, subsidizing high-usage customers with low-usage customers is pretty generous to the high-usage customers, and there's no pricing model that doesn't suck a little.
Pricing tiers suck if your usage needs are at the bottom of a tier, or you need exactly one premium feature but not more. A la carte pricing is always at least a bit steep, since there's no minimum charge/bulk discount (consider a gym or museum's "day pass") so they have to charge you the full one-time costs every time in case that's your only time.
Base cost + extra per usage might be the best overall, but because nobody has solved micro transactions, the usage fees have to be pretty steep too. And frankly, everyone hates being metered - it means you have to think about pricing every time you go to use something.
> Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.
So… Marketing has taken over, just as parent comment said. Got it.
I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of “unlimited” really means. It’s not a shenanigan. It’s just calculated risk. It’s clear to me that they simultaneously intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that they can easily predict and plan for. It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.
> It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.
I understand this, many others do too, the only difference seems to be that we're not willing to play those games. Others are, and that's OK, just giving my point of view which I know is shared by many others who are bit stricter about where we host our backups. Instead of "statistical games" we prefer "upfront limitations", as one example.
The problem is you have to play with them - and sure, maybe they're willing to be the Costco to the unlimited backup's $1.50 hotdog - but for how long? Will their dedication to unlimited and particular price points mean you have to take Pepsi for awhile instead of Coke, or that your polish sausage dog disappears? Wait, where did the analogy go? I'm hungry.
It's a bit safer when you know your playbook - if there was unlimited (as it is now) and unlimited plus (where they backup "cloud storage cached files") and unlimited pro max premier (where they backup entire cloud storages) you'd at least know where you stand, and you'd change "holy shit my important file I though was backed up isn't and now it's gone forever" to "I have to pay $10 a more a month or take on this risk".
In university we had computer labs, I worked in the office that handled all of engineering computing. You paid the fee for engineering school and you got to use the labs. They had printers. We wanted printing to be free. This didn't mean "you get to take reams of blank paper home with you", it meant "you get as much printing as you reasonably need for academic purposes". Nobody cared if you printed your resume, fliers for your book club, or whatever, we weren't sticklers. Honestly we wanted to think about printers as little as possible.
But we'd always have a few people at the end of the semester print 493 blank pages using up all of their print quota they'd "paid for". No sir, you didn't pay for 500 pages of printing a semester, we'd let you print as much as you needed, we just had to put a quota in place to prevent some joker from wallpapering the lecture hall.
It was hard to express what we meant and "unlimited" didn't cut it.
You meant “reasonable,” but you did not apply reason. Situations such as this can be handled with a quota set at something like 150% of median use, but then extended upon a justified request. It can work in a lab where there’s a human touch, but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive.
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Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.
If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.
They mean that they're not going to limit the total amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural limit implied by the maximum rate.
When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.
In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".
They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow.
I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting.
For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests.
Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
> I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow.
Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).
In almost all services this tends to get an asterisk that says "unless your usage interferes with other users" which in itself is poorly defined. But typically means once their system gets closer to its usage limit, you're the first to get booted off the service.
No ISP I've had in my adult life had such conditions, it truly is "Whatever you manage to do with the bandwidth we give you". I've done hundreds of TBs for months without any impact to my bandwidth (transferring ML datasets among other things), and I'm pretty sure a ISP in my country would break some law if they'd limit a typical broadband home connection based on data transfer quotas.
What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your service contract multiplied by the length of the contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap
The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s connection, and your access to that connection is unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some point, and your access isn't cut off - there are no limits on your access.
Of course there are practical limits as you can't make your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc).
Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a endlessly consumable resource, like storage.
Of course. You're always capped by rate. But you're not capped by the cumulative amount (other than as a function of rate and time).
Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering
And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7.
Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
> And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7
I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually make use of that.
Second question would be, how long they would allow you to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the point the person I replied to was making: If you truly make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it is not a faithful offer in the first place.
> Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
Not important here because backblaze only has to match the storage of your single device. Plus some extra versions but one year multiplied by upload speed is also a tractable amount.
Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that.
Residential network access is oversold as everything else.
The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use.
But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time.
Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
Building out for 100% of theoretical capacity makes no sense but you can still easily accommodate the small handful of power users with plenty to spare. Most ISPs will not drop or throttle users trying to get their money's worth if it’s fiber or similar. LTE of course that’s another thing.
That sort of horrible abuse only happens in areas where some provider has strict monopoly, but that’s an aberration and with Starlink’s availability there’s an upper bound nowadays.
It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.
Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.
I've been running RPI-based torrent client 24/7 in several countries and never experienced that. Eats a few TBs per month, not the full line, but pretty decent amount. I guess it really depends on the country.
I'm in the UK with Virgin Media on their 1Gbps package, going through multiple TB a month and I'm yet to be throttled in any way.
Well, multiple TB isn't close to your bandwidth rating. It only takes 2% of your connection in a single direction to hit 6TB a month.
Ha, yes I suppose that's correct.
I’ve used Spectrum and their predecessors since the 90s. Never ran into this, although the upstream speeds are ridiculously slow, and they used to force Netflix traffic to an undersized peer circuit.
I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works.
Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern...
My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him.
A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
> Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US
Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards...
> A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
Data caps are just documenting the reality that ISPs oversubscribe - if they sell a hundred 1Gb/s connections to a neighborhood, it's highly unlikely they're peering that neighborhood onto the Internet at large at 100Gb/s. I don't know what the current standard is, but in the past it's been 10/100 to 1 - so a hundred 1Gb/s connections might be sharing 1-10Gb/s of uplink; and if usage starts to saturate that they need a way of backing off that is "fair" - data caps are one of the ways they inform the customer of such.
I've seen it with my new fiber rollout - every single customer no matter their purchased speed had 1Gb up and down - as more customers came online and usage became higher, they're not limiting anyone, but you get closer to your advertised rate - but my upload is still faster than my download because most of my neighborhood is downloading, few are uploading.
I have 5 Gbps symmetric at home. I and my fiancee both work from home, so our backup fiber connection from another provider is 2 Gbps. We can also both tether to cell phones if necessary. We can get 5G home wireless Internet here, too, and we might ditch our 2 Gbps line in favor of that as a backup. We moved from Texas back home to Illinois last year, and one of the biggest considerations was who had service at what tiers due to remote work. Some of the houses we looked at in the same three-county area in the Chicago suburbs didn’t even have 5G home available (not from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile anyway).
My parents have 5G wireless home as their primary connection, and that was only introduced in their area a couple of years ago. Before that, they could get dial-up, 512 kbps wireless with about a $1000 startup cost, ISDN (although the phone company really didn’t want to sell it to them), Starlink, or HughesNet. The folks across the asphalt road from them had 20 Mbps Ethernet over power lines years ago, and that’s now I think 250 Mbps. It’s a different power company, though, so they aren’t eligible.
Around 80% of the US population lives in large urban areas. The other 20% of the population range from smaller towns to living many kilometers from any town at all. There’s a lot of land in the US.
Here in dense NYC, most apartments I've lived in have but a single ISP available. It's common to hunt for apartments by searching the address on service maps.
I'm pretty sure one landlord was cut in by his ISP, as he skipped town when I tried to ask about getting fiber, and his office locked their door and drew their shades when I went there with a technician on two occasions. The final time, we got there before they opened and the woman ran into the office and slammed the door on us.
Our ISPs conspire to avoid competition (AKA "overbuilding") and so stuff like this just festers. It's truly a shame.