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ISPs Offer Faster Speeds, Why Don't We Get Them?
Ron Williams asks: "I'm infuriated every time I see that companies are raising their speeds when they can't maintain their current speeds. Here's my biggest issue: my grandmother signed up for the 3Mbps DSL plan through Verizon, however a speed test said she was only getting 750Kbps. Why pay for the extra bandwidth when she's not getting it? She downgraded to the 768K plan expecting to still have 750K. Wrong, instead her speed dropped to 300K. So, how about instead of companies constantly claiming to increase their speeds, they get their actual speeds correct. Comcast has done the same thing, I had their 6Mbps plan at one point, I got 2.5Mbps usually and sometimes 3Mbps, so they're all doing the same thing. In closing, with all these speed increases, why is my Internet not getting faster?" What practices and tools do you use to test your bandwidth speed and how have you approached your ISP when the performance repeatedly fell short of your expectations?
One thing to note is that you'll never get the top speed advertised for any connection due to transmission overhead; even so, you should be able to get close (within about 10-20%). Also, ISPs oversell their bandwidth, so if you run your speed tests when other customers are using their connection, you will notice the performance hit.
Last time I checked, you get no SLA (Service Level Agreement) with consumer DSL or cable Internet accounts. To the best of my knowledge you get no SLA with commercial DSL or cable accounts either (at least I don't and don't know of anyone who does). You have to buck up and pay for T or Frame or OC lines before you get an SLA.
Yes they oversell their capacity. Some places it isn't too bad (my connection), sometimes it becomes as slow as dial-up. I'd vote with my dollars appropriately.
Who will guard the guards?
Yeah I wonder about that, I'm supposed to have DSL (Verizon), always suspected it to be a bit slow: here are my test results: download: 783kbs, upload: 138kbs. I don't have my contract here, but that seems slow. I'm moving from this house, or I'd check further into it. (I just checked, I'm paying for the high speed connections, my test results are about 1/3 what "up to" speeds should be...)
My download speeds feel sluggish, the upload speeds are a little painful. My biggest objection to the upload speed results is they are just barely better than ISDN. WTF?
(BTW, go here if you want to see what your speeds are... It's a test site to see if your connection speed supports VOIP. Mine BARELY could.)
Then there's the whole issue of the internet in general. We've seen sites that are probably paying for OC3s and DS3s for their sites and you go visit their site and there's bad latency.
Then I click on my Slashdot bookmark -- voila! The explanation, darn Slashdotters hogging up all the bandwidth.
The point being there's a lot of noise in between the last hop out of your ISP and the destination address. Get over it. It's not false advertising, it's the unpredictability of the internet. Trying doing speed tests to many destinations.
What does gramma need with 3Mbps anyway?!
My ZooLoo
Find a real ISP, like speakeasy.
a class-action lawsuit in the making, if you ask me.
Jesus Christ! Call Whine 11 or something!
...Anyway, I have 8 MB Comcast and I am very pleased. I just used http://www.testmy.net/tools/test/d_load.php to measure my connection speed and here is the result:
:::.. Download Stats ..:::
Connection is:: 8212 Kbps about 8.21 Mbps (tested with 5983 kB)
Download Speed is:: 1002 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Server 1)
Test Time:: 2006/06/01 - 8:12pm
Bottom Line:: 143X faster than 56K 1MB Download in 1.02 sec
Tested from a 5983 kB file and took 5.969 seconds to complete
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3
Diagnosis: Awesome! 20% + : 62.71 % faster than the average for host (comcast.net)
Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-YLBMP5VFC
:)
My download speed really is that fast if I am downloading from a good webserver. And even when I'm not, the bandwidth gets used in bittorrent
Sorry you are having problems....
Its the same reason why online casino owners pay the blackmailers. Its the same reason you end up paying $1.39 for a 20oz. pop when it says 2 for a $1. Its the same reason web hosting companies say they offer 1 terabyte of disk space per customer for $5/month.
Why?
Because nobody ever challenges them. And the company gets away with it.
I haven't noticed that issue since getting fiber through Verizon. I can see a consistent 30Mbps when I download very large files. :-)
No real point to that. Just braggin'
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Use this to test your connection speed, and make speakeasy your ISP if you want to get the bandwidth that you pay for. It may cost you a bit more, but their technical support, speed, and service policies are more than worth it.
most of the time, companies like verizon will NOT guarantee advertised bandwidth. your real speed depends on how full the central office (c.o.) is, how saturated the dslam is, your distance to the c.o., and line quality. its a real racket. they can charge you full price but depending on those factors and more, you probably won't get the *advertised* speeds.
Speeds advertised are often optimal speeds for people living across the street from their local connection point.
As distance increases DSL speeds drop. For Cable when usage is up, speed drops.
for me, I pay for 2.5 Mbit connection and I get around 2.1 Mbit. I'm not on top of the hub, but I'm pretty close.
if you're getting speeds that low, its likely because you live a great distance or away or you may be having other line problems.
I've lived in 4 different places in 2 cities and have been able to consistantly recieve 80-90% of the advertised speed through cable. There's a reason why the ads on TV have speeds will vary written in fine print.
According to bandwidth test I have conducted RCN is always within the level of service advertised. Infact recently they updated me to 7megabit from 5megabit.
Do what the city I live in did and start your (the citizens) own ISP. I get the speed I pay for on a fiber optic connection. Plus they offer TV and telephone service. Better service, cheaper rates, and it's owned by the people that use it.
Bradley Holt
> One thing to note is that you'll never get the top speed advertised for
> any connection due to transmission overhead; even so, you should be able
> to get close (within about 10-20%).
When I had 256k service from CenturyTel I got exactly 256k throughput. Now that I have 1.5M I get from 900k to 1.2M. Since I'm about 15,000 feet from the CO on a fifty year old buried cable, I'm not too unhappy.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I usually use Bandwidth place which has a nice GUI and useful reports. Also goes without saying that you can find many bandwidth test sites by Googling "bandwidth".
I use bresnan Cable internet where im at (montana) and its usualy not bresnans fault for slow speeds. they reacently uped our speed to 8Mbps and i regularly see 1-1.1MB/s downloads from good servers.
I do notice some problems in the evenings but thats seem pretty normal every where you go, but the drop is not much maybe getting 700-800KB/s.
so i would say that the problems every one is talking about is more of a large city problem. My dad lives near seattle and uses comcast cable internet and has similar problems to the artical posters... and dont forget bandwidth shapeing killing every ones speed
I've often seen the same thing on my DSL connection (5MB/896KB), however when I BitTorrent a popular download, I always get my max bandwidth. So I'm sure my ISP is providing what they say they are. I suspect other culprits might be to blame, such as bandwidth of site visited, or mod_throttle on their end.
I called Comcast and I was like yo I'm watching your commercial and it says my bandwidth is blah blah blah but I test it all the time and it's 1/10 of blah blah blah. Then they said yeah well we are the only cable company so if you don't like it move to blah blah blah. ;)
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
SLA? Bullshit. If I buy a car called "Toyota 85MPH Blue Car" it had damned well better not be goverened to 55MPH. "But when you bought the car, the dealer never signed an agreement guaranteeing speed." Bull-shit.
I have Cox Cable, 5mbps down, 2mbps. I regularly download at 680 k/s (5.3mbps) and upload at 280 k/s (2.1mbps).
I have never had a problem with their service.
Registered Linux user #421033
Remember that things like DSL are 'last-mile' technologies. They only effect the theoretical maximum over the wires going from your ISP to you (and for DSL, it varies depending on how close you are physically to SAI of your ISP). This connection is very rarely the limiting factor in your actual connection speed for a randomly chosen internet destination. What is worst, if you are a gamer, latency is probably much more important to you ... and I bet your ISP isn't advertising that little fact at all. It is mostly just smoke and mirrors to get you to pay more or to lure more customers.
Something I've heard from my friends a lot is that they don't realise companies sell their connection speeds in BITS per second.
Myself, I have 512Kb/s down, and as a rule of thumb I divide by 10 to get it in bytes. I get at best 54KB/s downloads, which works out by this rule.
I know, a byte is 8 bits, but as a rule of thumb, dividing by 10 seems to include overhead.
I know my 512Kb/s ADSL connection doesn't rate against these 3Mb/s cable connections, but, this is my experience, learn from it what you will.
"What practices and tools do you use to test your bandwidth speed and"
Download it here http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/ From the website: "Iperf is a tool to measure maximum TCP bandwidth, allowing the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss. "
I am not left-handed, either!
Noone has or ever will get max speed out of their connection. Just like 100 MB ethernet noone ever get 100 MB that is what the rating is based upon Ideal condidtions. So suck it up. BTW Very bottom on time warner's page for Road runner cable access states>>>>>>> Actual speeds may vary.
the speed of your link doesn't have anything to do with an average through put you get.
Speed tests are totally dependable on where your testing from, as a speakeasy 6MB/768KB customer i know that i get my best speed test against the seattle one because thats where i am located. But then again since speakeasy have awsome peering i can usuaully get a decent test to other parts of the united states. I usually get about 5.1 or 5.2 max on speed tests which for me is ok.
DSL speeds totally depends on your loop length and the state of the physical copper, (noise etc), even though the loop length will gurantee a certain speed in theory its always good to have your line tested for noise.
With cable its a differnt story since if your in a area where there is a larger cable subscriber population with alot of leechers your bound to get a hit on the speed. but with my previous experiences with comcast i have no run into such incident except once which occured because of bad physical medium,
I Strongly recomed that you have a technician come to your grandma`s house and have the loop tested, bad cabeling can always be a culprint. Since most DSL and cable providers have enough bandwidth running in their backbone. If you don't agree with me tracerotue is your friend, do a simple traceroute to couple of differnt places. If your first 2-3 hops are not below 10MS you should consider switching ISPs
http://iesucks.org
I just moved to a new house. This time, I decided to do things right, and had a DSL splitter installed at the point where the phone line enters the house. [My splitter looks just like the one in the picture.] The previous owner had had unacceptably low DSL speed, but with the splitter installed, I'm within about 8% of the theoretical maximum on the 3 Mb/s plan. The phone line between the NID mounted on the outside wall of my house and the phone exchange is likely not perfect, which may account for the 8% degradation.
Note that the rated maximum speed (3 Mb/s in my case) accounts for not just the actual payload data being transmitted, but all of the protocol overhead as well: TCP headers, IP headers, etc (there are multiple protocol layers, each with overhead). Your typical internet speed test is not able to directly account for all of the protocol overhead, so your data will be transmitted slower than the rated line speed.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
I just ran the speed test from speakeasy.net (a competing ISP) against my comcast cable connection. I got 6154 kb/s down 714kbps up.
Admittedly that's at 11pm EST, from New York to Maryland, but that's a pretty solid percentage of 6mbps.
Are you sure your grandmother's PC isn't a spam-zombie and that's sucking up all her bandwidth? Or perhaps the speed-test site itself is overloaded? (They should limit the count, but you never know)
-Matt
To be blunt, where I am there is only one choice for internet service. The single provider may change, depending on what municipality, but in the end you only have one choice in your apartment. So, when I have an issue I suck up. I act stupid and helpless and ultra sickly sweet. I thank them profusely every step of the way.
It may not be as satisfying as being intelligent or righteously indignant on the phone, but it gets great results. I consistently get a tech out same day (from ATT (SBC), no less). I have problems where my circuit speed will drop drastically (from 3Mbps to 145Kbps) on a regular basis, and now that I have started being saccharine sweet, it is generally fixed almost immediately.
Simply point out that it is running incredibly slow (say something about images and pages taking FOREVER to load, don't sound techie) and that you logged in following THEIR instructions (thank you guys for giving me those previously, oh thank you thank you) and checked the speed and saw that it was slower than normal (from what you guys told me before), and that you would greatly appreciate it if they could fix it (since I am so helpless and LOVE you guys), and please help me, and oh lord thank you so much for giving me your time.
Other than that, make sure your router isn't causing you problems. Swap it out with a borrowed one or something. I had a bad one that was destroying my throughput. Check cables, wall sockets, everything. Make sure you can eliminate everything on your end before you call them.
However, if they ask you to test things again, gleefully (pretend) to do it. It makes them happy and gets you better service later. After all, it is not really that hard to sit there reading the newspaper and drinking coffee and simply saying "Nope, still doesn't work."
Does the tool you use to measure speed only count the data payload size, or does it count the size of all packet headers involved (including the lowest protocols used over the cable line)? eg. over ethernet cables (just a dumb cable), you can lose 8% speed just due to packet headers...
One "trick" they use is that in our area (Colorado, QWest), the DSL speed rates they quote are all the ATM frame rates. ATM has around 20% overhead, so this means that a 1.5mbps line will give you more around 1.25mbps throughput.
I don't recall that I've ever gotten anything less than that on DSL across the line. I've run routers handling the "megacentral", the ISP end of the DSL connection, and have had more than a bit of opportunity to test DSL connection performance.
As far as cable, we have Comcast in this area, and are paying for the higher service level. I do notice that when the school year starts, we tend to have performance issues for a month or two. This has happened on several occasions. So, instead of 6 to 8mbps (they recently upgraded to 8mbps, before that it was 6), we get more like 3 to 4. Annoying, but not a huge issue.
I have noticed that on the Comcast sales literature, they say "N mbps *" where the * links to something saying "No guarantees".
However, most of the time I'm able to get 8mbps, when the remote end can handle it. I have servers hosted at a location where I know I have plenty of bandwidth. I just downloaded the Ubuntu Dapper ISO over cable:
730740736 bytes transferred in 710 seconds (1005.4K/s)
So, that's right at 8mbps. This is not unusual.
It's important to realize that there are several places where there could be performance issues though. The line, the directly connected ISP bandwidth, the server you're downloading from, and everything in between.
Winging at your ISP for problems which are outside their control isn't going to be helping anyone. If you are downloading Dapper right now via FTP from the main site, the server is almost certainly not going to be able to handle 8mbps.
Another thing I'd wonder is whether maybe your grandmother might have a virus or two, or perhaps there's some file-sharing going on? All these lines have a fraction of the upstream bandwidth that they do down. If you are pushing out much data, it interferes with incoming data. If you do any performance testing, make SURE that you don't have anything else using it, either outgoing or incoming.
Hope this helps.
Sean
Now, I live in inner-suburban Adelaide, South Australia. I subscribe to a 24Mbps ADSL provider. They own the equipment at the exchange. However, because I am a couple of miles from the exchange, I only see about 12Mbps (I know, isn't it awful? sob sob, poor me...) The physical condition of the copper between your front door and the exchange can also have a big effect on performance; here I seem to be lucky again.
In general, the 802.11b link between my laptop and router is waaaay slower than my DSL.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Cox cable says that with their shiney 10mbps plan, I can get UP TO 10mbps. Notice it says "up to", that means "you won't ever get more than 10mbps, sucker". They realize that most people don't really need more than around 600kbps for surfing, "doing" email, and getting their 'tunes. So they inflate their claims, and the technically illiterate bite the bait and buy it instead of DSL because it "Gives you the speed you need!" (If you live where I live, you'll recognize that from a tv ad). The only people who notice they aren't getting what they paid for are heavy file sharers, hard-core gamers, and geeks like slashdotters who know the difference between kbps and mbps. These customers only form a fraction of their consumer base, so they just ignore the complaints and carry on cheating and stealing (until one day everything will be downloaded, from movies to books to software. Then people will start realizing that joe with dsl can download episode III just as fast as jeff with cable, even though one promises 4mbps and the other 10mbps)
I guess I'm very fortunate. My ISP, Surewest, offers 10 and 20Mbps symmetrical speeds for great prices ($30 and $50 respectively if you include phone or TV service and year contract). I have the 20Mbps package and I get full speeds through their network as well as most other areas around the US consistently. It is nice to know that you have an alternative to the behemoths such as Comcast and AT&T. I always wonder why there aren't more companies like Surewest popping up around the country. I know there are projects (i.e. municiple) which are trying to offer fiber services, but there seems to be no large effort other than maybe Verizon's FiOS. I know it is expensive, and I think much of the time you find these service offerings in newly developed areas, but I live in the oldest part of Sacramento yet Surewest still made a concerted effort to run the fiber through my neighborhood. A Surewest company executive said publicly that they will not make money at first with their aggressive deployment, but eventually I think that it will pay off (it already has started to). Of course companies like BellSouth and AT&T have a very shortsighted view of things.. imagine if they put more resources into running fiber to their customers. They are delaying the inevitable, while at the same time allowing their competitors the chance to get a foothold. They don't give a shit about faster speeds.
My beef with cable is that they frequently have too many users sharing one connection. My cable provider advertises 6000/2000 kbps (down/up). I usually get these speeds at, say, four in the morning. At five in the evening the speeds drop to about 300/100 kbps (down/up). If you call and complain, you're told that it's your computer (because you're running UNIX). Give me a break.
If I could just afford that full T1...
I do tech support for a major cable internet company and the terms of service does not guarantee a service level. There are too many factors to take into account. For one, cable companies are still subject to the phone lines at one point-our networks only go so far. We have our own speedtest for customers that they can check the speed along our network, but after that there can be issues. Remember after 9/11? It was easy to visit most websites on the west coast but forget visiting a European site. Spyware/adware can really choke a connection. This is usually a big hitter for many people. And have you called tech support? Most of us try to do what we can to clear things up or at least find the source of the problem. I am often surprised by folks who accept the problem and live with it, rather than calling in and trying to solve the problem.
Can't speak for all instances, but when upgrading your account, say from 1.5MB to 5MB it becomes necessary to adjust your TCP receive window. Qwest receives speed complaints all the time when customers upgrade, and this usually puts them to rest.
about grandma, and a webcam, and why that makes it our business
but i'm not telling that joke, nope
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It would sure be fun to see some lawyer try a class action for fraud on behalf of everyone with broadband. Opinions?
I get time warner and all I get is 33k upload and around three hundred something download. That is just pathetic for $45 dollars a month. BUt I dont dare complain, because then they will wonder why I need all that bandwidth!
My experience in this 65 year old apartment building is that the copper wire here won't support DSL above 4 megabits. I recently switched to cable internet (Comcast, Maryland) and saw a huge increase in available bandwidth. They originally promised a higher upload speed (I apparently purchased 6/384 and thought I was getting 6/768) and when I called to inquire I was offered 8/768 for 10$ more a month.
I'm able to pretty much get full speed out of my connection, but most of the times when I do speed tests on say Speakeasy.net or through other test sites, I frequently get reports that indicate half of my potential speed. I have been wondering if perhaps these tests are not very accurate at all, and would suggest connecting to a nice fast torrent to get a feel for how fast your connection is.
Works for me, anyway.
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
Actually, it's because the vast majority of their customers never use the promised resources and don't notice the fact that the ISP is technically fibbing. Unfortunately, since the advent of Gnutella and Bit Torrent millions of people are noticing that they aren't receiving the service levels they were expecting. Browsing, email and instant messaging don't give you any real feedback about line conditions ... but just run a few torrents and it becomes painfully obvious when the performance isn't there. The fact that ISP's business models (and profit margins) depend upon the bulk of their customers not using what they were told they were paying for doesn't change the fact that they are paying for it. If bandwidth-intensive applications continue to be popular (and usage shows no sign of slowing down in spite of numerous lawsuits to the contrary) the big ISPs may very well have to change their offerings. Either that, or build out their networks to the point where they can sustain the traffic. Neither option appeals to them, so they're trying to take the easy way out by labeling certain customers as "bandwidth hogs" or "account abusers" and maintaining undisclosed usage limits (to intimidate customers into limiting their consumption.) That works to a degree, but when the number of bandwidth hogs begins to number in the tens of millions there's definitely a problem.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
i have rogers cable 6mbps plan
if im downloading from, say, newsgroups, i will consistently and at any time of day get 6mbps
if im downloading from some random website, i will get random speed anywhere from 50kb/s to 700kb/s
just for this comment, i ran a speed test at http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/
result:
Communications 4 megabits per second
Storage 483.9 kilobytes per second
1MB file download 2.1 seconds
funny thing is, i can start up my newsgroups client right now and get 6mbps (from an external usenet service, my isp does not provide one)
so, maybe the bandwidth speed test isnt all that accurate after all?
:::.. Download Stats ..:::
Connection is:: 4964 Kbps about 4.96 Mbps (tested with 2992 kB)
Download Speed is:: 606 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Server 1)
Test Time:: 2006/06/01 - 8:39pm
Bottom Line:: 87X faster than 56K 1MB Download in 1.69 sec
Tested from a 2992 kB file and took 4.937 seconds to complete
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Diagnosis: 90% + Okay : running at 98.36 % of your hosts average (comcast.net)
across wireless. with utorrent running.
What speed test did you use? You need to use one on your ISP's network. If you use something on like dslreports.com you are depending on all the links in between. I'm on RoadRunner Premium and my test shows I'm getting my full 8Mb/sec.
You get those 6 Mbit downstream, X Mbit upstream between your DSL modem and the line card
:-)
at the carrier. Some DSL modems actually tell you how a lot about the connection:
ADSL-State: ADSL Active
Mode: ADSL
Manufacturer: ADSL Modems Inc.
DSL-Version: 1.0
ADSL Carrier Equipment
Manufacturer: Texas Instruments
DSL-Version: 1.0
Line capacity kBit/s 6816 1112
ATM-rate kBit/s 2304 224
Payload-rate kBit/s 2087 203
Latencymode interleaved interleaved
Latency ms 16 16
Frame Coding Rate kBit/s 32 32
FEC Coding Rate kBit/s 160 32
Trellis Coding Rate kBit/s 364 68
Negotation fixed fixed
Signal/Squelch dB 28 28
Line attenuation dB 23 21
Status 4ebc 6
LOS LOF FEC CRC NCD HEC
CPE 0 0 26 0 1 0
COE 0 0 0 0 5 0
I have 2Mbit downstream and 192 KB upstream (I know my upstream sucks).
So looking at what my modem tells me I'm doing fine here. However that's
just the raw interface speed. That has not much bearing on the kind of
performance I can expect downloading from some server on the internet.
First of all it's all my traffic goes through four routers at my provider.
I have no idea what kind of bandwidth is available in the internal network
of my provider but I'm sure that they favor business customers over home
customers. Then my packets leave my ISP and then it's up to all the networks
on the way to that server, including how much CPU, IO and network bandwidth
in general at that server is used up. You might want to look at those
2/3/6Mbit whatever Mbit you've been promised as the theoretic maximum. BTW,
the highest download rate I ever achieved with 2Mbit downstream was 220Kb/s
that 1.6 Mbits which is not bad but that was coming from an internal server at
my ISP.
Hope I shed some light on this mystery
there are many variables especially with ADSL, distances from exchange, line noise, etc.
I've got a 24Mbps connection, but the most I can train up at is about 3MBs. It's got a lot to do with my proximity to the exchange.
Plus, flash is a lesser evil than java
BS. Anybody can implement a virtual machine compatible with JVM bytecode from Sun's spec. The Flash license, on the other hand, prohibits anybody who has seen the official SWF spec from implementing an SWF player.
I've had comcast for about 2 years, and I'm very happy with the speed. While downloading a knoppix dvd iso (from 2 places within my state, one from the same city) I hit 13mbps (WOOT!). I also live about 5 miles from a big comast service station, so that helps. I usually download from between 750kb/s to 900kb/s.
ISPs sell on the basis of connection line rate.
There is often a disconnect between these advertised rates and the end-to-end experience.
This is somewhat (though not exactly) like PCs being sold on the basis of CPU speed alone. There are so many other factors relating to overall system performance.
Yes there should be a better measure. Will there be?
Probably not.
Am I the only one who finds your "Suso website hosting [suso.com]. No disk quotas and personalized support." signature a bit ironic?
Sometimes it's your onboard LAN. Check what its maximum speed is supposed to be. I assume that whoever posted this article thought of that but you'd be amazed how many don't think of it or just don't know.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
First off, you have to be confident that the bandwidth limitation isn't occuring somewhere outside the ISP's control.
Secondly, perhaps they're talking about the MAC-level bitrate, and you're measuring the bitrate of application-level data? When you figure that the typical application uses TCP/IP for network comms, there's a *lot* of overhead associated with the feeding and grooming of those protocols.
That's because the FCC mandates SLAs on T/Frame/OC lines.
Please help metamoderate.
The only thing I don't like about the deal is that instead of lowering the price to compete with DSL prices, they upped the speed which most people won't take advantage of. I wish I could pay less for a little less bandwidth. The only pricing options I can get are $45/month for 7Mbps or $30/month for 512K. That is a HUGE speed gap for only $15/month difference. If they dropped the price by $15 shouldn't that equate to about 2Mbps? Why can't I get half the speed for half the price?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
She's only paying for 3Mbps to the ISP and inside their systems. As with all communications, once it gets outside her ISP's border routers the speed is no longer in their control. If she's accessing some kid's p0rn site running on his dad's 56kbps modem in India, she's not going to get any more than 56kbps down the pipe! Add to that latency inherent in certain protocols, overseas link delays, etc., and you'll almost never get full speed to anywhere truly remote from your location.
Torrents are a good example for speed variability. Popular torrents are extremely fast when they're first released but as they age they get slower and slower because fewer people are seeding them. This morning I was downloading the Dapper Drake 6.06 release at 150 kilobytes/sec on my 1.5Mbps DSL, but often I'm lucky to see torrents download at 20-30 kilobytes/sec.
Verizon. That right there is your problem. I know this because I'm stuck with them.
Right now, I'm provisioned for 3.0/768 according to the Verizon second-level tech I was talking to earlier today. My modem (Westell DSL/router/802.11g total POS) is reporting sync at 864/160, which is the same speed I've seen for the year and a half that I've had the service.
Speakeasy comes back with 708/121 when I run their test, which is reasonable considering TCP overhead and the fact that I'm on a wireless connection right now.
Here's where it gets interesting: Verizon offers a slower plan (768/128) which is roughly what I'm getting right now anyways, for less than half what I'm paying. The catch: Supposedly it's not offered on my CO. WTF? I can see a CO not supporting higher speeds, but I've seen my modem sync as low as 160/64 when I had a wire go bad, so it definately supports lower speeds, they just don't want to offer it to me.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I've worked for a major ISP before doing technical support (Road Runner for those curious) I learned a little, most I knew to begin with. However, one thing that stands out is that bandwidth tests are inaccurate and never to believe them. 1. Your connection is: 5242 Kbps or 5.24 Mbps You Downloaded at: 640 kB/s You are running: 91 times faster than 56K and can Download 1 megabyte in 1.6 second(s) Member Ident: CompID:221366006356 Test Time:: 2006/06/01 - 8:46pm 2. Communications 2.9 megabits per second Storage 354.1 kilobytes per second 1MB file download 2.9 seconds Subjective rating Great 3. 1531 Kbps - You 1531 kbps 1. testmy.net 2. Bandwidthplace 3. Cnet Bandwidth meter As you can see they all vary. You need to take into consideration numerous factors. For starters how bogged down is the node your connection is on, ie how many people are on the same octet you're on. What's the bandwidth like from the site you're testing at? Is it receiving heavy traffic when you do the test or is it pretty quiet? Try doing a test on a server from your ISP, guaranteed you'll have blazing high speeds due to the proximity of the hub. Really, if I looked at bandwidth meter, I'd think I have a piss poor connection, when in fact it's all server dependant. I never, EVER trust speed tests. You want a good way to test your speed? Go to Microsoft and download a decent sized file, like SP2. See what your numbers look like on a fast server. People kept making this fuss all the time when I worked for Road Runner. "I did a speed test and it's low, I have a connection, FIX IT NOW OR I WILL USE ANOTHER ISP" Seriously, go for it. So many people complained about speed tests it was ridiculous. Do a traceroute as well, if you're getting 10ms on each route you're fine. Most of the time it appears slow because of people not knowing how to properly defend their PC from viruses, spyware, malware, adware whatever you call it. Firewall + AV + Spyware Protection = Faster connection. Quit your bitching.
My company decided to get rid of the 760Kbps service, to replace it with a more expensive 3Mbps service. I don't need nor want 3Mbps, but they now get to take an extra $3.00 per month. Or I can downgrade to the pathetic 100Kbps service. . .
It's just a way to grab more $. Competition is needed.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
Seconded- Apple system updates, for example, come in at just about maximum line speed, and the torrent of Dapper came in at a total data rate of about 750KB/sec, while uploading at about 65KB/sec..don't forget overhead of communicating with a whole boatload of peers (several thousand on the main torrent.) Increasingly I'm running across sites that have no trouble maxxing out speeds.
Besides, I didn't pay for the upper class of comcast service just to get another 2Mbit a second download; I paid for it to get the 3x increase in upload (768Kbit vs. "less than 384".)
Please help metamoderate.
Your computer
connects to
Your 6MB Cable
connects to
Cable Company
connects to
A slow or oversold internet connection
Here is a basic "How to" for calling your ISP... it sucks, and its a tad humiliating for most alpha-geeks... but sometimes we have to play by their rules to get our pr0n and warze faster.
1. Connect one PC to your cable/dsl modem (nothing else...)
2. Reboot your PC and your modem
3. Retest your speeds using a major speed test site
4. Call your ISP and explain your issue
5. Listen and follow their instructions (even if its a painful script... do it)
6. Respond with kindness and friendly responses (remember, they hold the key to escalating your issue or closing it without resolution)
Hopefully your ISP will recognize their is an issue and resolve it. Otherwise - tell them to go pound sand and move on to the next.
I have a similar issue here. However, when I use my full upload (or close to) Road Runner disconnects and I crawl through the internet the next few days. It's as if I'm getting punished for actually using what I pay for...
comcast in CT gives (no other options where I am): Communications 3.9 megabits per second Storage 472.5 kilobytes per second 1MB file download 2.2 seconds Subjective rating Awesome used http://www.testmy.net/tools/test/d_load.php [testmy.net] and this is with a first generation Airport, last time I checked get about 6 using ethernet
In my case, I consistently get speed measurements **faster** than my plan provides, but I'm with a new and small ISP and I expect things to get worse as more people sign up.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Gas mileage is not determined by the companies, it is determined by a set of specific tests under federal law. If you were able to run those tests and find a discrepancy, then you would have a case as far as fraud/mislabeling/etc. goes. Tests are quite easy to run on bandwidth, so it's an entirely different situation.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Well, when Comcast bumped the speed in our area to 6Mbps, I decided to test it with the Speakeasy Speed Test. Depending on which destination I picked, I got anywhere from 4Mbps to 8Mbps down, and 340Kbps to 360Kbps up. Seems to be consistent over days and weeks - I always get 8Mbps to the San Francisco destination, etc.
Since I'm not a torrent user, I'm more than happy with the download speed. I wish they'd quit bumping it, and would push the upload speed instead. Even when we were at 3Mbps it was pretty obvious a lot of the slowdowns were at the other ends of the various pipes, so going from 3 to 8 hasn't made much of a practical difference. But doubling the upload speed would make my ssh tunnels etc. much more usable (although things are acceptable now).
#DeleteChrome
If I measure the speed by noting the time and byte count on my ethernet interface during a download, wait a few seconds, and again note the time and byte count, and then calculate my download speed by taking the byte count difference * 8, and dividing by the time difference, I get 5251000 bits/second. Dividing that by 1024*1024, I get 5.01 mbit/sec. (When I say "noting the time and byte count", I mean having a program note these, of course...I'm not sitting there with a stopwatch).
This kind of surprised me, in that they aren't even doing the trick of defining a mbit as 1000000 bits to make it look faster.
The hotel I'm staying at (not a Holiday Inn Express!), got 553 down and 712 up. Usually things seem to go the other way around...
I have an advertised 1.5M/768k connection, and these are my speeds:
Download Speed: 1279 kbps (159.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 632 kbps (79 KB/sec transfer rate)
If you knock off 10% for overhead, you get quite close to the advertised speed. Not bad.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Why are you so sure the problem is your ISP? Do you know for a fact that the speed test is accurate? Are you doing the speed tests during a time of peak internet usage? Are other sites that you are connecting to serving fast enough to fill your pipe at full speed? If you are connecting to a site that can only serve 1 mbps, I don't care how fast your speed is promised to be, you'll never get anything from that site faster than 1 mbps.
And be careful when making claims "no ISP delivers the speed they promise". My ISP is Comcast on a cable modem. They claim they are giving me 6 mbps. And 99 percent of the time when I'm doing big video or Linux iso downloads or such like that and can see a good test of my actual speed, I'm getting the speed they say they're selling me...6 mbps.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Comcast in Western Mass has recently rolled out their Speed Boost plan to all the premium subscribers. My base service is the 8mbps/768kbps. With speed boost, they up the max bandwidth for about the first 15 seconds, then throttle back down to 8mbps/768kbps.
My connection currently peaks at about 20mbps/1mbps. Seems to be a token bucket kinda setup. If your DL rate drops to say 6mbps for a minute or so, it can spike back to 16-20mbps until the throttle kicks in again.
While this just seems like a trick to make speed tests rock. It is a pretty sweet deal for smallish DL's. I DL'd a 40ish MB kernel in about 23 seconds. The first 30 meg came in in about 13 seconds, the next 10 meg took the next 10 sec. So. I averaged about 13-14 mbps. Not gonna help with ISO's, but for under 50 meg it makes a difference.
Oddly enough, this speed test actually does rate my speed at about what my ISP's speedtest rate's it, just shy of their maximum. And since i install modems for a living, and this software is nearly identical to my ISP's, i know that it tends to cut off a fraction of that speed. I have, however, been to many speed test sites that have reported my speeds to be less than half of what i know i'm truly getting.
I'm on Road Runner, for what it's worth. Maybe your ISP sucks, and i just have a really good one. However, these speedtest articles are usually just someone complaining about a subject they don't have enough technical knowledge to fully understand.
Many providers have SLAs for SDSL, IDSL, and T1 lines. Some providers, like Speakeasy, have an SLA on business ADSL onelink lines (dry pair).
ADSL is typically considered a consumer-grade "Best effort" service, which means that the ISP will do its best to provide your speeds and reliability, but it is not guaranteed. Same with consumer Comcast. Check your contract.
Also, if you connection is slow 24/7 then there is probably a line issue of some kind. If it only runs slowly at peak hours of the day, and is very fast on weekends, then it is most likely a congestion issue on your area's backbone.
Also, check your DSL modem's line stats (most modems have them somewhere). It may be synching up at lower rates due to line quality issues. It should be at full speed with 10+ dB margins. If it is synched up at very slow speeds, but has very high margins (like 20-30dB) then its likely an intermittent line issue causing your slowness.
Yeah but paying 10k a year for an internet connection is kinda lame.
I just upgraded to SBCs new offer of 6Mbit DSL. According to my DSL bridge, I'm sync'd at the 6mbit, yet I only am able to download at 2.4mbit. It seems like they're doing some rate limiting besides what the modem syncs at now.
An internet byte is 10 bits because there is an open and close bit for each byte sent.
I switched from Comcast to FIOS last September and couldn't be happier! My tested speeds are 4995/1821, which is pretty close to what they advertise (5mb/2mb) but more importantly it's only $35/mo vs the $55+/mo I used to pay!
Theory1: The speed advertised by the companies is very often the speed at which their servers pump data to your modem. Or perhaps the speed on the last mile of fibre. The internet is made of so many machines with so many types of connections that the speed that you ultimately get is the lowest of the combination. Simple example: I set up a server with 100Kbps connection. A user surfs my site using a 1Mbps connection. What speed will he get? 1Mbps? He'll be lucky to get even 100Kbps.
Theory2: The companies advertising a 1Mbps connection may be capping the download speed to about 60% of the total and the rest of the bandwidth is for uploads. Just a guess, don't really know.
You can't rely on a speed test that is made in dallas, and your isp is in Washington state. Make sure you find a reliable site close to the source for a reliable test result.
First, where were you doing your speed tests? Some random internet site? NEVER trust those. They are worthless. If your ISP provides a speed test page, use that. Don't use one from dslreports.com or whatever. The reality is that, between you and your remote destination, there is probably some bottlenck that prevents your from getting full speed. Just because YOU have 6Mbit available, doesn't mean the site you are hitting does. WE ARE sharing the internet. You don't get a full 6Mbit connection oF your own to each and every site you visit.
That said, it is rather disturbing that your grandmother only got half of 768k. But again, that is just what the test said. WHo knows what is going on there.
All in all, I'm not particularly surprised. It is just par for the course that marketing promises so much and products deliver so little. Get used to it. That is how our economy/culture works. It isn't just ISPs.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
My cable account is advertised as 6 Mb/s. I compress a relatively large (20M) file and put it on a "close by" server, then use either FTP or wget to transfer it to my local box. Typically I see an average transfer rate of about 590 KB/s. If you figure 8 bits in a byte with 1 for overhead, that's pretty close to 6 Mb/s. They offer a 9 Mb/s premium service, but I'm uncertain how much additional benefit it would offer.
DSL in my area comes in 1.5, 3.0 and 6.0 Mb/s flavors, with the latter priced slgihtly less than the comparable 6 Mb/s cable modem service.
First off... what are you using to test your speeds. You should not be using some site that puts out a graphical representation. You have too many variables in there. You should be going to a site and downloading a test package and watching the transfer rates. Make sure the site has the capability to push 6megs to you. Then make sure you have your bits/bytes conversion down. After that look at your own pc's. Are you running a Pentium 2 with 32 megs of ram with every piece of spyware and adware known to man running? Not to mention that if you feel you have a speed issue, both Verizon and Comcast will send a tech out with a laptop and test the speeds. I know this first hand. I can't believe that slashdot would post this piece of shit news article.
If you like TV shows and gaming please check out BornSlacker.com
I'm rated at 40 Mb/s but rarely managed over 2 MB/s (note change in units). Bastards. 2 MB/s is so sloooooooooooooooooow. It takes like three whole minutes to download a 24 episode from iTunes at this rate. "Open a new socket" or something and fix this, please.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Sasktel is the provincial teleco of the province of Saskatchewan in Canada. I've currently got 1500 ADSL that runs at 188 KB/s. Sasktel doesn't have a listed upstream speed, but it's consistently around 35-40 KB/s. In other words, they're right on the mark when it comes to rated speed - for $35 CAD per month with no downtime. So, not all ISPs lie about bandwidth or oversell it.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
What part of *Maximum* speed don't you understand?? You're paying ~$40 a month, what do you expect? A 1.54mbps T-1 costs $250-$576 a month from a Tier-1 provider. I have 6mbps Comcast at home and get anywhere from 3-4mbps on average, sometimes 5-6mbps. I have 8mbps Comcast at work and get about 4-6mbps on average, for $99 a month. I also have a 1.54mbps T-1 from AT&T and get 1.54mbps. Oh wait, that's why you have to pay $576 a month for it. DSL works best within 3 miles of Central Office, the further out, the lower the speed. You could live 8 miles out like me and be lucky to get 16.8kbps dialup. I think I'll stick with my Comcast.
I work for an ISP. In my home, I have a 8Mbit connection and I get 8Mbit. I understand that the services are sold with your speed listed being the max speed you'll get with no guarentee it will happen. Time Warner offers SLAs on their commercial dedicated access connections, both fiber and dedicated access coax (Super Cable Modem as some call it). With those services you pay for say 100Mbit and you get 100Mbit on the nose.
Time Warner has the largest pipe in the midwest. Even if every customer was to download at full speed at the same time they would be using only 60% of the available bandwidth.
If your getting speeds more then 10-20% slower then advertised, call your ISP. They can help. It could be anything from signal level issues, flapping (data collision), CRC errors, and more. Another thing one must take into consideration is the reliability of off-network speed test sites. Just because you have a 5Mbit connection and the speed test site can handle those speeds doesn't mean there isn't a router somewhere between you and the site that's bogged down. Try on-network speed test sites if you can. Time Warner provides one for each division and has a national one for dedicated access connections. I tested a 1Gbit fiber connection using it today and it was right on the dot. I love my Cisco 3550. WankerWeasel@gmail.com
What does gramma need with 3Mbps anyway?!
Marge: "Where'd you get all the money?"
Grampa: "The government. I didn't earn it, I don't need it, but if they miss one payment, I'll raise hell!"
One thing you want to make sure is to do a direct test and not through a router or a home network network. If I connected my computer directly to the cable modem, I see some speed boost. I'm guessing there's some hit that's being taken by going through the router.
Also, test on servers that aren't busy and it's best to choose a high speed server close to you (i.e. local university). I'm sure you're doing this already, but make sure nothing else is using the internet (close all applications that send packets online). Yes, that means you'll have to disconnect from AIM and close your email viewer.
Finally, you don't want to test upload and download simultaneously as they degrade each other. You also only want to test downloading directly from 1 server.
With this setup, you should find the current maximum d/l you can get.
Repeat with upload (but with upload, you don't need a server that can download fast).
HD Trailers
I use Charter 3 Mbps service and I always get at, or real close to that amount.
Had a similar problem with wiring in an older (1960's) home with bad wiring. Tried everything we could think of but were only getting about 25-30% of our rated speed despite having a direct line of only 10-15 feet from the dsl modem to the NID.
Ordered a DSL splitter, but before it arrived I decided to try seeing how well it would work to just use a filter as a splitter. I ran a cable from the NID to the filter (placed immediately inside the house) and then split off from there so the dsl line was unfiltered and the rest of the house was filtered. End result was that we wound up getting 80-90% or so of our rated speed.
I will agree with one of the other commentors, though -- it's not worth doing this unless you try with the test jack on the NID first to make sure that the wiring in your house is the problem.
That being said, it's also pretty convenient to just toss a filter (or even a few in series) between the NID and your housewiring, since you don't have to worry about having a filter on each jack that way.
Thank the bandwidth gods for UTOPIA, a community fiber-optic system. 15Mbit symmetric. I've had LAN's slower than this, and I get a 2ms ping time to XMission's border router. Logged on to counter-strike, and found a few games being hosted at my isp with under 10ms pings. It's amazing what can happen when you get the damn telcos out of the way. :::.. Download Stats ..:::
Connection is:: 14320 Kbps about 14.32 Mbps (tested with 12160 kB)
Download Speed is:: 1748 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Server 2)
Test Time:: 2006/06/01 - 11:34pm
Bottom Line:: 250X faster than 56K 1MB Download in 0.59 sec
Tested from a 12160 kB file and took 6.956 seconds to complete
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060326 Firefox/1.5.0.3 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.3-1)
Diagnosis: Awesome! 20% + : 85.68 % faster than the average for host (xmission.com)
Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-QIOGKAJMB
Online speed tests are usually the WORST thing to use for a test. You have multiple hops to go through to get there, and who's to say if any of THOSE are bottlenecked. For that matter, since it's a speed test, who's to say that the speed test isn't overloaded and can't push what you're capable of pulling
While I'm not defending ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T (Formerly SBC) because they are NOTORIOUS for overbooking and/or throttling connections, you simply can't expect to get an accurate speed test by downloading from some site that is serving a speed test. If you want to see what kind of speed you're getting, download something fairly large from your ISP's website. We have multiple files that we have our customers download when they ask why they think they aren't getting the speed they should. We then point them to some outside source for a download or 2. As far as OUR experience since we monitor our traffic very closely, 99 times out of a hundred the speed problem is caused by the site that the customer is going to. Some times that site even blames the ISP knowing full well it's their problem that's proven by a simple trace route. 10ms until the hop just before the site you're going to and then it jumps up to 1200ms is usually a good indication.
Now, here's my usual schpeel about people complaining about their "big" ISP. If you're unhappy, switch. Independant ISPs are responsible to the customer and not investors and as such care more about customer satisfaction. Independant ISPs also usually care very little for the complaints that end users have about how unhappy they are with their simply because it's WELL known what kind of operations they run. Call centers in India, poor service, and even 'net experience controlling software. I can't tell you how many times I'll go work on a network and someone will sit there and complain to me about their current ISP but when I recommend switching, they practically laugh in my face (and on occasion have done just that). Sure they're cheap, but look at what you're giving up for cheap. Is $5 more a month really that much more expensive?
Oh, and cable is NOT 4 times faster than DSL. In my area, Cable is only 4 meg (and that's if you're lucky) and DSL can get up to 6 meg. I'm surprised that Comcast hasn't been sued for that statement yet.
Last year I had SBC increase my 1.5Mbps DSL to 3Mbps.
Then I checked - I was only getting about ten percent more speed than I was before.
I called SBC, they referred me to their provisioner.
The tech there said I was 12,000 feet from the DSLAM, therefore I could NOT GET 3Mbps - you have to be within 10,000 feet to get it. They could set my line for that, but they said my line would begin to drop more and more and eventually go down and stay down. They were quite emphatic that 3Mbps was not an option for me.
So I negotiated with SBC to go back to 1.5 - for less money than I had been paying for the 1.5 (I got that some years ago at the $49.95 rate), but more than the deal they were offering for the 3Mbps.
SBC is clearly setting itself up for a class-action lawsuit, regardless of the legal language about "best effort speeds." They are offering services they KNOW they can't deliver to a specific customer.
The SBC sales rep even told me they were going to TWENTY megabit speeds this year. How the hell are they going to deliver 20Mbps when they can't deliver 3?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I have the Comcast 8Mb/768K plan here in Sacramento and got speeds all over the place when I had my cheapo Netgear FM114P FW/Router in place....Things seemed to firm up closer to advertised when I dumped it in favor of a Cisco PIX 501. Using Speakeasy's tests..... Last Result: (SF - nearest test server) Download Speed: 8257 kbps (1032.1 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 720 kbps (90 KB/sec transfer rate) Last Result: (LA) Download Speed: 8208 kbps (1026 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 718 kbps (89.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Last Result: (Sea) Download Speed: 7104 kbps (888 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 718 kbps (89.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Last Result: (NYC) Download Speed: 5908 kbps (738.5 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 715 kbps (89.4 KB/sec transfer rate) Last Result: (DC) Download Speed: 3742 kbps (467.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 715 kbps (89.4 KB/sec transfer rate) Obviously as I started using test servers on the other side of the country my speeds took a nosedive, but otherwise, I'm happy. I have no other broadband options where I live....
So I've got Cox HSI. Last year they upgraded me for free from 3Mbps/512kbps to 5/2 (in response to FIOS). There was definitely a difference, even during peak. Using Speakeasy's speed test I regularly tested out above 5 mbps down, and usually between 1-1.6 mbps up. On the phone recently with Cox, they said I could upgrade to 15/2 for $10/mo less for a year. So, doing a quick speed test after the upgrade, I now only test between 7-9 mpbs, and still only 1-1.6 mbps up. I DEFINITELY don't see anything even approaching 15. Fortunately I'm paying less for it =D
Now, there are certain exceptions. In general, you can't drive a dense network at much beyond 1/3 the rated speed - thin-wire ethernet was bad for that - so you can expect similar sorts of problems on a shared line such as cable. The entire design of cable - a single line with taps off it - is exactly what thick-wire and thin-wire ethernet were like.
However, the article mentions DSL. DSL is not a shared line, it is essentially a dedicated line. The service only becomes shared at the teleco's CO (as that's where the DSL modems are, on the other side). At that point, everyone gets plugged into one or more routers. Now, when you change the speed of the modem, they simply program the DSL modem on their end to take a slower connection. They do not (at least, if they are network neutral) mess with the routers to change the priority of your network traffic.
Interestingly, when I worked for a company that got SDSL installed (no service agreement), the engineer ramped up the listed speed beyond what we'd paid for, but the actual speed we ended up with was what we'd bought . This doesn't conflict with what I've just said - we were on the edge of the service area and the speed we were supposed to get simply didn't operate. At all. Apparently, if the copper is poor, not all frequencies are guaranteed to work, and it's not an upper limit - lower speeds can be affected too.
Anyway, to the poster of the original story, I'd strongly suggest getting an INDEPENDENT person that you can trust to check the phone wiring from the DSL modem as far out as practical. At the very least, check the wiring in the house. It is possible that poor wiring, a rusty connector or a loose connection somewhere is killing the speed. If that is the case, then fixing the problem would be very cheap and easy, and would save a LOT of money - you'd have more bandwidth without shelling out the extra cash.
If the wiring is good, then the fault lies with the ISP, and I'd suggest calling a consumer advocacy group for advice on what to do - if, indeed, you can do anything. If only a handful of people care enough to actually do anything, you probably can't - although there are usually multiple DSL providers in an area, and some are better than others.
If a LOT of people are VERY frustrated AND willing to spend hard cash to get this fixed once and for all, you might want to investigate the pros and cons of setting up a DSL cooperative. The teleco can't deny you equal access to the CO (that's law), but industrial-strength network equipment (DSL modems, high-end routers, T3 or T4 line) - that isn't cheap. And, yes, you probably would need to go to a T3 or T4 in order to make the whole thing fast enough to pay for itself. This is NOT a recommended option, without some serious funding behind it. However, if the funding is there, it is the one path you can take that (a) guarantees you the results you want, (b) guarantees the ISP has consequences it WILL notice, and (c) guarantees you the undivided attention of every disenchanted geek and abusive ISP on the planet - at least, for a week or two.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Comcast has really done me right. I usually get MORE than they advertise. I can download ISO's or Rsync some files and still play a WOW on one machine and BattleField2 on the other. It may just be my area but they have been great. They did not charge extra when they upped my speed like DSL does. Also my PING, not just my bandwidth is great. I ping 0 to most closer bf2 or et servers. DSL was a minimum of 200 to 300 ping. We had major issues with Pacbell/SBC. Their tech support is "Let me transfer you to somone else" or "You are obviously not willing to work with us and I am terminating this call". We also tried to terminate our service and they kept charging us. They also signed us up for spam and also a dialup account that we never signed up for. They said it was "an automatic trial". I doubt its any better now that they are ATT. We had line issues and SBC said that we had to call ASI , their contractor to keep the lines running. SBC said that we were a few meters from the redline (fibre router) and we were actually over 6000 Feet from the nearest according to ASI. The ASI guys were nice and knew what they were doing and they told me that SBC was obviously selling me snake oil and that my house should not be able to even use DSL. Other companies like Earthlink and many resellers must use SBC lines as they own them so no matter what you are dealing with SBC. SBC will raise your price from 14$ to 53$ to 70$ a month too. For no reason without warning. I would trust Verizon FIOS and Comcast in my area. That's it. Even the advertised wireless internet sucks still.
I leave my P2P host [Azureus] running at all times unless I am gaming. My aggregate throughput has gone up steadly since I started doing that. I think demand has caused the company to adjust the supply. 8-)
CAVEAT: Shame on you for profiling... all my P2P stuff is legal. I watch the OpenOffice RSS feed for updated torrents, and I host Knoppix and Slackware torrents. 8-)
So anyway, one of the things I have done to _actually_ done to improve my speed is set up a Linux firewall and do some _very_ basic upload-side traffic shaping. In particular I have made sure that (1) I always send my TCP ACKs at the highest priority and (2) I throttle the transmission so that I never overrun the (relatively) small buffer in the modem.
By ensuring I never drop an ACK, I make sure that the TCP congestion control doesn't bite me in the ass.
Then again, I'd also bet that by using the bandwidth you have bought, you apply evolutionary pressure on your provider.
Call me evil... 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
The quoted speed you buy only counts for the first hop. If your ISP has a server immediately on the other side of that hop, you should get full speed to that. Beyond that, it gets messy.
If I have a 6 Mbit link to my ISP, and so do a thousand other schmucks, does my ISP have a 6 Gbit link to the outside world? Doubtful. Most of the time much less will be enough, but if they are overselling too much then they are cheap bastards and you should get a new ISP.
The more hops out you get the more you have to deal with the aggregate bandwidth of the internet being push over whichever backbone your packets happen to travel.
Start Running Better Polls
Ahh, my friend, you've now discovered the real motivations behind net neutrality.
Lets step back a few years. You're a Dial up ISP, with we'll say 100 customers at 56kbps [7kBps]. Well those 100 will never likely be online at the same time, so lets only buy something to support a full capacity of 50 [50*7 = 350 kBps].
While we may have the full 100 lines, there's no reason to pay for a 768 T1 when you won't use it.
Now fast forward to today.
You have the same number of customers [yes, this is hand-waving, but accurate], but now all 100 want to be online at the same time [e.g., cable], and want to use their full connection [e.g., bittorrent/voip/etc., constantly running]. All the sudden your over-subscribing/under-provisioning is no longer profitable.
So they want to QOS you based on what you pay. You pay for 768, bob pays for 1.5, therefor he should get to use 2:1 a ratio of whats available between you and bob.
Since bob uses VOIP, P2P, b/torrent constantly, you suffer.
Now of course you're not really competing with bob, you compete with 1000x the original customer base, but the problem remains the same. You suffer, because ISP's cant provide ANYONE with what they promise, because they rely on the old assumptions of subscribers, active users, and usage rates that have held true for all those dial-up years.
To abstract just a bit more, think of every time you get a "cell tower is at capacity" [or like] message. This is typically only common during disasters, but it happens every now and again. Same problem.
The provider doesnt expect 100% usage by 90% customers, so they figure they can cut down on whats provisioned.
Sick sad world.
How does this relate to NN? Why do you think the providers care what you do with your bandwidth? If they bought a T1 for every 1.5 [etc], this wouldn't be an issue, but they'd have to charge more. And since they dont want to charge YOU [the customer] more, they figure they can wring it out of yahoo, google, msn, etc. the ones who CAN pay.
-- (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I have 24 mbit ADSL. If I do a speed test with a http download I rarely get over 6 or 7 mbit for a single connection, but if I use a download manager to create multiple connections I can easily get over 20 mbit. Just because your end supports a certain speed doesn't mean that the connection from the other end will fill your available bandwidth.
But pretending that they'll fix all your problems isn't really an appropriate response either.
I understand you don't have a choice of providers (if you really looked, you do have a choice - it just may not be cheaper. It doesn't have to be cable either. It could be sat.), but in my case, when I left SBC for Speakeasy, I made sure they knew why I was leaving them. And I let them know I was willing to pay a higher price to be treated correctly. I also told them that I would not recommend them to other people. They consistently did nothing but read scripts, after waiting on hold for as much as an hour. And when I would try and tell them that I'd already tried what they were reading, they'd just start the script from the top again.
Sorry, but when you let them insult your intelligence, they think they can insult everyone's intelligence.
You would do well to assert yourself a bit. It's the only way they will acknowledge their deficiencies and improve their service. Otherwise, they'll continue to believe that we're all apologetic idiots and think they're doing a marvelous job.
Spyware
If I were you I'd check and see what rate your modem is syncing at, as well as what your line capacity and signal quality look like. If you can get it from your modem great, if not your ISP should be able to tell you. They should also be able to give you an idea of what signal level is required to maintain your desired bandwidth and possibly an idea of how far out on the loop you are. The backend equipment on their network can make a large difference as well. I'm not sure about Verizon, but an SBC/ATT connection will be almost completely unusable with a SNR of 6dB, whereas 5dB SNR on Qwest's system will give you your full sync rate.
Not all DSL modems are created equally either. I know SBC/ATT gained an extra 2-3kfeet of usable loop with 2Wire gateways instead of SpeedStream DSL bridges. Another thing to check on is the house's wiring. If you've got old untwisted copper in the walls it needs to be replaced with cat5, if you have a home alarm it needs to be filtered. Hell, see if you can have them install a filter in the box outside and leave one jack unfiltered for DSL. You can also purchase a Cat3 DSL Patch so you have twisted pair all the way to your modem. Things as unlikely as a dimmer switch can destroy your DSL signal as well and most techs wouldn't give them a second thought. Hopefully that gives you something to work with. If you can't get your connection up to a satisfactory level see if you have any alternatives available.
Cox Communications offers a 9MBit package out here in Phoenix. My room-mates and I have been able to consistantly speed test and real-world test it to the full 9 meg capacity. Better then that, during off peak times we can pull closer to 10.5Mbit from a capable server. Sure it's $65, but it works well and my employer reimburses me for it in the end.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Hence the need for QoS and a tiered internet. They can slow down those not complaining and speed up those who are. Not to be confused with spending the money being extorted from people who already paid thier conection fees but run a business so they are going to have to pay twice on non-bandwidth related stuff like a new company car or jet, raises for the execs, bonuses or whatever.
It apears that ISPs are already concerned with this issue. They have a plan too!
You are getting faster internet. You said yourself that going from 3mps to 768kps lowers the speed proportionately, thus the opposite is true. You are getting faster internet with the new 'faster' speeds, even if it isn't exactly the rate labelled on the service.
As for the label perhaps being false advertising, since when have you seen true advertising?
I signed up for (and pay for) 1.5 Mbps DSL. I get 2.2 Mbps (measured). I can live with that...
My ISP was so good, in fact, that I had to call up tech support and ask them to throttle down my bandwidth from 3Mbps in order to increase reliability -- and they did it, no questions asked. I still have trouble believing it, all things considered.
I think the critical difference is this: I don't get my service from the local telephone monopoly, or the local cable monopoly.
I went with EarthLink. It seems (where I live, at least) that EarthLink is more like a facilitator-- they hook customers with local ISP's (benefiting both the customer and ISP). The customer gets good service from a local ISP (in my case, steller service)
The ISP gets a pretty sweet deal too -- they don't have to pay for any advertising, and EarthLink does all the customer support and billing, leaving the ISP to keep the connection live; this means the ISP gets to focus on being an ISP, rather than a wearing customer service and billing center hats.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
this made me go read the terms and conditions of my cable internet service.
basically nothing is their fault if anything goes wrong... and i'm not even sure i'm allowed to post this??? after reading the restrictions =p
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Well, I have the same problem to some extent. Over here in Japan they have fiber to darn close to the home (the last few metres to the box is copper cable or something).
Anyhow, I signed up to nifty for their 100Mbps home service, it comes to about maybe 17 pounds (GBP / UK pounds) per month at the current exchange rate. But the thing is, I can only sustain up to about 70Mbps for long periods of time. Where is my missing 30Mbps I wonder...! (Actually, I usually don't wonder that, I usually think "Holy f***ing Wow!!!").
Due to a 'campaign' ("kyanpein" in Japanese language) I am getting it at 2/3 of the usual price, so really it would be about 25 pounds (GBP) per month.
I like the conditions too. I get a fixed IP address, I can use it to serve web sites, I can connect multiple computers (they even offer a router offer if thats is so), for VoIP, for watching TV here in Japan, and so much more. And they don't go screwing with my traffic. For a few extra Yennage (The local Japanese units of dough) I can get a phone that plugs in directly to one of the 100Mbps ethernet sockets and can sign up to a service just for IP phones (using SIP), or a service including SIP and to/from standard phones.
But, where is my missing sustained 30Mbps I wonder!? (well, sometimes I can peak at about 80Mbps I have to admit).
This is real competition! Real compition shoudl come to the UK, with less of this 'controlled competition' (i.e. no competition), between BT in most areas and Tele-NTL-West in some parts...
Nifty!
You can only go as fast as the site you connect to.... Which speed test are you using? many speed tests get overloaded after time, and you can't get your maximum speed....Where do you live? Where is the server located? How many hops to the server? I work for a Major High speed ISP (technical Support), and our customers recieve pretty close to the 5 MBit barrier that they are allowed when they go to speed test sites relatively close to us (7 hops to our preferred external speedtest). However if they go to a speed test on the other side of the continent, they get around 1MBit. This is normal, and I have educated many users on this.
Put it in Highway terms. The car you bought and licensed in Germany may be able to reach 200 MPH on the Autobhan, but if you're caught in traffic, visiting a busy town or if the speed limit in England is slower than in Germany, you're stuck going slower. Nothing your ISP can do will speed you up to a slower external site.
please provide more info (ie: your state, and the site of your speed test) when making claims that your speed test gives you less-than-desirable speeds. and remember - it's a Theoretical maximum - you'll never hit it. It should come close though.
Bits vs. Bytes
Bandwidth is usually given as bits (a lowercase 'b'), yet your OS displays bytes (a capital 'B'). I don't think i have to make mention of "8 bits in a byte" but would like to point out the coincidence -- and yes, it is a coincidence-- that the dated definition of a bits meant 12.5 cents which is equal to $1 (or a whole unit) when multiplied by 8.
Theoretical Speed vs. Actual Speed
There is a great deal of overhead attributed to a network. All this overhead (id est:processing of data) effects the actual throughput quite a bit. From a networking standpoint, a router causes the most latency as the data has more layers to traverse than a switch/bridge or hub/repeater, but when faced with a congested network the router helps the overall speed and efficiency.
Maximum Throughput vs Minimum Throughput
You pay for a possible maximum, not a dedicated minimum. DSL and Cable differ quite a bit from Frame Relay and the like) as they are often offered with a minimum throughput.
Megabyte (GB) vs. Mebibyte (MiB)
Somewhat confusing, the latter was coined less than decade ago to differentiate between base-10 and base-2. This is why your 80Gibibyte (80GiB) HDD only shows up as 74.5Gigabytes (74.5GB). At one point not much of an issue, and now a marketing standard for storage devices. The alteration is to simply point out the Binary arithmetic used. As storage becomes large the differences will become more pronounced and more accountability will be required to subdue any further lawsuits.
Yes it does, because almost all politicians currently holding high office are paid operatives of big corporate interests. Ignore this fact at your peril.
Here: Blow your mind.
I dunno, get a decent provider? A few years ago, I lived in a place where there was no broadband. Finally, Comcast cable Internet became available and I signed up right away. Their only plan was around 1.5 Mbps at the time and for a few months, that's exactly what I got. Then steadily, of course, speed went down as they grossly oversold the line. The last month I lived there, I was getting better performance out of my backup dialup connection.
Now I live in a much more modern area and have a wider variety of options to chose from. I'm currently signed up with a medium-sized local provider with tens of thousands of accounts in the area and their speeds are pretty much as advertised as long as you're a reasonable distance from the CO.
Local companies are usually a better bet for broadband. For starters, they don't have the marketing budget of national corporations, so they have to work harder to keep their customers happy. One time my DSL went out in the middle of the day on Friday. Plugged the modem straight into the NI to rule out problems with my wiring and called up tech support. They promised to send a technician out next week. Saturday morning, I roll out of bed at 8:30 and there's a note on my front door saying that there was a problem with some piece of equipment down the block and that my DSL should be back up. It was.
I recognized the name of the technician on the note. He was the owner of the company.
For the past few years, I've been paying for a 1Mbps cable line, and averaging around 1.5 to 2Mbps at any given time. I'm not complaining. (I user a locally owned ISP, not one of the national chains)
Your post is largely correct - starting a few torrents shows an end user that there is a problem, but those torrents are also the *reason* for the problem. Bittorrent accounts for about 1/3 of all network traffic. [http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html]
ISPs oversell for the same reasons airlines oversell - it is much more profitable to do it, and it would be silly not to. Why would they pay for 2Gbps of connectivity at an access point when, statistically, usage never gets above 1Gbps? Would you want them to be charging you the amount it would cost them for full utilization of your pipe at all times (if you're not running bittorrent or some other P2P software)? I thought not.
With bittorrent's explosion, usage has gone up by a factor of 50%, and the margins don't cut it anymore. ISPs aren't sure how to react - as you pointed out, they don't want to charge the average user more, and they don't want the outcry that would come from a metered rate - both would be business suicide.
So, for the moment, they do nothing (except push for tiered internet so they can charge you more for non-blessed internet traffic), and us geeks complain on geek forums, but the money still rolls in for them, because, let's face it, you aren't going to spring for a T3 to get your pr0n and torrents faster.
Sorry, I'm not in the US. I live in Germany, and I know that *each and every* DSL provider here will send you a free DSL splitter with your contract. I have never heard of any other solution before reading your post :)
I have a DSL 6000/660 plan, my line is currently synced to 5120/736, which translates to 4637/667 after protocol overhead. I think that's fair enough, given the options of paying 3 EUR less for 3000/384 or 10 EUR more for ADSL2+ 16000/800. I also noticed that the backbone connection is very good - I often get 500kb/sec download rates and 74kb/sec upload.
I have a DSL 2+ connection, and I am about 800m (half mile) from the exchange.
I synch at 18.5Mb/1Mbps
When I download I get 1.8MBytes ti 2Mbytes per second from the few hosts that can actually keep up with this kind of throughput.
For the most parts I am limited by the available bandwidth of the site providers.
P2P however is blindingly fast with these speeds.
Latency for Online gaming (eg: WOW with US hosts) sucks hard though at 250ms MINIMUM.
lounge around on the blue couch
Here in Southern California, Verizon is more than delivering on their promised speeds.
I had the 1.5Mbps/256Kbps plan until a few months ago, and they delivered just a bit more than that 99% of the time. Since they significantly lowered the price of the lower plan, I've dropped to the 768/128Kbps plan, and I'm getting that speed, all day, every day.
I've checked my family member's DSL connections, and verified that they're getting just about exactly the same speed as well, despide being at a much greater distance from the telco.
So I'm not seeing anything like the problems you're reporting. And, if many other people were having the same problems, I'd have expected to have heard loads about it, long ago.
I suggest you take a look at your telephone lines, and make sure they're very well connected. Particularly at the house/network interchange, I've seen some really half-assed wiring jobs, and wires that corrode to pieces after a few years of exposure. In-fact, plugging a long telephone line directly into the interchange box is a good way to see if the problem is in your house, or not.
The second thing to check is your modem. With cable, I called out Charter repair service about 10 god dammed times, and they kept replacing the coax connectors, resetting the modem, seeing that it worked for a few seconds, and leaving, despite my repeated objections... then a few minutes later, I'd call up for service again, and have another guy come out and replace the connectors again... They NEVER replaced the obviously defective modem they were "leasing" to me, so I demanded a refund for the months I couldn't use it, and switched to DSL. I don't really have a point here, I'm just still pissed at those completely incompotent morons, all around... So try a different modem.
If that doesn't work, you can try getting service through the DSL branch, but it'll be a real hassle, and take forever, but replacing the line might fix your problem, particularly if you're in an older house.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
But that's not what I'm concerned about. They finished installing the Project Lightspeed box just up the street a few months ago, and I'm close enough that if they really do use VDSL2+, I can get 50-100 Mbits bidirectional. But guess what? They're only offering 6M down / 1.5M up for the near future. The rest of it is reserved for their stupid cable-over-IP service, and I really don't want pay TV, no matter which company or technology it's coming from. I'm quite happy with free over-the-air ATSC, especially PBS.
However, I am aware that the DSL I get is technically a business class DSL (it's the same price as the equivalent business class service), so maybe in a few months when they start hooking it up, they might have a business class option that's a bit faster.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
ADSL speed depends where you are and how far away you are from the next telephone "hub". I have 50mbit ADSL and I get full speed. Inside Japan I even exceed the 50mbit regulary.
A friend of mine had also 50mbit but he never got more than 10mbit and a lot of disconnects. so he downgraded and now he is fine.
ADSL is very flaky crap.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
I get 6mbps from my cable co. (TimeWarner/RoadRunner) for the same price as a 3mbps DSL line would be from my telephone co. (SBC/AT&T)
If only I could've leeched @ 600k/sec like this 8 years ago!! =O
We should be getting 2gbps by now, imo =p
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Trust me, I would if I could. Most of the apartments in Dallas have "single provider" agreements. I can't even have a T1 or something like that dropped in because the apartment owners sell the wiring rights to single companies, and those companies will only give you one option and will not allow anybody else into the equipment closets or walls. The apartment owners have the right to refuse access to anyone they want (it is their property, after all), and the telco secures and utilizes that right in a contract with the owner.
:-)
//I, for one, welcome our monopolistic communications overlords.
////Besides, some of the phone repair people are hot.
I could install satellite, but it would cost me.....a LOT.....a WHOLE LOT!!!!! Try a $1000 non-refundable damage deposit to put the dish on the building plus a minimum of $75000 in renters liability insurance.
I can't get cable, because the same owner that sells the rights to the phone lines also sells rights to the cable...and guess who buys them....the phone company.
Even in the case that the owner sells the rights to two different people (phone and cable to two separate companies), the two parties generally get together and reach a side agreement. In my current building, I am supposed to be able to get Comcast cable and internet....but Comcast and SBC got together and swapped rights on several complexes. Now SBC controls phone AND cable in my complex and Comcast has the same in another (reselling someone elses phone service).
You can't win for losing.
This is pretty much the case at every apartment I have EVER lived in within the Dallas metroplex. The only exception was the apartment in the high crime district where we couldn't even get cable or DSL.
In the end, you are technically correct....I could get a satellite. But it is prohibitively expensive. To me it is simply easier and cheaper to put my ego and my temper to the side and suck up. It works. Its easy. Its cheap.
It is kind of like why I stay at my current job.
I figure patience with these inconvenient things now will pay off by saving me much energy and stress while working on my own things/ideas. Different priorities, I guess.
I just look forward to buying a house in the next few months so that I can have the illusion of provider choice for at least a few more months before the telcos and cable companies manage to legislate their monopolies back into (stronger) existance.
In the end, the telcos have millions of lobbying dollars and congressmen have giant holes in their pockets to fill. One day we will all have to bow to our evil communications overlords, may as well start practicing now.
1. It says "Speeds Up to" Somewhere somehow someone gets the speed advertised, under ideal conditions.
2. Why doesn't the internet get faster:
a. I can't download faster than you can upload. So the Asynchronous lack of speed means nothing moves faster than the slowest side.
b. The more people with high bandwidth connect to the net the slower the sites they go to becomes, including popular bandwidth testing sites!
c. Bandwidth capping, many sites cap their speed so as to not overwhelm the customers they had in 2000 (meaning the same companies who code only for IE 5.0)
d. Poor router configuration. Not by your ISP but by the "backbone" providers in between. I've actually worked at an ISP where customers dropped peering agreements because bandwidth was better if we didn't peer with them.(bad routers at our peering provider)
e. Poor site design. I spent a whole day trying to explain to a company why a 1mb webpage was slower than a 30k page from their competitor.
f. You get used to speed. Much like how you used to buy this really great sounding stereo, only to realize 6 months later that it sounds like crap.
g. Poor quality bandwidth testing. Just because you only get 750kbps between you and the testor doesn't mean that's all the bandwidth you have, it means that's all the bandwidth you can get. Switches, Nics, Routers etc all affect what happens.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I ditched comcast for a local fixed wireless ISP (Mesa Networks) who seem to be holding customers despite having both DSL and Cable in the area.
:)
I'm paying for a 3Mb/1Mb connection, yet according to the speedtest on speakeasy's site i'm actually getting 4022kbps/1044kbps.
If I use more distant speed test locations then it seems to be closer to what i'm paying for, however it looks like they must have raised the cap on the local end so that I can get transfers at the speed i'm paying for. On top of that, my connection bursts to 9/3 which makes small transfers really snappy
I pay for a 20Mbps connection, yet I get barely 1.5-2Mbps. That's the thing that sux about living in a poor area of town. Nobody can be bothered fixing up the local telephone exchange. :/
RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
I think when they say 6Mbps they mean 3 in one direction and 3 in the other. So all together 6.
So the asker getting 3Mbs would be about right.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
As I understand it one of the drawbacks of DSL is the further away you are from your provider the more interference the signal is subjected to. So unless you are within a few hundred feet of your provider the overall quality of a DSL connection will drop. And that's one of the advantages that cable internet has over DSL. I have a 3 meg connection from Charter and whenever a server has the bandwith to spare it hits 380k/s. Runs like a champ.
I lived in the US for the past year and I figured going to the second largest city (LA) in the country that's home to so much of the world's top technology companies, the Internet access would be just great too.
Well, where I can get full-rate ADSL and ADSL2 (8M & 24M) here in Finland in the middle of nowhere for pretty decent prices, the most I was offered was 3M in LA. And even then the ISP was too clueless to realize that even that wouldn't work, so they had to downgrade me to 1.5M to get the connection up.
Can someone tell me what's holding the US back so badly? It seems at least the free market has failed the consumer badly, as the reason Finland is in such good shape is because the government acted at the telcos trying to ask for draconian fees for competitors to use their lines.
Seeing that you aren't allowed to put large files that are not web accessible (or in mail I presume) bandwidth should be the limiting issue and that is limited.
How well does your ISP provide customer support? How well do they cover/compensate you for the hours/days that your service goes down?
Case in point: Approximately a year ago, a garbage pickup driver forgot to lower his dumpster lift. As a result, he knocked down the cable line to my block. I called it in to Comcast. They tried running me through the standard "Did you restart your computer?" routine, I responded, "No, my cable is down. I can see it lying here on the street.". They got it about the second time they asked. Anyhoo, they fixed it about 3-4 hours after the fact. Did they offer to cover it? No. Same goes for the other days they went down, such as their pathetic e-mail service (which I, ironically, depend on for business) giving either error messages or maintenance messages about every two weeks, or other outages. You have to tell them specifically when you went offline, or when you were inconvenienced by their outages.
Even if you do this, it doesn't stop them (specifically Comcast) from spreading FUD about satellite service or DSL, let alone disclosing how majorly both services technically give you the same amount of assraping for the same basic service.
Case in point: Comcast pretends their net service is cheaper. Okay, their basic connection cost is that you use the most basic cable service ($10 rounded out), and then their net connection (if you don't own a cable modem, you're paying $50 for the service and the modem rental, $60 total. On the telcos's side, you have $40 or so for DSL, and another $20 for the basic telephone line connection. Same result, $60. Both sides pretend that you're paying more for less service, no matter which you choose. As incentive to get you to pay more, they pretend further, that your cable/dsl broadband connection is costing you more for both services, when in the end, they're restricting your bandwidth to make sure you have the illusion that this in fact is true.
They're both giving us the ripoff, no matter what.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I am on a 5Mbps down / 1Mbps up plan. From DSL Reports speed tests I get 4570 kbps down and 740 kbps up. Pretty close to what I signed up for!
And haven't experienced an outtage so far and good tech support. So loose the KomKast and sign up for RCN if you can.
http://www.rcn.com/
I work for a small ISP (about 7000 active customers on dial-up/dsl) and all of our customers get the minimum that's advertised if not more. If a customer complains of slow speed we have them do a speed test via ftp to our site and if they're not getting at least what they're paying for we up their speed more.
All in all I'm very surprised at this. Our customers would flip out if they were getting less than advertised.
I have a 10Mbps cable connection. Sure, most 'net servers aren't able to give out files that fast. But the ones that are..
3-4 weeks ago I downloaded a 142MB file. Firefox reported it as coming down at one megabyte/sec. I'm not sure whether it lied, but the file was downloaded in under 2 minutes.
Surprised the hell out of me. Made me happy.
Cable company is NTL. Their technical support is absolutely atrocious. Luckily their connection is very stable, so I rarely have to call them. And the download speed is very nice indeed.
Something I've noticed from a quick scan of the comments is that people are talking about how you'll never achieve your rated line speed in practice because of the overheads associated with TCP/IP, etc.
Here in the UK, what companies sell as (eg) a 512Kbps connection is actually (from memory) a 572Kbps connection, with the extra few Kbps to account for that overhead. At least, that's how it was at least until recently; I can't tell any more as I upgraded to my ISP's 8Mbps service, but my phone line (as expected) can't handle that rate. (Still, the ~3.6Mbps I get is fine for now, and the upgrade was only £1/month more)
It always makes me laugh when I see companies advertising 16Mbps or even 24Mbps services; I can't believe that more than a handful of people actually have the line quality needed and are close enough to their exchange to achieve those speeds. Now if only BT would start improving the lines...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
That you dont even live in developing or 3rd world countries as I do ;)
Where I am right now, we're lucky to have 24/7 broadband at all, a whopping 64kbps cable connection which is SHARED with 15 other consumer per node for only ~USD35/month, but if you want the speed for yourself, there's the 128kbps for only ~USD130/month, oh, some ISP around here announced a speed improvement to up to 512kbps few months ago, weeee! I hope that gets to my area soon :P
It's the problem with humanity, they never get satisfied :D
PS: I studied in the states, so I experienced the joy of 1.5 Mbps broadband ;)
Unfortunately, cable is a best effort service. That means the cable company will make the best effort to provide you the bandwidth they say you can have. Of course, to do anything that can ensure you will have that bandwidth available (QOS?), would be illegal under all of these new net neutrality laws.
I am sure if you called up your cable companies transit provider and bought a dedicated t1 from then for 600-2000 bucks a month you would be able to get your promised speeds. Or not. Apparently it will be illegal for them to reserve bandwidth for their customers because they are not reserving it for people who are not paying them.
Excuse me while I go amuse myself by reading some more net neutrality bills.
I have a 20/5 plan and I see a constant 20/5 when the server can deliever those speeds.
I'm not convinced the OP understands the difference between bits and bytes.
For the noobs:
Capitalization of Kb versus KB matters. b = bits, B = bytes.
Broadband providers measure bandwidth in BITS per second.
Your Internet Explorer download dialog measures bandwith in KILOBYTES per second.
A kilobyte is (8*1024) bits (unless you're a hard drive manufacturer, in which case it's 8*1000 bits)
6Mbps = 6,000,000 bits per second = 732.4 kilobytes per second
750Kbps = 750,000 bits per second = 91.55 kilobytes per second
I'm just sayin'
Canadian ISPs have currently raised speeeds and we actually SEE the increases. My ISP (cogeco cable) recently upgraded to 7 MBPS from 5 MBPS for FREE (34.95/mo cdn BTW) and I consistantly get the full speed of my line downloading from usenet. Another story where slashdot ignores the rest of the world....
Most companies advertise there upload/download speeds in megabits, not megabytes, megabytes are what are used to calculate the size of a file. Megabits are made up of bits not bytes, so 1 megabyte would equal 8 megabits. So if you are getting a 750kilobyte/s connection then your acutaly recieving more then a 3 megabit plan. With my ISP I get a 10 Megabit plan for around $50 cdn, its a cable provider not DSL and I download at 1.2 Megabytes per second if the connection maxes out. You also need to keep in mind that some companies say 768kb, but again they are talking in kilobits, not bytes.
I've found that same rule works well for me. Take the line's rated speed in bits/second, measure download speed on my computer in bytes/second. If the ratio is about 10:1, the line is working properly and is close to it's realistic max.
It's not an absolute or anything, just a good way of estimating realistic throughput you'll see.
They know you're not being sincere. They get treated SO badly by everyone else though that they appreciate your effort.
;)
Trust me, I worked customer service for a while.
Not really.. The rated speed is the speed of the physical layer. Same with ethernet. Wireless just has more overhead associated with it so the actual data transfer rates are much slower. Once you take into account MAC and IP overhead, that 11Mbit turns into ~6 Mbit.
802.11b actually works much like traditional telephone modems. There are several physical speeds supported. When the two modems connect they negotiate the speed that will provide the greatest overall bandwidth. Often this is 11Mbit but sometimes it is 1.5Mbit. A professor from UBC recently lectured at UNBC about a new ieee proposal he designed. Great stuff, it's amazing how a simple change can result in such a large improvement.
Ok, this is off topic but I'll briefly review his idea. Essentially he suggests that the MAC protocol support two kind of errors - collisions and noise (ie, environmental). The current MAC protocol treats these the same. Currently, on an error the MAC protocol stops, waits, and tries again. The wait time increases with more errors. This is great for collisions, but unnecessary for noise.
Differentiating between the two types of errors does impose a little overhead, but the gains are worth it. In his simulations, overall bandwidth usage improved by ~10% on average. There were even instances where usage improved by >60%.
I wish I had a link to his presentation, but I don't. Needless to say, there is a little more too it then I described. If you want to search for it, be advised that he is a CS instructor at UBC and is also of asian descent (I think Chinese). Oh well, the point I was originally trying to make is that physical speed > data speed but this doesn't mean that the hardware isn't actually communicating at the rated physical speed.
How did this even make it on /.??? Your INTERNET speeds are based on _TWO_ things. The speed of your connection, and the speed of the slowest pipe to your destination. No matter who your provider is, ALWAYS use the speed test site provided by your provider! 3rd party speed test only tell you how fast you can get data to and from THEM! If they are overloaded your speeds will look like !sht.
/.
If you have a DOCSIS based connection and you have slow speeds to your providers speed test site. Check for packet-loss! As little as 2-3% packet-loss will greatly reduce your speeds. Anything more then 1% packet-loss is a sign of a problem.
I could go on forever but this topic shouldn't even be on
The past is just the present only older -me-
I have the same issue with my DSL (1.5mb package). For whatever reason my upload is always perfect but my DL suffers all the time.
The weird thing is, my internet always works perfectly the first few months I move to a new place. Either they are screwing with me or I am crazy. Cable and DSL seemed to do this, I would live there for a few months and I would get excellent uptime and excellent speeds and then the three months would pass and it would take a shit.
Here in Holland i signed up for a 1Mbps cable connection a couple of years ago.
... twice.
Nowadays, i have 4Mbps and i'm still paying the same - the provider has, on their own initiative and free of charge doubled the speed
And yes, i can can get about 80% of the theoretical maximum when downloading Linux ISOs from a local university.
The thing is, in Holland and due to the way the law is made (the ex-public, now private telco was forced to allow any ISP to provide ADSL access via their lines) the competition in the area of broadband internet is fierce.
Quite often we ask you to do what you just did again because most subscribers are so fucking stupid that when they tried it, they unplugged, say, the ethernet cable when they were supposed to unplug the power cable.
Seriously, at least half the time when a subscriber has tried to troubleshoot on their own, and they get through to me, they've screwed things up even more than they were in the first place.
Don't blame the techs for making you repeat things. Blame your fellow subscribers for causing us to spend an hour on a five minute problem one too many times with their horrifically incompetent attempt at life.
I have Comcast's 8mb Cable in Seattle. I constantly recieve 10mbps down, and have even recieved speedtests greater than 12mb down.
crystal:/tmp> wget tp://www.jp.kernel.org/.../linux-2.6.16.19.tar.bz2
2
--17:03:43-- tp://www.jp.kernel.org/.../linux-2.6.16.19.tar.bz
[...]
17:03:48 (8.61 MB/s) - `linux-2.6.16.19.tar.bz2' saved [40836905/40836905]
Granted, the trick is finding a server that has enough upstream to saturate my link . . .
I have a 100Mbit/s connection. The way I test it is that I run tptest, which is the standardized test tool from the telco regulatory government here in Sweden. It doesn't always reach 100, but 80 is good enough for me.
The way you get these connections is you start a company that offers them. You need to have a pretty big network before these things get economically viable (also a lot of traffic is actually internal to the network, since you want to get your stuff from somebody with a big enough pipe).
Build these networks with Ethernet. There is no other technology which is cheap enough. And build lots and lots of them! Customers will come, I can promise that.
I have a 100/100 Mbps connection but I only get about 93-95 Mbps, I hate my ISP...
I have NTL broadband through their cable modem service and currently pay for their 10Mbps service. I always hit 9.5Mbps or faster. I have always had great service from NTL which is why I have been with them since 1999 and never looked at another ISP. Sure there are cheaper ones but I like my service and for the sake for a few pounds a month, which will only get spent on other crap, I can't be bothered with changing.
To be honest, part of this problem is just the fact that the agents themselves are not fully trained half of the time, the other part of the problem is also the fact that the customers themselves are not by any means computer literate, I finding myself teaching people what the difference between 0 and O is on the keyboard often. Though the method of acting sickly sweet and just "agreeing" to do what the agent has asked you to do should usually get yourself an tech truckroll or something similar from the company that you are getting your service from, the main reason for this being a better solution at all is that many people who call believe that they do know everything that there is to know not only better, but also believe that they already know the answer to the problem to which they have been trying to fix. Arrogance can cause just as much dispute and idiocy. Another thing is when dealing with a larger company, (SBC,At&t, Verizon) how do you really expect to make a point about them losing your business, when in fact you are speaking with a peon at the bottom of the organization that is mostly likely someone that is part of an outsource(scab) company. These people who are techs, as stated before do not have the sufficient trainging for this job, however, that does not change their need for their income, so what do they have to go on but the script that is there. And if you do not follow that script then what can they do; of course, this does not dismiss their incompetence. However, they can only do what is given to them, if they do more and it is incorrect then they are fired, if they do more than the specific support boundaries and bypass protocol, that is the job that they are taking into the hands.
Don't join someone like Verizon or Comcast. Join someone like Speakeasy or (what I use, highly recommended) Sonic.net. Check out DSL Reports before signing up.
Sir, I suppose you have gormandized. Here in Russia I have an optical 100Mbit Ethernet delivered straight to my apartment building, yet the maximum Internet speed which we enjoy on an average basis is just [b]1.5 Mbit and this pleasure costs US $0.15 per megabyte[/b]. Yes, we have "flat" rate tarifs like $55 a month for ... 128Kbit Internet with 2Gbytes traffic limitation.
Have mercy - use Internet downloaders/torrent clients/eDonkey if you don't want to spend hours waiting for a movie to download. Otherwise I cannot understand the cause of your dissatisfaction. If they don't deliver the advertised connection speed why one should bother subsribing on it?
YMMV, of course, there are probably areas where cable is no good either, but it might be worth a try.
I've been using Time Warner Roadrunner in SoCal for about 3 years now, and I am very pleased with the quality. I've never had an outage or any other problems. I don't recall what my down/up speeds are, but I'm inferring 5 mbps down. At least, I can sustain 4.8 mbps downloads as long as the FTP site on the other end has the bandwidth to spare, and that's about as much as you're likely to get out of a 5 megabit WAN link using TCP. Most common large download: Linux install ISOs. If a connection can sustain around 4.8 mbps on something that big, it's pretty stable.
I'm currently using Roadrunner residential, but for over a year used Roadrunner Business Class where I used to live, and that was also very good. I don't think it had an SLA, but it did have some static IPs, a Time Warner-supplied router instead of just a cable modem, and a static IP for both their router and mine. Everything inside of my router (using two wasn't necessary, but I want my network edge to be under my control) was NATted, but I could have added some extra static IPs for a small fee.
Before getting RR, I first tried Speakeasy. They said I was within acceptable range of the CO (about 12,000 feet) and set me up with an account and sent me the DSL install kit. I hooked everything up and waited for it to be turned up. A few days later, somebody from Speakeasy calls up and asks how I like my DSL (at least I give them credit for being proactive on that point). I said "I dunno, it's not turned on yet." He said it was turned on a couple days before. The modem wasn't syncing at all. This led to a three-week "he said she said" clusterfsck between Speakeasy (who provides the backhaul), Covad (who owns the DSLAM), and PacBell (who owns the copper, and in whose CO the DSLAM is located). Any of you who've ever dealth with a telco in a professional capacity (been there, done that, too, which made it pretty easy to recognize what was going on) know exactly what I'm talking about.
During the three weeks, the only person who actually helped me was a PacBell lineman who came out to do a test at the demarc point. Before he came out, I'd connected the DSL modem at the demarc and it wouldn't sync there either, which eliminated my house wiring as a source of the problem. He put his testing device on the line at the demarc and said he could sync it there, but that the tester could sync under conditions where a DSL modem wouldn't have a chance. He also told me that the 12,000 feet figure I'd been given for distance from the CO was way off. His father in law lived one street over from me and a few blocks closer to the CO, and he said it was 15,000 feet from the CO to there, and that even that connection was suboptimal but he'd set it up himself and made it work as well as possible. He said it was really unlikely that DSL would work at all in my location.
I reported this back to Speakeasy, who said they would set up a conference between me, a tier 3 support person at Speakeasy, and Covad. I called at the appointed time only to find the tier 3 person at Speakeasy had blown off the appointment. Wasn't even in the office. That's the point at which I told them to just cancel the service. Once I said I was canceling, all pretense of politeness vanished. Their support guys really sucked. I don't say that lightly, because of done support and I know how hard it can be, but it's true. The lack of professionalism displayed by everyone at Speakeasy except the sales guy who called up to ask how my DSL was doing in the beginning has guaranteed that I will never, ever, no matter what, do business with Speakeasy again. All my friends know this story, too, and guess what? They all have broadband, but none of them use Speakeasy. That day, I called Roadrunner Business Class. The sales guy knew the answer to every question I asked, without having to look anything up. I asked how soon they could install, and he told me "We're booked for two days, but I can have
If you're in Australia, try using this:
http://www.ozspeedtest.com/tools_speed.shtml
It seems everyone I know (in Australia) seems to get reasonably accurate speeds in accorance with their plan.
I guess America has some catching up to do with their business ethics.
I have comcast in Miami, FL and of the advertised 6 megabits i get pretty much all 6 straight to my computer. I haven't really had a problem with the quality of service except that the actual physical lines running to my house have an issue that doesn't allow me to run the cable modem on the splitter with my television. The situation was extremely similar to my time with Bellsouth FastAccess DSL. Albeit slower (1.5mbps) I still received the allotted bandwidth to my home.
If you brought a car called a "Toyota 85MPH Blue Car" and could not drive at 85MPH down the high street in the rush hour you would not get much sympathy from the dealer.
Wow ... here I can only buy at minimum a 4Mbps, but then that's about twice the price of an ADSL2+ 16Mbps line (~ 15 ...)
http://tptest.sourceforge.net/
I recently switched from Pipex (with resold BT) to UKonline who are an LLU ISP (part of EasyNet). With Pipex I did get slightly more than the rated speeds, like the GP, but now with UKonline, I don't. Instead, I get exactly the numbers you'd expect - 2048kbps down.
Still, I did manage to go from 1Mbps to 2Mbps and save £8.50/mo whilst still not having a download cap, so I'm not complaining.
Cars have speedometers that go up to 120 or even 180 MPH. Lotsa luck trying to drive at that speed on those tires.
A goodly percentage of men and women have surgically-enhanced bodies, and lousy personalities.
Why should ISP's be any different?
Obligatory technical note: actual transfer rates can be as low as 1/3 the theoretical without anybody being to blame. There's unavoidable overhead in both bits and time.
So, when I have an issue I suck up.
Unfortunately what you outline is the only effective tactic in dealing with someone that makes $10 per hour, is reading from a script, doesn't really care about their job and knows that they will not get in trouble no matter how nonsensical they are as long as they are reasonably following written procedures. Be nice, and you might land on the nice side of the procedures. Be angry or uncooperative... You'll be following the worst parts of procedures to the letter.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Usually resetting my cheap DSL modem brings my speed back up to what it is supposed to be. I have to reset it once a week or so. Just now it brought my speed from 350kbps to 1200 kbps when my rated speed is 1500kbps.
It's been this way on the last 4 houses I've owned (on both coasts). There's nothing magical on the Telco side - just use the customer side and everybody will be happy.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I pay $15/mo for Verizon DSL @ 768k. My transfer rates for large files are often above 1.6mbps. Certainly time of day is important, but you need to remember that the "speed tests" will give you a different answer each time you try them. A network hiccup, a few lost packets, etc will all skew those things. Download a couple of really big files from fast servers simultaneously. That kind of real-world test is far more accurate.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I didn't even know they made something like that. Of course, I've always gotten rated speeds, too (though not always at peak times, as expected). I just grabbed the incoming line off the demark, split the signal with a $1 phone splitter, ran one side to the DSL modem and fed the other side onto the phone lines, through a single DSL filter. Heck, the equipment in the welcome box was enough to do that. Plus, I had a spare (or three) filters, just in case.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
http://www.rric.net/
this is absurd. Of course your speeds with DSL might suck depending on your location, and the way they determine what speed you get, of course a speed decrease will lower your actual bandwidth. You'll note the speed decrease is actually a bit less with the lower speed, but they are actuall still comparable and probably somewhat attributable to other networking factors.
Before complaining about your DSL line being slow, I think you really should read up on how DSL (and most likely ADSL to be specific) works. You are hardly ever going to get max bandwidth out of a service line though I honestly cannot complain about the speeds I am getting with Cable. So, remember, before starting a bitch-fest...know what the hell you are talking about...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
We are soon to be getting the 16mbps upgrade in the Nashville area, but right now i will hit 10mbps+ at times even tho we are "advertised" to get 8mbps. I never see 3-4mbps unless im being limited by the server I am hitting.
Is it just a concidence or have we just slashdotted every major broadband speed test web site on the web?
Next up, Slashdot posts a hot stock tip. Wall Street inexplicably sees no online trading action for hours.
I have the lowest tier of DSL from verizon, I pay 14.95 for 768/256. I just moved to DC area from SC and that is amazing compared to the prices and packages that Bellsouth offers.(I was paying 25 for 256/128) If I download a well supported torrent I get about 84KB/s so I am happy with that. There has got to be a good way of balancing Net Neutrality and getting more vendors in more areas so they can compete with each other. If someone wants to pay for the toll road that is fine as long as I can get to my sites the same as before.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
I found that using Brighthouse Networks Roadrunner service, I was promised "Up to 7Mbps" for $44.95/mo. and that's what I've used for a long time. Recently they started to offer Roadrunner Lite, which was advertised as 512Kbps down and 256(or 128?)Kbps up. I ran some speed tests and found that typically I was only getting 512Kbps down already even though I was promised "Up to 7Mbps". Guess what. I switched to Roadrunner Lite at $14.95/mo. Now, of course I'm getting 50Kpbs down. Yes FIFTY Kbps. What gives?!?!
False advertising no matter how you look at it really. Those "faster internet" commercials on TV claiming to provide dialup at the speed of DSL... those guys need to be fined about 1 billion dollars. They infuriate me. It's not physically possible, nor is it true.
With dial-up there's almost no way the performance will fall short of your expectationss, because you expect it to suck (especially after using something, anything, better.)
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I live in the UK and have 2Mbps Tiscali Broadband. I'm currently downloading Ubuntu 6.06 at 240 KB/Second which is not far off the 2Mbps claimed speed- I have at times come very close to that speed.
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i dont know if it was allready mentioned here, but i think its a tecnical issue. "my gradmys connection sux", maybe the grandma got a failure in her cable from the wall to here computer or something. In germany, from my point of view, the isps do what they can to grant the service they suppose, otherways the in-haouse connection or something was made slobby. I never had that problem, inspectet all plugs and cables during installation. Only those who have a distance about 5-7 miles from town recieve only withhalf bandwith.
Here in Southeastern Connecticut, I pay $149.00 for a connection rated at 1.5Mb-6.0Mb/384-608Kb DSL connection, and I regularly see 200k/sec. downloads and 42k/sec. uploads. Since this is the only game in town that doesn't filter ports or protocols (and I live in a VERY large town).
I'm forced to pay these rates if I want anything that resembles a quality connection. I'm also about 7,000 feet from the CO, so my connection should be faster, but it isn't.
I read stories about how people pay $60/month for a 3Mbps connection, and it makes me sick. I just did a speed test at from dslreports.com, and here's what it said:
dslreports.com speed test result on 2006-06-02 08:35:50 EST:
1681 / 467
Your download speed : 1681 kbps or 210.1 KB/sec.
Your upload speed : 67 kbps or 58.4 KB/sec.
I've had the telco out here, filters on the pole, house connection and every phone jack. Everything is top-notch quality wire and connections. Its just THAT SLOW around here, apparently... or I'm being lied to.
Apparently their lawyers think they can get away with lying to the public. I think once the public, and some ambulance chasers (you know what I mean!), get technically savvy about what these ISPs are doing, there'll be a class action lawsuit... man, that would be huge.
Most speed tests are unreliable. It takes a lot of bandwidth to test speed, so you should do several. Better yet, open ftp and run several downloads from different sites and add the total throughput. On a 5mbps cable connection I would expect about 550KB/s. I almost always get within 10-20% of that.
Keep in mind that upstream load on your connection can also affect your downlaod speed. TCP requires ACKs. If your upstream is jammed and has a large buffer (cable and DSL), you can have latencies of several seconds on outgoing traffic. This will cause most servers sending you data to throttle back the speed.
Keep the faster speeds coming.
On the other hand, I remember being a cable modem early subscriber. It was pre-docsys but the network ran at 27mbps. The only bottleneck was the 10-base-t port on the modem. I would get 950KB/s downloads and 80KB/s uploads. I miss those speeds (the premium package they sell isn't quite that fast, and costs twice as much).
I have fiber to the house and after several months of bouncing around to various sites, comparison with the T1 at work etc. I've pretty much decided the reason we don't get super fast connection to everything is that the originating sites can't keep up. Often one site will act like dialup at the same time I'm downloading several hundred megs from another in a matter of minutes. If the guys at the other end just have a T1 and a dozen DSL users are trying to download large files it's going to be slow. Even Microsoft bogs down on patch tuesday, and most folks don't have a fraction of the capacity they've got.
Before you letterbomb your ISP, make sure the site you are accessing isn't using a fractional T1 or shared hosting on Podunk Flats Internet.
"everyone gets one vote no matter how much money you have"
Priceless. Money buys influence. This influence control even the local politicians. Go to one of your perfect town planning commission hearings if you don't believe me.
Read the original post (I guess you could not call it TFA since it is not really an article). Take that same "85MPH" and take it back to the dealer. Trade it in for the "60MPH" model. Now, all of a sudden you go slower even in slow traffic!
I understand what the origianl post was saying. If external congestion is limiting the bandwidth to 750Kbps, then he downgraded to 768Kbps service, and suddenly he was getting 300Kbps. He brings up a valid point.
There COULD be congestion. The best way to test that would be to do a speed test at 3:00 in the morning. Then, if he did not get anywhere close to full speed, that is a problem.
Selling a service as 7000Mbps, you would assume that you could actually hit 700Mbps at least sometimes.
One more comment: The 700Mbps is most likely the raw bit speed. Ethernet adds some overhead, so actual download speed would likely be about 15% to 20% less -- but certainly not consistently 50% less.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I thought that too, but I have a 56k modem, and I've never gotten any connection above 21600bps. I usually only get a dl speed of 1kbs.
Like you said, dial-up sucks, but I have the same problem as the people with DSL.
It's also interesting to note that DSL and dial-up are the same price around here. Thats' right. There's only one dial-up provider and one DSL provider. Both charge 16 dollars for their service. So, I don't know what speed the DSL people "claim" to offer, but I would bet it's surely a little better than 21600bps. The only problem with that is, I live in a place where they don't even care about keeping up the lines they already have,(there have been 4 trees on them for 2 months now) so they're not ever going to put DSL lines in here.
So, yeah, dial-up can suck just as much as DSL percentage wise.
"In a world that exists without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?"
What are the tools you guys use to measure? Are we all using the same handful of sites, like dslreports.com, speakeasy.net/speedtest, and/or www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest?
Are there stand alone utilities I can use?
As a Korean, with broadband and high speed everywhere, I should be laughing and pointing, 'saying, '6Mbps? Hah, that's what I get on a bad day!'
Oh wait, I live in the States now...*sigh*
Well, that's because the analogy is flawed.
A better analogy, IMHO, would be that you're paying someone a toll for the privilege of being allowed to use a high-speed road, where, as the company owning the road claims, you can go as fast as 85 mph. Now, obviously, sometimes the traffic even on a for-pay road might so thick that you can only go at 30 mph. But if that becomes the rule rather than the exception, then the owner of that road had better use all the toll-money he collects to increase the roads capacity or alternatively revise his claims about the speed you can get on his roads.
Okay, that analogy is still not very good, but I think it illustrates the point:
If a DSL provider sells DSL-lines with a certain speed to several thousand costumers, he also makes an implicit promise that he has the capacity to take the traffic of several thousand costumers. If there are "Internet-traffic-jams" on a regular basis with this provider, then its the providers responsibility to do something about it.
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
why does grandma need a 3Mbit DSL???
You'll never get the full bandwidth all the time with home user plans. If you want the full bandwidth all the time, go for a business package. Businesses tend to be able to sue when they don't get what they paid for, so you're more likely to actually get what you pay for. (Actually another line of reasoning is that it's more important for businesses to have their bandwidth when they need it, but I like my line of reasoning more.)
Cox tells me I'm getting 5 down 2 up but that's a half truth. I normally get 1-2Mbps down, and don't really care about my upload speed.
The numbers I'm quoting come from the various speed test sites, most of which are run by companies trying to sell broadband.
So I tested on some Cox based sites and sure enough, speeds were as advertised. I also tests on a couple of local sites that I knew were peered with Cox over a hop or two and sure enough - good throughput.
You just have to know that what they're telling you is applicable ONLY to their network or within a hop or two. The rest of the world can't be predicted.
And that's true no matter whate medium you use, be it a PRI to an ISP, or likewise.
I should also mention that in the case of DSL in particular, the line matters. If your mom is in an older area chances are the incumbent phone provider hasn't upgraded the outside plant in 30 to 50 years. Old plant has bad insulation, many bridge taps, etc. that will absolutely degrade the DSL signal.
In that case lean on the telephone company.
I think there should be some sort of regulation here... maybe there is, I don't know... This sounds like false advertising to me. Imagine if $CARCOMPANY put the little asterisks in their commercials...
Announcer: "The $CAR received the highest safety rating from an independant board.**"
Legal announcer: "** safety features may not be available in all individual vehicles. safety may depend on several factors including but not limited to road congestion, what we had for lunch, if we ran out of glue, what type of gas you use, or comments on slashdot. Flaming metal deathtrap is not a valid reason to return a $CAR."
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
While this won't help you unless you're interested in moving, ISP's not meeting expectations isn't the rule. In Calgary, I paid for the 6Mbit/1Mbit service and got 7.8Mbit/1.6Mbit.
That's on DSL... I'm certainly not complaining. You are getting ripped.
Meh.
Verify that the wiring connections are clean (not black and corroded, but shiny), and that "between your interface on the outside of the house and the computer" that the wire is as short a run as is physically possible, and that if not new, then that all connections are as I said shiny.
New phone jacks, new wires, wires tighly secured; you'd be amazed at how a good solid connection will enhance your online experience.
Sad thing is, this "good wiring practice" is often times the one thing most people overlook. (same goes for cable, too, btw)
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
My ISP posts their speeds to marketing (7 Mbps for standard), and then sets the equipment to ensure that customers get those actual speeds (7.5 Mbps). I consistently get over 7 megs down, and their high-end techs hang out at broadbandreports to respond to any really tough network issues and user challenges. They get it, and I wish that more ISPs were the same way.
ISP: http://www.cogeco.ca/
BBR Forum: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/cogeco
Let me tell you a story about my ISP. So at one point I manage to mangle my password by using the change password form on their web site. Actually, I'd swear that it was the crap web site that mangled it, and thereafter neither the old one nor the new one worked. With or without capslock, etc. But ok, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was my fault.
So I call their tech support, am as nice as it gets (it's not that guy's fault anyway), follow the instructions so he can be sure that indeed I can't log in (can't he just reset my password anyway?), and dutifully recite to him all what software I'm using and how when he asks about that. (With the small hickup of him running out of pre-scripted answers when I tell him I'm using RASPPPOE on Windows 2000. Apparently his sheet only included that under XP.) He also asks for my invoice number to be sure it's really me. Remember that detail, it will be crucial in a jiffy. Since it's a daughter company of the telco here, I get the invoices combined, and he aggrees that the one on the telco's invoice is all he needs. I read it to him, he's satisfied with it.
Anyway, we have a nice civilized talk and he promises that he'll change my password right away and, as is their (idiotic) policy, I'll get the new one by post. Ok, so I'll be without net for couple of days, but I thank him kindly anyway.
Now let's think about it for a bit, before we delve deeper in this Lovecraftian madness:
- DSL is a P2P connection, so even if my password were to get to someone else, they can _only_ log on from my apartment. It's not like someone can trick them into giving them a password that'll work from somewhere else.
- the new password is sent by post to my home address, so they can freakin' know that _I_ am going to be the one receiving it anyway.
- my phone line is from the same telco and goes through the same exchange, so they could jolly well know that it was me who called, or at least it was from my phone.
A week goes by and I still don't have my flippin' password. By now I've dug out the old ISDN card and I'm using an expensive call-by-call account somewhere else to even read my emails.
So I call again, get someone else on the phone, read them the invoice number, they say "yep, I'm changing it now, you'll get it by post." A week later I call again. Then twice a week. Then every 2 days. The same freaking circus repeats every single time. Read them the invoice number, get told "yep, I'm changing it now, nothing happens." Eventually, after a month and a half, it becomes bloody obvious that they're lying shamelessly and they won't do anything.
So I'm annoyed, escalate it to hell and back, until eventually someone tells me what's the problem: my invoice number doesn't match the one in their database. Apparently when I moved they gave me a new invoice number, but here's the catch: the telco and their ISP department had given me different ones.
So for a whole bloody month and a half, the retarded tech support drones had just lied to me. None of them bothered telling me "oi, that number doesn't match." None of them bothered using their freaking brains, and figuring out that there are ways to authenticate me otherwise (e.g., tell me to come personally to one of their offices, if they're that paranoid, or call back to my home number to make sure it's me, or whatever) instead of following a script like a lobotomized robot.
That's what a month of being nice and polite and patient to lying idiots did for me. Yeah, it soo helped.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
>> my grandmother signed up for the 3Mbps DSL plan
Is she single?
Old modems are bad. I recently started a job managing networks connected via cable modem based service. First thing I had to do was pressure the cable company to update old modems effectively doubling connection speed at 2 sites. When testing speeds are you testing to a node on the cable network? When you buy cable service you are purchasing a connection to the ISP at that speed;not a connection to the "Internet".. I have had someone rant about slow service only to find they were trying to download from a busy site halfway around the world.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
Arguments about what you actually get are beside the point.
The point is:
"my grandmother signed up for the 3Mbps DSL plan through Verizon, however a speed test said she was only getting 750Kbps. Why pay for the extra bandwidth when she's not getting it? She downgraded to the 768K plan expecting to still have 750K. Wrong, instead her speed dropped to 300K."
She was getting 750Kbps. So all arguments about what is available are moot. The point is when she switched to the 750K plan and her bandwidth dropped to 300K, That is deliberate throttling.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
Cogeco Cable in Ontario is excellent. They advertise 8mbps and last night I downloaded Ubuntu Dapper at almost exactly 8mbps. Usually I'm restricted by the server's bandwidth, but I guess Ubuntu's pipe is a nice fat subway tunnel :)
I just wish there was a good 'lite' plan for $20/month that had reasonable bandwidth. They all seem stuck at 128kbps or 256kbps. If they'd do 512kbps for $20/month it'd be great because as it is now I can't even download OS updates on my mom's computer without leaving it on for a couple of hours while it's downloading at 16KBps.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Now, I'm trying to figure why I'm getting only 40 mbits/s on a fast ethernet (== 100mbps) LAN. It seems to be related to a plethora of factors like ping echo time, packet size etc. I'm also looking for ways to optimize both for fast ethernet (at work) and for the gigabit I plan to purchase (for home).
There was a beautiful article talking about this some months ago (how to config window size etc. in Linux, Windows, BSD etc.). I use this from that article to get reduced latency (in Linux):(Hint: google for this)
Now, could this not be also the case here? Is there some kind of configuration which will maximise throughput? For the record, I usually get 1.3 mbps of a theoretical 4mbps they should deliver.
DISCLAIMER: this is solely my personal opinion.
WTF is a n00bish question like this doing here? We are not men, we are techies. Er.. aren't we?!
For the past 6 months I've been the proud owner of a nice 30Mb/s fiber line at my place. Do you actually think I see those speeds very often? Of course not. Even, no *especially*, speed tests don't show my full power, since it depends heavily on where their server is located. There's one in Maryland that shows I get ~28Mb/s, but pretty much everything else caps at 15Mb/s (with a line faster than 15Mb/s it's real easy to see who's got a T1 when you're the one maxing it out).
And don't tell me that after you get that brand new OC768 line installed at home that you'll expect your favorite Japanese sites to come down a lot faster. How is this not obvious?
The only time I see max capacity on my line is when I'm grabbing something large and distributed. I managed to get the Dapper x86 ISO yesterday in approx. 5 minutes.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Considering the mention of speed tests in the OP, I assume the OP knows of the site, but for those who don't, you can find out who is providing higher quality service in your area at DSLReports. No one offers exactly what they claim their bandwidth is, but with enough looking around, you can find out who comes damn close.
Sign up Virtua with Mega Flash 2M (or Speedy, but I don't like Telefonica). They do some traffic shaping and you may only download 20 GB at this rate, but most of the time I can download at around 200 KB/s. It costs R$ 135,00 with the "principal advanced" package, which includes Globonews, Sportv, MTV, Natgeo, Universal, besides the senate channel, the congress channel and other shit. The most simple test I do: download the kernel or even better, apt-get upgrade.
On a 3 Mbps DSL line ($40/month CAD)
Please don't post prices formatted like this. It forces you to go back and reinterpret the sentence when you get to the full specification of the currency, which can be annoying if you aren't used to it. CAD 40/month, 40 CAD/month, CAD $40/month, CA$40/month, or at a push $40 CAD/month are all preferable, because they don't have this issue.
Thanks.
I currently have AT&T professional class DSL (3Mbps) and consistantly pull between 2.5 and 2.8 which shocks me. I am used to paying for 1.5Mbps and getting under 512Kbps. Of course it helps that my new apartment is almost sitting on one of the phone company central offices. I thinks speeds are only really going up for people with optimal situations. In my case much of the copper (both phone and coax) in my area was pulled in the last 5 years and is a bit higher quality. Add to that my apartments are wired with good quality CAT 3 for phones. In older neighborhoods you have copper as old as 20 years which leads to signal degradation and less than optimal speed.
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
But it does make a difference. At my old house, I accidently unplugged a filter from a jack with no phone on it. My DSL service became extremely slow and unreliable. I phoned tech support, they got me to verify that all unused jacks had a filter. I reattached the filter, and my service went back to normal.
Don't know if you ever maintained a PC with a SCSI bus, but the same thing happens with SCSI. You have to put a "terminator" on each unused SCSI port, or the bus stops working. The terminator apparently prevents signals from bouncing off the open port and reflecting back into the bus. I'm not an EE, but I figure it's probably the same principle at work with DSL filters.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
I use Brighthouse here in Orlando, FL. When I signed up it was listed at 5Mbps, I almost always get at least that. I heard rescently that they upgraded to 7Mbps and I regularly download at ~8 I have even hit peak downloads of over 1MBps from sites like FilePlanet or the last time I downloaded Quicktime.
Remember for DSL that it's critical to have a good line filter between every phone in the house and the wall jack. If I take just one filter off it immediately halves the line speed, with no other obvious symptoms or flakiness.
So my brother buys himself a new house, and wants his DSL connection moved to the new place. (Well, deactivated from the old one and activated as a new one.) He's also some kind of a VIP customer at them, as we had found when he first moved in town.
(I have no idea how one gets to be a VIP customer at a telco. Maybe he and his wife having their mobile phones from that telco and both being addicted to the phone would explain it. But I digress.)
So he has a house number like, say, 42a. (The number is made up, I'm not gonna post someone's real address on the net.) He talks to them, gives them the address, has it read back to him, and they assure him that he'll have his DSL connection in the next couple of days. What with being a VIP customer and all.
A week goes by, you guessed, he has no signal. Calls tech support, goes through the whole "reset the modem", "check that the cable is plugged into the computer" (why? the modem shows no signal on the DSL line, not a missing connector to the computer?) and generally following an idiotic script that didn't even apply in his case. But it's soon obvious that the guy there just _can't_ think outside the script, so they follow it dutifully to the letter. Eventually they get escalated, someone eventually tells them that no, the DSL connection indeed isn't activated yet, but they'll do it in the next couple of days.
Some more days go by, another phone call, another "reset the modem", "check that the network cable if plugged in the computer" script to go through. Another assurance that it will be done in the next couple of days.
Lather, rinse, repeat, for a month and a half. (Guess that must be some kind of family constant.) Nicely, politely and sucking up. After the month and a half, he loses his patience, stops sucking up, and escalates it to hell and back.
Remember the house number? 42a? Well, some idiot had typed it in as 42s. It's right on the next key on the keyboard, after all. Which of course, doesn't even exist in a suburb of a small city. They don't build houses _that_ big in these parts anyway.
So again, for a whole freakin' month and a half none of the drones could tell him this simple info: the address in their computers just doesn't exist. No, they lied to him too, again and again. Not to mention the shameless waste of someone else's time to make them diagnose the modem and the computer cable, when they _knew_ they hadn't even activated the connection.
And if that's how they treat a VIP customer... I rest my case. Anyway, fat lot of good being nice did for him, eh?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Shortly after signup (1.5M down/384K up) I started randomly getting awful transfer rates- it would drop to 64K down occasionally. Every day I'd come home from work, check the speed, and call tech service. I had them opening tickets every day for a week until I demanded to talk to someone who could actually fix the problem. After two escalations from there everything suddenly got better, and a year later I get a pretty stable connection at exactly what they promised.
Remember, every tech support call costs a fortune for them. Flood the company with complaints.
You can also try withholding payment if you think you can get away with it. (perhaps not on a non-SLA account) We're doing that at work right now with a particularly troublesome "turnkey server" which has been anything but. We got it six months ago and we still haven't paid- we've told both the reseller and the company that we are refusing to pay until the problems are resolved. If you are going this route, document *everything*- I've got 10+ pages of details of phone calls, patches applied, unfixed bugs, crash records, etc. I'm more than happy to detail these in public should the company decide to get nasty. (They aren't, and after a recent replacement of one of the pieces we've got almost three weeks up. They'll get their money end of next week if nothing else goes wrong.)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
You grandmother can only download her pr0n at half the speed of before?
This is silly. The average person really doesn't care unless their email is "slow" (usually due to a server issue or application issue and not a bandwidth issue) or their webpages are not coming up as fast as before. In reality, only power users really care and if you are trying to pinch every last M/Kbps out of your ISP, you really need to put the computer down and step away from the keyboard.
I remember the days when I could read the BBS's faster than my 300Baud modem could pull down the words. I got compression software that pushed it to 450Baud and I thought I was smoking!
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
My goodness, Grandma, what a fat pipe you've got!
I got 6116/351 kbps on the speakeasy test. My plan is for 6000/384 kbps. It is from comcast.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Of course you are not going to get the full potential of your speed. But think yourself lucky you can get speeds like that for a good price and with companies you can trust.
Unless your grandmother is a millionaire and I have got the wrong end of the stick completely.
The issue has nothing to do with service contracts, but rather with advertising. No doubt the cable companies do not make explicit promises about the service in their agreements with users, BUT they do make claims in their advertisments.
Its as if a gas station posted a price of 60 cents/gallon on their large sign out front but when you actually pulled into the station, the price at the pump was marked at $3.60/gallon.
I have what is claimed to be a 10Mbit cable connection from earthlink through a third party cable service provider. However, despite this fact when I benchmark my bandwidth speed the download speed clocks in at a lovely 3mbit if im lucky, and then the sites tell me thats good for where i live. Well if im gonna pay for a faster internet service such as the one that im currently on, i want a speed thats not oh 30% or less than the advertised and CONTRACTIAL stated speed. Last time i checked, this was called FALSE ADVERTISEMENT. However, in Bush's america it doesnt really matter now does it, everything is legal, unless that is he doesnt think so. I will however say if this is the cass for you with a nerfed speed from the contract given speed for service, point it out to the company and remind them that a contract is a legally binding agreement, and you DO NOT HAVE TO PAY for services not rendered, or services rendered improperly. I didn't pay my bill once from my old internet service, and it never hurt my credit. But it did require legal threat with a lawyer present along with an indepth discussion on what a contract is with the company.
"Some people think these questions are hard...
I get only a few Kbps less than my advertised 4Mbps connection speed > 90% of the time through Telewest Blue Yonder. Must just be in a good area (or lucky) I guess.
Many of "those" Linksys routers are indeed ARM equipped computers running LINUX! Ref example - WRT54GS.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Well, according to Comcast the plan I'm on is supposed to be on is 6M (cheapest, 1000-we're-too-stupid-to-deal-with-powers-of-2-bas e), and I usually average 4.8M (1024 base) which isn't too bad considering overhead etc. on a "direct" connect(100M ether).
Over wireless(802.1b) I can usually do about 3.5M, which also isn't bad(for sustained largish transfers, although interference can reduce this to as little as 240k).
Beyond this Comcast seems to have suffered from lets take a network that wasn't too terribly badly designed and make it extra craptacular(pretty much take me about 20 hops just to get out of their network for a large array of sites, although I must admit latency isn't affected too terribly badly, but it is kind of ridiculous although I imagine it saves them some money somewhere... It would appear that in my area at least they are trying to limit outgoing connections of the metropolitan area out to other areas through a single point now, passing it along through the local network as it goes.) in the 2 years since I opted out of their subscription, and then subsequently re-subscribed. Additionally, this arrangement seems to suffer from congestion problems much more so than their original layout did, which was about 3 - 8 hops then I was out of their network. Throughput usually remains fairly decent, but latency tends to vary widely during "peak" hours, although still not bad overall, but I'd rather have a relatively constant or with SMALL variation latencies.
Now, according to Comcast they also offer an 8M "gaming" connection(I guess that someone forgot to tell them that bandwidth has little to do with gaming performance after a certain low level point which they had ALWAYS exceeded, and that latency is FAR more important, low and relatively constant...) I wonder if the real utility of that package might be low and relatively small variation latency in connections. Does anyone pay the exorbitant(even more so than their 6M connection) fee for this "service"? Are the latencies relatively low with little variation?
DSL: not available to me, however my sister has this(forgot to traceroute it, and don't really recall latencies either), and the problem with this is they're lucky to get about 50% of the rated(1.5M) speed and ARE 1000' from the CO. Additional annoyances are that for some reason their DSL modem tends to fairly frequently lose synch and requires a restart before the re-synch will actually work(noise on their line is low, don;t recall the exact dB val though according to "modem"...). This set of problems seems to be fairly common to my experiences with DSL, from seein other DSL ISP customers, and problems reported on various forums, although the upside is that subscription plans are usually reasonably priced v. cable unfortunately where I live the CO is not wiredd for DSL, and I would be out of worthwhile speed range in any event...
I've had 10/10 Mbps connection for 4 years, if I download from fast servers I usually get around 1.2MB/s download speed. I'm so happy I don't have adsl or cable crap.
Net bandwidth is interesting to measure and there are quite a few products out there that do it well. However, a lot of people are simply interested in measuring the speed at which they can perform the most common activity on the internet, Web surfing. Surfing speed is not only a function of bandwidth, but also server response time, PC processor availability and speed, RAM, and so on. PCMag.com released a free tool that measures your web browsing speed (by downloading and rendering pages from popular websites, and then deriving an average speed) and gives you a number that you can compare to other SurfSpeed users dynamically. SurfSpeed is NOT a bandwidth meter, it's a real world surfing speedometer. It's a fun tool.
I don't know if your ISP uses PPPoE, but most DSL providers are doing an awful amount of encapsulation. I run an ISP network and we had looked into DSL. Our local telco uses PPP over Ethernet over ATM over DSL. That is a lot of overhead, and PPPoE requires a ton of processing power at the aggregator. They may have an overloaded PPPoE aggregator.
I neglected to mention that it is only on connections to some (i.e. non-cheap-bastards) sites that I am able to achieve 4.8M or greater bandwidth.
The VAST majority of site tend to top out around 50-60k(either throttled, max bandwidth to site, etc.), which also happens to be around the max I see from online gaming, impllying that a 1.5M or 3M connection that is able to achieve 50%+ of advertised bandwidth would be more than sufficient for the VAST majority of applications at this time.
And get a little over 3 mb/s in user transfer speed on my BellSouth DSL. Given latency issues, that seems reasonable to me...
A little of topic, but related:
If you have been watching the Alctal - Lucent merger, then you might be interested in what IEEE Spectrum has to say:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may06/3427
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
what's funny is people with my same connection (8mbps/768kbps comcast) see transfer rates of 15mbps in different parts of the country while I see the exact same download speed as i did on 4mbps. I always test at a download speed of 2-3mbps while my upload speed is pretty true to the advertised speed, doesn't matter if i am hardwired or wireless. And in practice, i see the same download speeds as my parents on 1.5mbps verizon dsl.
I had always been told that cable internet was "shared" with your neighborhood while dsl was a private line. After reading some of the posts here, it seems like both are shared, but maybe I'm getting the wrong impression.
I wanted to get Speakeasy dsl when i moved in to current abode, but I didn't realize it was going to take up to 2 weeks to get service once I placed the order...one week for the phone line to become active and then another week for the dsl to become active. The lady I talked to explained it pretty well to me, but I still find that absolutely obsurd. Which is why i got cable internet instead. I was already calling comcast to get digital cable/hd service and I was going to have service in a few days, instead of a few weeks. It's too bad tho, because I think I'd still rather have DSL service than cable. Not to mention the fact that comcast and verizon, and I'm sure others, block inbound ports to keep users from running servers. I pay for my internet access so I want to be able to use it as I see fit. I don't really see why they should care if i want to tie up my personal bandwidth with a personal website.
Also remember that when it is 3 am here in the states it is daytime in other parts of the world. Many high-profile websites are still getting tons of traffic from Europe and Asia. In my experience it is best to do several speed tests at different times of the day and night to see if you can find a pattern in the reported speeds.
As an aside, it is probably the ISP. I used to have SBC (now AT&T) DSL both in Houston and in South Texas. Both times I paid for the high speed connection and never got the speeds I was paying for. Both times after three months I called and complained and lo and behold the SBC rep told me that my DSL line had somehow been "accidentally" locked at the lower speed. That means that I paid for six months of high speed service and got the low speed instead.
Coincidence? I think not, it is just that SBC are a bunch of lame assholes. The reason I say that is because when I last had SBC DSL we had a thunderstorm in the area and the nice clean line I had somehow got affected and I started to get noise in the line. Called SBC tech support and the tech monkeys in India refused to believe me and never did anything to fix my problem. Eventually I got through to a second-level SBC tech (a White guy in Texas) and he verified my line noise problem but again the problem never got fixed.
Eventually I got disgusted with SBC and got rid of my DSL line. I then got Roadrunner cable service which is advertised at 6 Mbps; I consistently get 5.5 Mbps downloads (I live in a low-income barrio and am the only one on Roadrunner so I get all the bandwidth for myself
A man who wants nothing is invincible
If you think about it, the limits of the internet are endless if speed can increase to extreme measures. Imagine the internet at such speeds that transfer rates are as fast as copying files from one hard drive to another. You can execute files and games stored on servers. Full length movies that play in real time. The internet as we know it will vastly change in our life time. And possibly for the worse, (i.e. Net Neautrality, speaking of those cock-suckin', ball-swallowing, nazi-lovin', jewbag ISPs) If speed and server storage space increases to high rates, the internet, and the personal computer will be completely different.
I have Verizon DSL and get pretty terrible speeds, so much so that I called them up and asked them to send out a technician to see what the problem was. The guy came out and looked through my house and then at the wiring down by the street and told us that in reality, we were too far away from the DSL place (I don't know the technical term, wherever the area I'm in connects to in town) to get decent speeds, and that he wouldn't have offered us DSL service at all if he had been our installation technician. He managed to adjust the wiring so that it was neater and our speeds increased slightly and we stopped disconnecting randomly, but it sure as hell isn't the 768kbps we pay for.
I don't know where the OP lives, but if its like me in a small town, you could have the same issue - call your DSL provider and ask them to send a technician to examine your problem and if neccesary move to another broadband provider.
You have an 8 lane crowded highway and you want to transfer a ton of small packets over it. Why use a big convoy of trucks and wait like 98% of idiots out there? Didn't you notice something strange... those motorists that are laughing at your face and passing you by all the time? Why not use them as the means of transport? Maybe because they are expensive in real world, but in digital that's not the case...
I use them. I use software like ReGet that doesn't put out one connection for a truckload of data. It creates in my case by default minimal of 32 (or in serious congestions even 64 and 100+) connections and downloads them all at the same time. It's like a ton of motorists transferring your data around slow moving trucks. I never get less than 100% of my 2Mbit downlink downloading this way.
(Both for regular cable subscribers)
As a workaround as far as Comcast goes, it states in their $29.99 plan that you only have to unsubscribe for 60 days to again qualify for that pricing.
For the $19.99 plan it only states "new" customers, but it does not define what constitutes a new customer, so I'd imagine that after 30 days you could probably qualify as new again, unless they choose to define "new" customer as someone never having subscribed to comcast internet service before...
All I know is that the last time that I unsubscribed they did try to hauk it at me for $19.99 for 6m, but cost wasn't the problem at that time.
Now, SBC had some pretty decent pricing for 1.5M DSL in our area. $20/month period. (Ends up usually around $24 with various fees...) Of course DSL tends to be pretty crappy as far as my experience goes with it, although for that price I'd put up with it. Unfortunately the local CO has no SBC DSLAM(only Covad, which is about $60/month for the same service last I checked in January) and I would be at the very distance limit for that speed or force to attempt 768k if that could even be managed(c. $45/month from Covad based ISPs, either of which 2 pricings make Comcast a bargain, even though it isn't.)
When doing DSL installs for customers, my strategy is always to place the DSL modem closest to the point where the telco wiring terminates on the side of the house. I then use ethernet, powerline, or wireless to get the signal to the computers. Also, I've noticed that some DSL modems are much, much more sensitive to line conditions than others. For example, in Florida, Bellsouth offers a base Westel 6xxx series modem, a Versalink 4-port ethernet with WiFi DSL modem/router, and a Netopia 4-port ethernet with WiFi DSL modem/router. The new Netopia seems to be the most resilient in terms of connection drops and line quality tolerance.
I also picked up a SunSet DSL test-set on eBay for just under $100. This is the same equipment that Bellsouth uses to test the line. I've found it to be very, very useful. I unplug all the phones in the house and test jacks until I find one that produces no errors.
idk if you look at your numbers. But it seems that the speed they give you is both ways up and down. And the speed you measured, which i assume is download, is about 1/2-3/4 the advertised speed. the other 1/2-1/4 is upload.
no one mentioned the fact that the speed of DSL decreases the farther you are from the central office. If you are a fair distance from the CO you will have a much slower connection.
I just ran Speakeasy's test on my Comcast cable line. In the same city (Washington, DC), sure enough, it returned 3Mb/s. Connecting to Atlanta, it predictably dropped a bit to 2.7Mb/s and connecting to Los Angeles, 1.6Mb/s. Upload speed was consistent at all three at around 350kb/s (it's supposed to be 384kb/s).
Damnit, it would seem that they're delivering the product they've advertised. Somehow, I still want them to be doused in boiling oil and flayed alive because they're evil, incompetent bastards.
Everyone buys "cars" that are "advertised" (via the speedometer) to obtain "speeds" of upward of 100 "mph".
Everyone knows that your actual speeds may vary, in that during "rush hour", your "throughput" may only be 20 or 30 "mph", and in normal traffic, you'll go 60-80 "mph", and if you get out into the middle of Nowhere, Montana, you might actually be able to go 100-110 "mph" or more.
No one is suing Toyota or Ford or Kia because they don't get their "advertised speeds", because with regards to cars, everyone knows that your actual speeds may vary based on where you're driving and what the rest of the traffic is like. The internet, really, is no different. Under optimal conditions, with the right settings and lack of anything in your way, you can obtain the advertised speeds. In practicality, these speeds are likely only obtained between your computer and the first gateway you hit, because after that point, there's too many other variables in play to be able to make any guarantee on service times.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I use Clearwire (I signed up for their 512 kb/s plan) and consistently get 30 Kb/s more than what I signed up for. Occasionally, I'll get around 4 times as much at the beginning of a download, and once, I got over 15x what I signed up for at the beginning of the download. It declines pretty quickly, but it's pretty handy nonetheless. Then again, I'll occasionally get around 20% of the speeds I signed up for, but that happens much less often.
Has anyone considered that this person may be on a poor speed test site, such a one that is not geographically local to his location. Also what is the ADSL trained at? The advertised rate?
I to also have the same Comcast plan that you do. I have found that when I run a speed test on my laptop that is connected wirelessly I can typically only get DSLreports.com to report that my download is 2 to 3 meg a second. Now granted my access point is using WPA and when I take off WPA I do notice that my throughput increases substantially. This Wireless AP that I'm using is an enterprise class AP and so I can only imagine it being that much worse if you are using some retail equipment. I do also have a desktop that is hard wired into my network and when I run a speed test on it I usually typically do have it test out around where it is suppose to. So I don't know if you are in a situation where you are connecting via a wireless AP or not BUT connecting to your ISP via wireless does add considerable overhead and from my experience does cause connections to report as being slower then what they truly are.
First of all we'll go over DSL. The further you are from the CO, the slower your speeds will be.
And as for cable, you must remember that your neighborhood is on a hub that has a max speed. If they oversubscribe this hub, you won't get the advertised speeds.
Fortuantely, I live in an area were not many people have cable modems, so the hub is not oversubscribed, and therefore I get speeds in the 5.4Mbps area. (Depending on the destination, of course.)
Then why, when you lower your service, does the bandwidth lower porportionately as well? Sounds to me like whatever they're doing with the DSLAM, they're throttling you somewhere, intentionally.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It reminds me when I started my system and used my Comcast 3Mbps cable connection to painfully download a 50kB or so email. 5 minutes later, finally, that email from Comcast announced that they had just doubled my connection speed to 6Mbps.
Thank you Comcast.
Signed: A happy Comcast customer.
You can do a simple ftp of an archive of 1-10Mbytes and get the average speed of your connection...
Your stupid. MB and Mb are 2 different things. 3Mbps is equal to about 750KBps. The difference is MegaBytes(MB) and Megabits(Mb), and KiloBytes(KB) and Kilobits(Kb). This is nothing but a case of you being stupid.
So of course if you downgrade from 3Mbps, your going to drop in KBps too.
...when my ISP screwed up their bandwidth limiting.
:)
I have broadband, 2 Mbit/s symmetrical. Apparantly the provider have decided to base their entire network infrastructure on ATI equipment. While this might sound bad at first (after all, what good is broadband if your uplink is dead), I've found that this is not so terrible after all. Since the equipment to the household is all standard fast ethernet, they cap the bandwidth in some (ATI) device somewhere. This is where things get interesting.
I do have connectivity all the time. However, recently my 2 MBit/s bandwidth limiting got screwed up, so I've had between 40 and 50 MBit/s for what amounts to about $23/month.
That rocks
Go ATI!
Me from getting into the ISP business, and advertising double the speed of my competitor for the same price, regardless of what the actual speeds are? If ISPs aren't held accountable for their product doing what they say their product does, what's the point in any kind of honesty in this business? And how does it differ THAT MUCH from some other business/product that the ISP is legally allowed to lie about what their product does?
Seems to me like ISPs prey upon a general misunderstanding of bandwidth, and people see numbers and translate them to "fast", "faster", "freakin fast as hell", etc.
Just isn't right.
They're advertising metric bits, but giving you imperial bits. It's up to you to do the conversion. Something along the lines of "hogsheads per forthnight"(?)
What?
What works for me is to show them immediately that I know a fair bit about networking. That is, I'll be logged in to my Linux router, and I'll say things like "I'm not getting a DHCP response." They'll say "Reboot the computer" and I'll say "How about I just restart the interface?"
The service has been rock solid. My ISP simply delivers, except when they don't. Thus, when I have no Internet, I raise hell. No, I won't plug in another computer, I just tested this network card, plugged in a crossover to my laptop, and it's fine. Hell, I even set up a DHCP server on my laptop to make sure that works. Now, could you tell me who pulled the plug on your end?
And invariably, whoever I was talking to eventually checks with the Powers That Be and lo and behold, they're doing something on their end, and I'll have Internet back in a day or two. I express my annoyance at being cut off, and I wait, and in a few hours, I have my connection again.
Playing stupid doesn't work with techsupport people. Being nice might -- a little empathy, a little humor, I know it's just your job, I know your script, but trust me, let's just skip to the part where you call someone else at the company. Most importantly, if you're not a clueless user, prove it.
Maybe it's arrogant, maybe some techs won't like you acting smarter than them (even if you are), but really, they don't like going through the script any more than you do.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I let Konqueror measure my speed. I am subscribed to a 3mb (megabit) down/512kb up DSL plan. Konqueror measures my downloads at a consistent 300KB+/sec. When uploading to my home computer from work (through sftp), I get a consistent 50KB+/second.
I am getting what I'm paying for.
I also divide by 10 because it's just quick and simple. Then, if I am getting worse than that, I know that something is just wrong. 768kbps / 8 = 96KB (in a perfect world). So if I don't see AT LEAST 77KB, then something is REALLY wrong.
Lastly, what tools are you using to measure your speeds!? When Verizon put the fiber into the house, we started measuring throughput using their website. The speeds were horrible! NO ONE was happy. But part of the problem was that I quickly threw a dumb box together so that I didn't have to have Verizon technicians in my bedroom to see my daily PC (nor install any software on it either). Once I ran the same website based test on my daily PC, the speeds were there. Between 4500kbps and 4900kbps for my 5M line. And I run those test every so often. The results are truly all over the place.
You can try the Verizon Infospeed Testhere, although I suspect they will check for valid Verizon IP addresses.
I also use DSLReports Tools to monitor my line a bit more independantly.
Finally, the real deal is when you start downloading ISOs anyway. That's when you find out what your line CAN be like. To that end, I've never been happy.
Lou
Phoenix area, Cox Cable. Advertised "Up to 9Mbps Down". Speakeasy speed test: 9139 kbps down. I regularly get nearly a full MB/s on http downloads. Seriously I more often run into the limited bandwidth of a server I'm downloading from than anything else. All this for $54.95/month.
Common guys !! No point fighting over statistics from useless speed test sites. I ran through all the speed test sites each reporting a new speed. I have a 8Mpbs connection from COMHEM,Sweden. Almost all the US speed test sites reported only 1-4 Mpbs speeds, while some European speed test sites reported 5 Mbps. But when I downloaded Fedora Core 5 from a SWEDISH mirror it clocked 8Mbps+ Clearly, this indicates the enormous overhead present at the Speedtest sites. So, I guess now you know how to test your speeds !! :-))
you may be 6'7 and 280 lbs, but if you sound stupid and helpless and ultra sickly sweet, you are attended to immediately with utility services, paycheck troubles, credit card charges, government services, and everything else. except at job interviews, there it fails miserably.
Damn, another car analogy.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Oh, this is fun!
...Ever think your "problem" might be something else entirely?
I used to have SBC (now AT&T) DSL both in Houston and in South Texas. [...] the tech monkeys in India refused to believe me and never did anything to fix my problem [...] Eventually I got through to a second-level SBC tech (a White guy
Then there's me. I pay for a 6Mb down / 384Kb up link from Comcast. My uplink is strictly throttled to 384k; but I've tested my downlink throughput as high as 11.7Mb! The lowest I've seen is around 5. It all has to do with what traffic is on the network at the time.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Actually, in the bad old days of dialup, /10 didn't quite cover the overhead. It exactly covered the serial protocol overhead, but not the overhead of PPP, IP and TCP headers.
They are using marketing gimmicks that most technophiles have been seeing for years.
They are advertising both the up and down speeds combined into one number.
Most residential circuits are not symmetric meaning that the up and down speeds are different.
So they add up both the upload and download rates
and then call that the *Speed* of the internet connection you are paying for.
After all what do they know, they are marketers who care nothing except for that green stuff in your wallet?
All hail the ignorant consumer.
I haven't read through the hundreds of comments, but I'm sure what I'm gonna say has already been said, but just in case... Your DSL speed varies depending on how far you are from your ISP CO as well. This distance can drastically affect the speed at whcih you connect. Of course, the closer to the CO you are, the faster your connection. You should ask your ISP how far your are from your CO. If you are more than half a mile away, then you're probably going to have a lot of latency on your connection.
I agree with you wholeheartedly! What bothers me most about this, and the whole "Net Neutrality" thing, is that by mucking with all of this, they are fundamentally breaking one of the main things that keep stable networks (from a network theory POV) stable: keeping the intelligence at the ends. By putting more "intelligence" in the network, the network won't get better - it will (more likely than not) "break" more often. By "breaking", I mean from the viewpoint of the intelligent "ends" - not from the viewpoint of the network. Slowdowns, loss of packets, etc - degrading the network, and ultimately causing some of those ends to say "fsck it", and drop the service. This devalues the network over time, ultimately causing it to unravel if left to go long enough.
This problem started with asymetric bandwidth to users, continued with port blocking, and now the debate is on "net neutrality".
I want to do with my bandwidth as I see fit, just like you. One thing to recognize is that not all ports are generally blocked (YMMV) - many are kept open - just the "popular" ones are blocked. Say you want to run a webserver at home - ports 80, 8080, 8000, and other variants are typically blocked - but nothing says you can't port-forward from your firewall port 6354 to your webserver. Now, most people wouldn't know this port, of course, so you would need some kind of outside entity doing some translation (probably dynamic DNS providers offer this, haven't checked because I use a vhost - Hurricane Electric, BTW, great provider - for my site - but I know it can be done).
But yeah - it would be nice if things worked the way they should work, and we were treated like real internet nodes instead of mere consumers. I am even willing to pay for the ability. Which brings up other craziness. Here in Phoenix, we have mainly Cox (cable) or Qwest (DSL) to choose from. Both offer business services. I currently have Cox residential high speed, but in order to get the business package (where I could run servers without violating the TOS), I have to pay a LOT more money - something like $400.00 for install (the last I checked) and around $100.00 or so a month. Now, the monthly isn't to big of an issue - but the install is retarded. They don't do anything other than change some settings at the head-end - the cable "modem" likely stays the same, as any other changes allowed by DOCSIS are pushed down to the modem. So just where is this $400.00 going to? Different scenario (maybe) if you don't have the modem, otherwise it just seems like a scam. Qwest DSL only recently became available at my house (unfortunately, Speakeasy isn't available - unless I want a T1) - so in theory I could get their business package, which they have been offering on TV for $90.00 - free install, business DSL and business phone package (whatever that is). Seems like a better deal than the cable, but I haven't looked into it fully.
I just don't see why I can't use the bandwidth how I want when I want, for a flat fee, and then if I go over some usage limit, I pay for the gigabit or whatever based on current rates. I also gave thought to the idea of why not change the rates based on site popularity (ie, price goes up if you browse google a lot, less if you use Ask Jeeves or something). In my half-baked plan, I also had this idea that maybe you could set up a "stock market", whereby prices per gigabit change/fluctuate based on popularity - so if you host a site at your home, it is cheap to transfer bits if it isn't popular, but as popularity rises, you get charged less, or you accrue download "credits" or something - like I said, the whole idea was "half-baked", but in essence I was thinking of a method by which *everyone* benefits.
Which of course means it will never be adopted or implemented ever, because the idea makes sense and doesn't allow any particular entity to dominate others - the greedy bastards.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This rives me fucking crazy. I work for an ISP, we have plenty of bandwidth, our service is nice and peppy(I have it at home, and our main office uses it for bandwidth as well). Yet, we get customers constantly calling, "why am I only getting so much speed from this ?" I got news for you, they don't fucking work.
1) When you access a speed test, it is not very likely that the webserver running said speed test is directly on the other side of your link to your ISP. It far more likely that you accessed a test running on a web server on a different network than your ISP's. SO, you are not testing the speed of your line, you are testing the speed of the slowest/most congested link between you, and the speed test site. Or, to put it a better way, you are testing your connection speed to a speedtest. If a speedtest's feed to the internet is only a T1 line, got news for ya, it will never show anyone's speed as anything faster than 1.5 mbit, even if they have 3 mbit dsl.
2) Speedtest enthusiasts (and yes, some people click them like mad, it must be fun, I dunno), seem to believe that just because they have a 7 mbit download, that every web server on the planet is willing to send 7 mbit at you, just because you can potenially see it. Got news for you, that web server is busy servicing god knows what else, and if you get 1.5 mbit, consider yourself lucky. a 7mbit connection is not about having 7mbit to any _one_ site, because it is just not going to happen. It is about having 7mbit capacity TOTAL.
You want a decently (and not good mind you) acceptable speed test, go to freebsd.org, select four different ftp mirrors, and download four different isos at once. A better method is simple, "let the merits of the service speak for themselves." If you can do many things at once, without any noticable speed hit, you have a nice fast connection, with a lot of capacity, be happy. If you can slug it out with little to no effort, you're hitting your upper limit, whip out a calculator, and do some actual math, because a speedtest will not tell you your connection speed.
The question is ignorant, moronic, and doesn't belong here.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
I do blame them when they insist the problem is on my side of the demarc AFTER they have been told by me that I have eliminated possible problems with the NIC (there are two in the PC, both verified to be working correctly in Windows and Linux). I do blame them when they insist the problem is on my side of the demarc AFTER they have been told by me that I have a dedicated phone line for DSL (with fresh CAT 5 no less).
I guess too many bad experiences with SBC/AT&T tech support have soured me on the whole concept of calling for tech support. The funny thing is for $10 more a month Time Warner has given me double the speed (6 Mbps) and a semi-static IP (DHCP but has not changed in months) all while having fewer problems with the connection (number of times I have called Time Warner tech support ==> ZERO).
A man who wants nothing is invincible
As cable and DSL speeds increase, i'm starting to see lots of old Netgear routers that can't keep up. Old RT311's and RT314's seem to have a tough time delivering 10 Mbps throughput. Some older firewalls with stateful packet inspection also seem to have performance problems.
If you suspect that your router / firewall is limiting your broadband performance, bite the bullet and spend $59.00 on a new Linksys (or whatever brand you like). Most new firewalls have faster processors and can handle a 10 Mbps link.
-ted
I have had Shaw's (a Canadian cable company / ISP ) Xtreme-I premium service for almost two years now. It's rated at 7 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Most of the time I actually get the bandwidth they advertise. Of course my speeds depend on the server I am downloading from and torrents never go that fast anymore since they implement packet prioritization. So I am really happy with the bandwidth of the connection but the latency is ... poor.
A friend of mine play online games with each-other a lot. We both have the Xtreme-I service and we live about 5 km away. Typically we see latencies in excess of 100 ms between our two machines, both of which have external IPs. It's really frustrating because for a lot of games this latency results in a VERY perceptible lag in the game-play. We've both called Shaw several times in the past but the techs never give us any answers, and most of the time they do not even understand what latency is versus bandwidth. It's incredibly frustrating for both of us, especially since the Xtreme-I service used to be low-latency.
There's nothing either of us can really do to get around the problem either. Complaining for months on end hasn't gotten us anywhere, and neither of us can switch to DSL since it isn't in our areas. Shaw used to be a good ISP, but now I just cannot wait until I get free myself from them.
If we use 'Ford's Law', I would expect my computer to spontaneously flip over and catch on fire because of a faulty five cent connector.
Actually, Ford sued to have this renamed the Bridgstone Law.
The correct Ford Law was coined in the 1980's and early 1990's: "You can have any color so long as it's beige."
Many folks in areas not yet served by broadband would love the opportunity to kvetch about what lousy speeds they're getting. Unfortunately for them, we're talking about the difference between 40k and 56k along the narrow dialup spectrum, which is totally inadequate for today's needs. I've decided to do something about this issue, so I co-founded a nonprofit organization to address the problem, have written several news articles, and managed to get myself appointed by Maine's governor to serve on our Broadband Access Infrastructure Board. And, better yet, we've actually passed a bill (LD2080) that will fund municipal networks in underserved rural areas and other demonstration projects while seeking grants for more extensive buildouts. It's a good start.
I can almost guarantee that if someone is paying for 6mbps ADSL, they are syncing to the DSLAM at 6mbps.
Unless of course you are a Bell South customer. Then all bets are off...
But seriously if someone is paying for 6mbps ADSL there is no gurantee they will be synching at 6mbps at the DSLAM. First there are environmental factors (how good is your houses internal phone wiring?) and distance to the CO.
Sure the DSLAM theoretical sync maybe 6mbps, but unless the thing is on your block or in your building (if you are in NYC) and you have perfect phone lines (no load coils, AM radio station nearby, or arc weilders) you will never get that true sync speed.
However, that said... I think it is expected that the ladies speed dropped from the 700 to 300 because the DSLAM is only trying half as hard and using only half the bandwidth in frequency on the copper line. So now your crappy fast speed is just a crappy slow speed.
Personally, I don't like DSL as a technology because I had to work at an ISP that supported it an roll out BellSouth, SBC, and Covad trucks to houses where people couldn't get sync at all to fix their NIDs and there were so many environmental issues that could go wrong between the customer and the central office. It was pretty much a hit and miss (especially with Bellsouth)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I have 768/6.0 service from Speakeasy. We have 4 big time downloaders sharing that connection. And believe me, we made use of that download portion - until last month. We got a call from their security department (it turned out is was actually the abuse department) recommending that we first check our security (as in wireless routers), and failing that, curtail our downloading activity.
They were keen to say that there are no caps, but they way things were worded getting over 3.0-3.5 GB/day is considered excessive use. Because of this, downgrading the account to a 1.5Mb download rate might actually be more cost-effective now since we need the data more than we need the rate.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
If you have the mtu wrong, you will get about 1/2 the rated speed of the connection...this sounds like what his problem was.
If your 3Mb/s connection generates 750Kb/s and the problem is a bottleneck, then dropping the maximum speed available to you is not going to change anything. Your throughput at the bottleneck will be just as fast - 750Kb/s.
Not necessarily.
If you can only put a quarter as much in the queues as each of the competing 3M users who are throwing four times as many packets at the bottleneck as you are, each packet has the same probability of discard, you get a quarter as many through as they do (and as you did when you had the bandwidth).
Then everybody's TCP throttles back using the same algorithm and you split the bandwidth "fairly" - with the 3M users getting four times as much of it as the 750Ks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If we use 'Ford's Law', I would expect my computer to spontaneously flip over and catch on fire because of a faulty five cent connector.
I take it you haven't been following the news about the lithium cells in laptops and cellphones catching fire.
(Now HOW MUCH does that little charge controller chip with the temperature sensor cost in commercial-sized lots?)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"However I do blame the techs when they insist on reading a pre-canned script aimed at noobs from the top AFTER being told that I am a systems/network administrator with LOTS of Cisco training under my belt."
/renew" fifteen times. Don't have to direct them to "Network Connections" in control panel. Don't have to explain that their modem can be connected to the internet, while they cannot get online with the computer attached to it(this gets fun when they demand credit for the downtime). Don't have to explain the difference betwen USB cables and Ethernet cables(just the visual difference mind you) 5 times and they still get it wrong. Good network engineers, that actually deserve the title, we can get done in two minutes what would take us 10 or more with a normal caller, to say nothing of the arrogant fucks that think an Ethernet and an HFC network work identically with identical support issues.
Most of the time people do this, they are the worst callers imaginable. They either don't know even 10% of what they claim, or they are the biggest assholes on the planet. You might not be this way, but there are a lot of people that don't understand there are different support issues when dealing with an HFC network of over 1.5 million subscribers than there are with a couple thousand node Ethernet, and think that they can diagnose a problem on our end without access to any of our diagnostic tools or logs, based on their experience with said ethernet.
That said, a network engineer worth a damn is a prized caller. Don't have to spell out "ipconfig
Watch the commercials again, re-read the ads, then figure out the answer. The ISP's don't say they're "selling an 85 mph car." It's always a car "capable of speeds up to 85 mph" or "up to 10 times as fast as jogging." That's under ideal conditions, which of course never happens.
There's plenty of people here who can explain the reasons you don't get top speeds better than I, but I'm sure overselling the bandwidth is one of them. Try DL'ing stuff at 3 AM sometime and see if you get different results than at 5 PM when everyone gets home from work. To see some of the myriad of other factors involved in action, try transferring a big file between two computers on an empty LAN and see if you actually get 10/100/1000 Mbps like the hardware can supposedly achieve. I think personally the best speed I've ever seen is 32 Mbps (ie, 4 MBps) on a 100 Mbps LAN.
Of course the ISP's could try to figure out what the actual average speed users get is, but that's still just a mean for a wide range that depends on a lot of factors. Even getting around the overselling bandwidth is tough, because if you provide space for all of your users to simultaneously max out at once (which doesn't really happen anyways), you're going to have to raise their rates to pay for the added infrastructure. They'll be much less happy about a huge rate increase than an occasional slowing of their connection.
As far as your analogy, internet access is much more like a road or a pipeline than a car. You generally aren't going to get some place faster on a side street than on the freeway, and just because the speed limit is 55 doesn't mean you'll be able to go that fast.
Nope.
If patriotism is racist, is racism patriotic?
I dont know about how comcast works but for DSL usually you are capped due to copper line issues. (i.e. old/crappy lines in the ground or long distance from CO) I know alot of areas are getting either fiber upgrades or at least remote terminals that allow very high speeds to a neighborhood area.
Brighthouse Networks have 5,10 or 15 mpbs download speed. 5mbphs is standard you can upgrade to 10 if you get the digital cable package along with some other stuff. However if you would like 15 mpbs they demand you get they $33.95 a month voip package alone with taxes comes to $50. I have Vonage which is under $28 a month. I would love 15mpbs I thin it would add $15 to my internet bill but I am not paying $50 for phone service it is nuts. Also I think it is unfair how if you want the fastest speed you have have everything they offer.
Has anyone put 2 and 2 together yet?
We have been hearing for MONTHS about the possibility of a tiered internet. The fact of the matter is that we already have it.
Google is paying for T lines or D lines or maybe even some OC lines...but they pay for it, and the speed is guarenteed.
We pay for our DSL or Cable or Dial Up, no guarentee, but we have levels of service we pay for...56kb, 112kb, 512kb, 1mg, 3mg, 6mg, etc...
The idea of the tiered internet is that consideration will be given to those that pay for it, i.e. you pay more, you get more speed.
Last I looked, 56k was $9 and 6mg was $50+ while T lines can be $2000 and OC lines, well, I would have to rob a bank to pay for one...
What I would like to see is internet access at the fastest speed possible for one fee...
--E--
although it is monthly bandwidth capped which is a pain :(
:)
also, Look reliably provided to us twice the peak speed we paid for which was 4x the speed they said we would actually get.
everything's better here in canadia where the market is not quite so "free" to screw you over
As a test, connect your computer directly to the Cable/DSL modem. See if your speed is any different. Through the router, my speed (using Speakeasy's speed test) maxed out at somewhere around 3.5 to 3 Mbps. A direct connect got over 9.
I switched over to using my Vonage-supplied router as the first connection, and I now get the full bandwidth. It seems that the Netgear router wasn't designed to handle connection speeds in excess of 3 Mbps, and it isn't even a year old.
1) The line speed (3 Mbps, 1.5 Mbps, etc...) is your speed to your ISP's router. The line ALWAYS runs at that speed, so the cable/phone company really is giving you what you paid for.
2) Your download speed partially depend on how many errors you are seeing on the line. If your wiring is just a bit faulty then you will see lots of errors on the line and your speeds on downloads via FTP or HTTP will suffer greatly (due to TCP's slow start procedure). The cable/phone company obviously only has limited control over this.
3) Your download speed partially depends on the latency of your connection. Cable's latency can fluctuate, depending on how congested the local network is, and DSL's latency can be rather high due to error-correcting methods that some providers use. The higher your latency, the longer it takes for TCP to ramp up to full speed. It is especially relevant when you combine high latency with lots of dropped/error-laden packets.
4) Your download speed partially depends on the quality of your ISP's backbone and their internet connections. This is probably a bigger worry for DSL customers that use a smaller ISP. High-speed interfaces are pretty cheap, though, and you can get decent non-Cisco gear for relatively cheap, so the backbone issue probably isn't a huge concern. More important is your ISP's internet connectivity; if their upstream providers are small tier-2 or tier-3 providers, then you'll probably see more latencies/losses than you would if they have a few tier-1 providers.
5) Finally, your speeds are very dependant on the server from which you're downloading. If they have a lossy-connection, a high-latency connection, or poor internet connectivity, then you'll be limited by their infrastructure and not your own.
The reality is that it can be very difficult to point the finger at someone for causing your slow download speeds. Don't assume that your ISP sucks because you can't download movies at 3 Mbps; there are a ton of complicated factors involved.
Hopefully someone has already posted this, but just in case I will cover this subject. The ISPs are not lying about their connection speed. They are just advertising their speeds it megabits per second, not megabytes per second. Most speed tests will give you a result in kilobytes. So be very careful not to get MBps confused with Mbps. Just do a search in google (or whatever engine you prefer) for bits vs bytes for more information.
Most people who think they have a right to complain about advertised speeds and 'performance tests' are uneducated. I don't care what kind of service agreement is given to the customer, an ISP can only ever guarantee bandwidth through their network. It's no a 768Kbps link to yahoo, dslreports, or any other external site. An ISP only has the ability to guarantee bandwidth through their network.
--If an ISP provides a means to test the speed within their network and the numbers aren't close, only then does the customer have the right to ask what's going on. Too many people are too quick to believe that dslreports' bandwidth test proves that they're not getting what they're paying for.
Why expect "X% faster while paying Y% more" to bump up a tier, but when you drop a tier you act all surprised with
100X/(100+X) percent slower, for 100Y/(100+Y) percent less? Real slowly now, "You pay less, you get less."
eg., 200% faster for 150% more in one direction, becomes 66% slower for 60% less, in the other direction.
--
Real numbers instead of a formula, for the math-challenged:
60% faster for 25% more (2500 for $40 becomes 4000 for $50)
37.5% slower for 20% less (4000 for $50 back to 2500 for $40)
Internet traffic varyies wildy. I have a RoadRunner account 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up. The absolutely only place in the world I can actually get 10Mbps down is from RoadRunner's own servers. Their mail server runs LIGHTNING fast, even with huge attachments. Their news server, the same. I actually can regularly get 10Mbps binary downloads. Content from their webservers, the same. They even host servers for certain online games and it's like a LAN. If I run the bandwidth speed test from RR's server, it reports around 970Kbps most of the time, close enough to advertised to satisfy me. They even have a couple of HUGE files out there, 10MB and 50MB hosted as both HTTP and FTP, so I can clock the download of those files and remove any possibility that their bandwidth tester lies. I get download speeds of 2000 kbps or better.
But the minute I cross over to the internet, it's a different story. 3Mbps is the best I generally get. This is not due to RoadRunner being "evil" and overselling their capicity to the internet. Rather it is because the OTHER side, the site I am downloading from, either has the "per user" bandwidth capped (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc...) or simply does not have any more bandwidth than I am using. I can generally make MULTIPLE 3Mbps downloads, provided I go through different sites. But it is rare that I can get a single download to run faster. Occasionally Microsoft leaves a download uncapped, but rarely.
In part, this is just the natural result when highly technical products and services are sold to a relatively ignorant public in a competitive system.
When the users aren't clued-in enough to appreciate real differences between service/product A and service/product B, claimed differences become more important, from an economic point of view.
If provider A claims N Mbps, provider B better counter with similar speeds or lower prices. If the users, by and large, wouldn't actually know a Mbps if it hit them on the head, then the easiest and most profitable way to compete is claim to provide N+1 Mbps. After all, for most light web browsing / chat-room / e-mail users, 1Mbps and 10Mbps connections provide similar experiences. What the service really is capable of is less important than the way the users feel about it.
The same circumstances drove claimed CD-ROM drive speeds into meaningless exaggeration in the late 90s. The same circumstances drove Intel to chase gigahertz rather than real-world performance in the Pentium IV line. The same circumstances cause Wi-Fi equipment vendors to make wild claims of 100+ Mbps speeds, when users will be lucky to see a tenth of that.
The phenomenon applies to other fields as well. Digital cameras make a big deal about megapixels, because that's easy to measure and compare, even though image quality is about more than megapixels, even though other, non-image-quality issues may be of far more importance. Plenty of owners of status-symbol watches have no idea what "jewel" means in that context, but are confident that more is better. Few owners of cars with badges like "DOHC" or "VTEC" can give a coherent explanation of what those badges mean, but the badged cars sell for a premium anyway.
That Verizon is a huge company and not all regions operate in the same way. Where I live (central pennsylvania) Verizon won't let you "buy" a higher speed service than they can provide. I havn't heard of anyone receiving less bandwidth than they purchased here. That could be different where you live, though.
from an end-user's perspective, drawing a line inside the stack is going to get *very* confusing.
I am quite familiar with the internals of the TCP stack, but you can't expect your beginning-level technician to expect that the rates include some but not all expected overhead...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Why use a speed test when you can simply see what your modem syncs at:
Tx Line Rate 1149 Rx Line Rate 18076 Max Att. DnS LR 18526
I live in Germany and all providers here lock their modems with supposedly secret passwords, but thanks to certain forums these are not so secret anymore these days.
Although in the case of my modem (Siemens C2 aka GlobespanVirata/Conexant Cellipe Viking II Plus), the one who originally found this out probably had to use the modem's serial console which can be accessed with a 12 to 3.3V level converter soldered to the board.
Yep, that's about right. I'm on Optus cable eher in Oz. I regularly get 820-850kbytes/s download speeds from Optus' mirror. Everywhere else - well could be anything from 2k/s to 300k/s. If I go overseas, I'll never see more than 100k/s - and only for big name sites like hp.com, sun.com, etc. So, what's the problem again?!
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When you figure that with your average traffic - which is what most speed testers use - you're sending tons of check packets back and forth that are typically NOT counted alongside the data... Wouldn't those speeds be quite accurate?
In fact, I don't think I've actually seen any bandwidth speed testers that did anything more than divide the file size by how long it took you to download it. Leaving me with the assumption that your other miscellaneous traffic, including simple network control resultant of the download, would easily take up the extra bandwidth.
Between everyone downloading, how much of the data is redundant?
In other words, if each of you are sitting in a room on a computer, downloading to thier individual hard drive, and at different points in the day each downloads the same or similar file, wouldn't it be better if it was downloaded once, and stored to a fileserver for the others to access?
If it can be determined that is true, you could then set up a multi-protocol "downloading server" where you can queue up the downloads to the fileserver, perhaps with alerts back to the person who queued the download (to let them know it is done). I know - easier said than done, but it might get Speakeasy off your back (which is strange - your story is the first negative thing I had heard about them) if you can set it up.
First step, though, would be "comparing notes" with your friends to see if there are any commonalities in the download arena. If there are, and they are significant (spot check a few single random days in a month, to get an "average" idea), then the download server might be the way to go.
Or, talk with Speakeasy, ask about your plan, and whether they offer a similar plan with less restriction on the amount of data (maybe a business class plan).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Hey, I'm moving there.
Is this still wise given you just slashdotted your broadband and electricity?
What the hell does your grandmother need with a 3Mbps connection?
I ahve yet to see that anyone has mentioned the real issue regarding the "speed" of a DSL or cable modem broadband connection. If you read the fine print and some of the not so fine print you just might notice that the advertised speeds are considered "Best Effort" speeds. This is directly from BellSouth's web site: Service Description BellSouth FastAccess DSL Service is a best efforts service. The actual speed experienced by customers is based on DSL sync rate and may vary and depends on several factors including customer location, destination on the Internet, traffic on the Internet, interference with high frequency spectrum on the customer's telephone line, etc. Wireless connections are subject to varying speeds based on factors such as: proximity to the wireless gateway, or interference from other devices. No minimum level of speed is guaranteed. Anyhow - that's my $0.02 for this conversation.
IMHO, people should look into how far away their residence is from the nearest central office before ordering DSL service. I have yet to run into anybody who lived really close to theirs, or to a substation built to extend the reach of the C.O., who got really poor DSL bandwidth.
The problems seem to almost always come from folks who live far enough to be on the outer limits of the wire distances supported.
In my own neighborhood, I couldn't even get DSL for years because they claimed the central office my phone lines were on was several counties away. One day, they finally installed a substation really close to my house though, and now I get very reliable 6mbit DSL that consistently gets download rates of around 605Kps.
Love, honour & obey? -- yeah riiiiight.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world