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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.)
Find a real ISP, like speakeasy.
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.
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 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
"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!
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 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.
It's more like buying a Ferrari with a top speed of 196mph, and then finding that you can rarely go faster than 60 because other drivers are always in your way.
Hey...watch what you say. Now days grammas are in 30s. Into bittorrent and stuff....you must be old.
That's because the FCC mandates SLAs on T/Frame/OC lines.
Please help metamoderate.
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)
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; }
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.
well if you use http://www.testmy.net/ you should be able to get the maximum speed your connection will allow. They use very stable servers for testing.
:::.. Download Stats ..:::
It's like the only place that I can max out my personal connection.
Connection is:: 9363 Kbps about 9.36 Mbps (tested with 5983 kB)
Download Speed is:: 1143 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Server 1)
Test Time:: 2006/06/01 - 11:06pm
Bottom Line:: 163X faster than 56K 1MB Download in 0.9 sec
Tested from a 5983 kB file and took 5.235 seconds to complete
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Alexa Toolbar)
Diagnosis: Awesome! 20% + : 112.46 % faster than the average for host (cox.net)
Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-NUDR6SIAF
I can almost guarantee that if someone is paying for 6mbps ADSL, they are syncing to the DSLAM at 6mbps. Do they guarantee speed XYZ for ABC hops with ### latency? No, THAT would be an SLA.
DSL signals drop off because they demand better quality from the line. A typical telephone reproduces audio frequencies between 300 and 3,400 Hz - the acoustical range necessary to understand human voice. (In comparison, a typical studio mic probably picks up sounds between 20 and 20,000 Hz.)
The reason you can piggyback DSL on a telephone line without affecting voice calls is that DSL uses frequencies outside of the human voice range to transmit the data. The farther away you get from the central office, the worse the signal gets, and speeds are impacted.
In other words, the reason you can call somebody in Japan is because the audio quality does suck.
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.
I agree that not everybody has the same dollar voting rights, but that's not that bad in practice. More dollars *overall* for a company only indicates which demand is more pressing, so it will try to satisfy the higher demand first.
Agreed, for the Megacorp your consumer dollars might not be of much value, but for a smaller consumer-only ISP they're real, valuable dollars.
The conclusion is the same: if there's need, build your own ISP, but that's because there's still much room for improvement even at current ISP service rates that the Big Ones aren't interested in.
The answer doesn't have to be democracy, it can just be competition. (But I'm happy to hear that a city runs an affordable ISP. I'd be interested to hear about the costs however, as I'd be afraid that taxpayers overall pay much for for such service, due to government inefficiency.)
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.
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?!?!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Lynx is giving me headaches, but w3m isn't installed
at my college. This is bad enough, but then I keep having to log in.