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

Municipal Broadband

[mysqlrocks]

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.

Re:Municipal Broadband

[mysqlrocks]

It's a cooperative?

No, it's municipal broadband as my subject line said. That means that the city runs it. We, the people, collectively own the assets of the city since we are the voters and the taxpayers and this is a democracy. Since they only provide service within the city, then everyone that is able to receive service owns the network. We "own" it in the same we that we own the parks and other public spaces.

If I don't like the way the network is run I can vote to change it. Now, you may argue that I can "vote with my dollar" if I am customer of MegaCorp Broadband. The problem with that logic is that not everyone has an equal vote. In a democracy, everyone gets one vote no matter how much money you have. We, the citizens, decided we were tired of getting screwed by MegaCorp Broaband (Adelphia or Verizon as the case may be here and now) and that we would have provide our own service. Now, I can get my Broadband, my electricity (yes, the electric company is run by the city here too), and my water from the city and I can feel confident that I, as a citizen, can have a say in how these services are run regardless of how much money I may have.

I suck up.

[patryn20]

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."

Re:Don't have that problem with my fiberoptic

[hivebrain]

I pay $55/month for 30 down / 5 up. I think you can get 15 and 2 for about $40. I also get my TV through the fiber now -- $30 cheaper than digital cable through Comcast, more channels, HDTV, yadda, yadda.
I'm in the northern VA suburbs of DC and I know that Verizon's already in a wide variety of towns in the area.

I'm also getting my full bandwidth

[Lenolium]

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

My ISP undersell...!?

[grahamsz]

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 :)

Re:False advertising != lack of SLA

[Detritus]

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.

Broadband data networks over CATV are very different than shared-media Ethernet. Ethernet uses baseband signalling, everyone shares a common channel (CSMA). With cable, there can be multiple independent downlink channels. There is a single uplink channel that uses TDM to support multiple users. Each cable modem is assigned a shared 6 MHz downlink channel and a time slot on the uplink channel. There is no contention for access to the media.

Re:No surprise here move along

[rmerry72]

Is if fraud when hard drive companies sell you a "250GB" HDD?

Well, no, actually. A 250MB hard drive is exactly that: 250,000,000,000 bytes. That's the same definition of 1GB (ie 1,000,000,000 bytes) that ALL hard drive manufacturers use, and have been for quite a while. Most will actually state x,000,000,000 bytes. So its fair, and you're are getting what you pay for. It's the same thing here, you pick the description that makes you look the best.

Only if that description is acturate; Otherwise its fraud. Marketting is about putting the best spin on what you've got to sell. Saying your selling something your not is fraud. And marketing in general strays very close or a touch over the line.

With bandwidith it is reasonable to expect some loss, but you should be able to get at least 90% most times, and then deduct network and traffic overheads. If your only getting 25% of the bandwidth delivered that's a cause for suspictions of being ripped off.

Overselling is a poor excuse, one used by airlines all the time. If I buy a seat on a flight I expect to get one - even if everybody else they have sold a seat to does as well.

Re:No surprise here move along

[The_Mr_Flibble]

Well I don't know what it's like over in the states but over here (uk) there's a little something the providers don't make a large fuss about and that's the contention ratio
and in some cases it's really bad (something like 40:1 on a standard home dsl) so if you have a 2 meg adsl so if you only get connection speeds of 100kbs there isn't much the provider will do about it (yes I have seen this happen with a certain large provider over here who would not do anything because it was indeed in range)

So have a look at the contract you signed for your dsl and see what sort of ratio they try to give you.

If you have a problem with contention ratio then you may need to pay a bit more for say business broadband which has a lot lower contention ratio.

btw over here if say you have a 1mb adsl and you pay £20 a month for it and all your traffic goes over transit connections (which isps have to pay per mb for) and you use that 1 mb constantly the isp will loose a lot of cash as they will be paying about £30 a meg for the transit then they still have to pay the cost of the dsl connection as well.

In conclusion read the contract!

my cable provider delivers

[Cederic]

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.

Re:No surprise here move along

[keraneuology]

After the promotional period Comcast said they were doubling my rate to just under $65/month. I spoke with three different 800-operators and sent an email to corporate asking them to reconsider and they refused. A couple of them told me outright that if I really wanted to switch to DSL ($17.99/month vs $6x.00/month) I should go for it, but that they do not consider price reductions under any circumstances.

Bye bye, Comcast.

Re:SLA?

[mo^]

I must admit to always thinking that the Car Analogy should be included as a form of Godwin's Law.

Re:SLA?

[tinkerghost]

To be fair, you ISP only owns parts of the highway: the on ramp (some might own a bit more than that). I bet you'd find that a bandwidth test against a server in their network would probably report numbers very close to what they're selling you. But there are quite a few bottleneck on the internet, including the bandwidth connection of the website you're trying to reach (including the bandwidth test sites I have seen).
I might buy that for the overall issue of not recieving the bandwidth promised. However when you concider:
She downgraded to the 768K plan expecting to still have 750K. Wrong, instead her speed dropped to 300K.
Note that all the numbers are in bits per second since he referenced them that way earlier in his statement.
You can see that the problem is not a bottleneck issue. 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.
This is more likely a QoS implimentation which assigns specific allotments of bandwidth to the various levels of service. "OK, we have 100Tb/s of bandwidth, our 3Mb/s customers pay the most so we will give them 50Tb/s, 2Mb/s gets 25Tb/s ... Oh, and that sucker paying $20 a month for his dialup ... ehh, cut him off & tell him it's his modem is broken."
You can see the difference between bottlenecking & segregated bandwidth issues. If there's a bottleneck, everyone up to the throughput of the bottleneck doesn't know it's there. Everyone over that limit sees it exactly the same. With the bandwidth segregation, each tier will show differently based on the load at the time.