Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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.
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.
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)
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.