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The FCC Says ISPs Aren't Hitting Advertised Speeds
MojoKid writes "The Federal Communications Commission has released the results of a year-long scientific study it conducted with regard to the upload and download speeds of thirteen American Internet service providers. Most of the ISPs hit 90 percent of their advertised upload speeds. Of the 13 providers tested, only four (or less than a third) averaged at or even above their advertised download speeds (Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Verizon Fiber). The tests were performed by a private firm that has run similar tests in the U.K. It measured performance at 6,800 'representative homes' nationally in March."
On my Verizon FiOS connection, I can regularly hit 25mbps on my 15/5 line for file downloads and speed tests.
I'm willing to bet that if I kept that up for extended periods it would drop down a lot, but it's fine for quickly downloading a Steam game once a month.
I know DSL, being an ATM-based technology and often subjected to PPPoE overhead, will score lower than rated. I have a 5 megabit connection but that's the sync rate. You can realistically expect to lose 9-10% just from the above overheads. That rather fits with the graphs I'm seeing.
I've seen some ISPs compensate by setting the sync rate above the advertised rate but most don't.
Verizon is evil in implementation of their contracts. They have good technology with outstanding network reliability. However, their policies and their hip-hop rapping store staff can suck it!
Comcast OTOH has good technology and a nice network too. They're pricey, but well worth the service IMHO. They customer service in India can suck my left nut, and those sub-contracted repair service men need to stay the hell away from my beer and peanut. But most importantly, they need to fix the problem the FIRST TIME AROUND. You here that Comcast, get your damn men to fix the problem. Your repeat truck-rolls are costing me time from work (to meet them) and you as well.
Life is not for the lazy.
They still are. They just hide their packet shaping from burst speed tests pretty well.
Apparently the ISP that supplies /. is one of the slow ones.
Time to offend someone
I'd like to know where they tested Charter at. If you're in a relatively sparse area they're great, but here in Madison, WI, they fucking suck. I have "21 meg" or some shit and at most I pull down between 2 and 5. Between the hours of 5 and 7 or 8 o'clock in the evening, it's damn near unusable because everybody in the city comes home and starts streaming Hulu and Netflix and I'll be lucky to pull down 700k, and the latency spikes like you wouldn't believe. The techs themselves tell me never to expect to hit the speeds I'm told I'll get, because that's not "real-world use."
So if I'm never going to get that speed in practical application, why again are they allowed to advertise said speed?
With Comcast, " averaged at or even above their advertised download speeds" means they sustained advertised speeds for all of 60 seconds -- right up until PowerBoost switched off.
I have NEVER gotten the 'upto' speed that any isp has ever sold me.
At least the crapcast i have now is sort of stable and about 3/4ths what i'm supposedly paying for.
But they drop connections at random. p2p... non p2p.. whatever. random.
And it's not cheap either.
So thanks crapcast for only sorta screwing me over and mostly ripping me off.
Geeze... going back in time... a 1.5 Mbit T1 connection, while actually a continuous 1.5 Mbit connection, never quite delivered that much speed when it was hooked to "the internet" and expected to move TCP/IP traffic. Same for 10 Mbit Ethernet (and that was never a true bidirectional 10 Mbits to begin with).
Protocol overhead always nibbles away at the edges.
Although I'm only one datapoint, my Optimum Boost (Cablevision) service north of NYC almost always hits the 50d/8u Mbps that I'm paying for ($15 over base service for the higher speeds). When I've had issues, they've always been catastrophic ones (no signal due to bad connector on the utility pole, etc.) rather than just slowdowns.
Aye, but there's also something this doesn't cover - region. Many of these companies perform differently if you use their service in different cities.
Where I live, you can regularly expect AT&T DSL to give you about +10% of advertised speed, and we have Wide Open West, which is good (but not listed there). The Insight and Time Warner list there probably overestimate the quality of service here where I live. Actually, since Insight (at least here) uses the TimeWarner infrastructure, it doesn't surprise me at all that they show so similar.
However, if we conversely go to a friend in another city, her Time Warner acually does meet advertised peak speed, and does so fairly regularly, but equally regularly goes down to DSL speeds.
The charts that are listed on the TFA are useless except on a per-city basis.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
When I visit speedtest.net, I get faster speeds to Fiber Internet Center in Palo Alto, CA (21 Mbps down) than I get from Comcast in Denver, CO (9 Mbps down), even though I live within 30 miles of Denver and use Comcast for my 12 Mbps high speed internet connection. Anyone able to explain that one?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Well, I don't hit the advertised speeds. I am provisioned at 7mb down and 896k up. On a good day I get 6mb down but the upstream seems fairly consistent. However, this is a lot better than the leading cable company, Cox. Cox was a nightmare to deal with so I'll gladly put up with Qwest because I have no other choice. At least Qwest is less evil and doesn't engage in port blocking and require you to buy a small business package for a static IP to stop port blocking.
There is much less incentive to throttle a 1Mbps link than a 10Mbps link. Sure, you've only got 1Mpbs, but at the same time, you've always got 1Mpbs. While your neighbors are pulling their hair out because they can only get 3Mbps out of a supposedly 10Mbps link, you're patting yourself on the back for getting exactly what you paid for.
In fact, I would bet that the more you pay, the more you will be ripped off, due simply to the amount of headroom they have to play with.
I have an "Up To 12 Mb" connection through my local cable company. I get exactly that. Somewhere between nothing and 12 Mb. I certainly never get more than that. But given that they advertise it as a "you might get as much as X bandwidth", I don't see how you can say they aren't giving me what they promised.
I think location is more important than the company. I've worked for Charter before, and they do a fantastic job in some places, but not so great in others (especially new acquisitions.)
My mom has Charter, and her advertised speed is 8Mbps down and 1Mbps up, but whenever I run tests on her connections, it's consistently about twice that.
I have Time Warner where I live, and I usually get about 80% of of my average speed (15Mbps rated, 12Mbps tested.)
With that in mind, Charter is probably better at maintaining their networks, and upgrading them when they can than other providers.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Most of the providers who hit their advertised speeds implement a burst-based traffic shaping.
For example, Comcast does full or over-full speed for first 10mb down and 5mb up.
It's nice that speedtest sites like speedtest.net show a graph of how speed changes, but their test sizes are still far to small and should exclude any detected burst speeds.
The only good way to test this is to actually transfer files and exclude the bursts.
Another thing that SHOULD be tested is the speed difference with single threaded transfers and segmented/multi-threaded transfers for both same continent and cross-seas.
Internet speed is relative and that is part of the problem.
I would love it if we got a real study, one with some depth, where they went around and tested every ISP during peak hours at several locations in their service area. I have a feeling that if they did that we'd see a much different story than this quasi-fluff piece...
Columbus area? I inquired via email when Insight was going DOCSIS 3 (like Time Warner already did in the downtown area from what I read) and about getting a replacement for my Moto DVR. I got directed to Sales and they seemed to ignore the network inquiry.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I _can_ hit wirespeed from my ISP (AT&T DSL), but only during off-peak hours. During rushhour (late afternoon, evening, esp Sunday), I'm lucky to get ~1/4 wirespeed.
I'm sure this is AT&T overselling their infrastructure (Uverse) and has choked the uplink fiber from my DSLAM. YMMV -- not everybody will be choked. But I doubt the FCC measured this congestion.
stop stalking me please. I'm creeped out now :-P
(and, yes, Columbus)
Warning: calling WoW "expensive" is a bit of an understatement. Worth it to me, but maybe not to others...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I'd agree with your statement if it weren't for the "quasi". That spoiled it for me.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
When I had issues with my Comcast cable internet connection, it was taking me about 5 minutes to load Google's home page, 10 minutes for the nytimes.com home page. Slashdot took about 7 minutes. I went to three different independent speed test sites, which each confirmed I was getting less than 5% of the bandwidth Comcast advertised. I called them up and they directed me to a flash animation that looked like an analog gauge of a car speeding up onto the freeway, overshooting the advertised bandwidth, wavering a bit to make it look like it was actually measuring something and leveling off at exactly the advertised bandwidth. I reloaded it a couple times, and each time it was the exact same animation. The rep then said, "can you read me what it says on the dial? Looks like your connection is working just fine. The sites you are trying to visit must not have enough bandwidth to handle the connection." I asked if she'd ever heard of a little company named Google, and she said they must be having network trouble on their end.
Mine advertises 30Mbps and I routinely spike to 45Mbps, so I'm kind of on the other side of this coin. I have no idea how they get me so much speed out here in the country, but I'll take it.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Just switched from comcast to qwest. Have to say that their bandwidth positively SUX. We even have 20 mb vs. the 12 that comcast advertises. And yet, this is slower than comcast. Sad. Real sad.
Hopefully, they have better uptime than comcast (comcast has so many outages; glad that I ran my own bind; their always had issues in their DNS).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think Insight in Central Ohio is the only division of Insight that uses Time Warner... and the only division of Insight that seems to be falling behind (tech wise). ;)
No stalking needed on that one.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The FCC Says ISPs Aren't Hitting Advertised Speeds
An I'm, like, no shit, Sherlock? In other news, people get hurt in car crashes.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
DSL from AT&T here are very quirky. A buddy has one that gets close to 20% better then advertised, yet a business I do support for that is a half mile away struggles to get 50% of the listed speeds. Funny thing is that the business is susposedly closer to the telco then my buddy. I know there are many factors, but AT&T has supposedly "tested" all the lines and says its' all "ok". I always take that with a large grain of salt, because I have found AT&T likes to find a excuse and stick to it till you prove them wrong. It usually takes threats of dropping service to get them to actually do something, much like when their equipment goes bad and they want you to pay $80 for a cheesy DSL modem.
Indeed. My provider is Metrocast Cable (out of New Jersey, but I am up here in Connecticut where they picked up a small cable company) and they have been upping the download rates fairly steadily (every 1-2 years we get another 1-2 Mbit.)
Often we will get the rate bump 3 to 6 months prior to them making it an official offering.
Also, they dont cap or throttle anything.
"His name was James Damore."
Did they send a burst of nops over port 80 for 1 second on tuesday at 4am? Any details on the tests would be great. Without something specific about the tests the information is bullshit. Give us something useful like sustained side by side TCP and UDP data transfers over multiple ports for at least 350 days. Here is the results of my "data". Cable and dsl do not meet their advertised marks while fiber does. My data --> cuz_i_sed.txt.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I have no problem with FIOS. I sustain very fast download speeds(and upload, for that matter). Reaching 25mbit is no problem(I have a 25/25 plan). Reaching past it isn't either. In fact, it's the best internet service I've ever had. Only service I'd put on par with it was MediaOne
Every advertisement I've seen says "up to X," which means "anything X or below, but not above." So, 90% of that speed falls within the advertised spec.
Nothing to see here except more big anti-business crap from this administration.
... cheat, steal, and lie. Old news. Move along.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
5Mbs both ways, and their customer service has been excellent. I've had them for internet about 13 yrs now.
Before participation: Time Warner/Roadrunner here in Southern California gave me less than a tenth of advertised speeds. Officially 7mbits down, 1mb up, the actual service was more like 400kbits. Up to 800kb, sometimes even over a whole megabite early in the morning. (Exciting!) After the initial burst, which hit over a megabit down fairly often, there were times when it slowed all the way to single digits in KB.
Under the Sam Knows program, the FCC lets the ISPs know which subscribers are part of the test. (Bit of a problem right there, I'd say.) A few days before we had the government router hooked up, no doubt when Time Warner got word of our new "status," our speeds suddenly shot up into the advertised range. I nearly swooned the first time I saw a download go by at over a megabyte. And, interestingly enough, they've stayed there. It wasn't just some random thing. We don't usually get 7mb, but 5-6mb is the norm now.
So the info that ISPs aren't delivering stated speeds even in the FCC study is interesting, given that they seem to be jimmying the results for all they're worth.
(Speed tests before the FCC program would show us getting multi-megabits that we never saw in real life. Two things there: burst-shaping, no doubt, and I've heard that ISPs have ways of recognizing speed test traffic and giving it bandwidth.)
Which for ADSL is pretty much the only way you can advertise it. The speed varies dramatically depending on how close to the exchange you are. Which is why most ADSL suppliers (in the UK at least) will have a way of checking before you sign up. Normally this is done by having you enter your postcode and then checking against a database of known speeds for that location. So before you sign up they can tell you roughly what speed you can actually expect in your area.
I wouldn't brag about that if I were you.
FC Closer
The CEOs of the losers on the list will use these rankings as more fuel to implement usage caps on the "abusers" who are slowing the internet down for the rest of us.
* Where one megabit equals one million bits.
Liberty in your lifetime
Weird. I've had their DSL before, I've had issues with their billing, but the actual DSL service/support in my area was excellent.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I recently watched a PBS special about broadband, which indicated the UK's system is setup so that most households have a choice of multiple broadband providers, where high speed starts in at least 2-digit megabits per second, and the monthly cost is almost trivially low (I forgot the actual costs that were mentioned).
Although the lines are owned primarily by an oligopoly of companies (AT&T, Verizon, and British Telecom were the three mentioned), they are required by law to lease the lines to competitors. Not only that, but Verizon, AT&T, and BT all wholeheartedly endorse the the concept of being required to lease their lines to competitors. Spokespeople for those companies all said that the required competition kept them working to improve their respective services.
The special also said that the companies are investing in massive new outlays of fiber optics across the country so that even very remote and sparsely populated outlying areas get fast Internet.
Now shift to the U.S., where Verizon and AT&T are fighting tooth and nail against regulations that would provide the same level of service and network expansion going on in the UK, and where 3mb DSL is considered high speed (by AT&T).
It just drove home how royally screwed we are in the U.S.
You're tanking in the polls. The Republicans hate you because you are not a Republican. The Tea Party hates you because you are not white enough. The progressives hate you because you've betrayed all of your campaign promises to them. The whole country hates you because the economy is tanking due to your collusion with the Republicans to transfer even more wealth to the corporate elite.
If you want any hope of re-election we have to throw the progressives a bone. You have got to make it look like you are fighting against your corporate sponsors without actually causing them any damage.
I've got it! ISP rates have barely dropped in 15 years yet the bandwidth they provide hasn't increased at all. Surely Moore's Law has dropped some of their costs substantially. Let's pretend to stand up for consumer rights by forcing our telco sponsors to make small increases in the bandwidth they provide. That won't cost the telcos a dime, yet it should make us look like we're anti-corporate.
Make it so.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I guess my submission was not significantly negative enough to make it through the moderator filter. I was surprised to see that the large majority of the ISPs are able to give 90% of their advertised rate during peak times. I'm with Charter and despite being on their lowest tier, I get close to 20Mb on a regular basis.
As much as people like to bitch and moan on here, I think you're all a bunch of babies. Mod me flamebait all you want. If you're getting more than 15Mb and still whining about it not being fast enough, you need to get a life. Go outside.
The real story is that ISPs who are selling internet service with speeds "up to" are getting 90% of those speeds nearly 100% of the time. If you want a guaranteed rate, pay for a dedicated circuit. Otherwise, STFU and admit that the speeds really are there.
For those who don't want to read the article or haven't seen the actual results, the only ISP who exceeded their advertised rates is Verizon with their FiOS service. Everyone else comes up short.
Where did you find information that the FCC let the ISPs know which subscribers are participating? I also took part in the study and I was expecting that sort of thing to happen, but I never saw anything to confirm it.
I had Comcast once upon a time. They were absolutely awful. Service was too expensive and pathetically unreliable. Customer support was utterly unhelpful.
In closing, fuck Comcast.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
they should check the ones that get hit the most by hiked prices...the us and canada....where they pay the most for the least....it might lead to class action lawsuits by the "people" and lead to a better regulated industry. I sure hope that someone picks up this mantle...
Frontier bought the local fiber from Verizon... oh, a year ago I think. I regularly test upload/download speeds and it's always been slightly more (approx 5%) than advertised. With Verizon, and before that Comcast, I would periodically (every one to three months) see download speed drop to a lower tier. (Measured consistently from several tries.) A call to the ISP, they "re-provision" my line and my speed would return. I suspect that this isn't an accident. Enough people wouldn't notice a speed decrease that it's in the company's best interest not to pursue these "mistakes" too enthusiastically.
But as I said, haven't seen this from Frontier, yet. (Just measured last Wednesday.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Citation most definitely needed.
I have Verizon FiOS, the 15/5 plan. It's not bad--and cheaper than DSL since I signed up with a promotional price. I have noticed the throughput goes up and down throughout the day for no apparent reason. When I run speed tests it always confirms the 15/5 speed, but "real world" conditions will have downloads vary in speed. For instance, I've had things downloading via Steam that were just blazing fast at first, then slowed down halfway through to a trickle (almost dial-up speed), then ramped up again later. Up and down, up and down. Don't know if this is a congestion issue or what. I've never had the connection actually drop in any way. I couldn't say the same for my DSL, which dropped all the damn time. It just seems to slow down sometimes.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I got outed reading your post
FTFY
Time Warner user here too, and in the study. I saw the same thing. My speed suddenly was amazing. Before I could Netflix a movie and maybe browse a few sites before things got choppy. This last weekend I Netflixed, browsed Facebook and Google+, and was connected to my VPN while my wife used her computer and we did not even notice a change.
Morale... looks like we will all have to become members of the SamKnows field study.
I've also had problems with Steam, but I think that some of that is from the Steam end. The only reason I say that is because I'll never have any bandwidth problems with something like BT.
This article is about advertised speeds. I have FiOS 35/35 and get about 30/40-42. I am having a hard time with this article because if anyone has ever seen a commercial or even RTFContract of their ISP it has two key words..."UP TO." Hearing this in the commercial "with speeds up to 5Mb..." ISPs don't promise or guarantee you speeds as they simply can't do that. Since you are not going to get a perfect connection everywhere, bad area(old lines, etc), a place with lots of users, etc. then you would not get those advertised speeds and this is why they add those two words. I know from the article that FCC is going after advertised speeds, but with the two key words of UP TO, can they really say anything at all? Granted, if the ISP was offering 5Mb and was purposely slowing it down to 1Mb, I see that as a call for alarm, but it does not state that in the article.
"That's right...I said it."
In other news, Enzyte doesn't actually make your dick bigger. Story at 11.
Seriously, who is surprised by this? Having no legal repercussions for false advertising sure makes for a lot of fucked over consumers. Vote with your wallet my ass, the pricks already took my money by lying to me, they'll just lie to someone else to keep their business afloat. It's high time these companies start getting dissolved, with their top execs getting federal PMITA prison time for pulling shit like this.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
I gotta say I'm quite happy with it....about 99% or so uptimes for me, and when I have had need of services...they are quite prompt to help me, usually right on the call I make but on a rare occasion, called, left a msg and they got back to me in less than 30 min.
One night I called and my connection went down...they had someone out there with a truck to fix the lines at the pole somewhere around 11:30pm...I'd called them about 10pm....
I must say, I'm quite happy.
I only pay $70/mo....no caps, I can run servers, and get good service. I get about 15 down and often times about 9-10 up.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That 10% is wasted Call of Duty potential! I'm 10% (or more) better than you see me play online! I promise! Quit holding me back bandwidth!!!
Another single data point:
I can watch a couple of Netflix streams on different devices, load up on torrents, goof off with Youtube, SSH into a remote *nix box, and web browse at the same time as my wife plays WoW, regardless of time of day.
All on a single consumer-grade VDSL loop that is about 300 feet beyond spec and consists partly of lead-sheathed cable that dates back to the infancy of the PSTN. And I wasn't even part of the study!
That folks seem to think this is an unusual level of performance is pretty disturbing.
Kid-proof tablet..
UK != Europe, FYI.
The bandwidth situation in, say, Scandinavia is actually shockingly good. But if I recall correctly, British Telecom was still charging by the minute for local phone calls a good 10 or 15 years after doing so became unfashionable in the rest of the developed world.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Have you even bothered to complain?
When I last had Road Runner, I had dropouts regularly whenever things were wet. I called, complained, and 2 minutes later had an appointment for a tech to show up and fix things during the next day.
The tech apparently did show up (he never rang the doorbell), and apparently did fix things, because after that everything was golden.
Protip: Your ISP won't fix your connection problems if you don't tell them that you have them. (Whether they should fix them on their own, without prompting, is another discussion.)
Kid-proof tablet..
I'd like to know this as well.
(The story has scrolled down far enough that neither of us are likely to get a useful response, but I figure it's worth a shot.)
Kid-proof tablet..
It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it was in one of their reports on the FCC web site, buried in the interminable methodology section. I'll try to find the time to get the link.
I have the same. Except here I pay $104/mo. And that's only because I opt to keep renewing my contract from 5 years ago (otherwise it'd be $160). Speeds during the day (until around 10pm) are anywhere from 30-70% advertised speed. I know, quite a range there. At night I'll top it out most of the time.
I wouldn't have a business account, but they do shit like block your ports "for your own safety" unless you're willing to fork over literally twice as much or more for the same damn connection with open ports, and the possibility to pay for a static IP.
What bullshit is that!? On the other hand, I'm confident I'll stay mostly clear of their abuses of consumer plan customers (caps, throttling, non-hijacked DNS results, etc). In other words, I have to pay double to get the internet connection I should be getting in the first place. UGH.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
We can't FIOS in central Illinois. Actually, we can't get Verizon anymore - they sold all their phone and internet accounts in the area to Frontier (which has developed an abysmal reputation for their DSL, which is slower than advertised (and it's only advertised at the 700kb level) and has been unavailable more than 10 days last year in some parts of town. Which, to my mind, is absolutely awful. Comcast is better than Frontier, which is the only reason I have it.
It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in one of their reports on the FCC web site, buried in the interminable methodology section. I'll try to find the time to not get the link to the data which doesn't exist.
Kid-proof tablet..
i could have told you for free years ago that about 90% of the time my isp delivers only half the speed it advertises ... when using wifi it never hits above half really, not that i've seen except for an occasional spike perhaps ... helpdesk even admitted it once, the guy said that was 'normal' ... when i asked if they would cut my bill in half since that seemed the 'normal' thing to i didnt get a real clear answer. Atm they're facing a lawsuit, which is nice, but is way too late, there's just not enough competition or else they just sit around the table and divide the pie evenly, what do the yokels know ...
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?