It’s been explained to you multiple times by multiple people but you’re just not grasping it. You fundamentally misunderstand at every single level. There are experts, there are non-expert laymen, and then there’s you, way down at the bottom where the sun can’t reach you.

Ultimately, what you want to happen will never happen, no matter how much you whine and complain, and for very good reason. So there’s really no point wasting your time and energy defending your indefensible position. The adults have made a decision.

I absolutely do not agree with you at all on how useful it is, and I don’t think the usefulness it does have is worth the inaccuracy and confusion you introduce by adding it. If you ran your own ISP, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if you did, but the ISPs today that omit it are absolutely right to. And advertising their services based on it as users are suggesting here would be completely inappropriate and misleading.

And file transfer protocols are anything but standard. They deviate drastically from one to the next. That’s a big part of why it’s not a very useful estimate.

You’re still not quite getting it.

It makes sense why the ISP can most easily measure the network bit speed, rather than the speed or bandwidth of services carried on the network.

There are two big flaws in your logic here. The first is that you’re trying to logically separate the overhead from the desired function itself such as a file download. As if the ISP should account for overhead, and give you a number that represents the ultimate file transfer speed. But both the file transfer speed and the overhead belong to you. You’re trying to get away with not counting the envelopes in the back of the truck because they’re incidental to what you actually want which is the data inside, but the envelopes are still yours, not the ISPs. “The speed or bandwidth of the services carried in the network” includes the overhead.

The second flaw is that you latched into the overhead but forgot the other half of the answer which is that you just have other traffic going on. Just because you’re downloading something from Steam, doesn’t mean you iPhone isn’t also trying to download updates, etc.

It still isn’t a very useful measurement for a layperson customer. In other industries, regulations exist that make it easier for the customer to place the data shown to their real world use of the service.

It’s a very useful measurement for a layperson customer. It tells you exactly what you’re getting, and gives you a number you can use to determine how it affects your personal requirements. Sure you’d have to google it and learn what it means which will take you a few minutes, but if you really care you’ll take the time to do that. Megabits per second are your real world use of the service. There’s nothing abstract in unreal about it. Using your car analogy, does every customer know exactly what a horsepower is? Or what lb-feet of torque is? Are car manufacturers being dishonor at by not renaming these things to something every tom dick and Harry off the street would intuitively understand without so much as a google search? Of course not. And what about air conditioners? Do customers just inherently know what a BTU is, or are they expected to look into what that is and how many they need for their home before they buy one? Nearly everything you buy is like this in some level.

cars are sold with EPA-mandated miles per gallon estimates.

Yes and you’re expected to know how much liquid a gallon is and how far a mile is, then take those numbers and apply it to your personal daily commute and car usage. I don’t know why a customer should be expected to know what those two measurements are but not what their Internet bandwidth is.

You could have ISPs include a tidbit of estimated average file transfer speed, but that literally cannot be the way you advertise or bill for service. It would be informational only. And the reason they generally don’t do that is two fold, firstly, file transfer speed is not the product they’re selling you. It’s a function of a hyper specific process that is related to the product they’re selling you. Secondly, it just gives customers an inaccurate number for them to misunderstand and then complain about. When you give somebody a number they expect to see that number. It’s easier to give a customer a number that you can quantify and verify and say “Here you go, you’re getting the number we promised you” than to give them a number based on guesses and averages and then when they complain all you can tell them is “We never promised you this number, this was just a guess”. Customers really don’t want to hear that.

That is a very good question.

The answer can be simplified down to what is really two answers.

The first is: Overhead. When you download a file over the Internet, it’s broken down into many many little messages called packets, which you can think of like postal envelopes. Each envelope holds pieces of your file, but that’s not all they hold. They have to hold the senders address, the receivers address, your zip code, your town, your state, your country, etc. all the info it needs so the postal service (Networking equipment) knows how to deliver it. Let’s say the file you’re downloading is an image. The person sending it to you takes a piece of that image and puts it in an envelope and mails it. They intend to do the same with a million other pieces of the photo until you on the other end can take all the pieces together and look at the photo. This postal service of sorts will also put that envelope inside other bigger envelopes to help it move through the system, among other things. These encasing envelopes get put on and stripped off at various points during the journey, but each of those envelopes are tangible objects. Just because the envelopes themselves are not part of the image you’re sending/receiving, doesn’t mean they don’t take up space in the back of the mail truck. Also before they even started sending the pieces of the image, you and the person on the other end had to exchange a few letters agreeing to the image delivery. You also frequently send letters to each other to keep track of what was sent and what was received, etc to make sure everyone’s on the same page every step of the way, and not all of them contain pieces of the image.

To make things more complicated, “Downloading a file” can mean a great many things to a computer. In the case of the photo, what happens if some of the envelopes get lost? Luckily the postal service has a mechanism that helps the recipient notice that one of the pieces of the image you were expecting never arrived, so you can send a letter back informing the sender so that they can send that piece again. After all you don’t want holes in your picture. Let’s say that works — you now received that piece. Well that piece took up space in the postal truck the first time it was sent to you, and it took up space again the second time they sent it to you. There are other ways of downloading a file though where you and the sender agree not to resend any lost envelopes, you’ll just deal with the holes in the photo. This obviously takes up less space overall because there are no duplicate envelopes being sent, and this decision is made without consulting the postal service. It’s strictly a decision made between you and the sender.

The second answer, which we will keep the letter metaphor for, is that not every piece of mail you send out or receive relates to that image you’re sending. You get a bill from your doctor in the mail, Your birthday is tomorrow so you receive a letter from your grandma. All kinds of stuff. The postal service is delivering all of it to you and it all takes up space in the truck a long side the pieces of that image.

Now you paid for a finite amount of space in the mail truck, and during this time you’re filling that space you paid for down to every last inch. You filled it with the pieces of the image in the envelopes, the envelopes themselves, the envelopes that don’t have pieces of the image in them but are related to the image, letters and the envelopes that contain them that were mailed to you by your doctor and your grandma, etc.

You filled 100% of the space you paid for in the mail truck, but only 90% of that space is taken up by the pieces of the image. The other 10% is filled with duplicates to earlier lost pieces of mail, the envelopes themselves, and the unrelated letters you’re receiving from other people.

This is why the postal service advertises to you and bills you based on space in the truck, a known and quantifiable amount of space they can commit to you, and not by how fast that particular image or anything else will be delivered. The postal service doesn’t exist for you to send images, it exists to send … stuff. All the stuff, it doesn’t care what. They give you the space, you decide what to fill it with. How much of that space is taken up by just your image pieces is dependent on the image your sending, the way that you and the sender agreed to send it, how full the image piece envelopes are with other sets of instructions meant for you and the sender that doesn’t involve the postal service at all that you stuff in next to the image piece, etc. That’s your prerogative. What the post office is concerned about, and should be concerned about, is that the space you paid for is available to you on the truck, and that the truck will successfully deliver your mail from your local post office to the next post office on the route.

As knowledgeable engineer who knows accurate technical terms? I should hope so. That’s been self evident from the start.

You’re referring to two different things. You are using 100% of the bandwidth they’ve sold to you, which is 1000Mb/s or 125MB/s. Thats the “speed” at which you’re transferring data across the network.

90% of that bandwidth — that you are using 100% of —consists of the file data you’re downloading.

This is why those two numbers are not interchangeable, and why simply converting to bytes won’t result in the numbers you expect as a consumer. Because of the very nature of how computer networking works.

The job of computer networks and network devices is not file transfer. Its to pass information, only a subset of which is for file transfer. Networking devices pass pass bits between each other, so it only makes sense to measure how many of those bits they can pass per second.

Hiding it is not anti-consumer. Nothing is being hidden. The capabilities of the devices are simply being accurately described based on the job they perform and the way they perform it.

What good is it that i can reach the local node in 1000Mbit/s if their first hop to an internet server slows the connection by 90%?

The first hop to an internet server doesn’t slow the connection by 90%. The connection remains at 100% the entire time.

Maybe they shouldn’t advertise 125 mb/s if they can only deliver 90% of that in the best case.

They aren’t delivering 90% to you, they’re delivering 100%. You are getting all 125MB/s, the full amount they advertised to you. The fact that you’re confused here is exactly why they do not advertise bandwidth this way.

Routers, network cards, and Ethernet cables being “gigabit” or similar is also confusing,

No, it’s not confusing. Those devices pass bits between each other. It would be confusing if you measured the bits they’re passing in Bytes for some reason.

1000Mbit/s down, which translates to a real world speed of 110-112 mb/s

The real world speed is 1000Mb/s down.

Yes in networking we use the decimals based decimal-based Gigabyte and Megabyte.

So Megabyte = 1000 Bytes Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes.

When referring to the binary based system, like with computer RAM we use Mebibytes = 1024 bytes Gebibytes = 1024 Mebibytes

Listing the bandwidth in bytes would be less useful because they still wouldn’t match the download rates they’re getting, but also your internet bandwidth would now be in a different format from every other networking device in your house. Paying for 125 Megabytes but your downloads only ever being 100-112MB/s is still going to prompt those service desk calls, and now going to the store and trying to buy a router would be more confusing as well because you’d want to buy one that matches the speed you’re paying for but now your bandwidth is in bytes but all the routers measure their throughput in bits and you’re right back to being confused.

If you’re streaming video from or to the internet and run into issues it’ll be harder to figure out what the problem is because your ISP bandwidth is in bytes but your video bitrate is in bits.

Changing one factor in your internet solution to bytes while every single other component involved measures it in bits is just not by any stretch of the imagination going to result in less confusion overall. You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, but Paul is still being shorted.

I actually appreciate you taking over arguing with that knucklehead haha. Guy is a menace lol

It’s from your home to their local node primarily. You’re essentially paying for the link into their network.

Uh no by defending the completely honest and objectively accurate advertising. As opposed to the inaccurate and misleading advertising that would be advertising based on file download speed.

What are you talking about? Overprovisioning literally means selling more transmission rate than what the upstream lines can accommodate. It is not accounted for.

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.

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?

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.

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.

You’re asking why it’s not possible, and then explained a work around that would be needed because it’s not possible.

What you’re suggesting is that instead of selling a service to you based on a quantifiable number based on things within their control that you can reasonably hold them accountable for, they should sell their service to you based on a series of educated guesses about what you could potentially get based on a number of factors entirely outside of their control.

Modern networks pass data serially bit by bit over a wire. So on the lowest level networking works on a bit level, not a byte level. There is some logical stuff in upper protocol layers that will actually group things by bytes and such, but when you strip everything down to the smallest detail of what networking does, transmit data over a wire via electricity or lights, or otherwise wirelessly, its bits.

The Mbit number your your ISP sells to you is actually lower than what you actually get, to ensure that you get what you paid them for. If you track your bandwidth usage closely you’ll notice you burst higher than what that number it’s “up to” because there are variables outside of their control as well. So it’s not a hard ceiling, but a rate they promise to be available to you.

Not a marketer, just a network engineer who cares about honest and accurate advertising.

There’s no reason not to include a helpful subtitle that gives you an approximation of file download speeds ( other than consumers mistaking it as a promise the company can’t actually keep), but that’s a completely different animal than advertising the bandwidth itself in bytes. Because simply converting the bits into bytes will not result in the number that the customer ultimately sees.

All you would have in that scenario is the same confused consumer calling the service desk asking why the number of Megabytes they paid for is not the number of Megabytes they get when they download a file.

This as absolutely a hill worth dying on for me. I don’t think it would be a good thing for companies to stop advertising their products based on their precise and accurate capabilities in order to sell to a consumer based on a guesstimate around one subset of use of that product.

Marketing in bits is anti-consumer, since average consumer does not understand what actual download speed they will get when buying.

It’s not anti-consumer to advertise a product’s capabilities in the most accurate way possible. When you pay for internet bandwidth you’re not paying for download speed, you’re paying for a transmission rate. Advertising internet plans based on the speeds you get in Chrome would not be possible and therefore any attempt to do so would be deceptive to the customer.

Almost everyone I know is confused why the speeds they pay for don’t match the speed of downloads in Chrome

The Internet bandwidth they pay for will never match the speed of downloads in Chrome, even if you convert bits to bytes.

What you’re missing here is that you want the number you pay for from your ISP and the number you can measure downloading a file at to match. But they never will, because they’re two completely different concepts. One of those number is a constituent part of the other number. They’re not interchangeable.