They mean that they're not going to limit the total amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural limit implied by the maximum rate.

When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.

In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".

I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow.

I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting.

For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests.

Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

I've been running RPI-based torrent client 24/7 in several countries and never experienced that. Eats a few TBs per month, not the full line, but pretty decent amount. I guess it really depends on the country.

I’ve used Spectrum and their predecessors since the 90s. Never ran into this, although the upstream speeds are ridiculously slow, and they used to force Netflix traffic to an undersized peer circuit.

I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works.

Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.