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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.)
Jesus Christ! Call Whine 11 or something!
...Anyway, I have 8 MB Comcast and I am very pleased. I just used http://www.testmy.net/tools/test/d_load.php to measure my connection speed and here is the result:
:::.. Download Stats ..:::
Connection is:: 8212 Kbps about 8.21 Mbps (tested with 5983 kB)
Download Speed is:: 1002 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Server 1)
Test Time:: 2006/06/01 - 8:12pm
Bottom Line:: 143X faster than 56K 1MB Download in 1.02 sec
Tested from a 5983 kB file and took 5.969 seconds to complete
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3
Diagnosis: Awesome! 20% + : 62.71 % faster than the average for host (comcast.net)
Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-YLBMP5VFC
:)
My download speed really is that fast if I am downloading from a good webserver. And even when I'm not, the bandwidth gets used in bittorrent
Sorry you are having problems....
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.
Bradley Holt
Someone's gotta seed the Matlock and Bob Hope torrents.
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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.
Something I've heard from my friends a lot is that they don't realise companies sell their connection speeds in BITS per second.
Myself, I have 512Kb/s down, and as a rule of thumb I divide by 10 to get it in bytes. I get at best 54KB/s downloads, which works out by this rule.
I know, a byte is 8 bits, but as a rule of thumb, dividing by 10 seems to include overhead.
I know my 512Kb/s ADSL connection doesn't rate against these 3Mb/s cable connections, but, this is my experience, learn from it what you will.
Just curious...
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What does gramma need with 3Mbps anyway?!
Irrelevant. They sold her on 3 Mbps, they aren't delivering it. It's not my business or yours what she wants it for.
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.
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."
about grandma, and a webcam, and why that makes it our business
but i'm not telling that joke, nope
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
That's because the FCC mandates SLAs on T/Frame/OC lines.
Please help metamoderate.
Gas mileage is not determined by the companies, it is determined by a set of specific tests under federal law. If you were able to run those tests and find a discrepancy, then you would have a case as far as fraud/mislabeling/etc. goes. Tests are quite easy to run on bandwidth, so it's an entirely different situation.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
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
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 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
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.
I've heard of this phenomenon. I think they call it "lobbying".
In most parts of the world this is better known as 'corruption'.
this is absurd. Of course your speeds with DSL might suck depending on your location, and the way they determine what speed you get, of course a speed decrease will lower your actual bandwidth. You'll note the speed decrease is actually a bit less with the lower speed, but they are actuall still comparable and probably somewhat attributable to other networking factors.
Before complaining about your DSL line being slow, I think you really should read up on how DSL (and most likely ADSL to be specific) works. You are hardly ever going to get max bandwidth out of a service line though I honestly cannot complain about the speeds I am getting with Cable. So, remember, before starting a bitch-fest...know what the hell you are talking about...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."