It's actually very useful in that it correctly tells you what speed you can expect.
If "50 Mbps" is the right way to describe a 200 kbps plan that can do 50 Mbps in bursts, what's the right name for a plan that can do 50 Mbps all the time? Really honest to god 50 Mbps?
Apple does specify two clock speeds when configuring Macs for instance. Battery life is not a good example, since that's normal and expected to vary under load.
It's already been explained to you that the "unlimited" plan at issue was clearly not best-effort after the limit was reached. The throttling that Verizon applied was around-the-clock and resulted in the fire department's device getting a tiny fraction of the speed that personal devices at the same location were getting. The throttling was not happening as a result of congestion, it was an artificial limit on a plan advertised as "unlimited". All theses arguments you're making about best-effort service are irrelevant distractions. A plan that stops being best-effort part way through the billing period cannot be honestly sold as "best-effort" any more than it can be honestly sold as "unlimited".
Short bursts are no longer the normal way for consumers to use bandwidth. Most bandwidth is now used for streaming media. In 2015, it was 70% of American bandwidth at peak hours[1]. It has probably only gone up since then.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/streaming-services-now-ac...
> If they actively apply throttling after a certain amount of data, that is not making a good faith effort to deliver what you promised me
I agree that would be misleading, but who does that? I've never seen a plan that's advertised as e.g. 50 mbps unlimited data that throttles after a certain usage.
> Short bursts are no longer the normal way for consumers to use bandwidth. Most bandwidth is now used for streaming media. In 2015, it was 70% of American bandwidth at peak hours[1]
Measuring it by a proportion of total bandwidth is misleading,[1] because sustained loads will obviously use more bandwidth in the aggregate than bursty loads. But users likely still spend much more wall-clock time doing bursty activities (web browsing, refreshing facebook, twitter, downloading apps tore apps) than streaming. Given that a web page these days is in the 5MB+ range, it still makes sense to optimize networks primarily for bursts.
[1] It's like if you analyzed laptop battery life by looking at the total kilowatt hours used by different tasks. That would overstate the importance of things like gaming, which use more battery life in the aggregate but which users spend less wall-clock time doing than word processing or web browsing.
Please be reasonable and apply some common sense. Colloquial statements are usually not intended to be taken to the most extreme level of literalness possible. It is commonly understood that any form of internet service may occasionally experience brief outages or degradation in service because of circumstances outside of the provider's control. It is not commonly understood that any form of internet service will necessarily involve the provider voluntarily causing that degradation in service.
> I agree that would be misleading, but who does that? I've never seen a plan that's advertised as e.g. 50 mbps unlimited data that throttles after a certain usage.
Verizon has multiple plans with "Unlimited" (some of them with the ridiculous names of "Above Unlimited" and "Beyond Unlimited") in the name that actually have limits once you look at the details. I'm not saying that type of plan is wrong to have, just don't name it something that is a bald-faced lie.
The problem is that there is a well-established distinction between a dedicated circuit, which offers a certain speed "all the time," and best-effort service, which offers "up to 50 mbps" subject to network congestion. To anyone familiar with telecom, it sounded like you were saying that only e.g. 50-mbps dedicated circuits should be advertised as "50 mbps."
I agree with you that if you advertise a 50 mbps best effort service, and also guarantee unlimited data usage, it would be wrong to throttle it after a certain amount of data usage. But to my knowledge, nobody does the combination of both.
> Verizon has multiple plans with "Unlimited" (some of them with the ridiculous names of "Above Unlimited" and "Beyond Unlimited")
Verizon doesn't have any consumer plans that guarantee both an amount of data usage and a specific speed. The plans that specify a certain speed (e.g. FiOS) do not throttle after any amount of data usage. The plans that specify unlimited data usage with throttling after a certain point do not guarantee any particular level of speed. You're taking "unlimited" to mean "without limits in both data rate and data usage," which is one possible, but not the only possible interpretation of the phrase.
Even dedicated circuits do not guarantee a certain speed 100% of the time. They guarantee a certain speed 99.x% of the time specified by an SLA.
> Verizon doesn't have any consumer plans that guarantee both an amount of data usage and a specific speed.
They do. They have multiple plans that specifically say "Unlimited 4G LTE Data"[1]. You might argue that 4G LTE is not technically a measure of speed, but it is certainly understood that way by consumers, so it should not be used in marketing if it is not intended as a measure of speed.
Even if it's hard to exactly quantify a priori what "4G LTE" speed is given that it varies with circumstances, it's pretty easy to show when Verizon isn't trying to deliver as much data as they have capacity for. The fire department did that, by comparing speed on their throttled device side by side with a personal device on the same network.
It is useful to the consumer. It's not useful if you want to sell it.
Likewise, if you can deliver 50 mbps most of the time for the workloads your users will typically see (sucking down a 5MB page then idling for 30-60 seconds), that's the most honest way to market it.