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.
I'd vote with my dollars appropriately.
Easy to do if you're in a broadband-competitive area (I am, and I have Comcast, and if things aren't working to my satisfaction I call them up and say the magic word "Speakeasy".) I know people that only have one option for broadband, and things can get a mite more difficult (I'm not picking on Comcast alone, seems like most broadband providers are only as co-operative as they have to be in a particular service area.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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 have 3Mbit down/384k up service (and was getting 3Mbit down and 360k up on their test, and it still told me I couldn't use VoIP with good QoS, yet I use VoIP all the time on my network and get quality equal to or better than my cell phone. It's not clear to me that their test is all that useful - or their metrics are screwed up. If they consider 33 ms ping times bad, I'd like to know where they can find a better residential connection.
Really though, this whole story is a non-issue. I have yet to see an ad for any residential serviice that doesn't say "speed not guaranteed". The speeds they quote you are always "up to this number", not "you always get this number". For cable it's a shared medium between other users on your head end, so unless you're the only user, you're not going to be able to max out the line. 802.11b is supposed to be 11 Mbit per second, but I rarely get that, because it's divided among the other users of the access point. It doesn't mean Avaya and Enterasys are scamming consumers because their access points don't always give 11Mbit/sec. DSL is very sensitive to your distance from the CO and quality of the wiring, so of course it's not guaranteed. Even a LAN is not guaranteed. For short and medium transfers, I rarely get 100 Mbits out of my local network. These "connection testers" are mostly useless - a better test is to download large amounts of data (BitTorrent, for example) and look at the average throughput.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
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.