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> 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.

by Dylan1680714 hours ago|

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> 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.

by deno14 hours ago|

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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.

by cestith12 hours ago|

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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.

by salawat11 hours ago|

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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!"

by deno11 hours ago|

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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.