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.

Comments

Re:No surprise here move along

[ScrewMaster]

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.)

my solution: I installed a DSL splitter

[dmoen]

At my old house, I was on a 1.5 Mb/s DSL plan, but I never got more than 1.0 Mb/s, and just before I moved, it had degraded to 600 Kb/s. I was using the standard 'put a filter on every phone jack' method, the only method that the ISP would tell me about. I tried the 3 Mb/s plan, but the speed was actually worse, so they bumped me back down to 1.5 Mb/s.

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

Re:SLA?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 don't think anyone is claiming that the ISP is intentionally capping the speed at half the advertised rate (they'd be committing fraud if this was happening) -- instead, they are just overselling their capacity.

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.