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this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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You can give an accurate enough estimate. Yes, you may have to make some assumptions on protocol and server. And yes, you will be a few percent off. But so what? It is much more informative to the average consumer than transmission rate. In the first place, transmission rate is also a meaningless metric without information on overprovisioning, latencies, etc. Except instead of an understandable but slightly inaccurate download speed estimate, you have one engineering parameter that is unhelpful to an engineer anyway without more information as well as not understandable to the average consumer.
PS: I am not saying I can't include engineering parameters, but it shouldn't be the main marketing number.
Accurate enough for who? It wouldn’t be accurate enough for me. And it certainly wouldn’t be accurate enough for the consumer who you described as expecting that estimate to match reality. And worst of all, it wouldn’t be enough for any consumer protection agencies or remedies. So many assumptions would have to be made based on factors entirely outside of their control in order to sell to you based on your file download speed. And if you allow them to sell you a product based on assumptions of things outside of their control, then you then have no recourse to hold them accountable. I don’t want companies to sell me a product based on a number offered via a shrug. I want a promised number I can measure against what I’m getting.
Transmission rate is the only metric with any meaning in this context, because the transmission rate is the product they’re selling to you. The overprovisioning and etc is actually accounted for in the transmission rate they’re selling you. Thats why they almost always overprovision your connection based on what you’re paying for.
It’s as if you’re asking for a car dealer to sell you vehicles based on how many how many people you can move between two locations per hour, instead of the number of seats it has and the speed it can go. They would have to start making guesses based on the average waistline of people in your area, the speed limits of the roads in your town, your driving ability, what routes you like to take, etc. that might be sorta handy because you don’t have to do that math yourself now, but it’s not going to be all that accurate to you specifically, and if that number of people is lower than what they estimated, it’s kinda on you because they don’t know if your friends are petite or 600 lbs, etc etc. But if they sell you a car that seats 5 people of normal healthy size and it can go 100mph, and they deliver you something that seats 4 with a top speed of 80, they’re accountable for that.
What are you talking about? Overprovisioning literally means selling more transmission rate than what the upstream lines can accommodate. It is not accounted for. Therefore, you only get your advertised transmission rate if your neighbors are not fully utilizing theirs.
How can it not be accurate enough when it is just a conversion from transmission rate via a formula that converts to bytes and accounts for expected protocol overheads? It's the same number, converted to easily understandable units. If it is not accurate enough, neither is transmission rate.
I’m talking about overprovisioning, where your ISP actually provisions you for more bandwidth than you’re paying for. It is accounted for.
You’re talking over subscription.
Are you asking me how a flat base number derived direct from the source is more accurate than a different number that takes that first number and then adds a bunch of guesswork on top based on a bunch of unknown variables? Well that’s because in your head “expected protocol overheads” must be a simpler and more quantifiable number than it is in real life. For starters, which protocol? Downloads happen over TCP and UDP, both have completely different overhead profiles. What about the protocols above that? How are we proposing the file is being downloaded? Tor? SMB? NFS? HTTP? MLS stream? Which OS is the client? Different operating systems have different TCP window scaling logic. Different devices have different MTU sizes. The Internet service you’re buying can be used for all of them. Are we picking picking one set based on the most common use case? Averaging them all together? Weighting them based on common usage? Uhhh or we could just advertise the product based on the product the ISP is actually selling you, the transmission rate.
Your entire argument here is like being upset at McDonald’s for giving you the nutrient values of their food, like calorie counts and detailed macronutrient breakdowns, because you think instead they should just tell you how full each item will make you.
I really can’t break this down any simpler for you than I already have.
Dude, what is your fixation on the protocol parameters? I said average. Yes, for the purpose of getting the exact speed Chrome downloads shit, it will be off by a few percent. Who cares? The weight of the food you buy is allowed to be off by a few percent. The calories in food are already an approximation based on energy released while burning, not digestion. Every measurement in the world has error bars.
But a number most people can understand is a lot more useful than a slightly more accurate representation of the same number most people don't understand. I am sure you can still find the details in a spec sheet if you feel too smart to use the simple representation and too lazy to convert it back.
Ok, let's say I used the wrong term for the sake of the argument. Point, is (most) ISPs don't guarantee your full ratelimit will be available to you. Which you clearly understood yet did not address.
I mean, wasn't this discussion started by whether bits per second or bytes per second is deceptive or misleading in order to make people think "woah, bigger number means better internet" ?
Also, how is a division or multiplication by a factor of 8 the difference between what most people do or don't understand? It's a primary school mathematical operation. If people cannot understand that, how are they going to understand that different downloads or uploads inside different applications provide them with different (byte-based) values depending on protocol and server performance of whatever service they are using?
It really is the truest and simplest unit to use that the ISP can reasonably guarantee to you, because on the lowest level, whether using fibre or copper, we send bits and not bytes across the wire.