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Houston DSL users File Lawsuit Against SBC
cprincipe writes "According to this story on Yahoo, Houston DSL customers of SBC Communications have filed a lawsuit alleging that SBC has intentionally lowered connection speeds to its customers. " SBC, it should be noted, is the parent of Southwestern Bell, and recently acquired Ameritech.
Just as a test I did a ftp session to ftp.kernel.org (zeus.kernel.org) and did some transfers and this is what I got.
get linux-2.4.0-test6.tar.bz2
local: linux-2.4.0-test6.tar.bz2 remote: linux-2.4.0-test6.tar.bz2
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for linux-2.4.0-test6.tar.bz2 (18106527 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
18106527 bytes received in 122 secs (1.5e+02 Kbytes/sec)
That's what I expect 1.2Mbps download speed, so as you can see it's not an all 128k cap on everything.
-- Ed Bugg --You have freedom of choice, but not of consequences.--
Finally, a reporter who understands why people need DSL. :-)
Attempt to dodge off-topicness: 128k is pathetic for DSL, isn't it? I doubt they can win a suit, but good luck to them.
Ever hear of oversubscription? Each customer isn't going to use the whole line all the time, so it's acceptable to put more customers on the line than you can support (to a point).
Also, instead of lining their pockets, the executives might want to spend money buying another T3. It would be good for their business in the long run.
While I understand how the plaintiffs feel in this case, and intentionally lowering speeds might not be a nice thing for a DSL company to do, I can't see how a suit like this could be taken seriously. Has a law been passed that I'm not familiar with which outlaws such an action?
If a company offers you a service and they say they are going to GUARANTEE 384kbit/s to email, they kindof have to abide by that, it's simple contract law. If at any time that speed goes under 384kbit/s, regardless of cause (act of god notwithstanding), they can be held liable.
If people aren't happy with their DSL service, why can't they just switch providers?
In many cases there is only one high speed provider in the area, a "virtual monopoly" if you will. Sure, you can switch providers... but it'll be dialup.
-- iCEBaLM
I've worked (and keep working :) in telecoms all my life and after reading most of the comments I have some comments.
Are you sure that they are capping bandwidth or are they congested? In the telco industry to oversubscribe (I've seen rates from 1/2 to 1/512) a service is a common practice (You usually take into account the bandwidth you have and assign a worst case scenario in which a percentage of all subscribers transmit and receive simultaneously). The bad part is that most network engineers don't take several factors into account like exactly what applications are being used. It's a lot different to oversubscribe if the final app is web browsing (Where you know that most users go to only five or six pages and you have proxies around) or Napster/FTP (Where you're going to have your bandwidth maxed for periods of time).
Another issue, how good is their connection to the Internet backbone? How many NAP points do they have? Usually having one huge pipe to one provider (as in bbn, uunet or digex) is not enough, you need two or three in order to have some traffic balancing. Also most IEX points are congested and unfortunately most of the content seems to be placed in 2-3 major providers.
So IMNHO I think this is a sign of poor network design as much as malice from their marketing dept.
ZoeSch
I hate to agree with davecrazy but...
I was in a meeting about 6 months ago where people were joking about how long it would take for the first class action law suit over deceptive DSL advertising to show up... The throttling is done by the network design. The DSLAMs concentrate the traffic from 576 customers onto a T3 (45 mbps) line. Do the math... That comes out to about 78 kbps/customer. Far below the guaranteed rates. BTW, I have RoadRunner and will change to DSL ASAP. Despite the deceptive ads DSL is still better than a cable modem. And, I can have as many machines as I want on a DSL and I can have a server on a DSL. Things that I can't have on RoadRunner. Not to mention that RoadRunner is about to become AOL.
I've had the advertised "384kbps-1.5Mbps downstream / 128kbps upstream" DSL from PacBell for about a year now. I used to have it with the PacBell ISP, and I've often got download speeds of ~250k/sec. In other words, even beyond 1.5Mbps. Well, a few months ago I've gotten a letter in the mail from PacBell that they no longer have a choice of ISPs, and the ONLY ISP available is through SBC, to which I was automatically changed. With this new change, my downstream is FIXED at 80k/sec, I guess 640kbps or whatever. Now, I wonder if this is illegal, because it is obviously CAPPED at 640kbps. And I am paying for "384kbps-1.5MBps depending on how good your line is" deal, so if it's capped, at least they should cap it at 1.5MBps. Long story short, SBC sucks.
It's what you do with it.
Really, though. This article doesn't explore in-depth the 'tests' he ran to determine he was being cheated for bandwidth.
Since SBC uses an ATM fabric all the way out to their DSL modems, it is possible to assign priority to different types of traffic. SO, it
is not a question of COULD SBC be doing this, but ARE they doing it?
The question to me is a matter of physical bandwidth vs. logical bandwidth. After all, the customer can still pass 384K of traffic, but there's nothing in the guarantee that says SBC's news servers must be able to support twenty-thousand users hitting them at 384K at the same time.
Good customer service would dictate that they attempt to keep up and provide servers which can handle the traffic. However, I think it would be terribly hard to PROVE that news bandwidth was being intentionally limited at the customer end. I'm not saying it COULDN'T be limited there, just that it could be limited elsewhere without technically violating the agreement. I would really appreciate more detailed information about the supposed 'tests' that have determined this.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.