Wireless ISPs don’t advertise any particular speed level. They sell “best effort” service and advertise it that way. What you’re asking for is an SLA (presumably for consumer level prices).

Unlimited - not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.

Best effort is when your taxi driver tries to take you to the airport as fast as possible but traffic gets in the way and you're late. When he stops in a tunnel and requests more money because he has to drive through his lunch break, or else he'll just inch forward that's not best effort. That's what I said before: squeezing for money.

Reading the article helps: this is not network congestion, this is artificially limiting the speed.

Clearly a connection cannot be “unlimited” in reality, because there are many physical limits. That’s why you introduce the idea of “artificial limits,” but what are those? The number of cell towers in an area is also an “artificial” limit—the provider could build more. So even by your reasoning, you can’t take “unlimited” literally, and have to apply context. (And that is, in fact, the relevant legal consideration. Advertising must not be misleading, but that does not mean you resort to dictionary definitions and ignore context and history.)

And what is that context? Well, “unlimited” has always meant the opposite of time or usage limited service. I.e. you don’t pay extra for exceeding a certain usage. If you asked me in 1997 what "unlimited" means, I wouldn't have pulled out the dictionary and said "unlimited means 'not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.'" I would've said "that means you don't have to pay extra for AOL after your 20 hours is up." All this supposed confusion seems entirely contrived to me.

And I'm perfectly OK with being allowed to hit physical limits. Unless you're arguing that 100GB of traffic is a physical limit of the network. Or that a software limiting the speed to something decided by management is also a physical limit. I'd love to see someone try to make that case.

As per the links posted above:

> Santa Clara Fire paid Verizon for "unlimited" data but suffered from heavy throttling until the department paid Verizon more.

I'm an engineer so maybe I have a different definition for what an artificial limitation means. If you can pay for it and instantly get it then maybe it was there all along, just artificially limited. Physical limitations don't get removed with when your payment is cleared. And I'm paying for access to a network which has some intrinsic parameters. One of them is the number of towers, not the potential number of towers. I care about the actual physical speed and capacity describing the actual network.

We also seem to have different definitions of what "misleading" means since you obviously believe saying nothing about the limitations or their true nature while selling an untouchable maximum and even a patently false claim of "unlimited" is in line with "not resorting to dictionary definitions and ignoring context and history". Your explanation above is nonsensical. Nothing else gets judged by 1997 standards. VW should get a free pass for pollution in the context of "this was clean in 1997". EVs can claim they have unlimited range. Can't ignore that history. Maybe you also accept to be paid in 1997 dollars so when you charge a customer $80.000 they can just give you $50.000 and call it even. And some day you might even buy a 50TB HDD that will only have 50GB and some lawyer on the internet will tell you that in '97 people were happy with 5GB and you can remove that "physical limitation" with a paid FW upgrade.

The reason "unlimited" takes different meanings in these cases is that some countries are actually lead by lobbyists and when they say "jump" you ask "how high?". Not because you can ever reasonably argue "unlimited" means 20 hours because 1997. The proof? In many civilized countries such claims are illegal.

And I will say it again: actually reading the article would help you make some important distinctions.

The guidelines ask specifically that you not insinuate the person you're arguing with failed to read the article.

Thank you for the word of advice, I will genuinely try to keep the guidelines in mind for my future comments.

Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

I'm curious what the win condition for this argument is. Obviously, no appeal to semantics is going to alter the business model of a wireless provider. Are you really just after them changing the word "unlimited" to something else?

The guidelines ask specifically to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith - I can assure you what I'm saying is in good faith. "Unlimited" was just one of the misleading things that you can notice without peeking under the hood on the ISP. The throttling of data is another more pervasive one but harder to spot with the naked eye. And the way all this is presented when advertised is misleading at best, flat out lie more realistically. I made several mentions that were ignored in favor of the weaker interpretation of "semantics".

> saying nothing about the limitations or their true nature while selling an untouchable maximum and even a patently false claim of "unlimited"

> this is not network congestion, this is artificially limiting the speed

> they should offer a quality level at least "statistically"

> I want to know what to expect for the service and be compensated for not getting it. I want to know realtime if my traffic or service is being throttled or not when I use it.

> Informing the users properly is the the least they could do. Today they willingly mislead consumers

Changing the word "unlimited" is just one thing that would help clear up the confusion that you are getting unlimited data. That's one of many things they could be required to at least disclose (if not discontinue completely) in a clearer way especially since these usually involve multi-year contracts based on that misdirection. Basically exactly what's expected or required from most other companies' advertisements.

I honestly thought this would feel like common sense to anybody...

P.S. AT&T or Verizon have the following lines in their offers:

AT&T may temporarily slow data speeds when the network is congested

During times of congestion, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic

This is disingenuous as it implies that they never do it unless the network is congested and that they don't carefully throttle only specific types of traffic from specific sources. That has been proven a false claim repeatedly.

I'm not responding to any particular interpretation of your argument. I'm asking an orthogonal question. I tried to fish an answer out of this comment, but couldn't find one. It's a simple question: do you expect a behavior change from the carriers, or a marketing change?

I'm not trying to justify what they're currently doing either. What I'm trying to explain is that making something that legally works the way we all want it to is a different and much tougher problem than merely being able to imagine a world in which the current practices don't exist.

Informing the users properly is the the least they could do. Today they willingly mislead consumers.

I agree with that.