If you check the fine print in any ISP advertisement, you find out that none of the speeds they advertise are guaranteed. (This presumably goes away when you buy a QoS contract and the legal right to rake them over coals for having a service that is not boundedly crappy.) My question is, how much can they lie before it actually becomes illegal? Is there actual case law on this? Can they sell a regular dial-up line as a 1 Mbps connection* (*maximum speed, not guaranteed)?
They can advertise theoretical speeds. That is, if you are the only person on the network and everything was ideal you could get “X-speed”.
For home use I have never, ever seen a promise to always provide “X-speed”.
Businesses can and do get such agreements (I work at the CBOT and co-location facilities here guarantee astounding performance). They pay for that though. They pay a LOT for that. For some algo trading firms it is their edge.
If you wanted to you could pay for it too.
They can’t, because a regular dial-up cannot ever be a 1 Mbps connection. They cannot advertise something they could not ever provide. In the UK, every ISP advertises broadband “up to xxx”, with the proviso that actual rates may vary based on the distance between the home and the exchange, home equipment, line quality etc. Also, the regulator can give ISPs a kicking if the overall performance is substantially different from reasonable expectations - so if you can only get close to advertised performance for 10 minutes in the middle of the night due to contention and the rest of the time it would be faster to use semaphore lamps, they are in breach of their obligations. A number of ISPs have been told to adjust their advertising due to setting unrealistic expectations.
Ofcom site on broadband speeds.
Of course, in the US, state laws on “Truth in Advertising” will apply, but the general principles will be that same.
Si
si_blakely, Whack-a-Mole: OK, all that makes sense.