That's a cool story. It sounds like something the marketing and sales departments should probably think pretty hard about. It's not an easy problem.

But a service with a cap also isn't unlimited.

Making a pricing structure which works for the company and is easy to understand for the customer isn't easy. Nobody said it was easy. But I don't understand how you go from that, to arguing in favor of lying to the customer.

> The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits.

But the fact that there is a limit at all, means that you can definitely display it somewhere.

Suppose you have two users, John and Jane, John is in the 1% of most valuable customers, Jane signed up last month. The data center has plenty of free capacity in June, but is closer to capacity in July.

Now suppose that each user has their own dashboard for resources.

  John:
    June - Your bandwidth limit is 200 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it.
    July - Your bandwidth limit is 160 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it.
  
  Jane:
    June - Your bandwidth limit is 40 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend.
    July - Your bandwidth limit is 30 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend.

As a matter of fact, Hetzner already has something like that under their "Limits" section:

  Limits
  Limits are set per customer and are counted across all projects that you created. If you need more resources, just send us a request, and we are happy to adjust them for you.
  Outgoing traffic to ports 25 and 465 are blocked by default on all Cloud Servers. Send a request for unblocking these ports. Please note that we generally do not answer questions regarding limit increase on the telephone.

You don't necessarily have to advertise the fact that your limits will be dependent on lots of variables and will change (though you should disclose it). What you shouldn't do is say that there are no limits, which is clearly lying. Even if the lie only becomes relevant to a very small part of the clientele who'll be affected by this, it's still lying.

Of course, that's not the world that we live in and "unlimited" offerings will be a mainstay of marketing in the industry, for the better or worse. Probably better for the org and worse for the clients. Kind of why I also hate mobile carriers being dishonest with their data plans. It's like nobody even knows what "unlimited" means.

Maybe like ADSL was originally advertised in some markets, with the contention ratio?

In your scenario, 10:1 contention ratio, "up-to" 1Gbps throughput, 1Gbps link-speed.

In the UK British Telecom originally offered 'consumer' ADSL at 50:1 and 'business' (more expensive) at 20:1 contention ratio specifically to deal with the backhaul limitations.

Probably the way they do processors, say you get N Mhz as a min that is boostable up to M Mhz.

If they advertised "you get a min of 200kbps, that could boost up to 1Gbps" that would be acceptable, as long as you actually got that 200kbps. The problem is they claim it is 1Gbps, then look at you funny if you expect 70% of what they claim.

how about saying "limit: XGB/gbit/whatever, but IF we feel like it, you might be allowed more"