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Ask Slashdot: Holding ISPs Accountable For Contracted DSL Bandwidth
mcleland writes "I'm not getting the bandwidth I paid for from my DSL connection. My '3mbps' fluctuates between about 2.7 during the day down to 0.1 or 0.2 in the evening according to speedtest.net. Let's assume DSL is the only viable option for broadband at my house and I can't really move right now (rural area, on north face of the mountain, no cable service, very poor cell coverage). This was discussed 6 years ago, but I'd like to see if there are any current thoughts on whether I'm just stuck or if there is some way to make the ISP hold up its end."
Get a lawyer. But, of course, the lawyer will be prohibitively expensive.
So realistically, no, there's nothing you can do short of terminating service.
I don't respond to AC's.
Does what you signed guarantee you a certain bandwidth, or is is an "up to x" sort of thing? I strongly suspect the latter. It's unlikely they're going to put another DSLAM (or increased backhaul) in because you complain, it's cheaper for them to lose you as a customer.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If you did, then "up to" means anything in between. You'd be getting exactly what you're paying for as part of the "up to" modifier.
this is my sig
Your DSL provider probably delivers on a "best effort" basis. See if you can get service from an alternate DSL provider. Other than that, there's really nothing you can do other than complain or cancel.
You would have alot better response to your complaints. But of course, that 3 Mebibits will cost you somewhere around 100 dollars a month.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
You're not beholden to a de-facto monopoly for your internet service. Have you got any neighbours within wifi distance with whom you could share the costs of satellite broadband? In the UK there are even grants available for setting up community broadband service.
You are only "guaranteed" what you are getting. However, I have been in that boat, and there was a physical problem. Just call your provider, explaining what is happening. If they have 24/7 support, wait until it starts happening, then call them -- so when they test it, they will see the problem.
Unfortunately, for me it took three different calls. The first call the technician came out and just swapped out some hardware. Elapsed time for him: Maybe half an hour. The second time they checked the wires from the house to the modem, and gave me different hardware ("that other one has problems with some old wiring").
Finally, with the third guy to come out, he traced it to some intermittent problem with wires. He swapped pairs from the house to the box (or the box to the DSLAM, can't remember exactly), and from then on my downloads quickly went up near the maximum and stayed there.
If you have already called the ISP and you got one of the responses above, you can always call back and complain again. They do seem to track that you called before, and will try something different. I was with BellSouth / ATT, so your mileage may vary. (I keep using past tense; I upgraded to U-Verse when it became available, and the speeds are great).
Have an SLA? ...I didn't think so. You're SOL.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
Maybe nighttime moisture is killing your dsl signal. To fix my 'dsl goes out when it rains', I had to get a good modem (broadcom based zoom something or other, bridge only modem). YMMV, but luckily there's still ask-slashdot so you can always come back later and complain to us.
I have yet to see a DSL provider that does not state in very small print that the connection is "burst" or "variable" or "up to".
They are over selling their capacity.
They are not contractually obligated to give you the amount you thought you would get, unless you bought service with an SLA that states otherwise.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If your provider actually made any specific and guaranteed speed claims, they are the stupidest ISP on the planet. Providers always use weasel words, just enough to lure you in, not enough to bind them to anything. This is an old, old game, and they're masters at playing it.
The only thing they listen to is market pressure, and if you've got no cable service to compete with them... good luck.
I'm SOL on internet at a house I want to buy..the new Satellite service limits my bandwidth and would cost in the ~120 range. I work remotely and will burn through the caps even though they say the VPN speeds are decent now, I can't get DSL or Cablemodem, no close fiber drops, I can't hit a WISP because I can't get a line of sight to it...last resort, I called telco business and I can get a T-1 for $340/month on a 1 year contract. I get a SLA, I'll be taking them up on this..I'll have a T-1 to my house.
You don't live up the hollow from me, do you? Because your description fits my situation to a T, apart from my nominal 6 mbps speed. The rural DSL supplier in these parts, Verizon, did take some action in response to a well-publicized community meeting of residents in another part of my county who lobbied a year ago to get DSL extended to their neck of the woods. I think one of the county supervisors attended, and it seems that Verizon decided that it was in their public-relations interest to make a commitment to providing service, which they did in fact implement fairly quickly. In the meantime, Verizon has told me that the notorious evening slowdowns are the result of known "bandwidth exhaustion", which is supposed to be fixed Sometime Soon, for the usual values of "soon". Whether getting all the neighbors together to hold a bandwidth exhaustion protest would do any good is an open question.
What exactly did service agreement say? As others have said, words like "average" and "up to" are different from "guaranteed". You can call them and see what's up (probably under provisioning) at night (everyone gets home from work). Try to be nice and see if something can be done at their end (their DSLAM might not be 100% utilized).
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
That last 10% is generally considered to be transactional overhead. Speed testers don't tend to count that. Your best advice is to either live with the 300 kb/s missing, demand a 10% discount for that overhead (which will likely be unsuccessful, because that top speed is NOT guaranteed and it will most likely say as much in the TOS), or find a provider that will provide that max speed limit at all times.
Good luck.
This sig no verb.
ISPs typically hide behind "speeds up to..." garbage to ensure you can't hold them accountable for this. My own horror story went along a path of seeing maybe 50%, at best, of the speeds I was promised, and that was when it was working. Endless tech support calls being forced to talk to moronic agents, if they called me back at all, only compounded the frustration.
At one point, I actually had one of the main guys at the company tell me point blank, on tape (I was recording the calls by this point), that they knew I wasn't getting the speeds I was paying for, that they knew it was their fault, that there was nothing I could do about it, and that if I tried to cancel they would hit me with a $400 early termination fee as well as the costs of service for the remaining months on my contract. By the way, never sign a contract if you at all can avoid it. I could have probably beaten them in court, with recorded evidence I had, but at that point I was so worn out I just cancelled and switched providers as soon as possible.
Long story short: suck it up while keeping your eyes open for other options. I don't know how close you are to another area that does have more options, or what your level of technical expertise is, but if you're within a mile or two, and you know someone living there, you may consider going in on a connection at their place together and beaming it up to your house using some nice roof antennas over long distance WiFi. The Ubiquiti Nanostation M5 is suited for this purpose, and is actually what my own wireless ISP uses on each home (for speeds up to 50mbps).
If even that is not an option, you may just have to deal with the consequences of living in a rural area, and being stuck with a provider who knows the leverage they have over their customer base because of it.
Not sure if it's possible in your area, but I switched ISPs and made it clear to them why. This was after the first ISP basically refused to investigate the problem beyond saying that variable speeds are because of 'network traffic', then unceremoniously hanging up.
Had the same problem with the second one but they investigated, played around with some of their own settings, sent a technician out to the exchange and they delivered a measurable increase. Then I got a call from the first ISP's retention people, offering me a credit against my entire 7-year term to re-sign.
So basically it was a case of initial hilariously lazy technical staff, that may have been saved by overly apologetic customer service. I had the choice of keeping my faster connection or getting cash back with the slower one. If there's no other option, I'd suggest shaking their customer service tree until results fall out.
Aside from all the technical issues involved on the wire (length, capacitance, reflections, etc.) you'll probably find you're boned because all ISPs advertise line speeds with the magical phrase "up to." i.e.: "3Mbps" is not the same as "up to 3Mbps."
I work for a broadband provider and I know that, in Australia at least, providing any accurate predictor on what bandwidth a customer will get *before* they're hooked up is nigh on impossible. There are so many different factors that can affect actual bandwidth (let alone the perceived speed as experienced by the end-user) it'd be crazy to try and write into the contract of service (other than to say 'you'll get greater than 0 kbps most of the time'). DSL technology limitations combined with ageing copper network, 3rd party last-mile providers, and general user ignorance/misconceptions can make it very hard for an ISP to control/fix/maintain.
Better check your contract, few ( if any ) home services will actually guarantee your rate. It may look like it does, but read closely and you will find it does not.
Some business accounts do, but not all of them either until you go to a dedicated line..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
On anything called "DSL" you pretty much have the right to a bill, the rest is best effort.
Not obnoxious, but keep calling each time you have the problem. Eventually they'll be able to track it down. If there's no problem and that is just "works as expected" they'll eventually tell you that too. In that case, maybe look at a new provider.
I had intermittent droupouts with my cable, which they always seemed to have trouble seeing on their end. Finally after a number of calls a technician was dispatched who found errors on the line. He put in the appropriate ticket and said "Call me directly in a week if it isn't fixed." It wasn't, I called he came back, tested and found errors again, and went back to the ticket. It got fixed.
It is possible that your DSLAM just has a tiny line to it and lots of people and is getting overloaded, but I find it at least equally likely there is a problem. However you have to make them aware of it, and you have to keep calling when there is a problem. Remember two things:
1) You are dealing with low level call center people who don't know what the fuck is happening. Their troubleshooting ability is limited, and who are discouraged from escalating things if there isn't a problem. Hence the need to get multiple data points with multiple calls.
2) Most people are morons and the problem is firmly on their end, so the ISP is inclined to disbelieve you from the beginning, hence the need to work at convincing them through multiple calls and documentation.
Won't do anything unless the speed has dropped more then a third from what I'm paying for. Ask your provide what their policy is, they might surprise you. Ha Ha, just kidding.
If your DSL speeds are good during the day, and slow down at night, its almost always a capacity problem. (There is a small chance its a line fault, where cold/rain/etc might cause slow downs, but then it wouldn't *always* be at night).
Your DSL provider has a DSLAM at your local exchange, that DSLAM goes back to another aggregation point via backhaul, from there it keeps going back until it reaches the backbone, then heads "north" until it gets to a transit point, and is handed off.
The situation you describe is commonly with the first leg of backhaul, but, depending on how wide spread the problem is, it may be further back. Remember that during at least the first leg of the backhaul, if not much further, your connection is still PPPoE, so you can't "see" these hops with traceroute. You are effectively tunneled back to the LNS, so ping times, etc won't help diagnose.
So how do you fix it? Unfortunately the answer is make enough noise the ISP looks at your backhaul and goes "ah fuck", and upgrades it. I have no idea what its like with your ISP, but often ISP's don't use dark fibre, so they pay for connections from other Telcos to link their POPs. So sometimes its just a matter of going up an STM, and increasing the pipe size, sometimes its a matter of infrastructure overhaul (in the case of dark fibre thats max'd out), sometimes its a matter of adding more circuits (2 x 1Gbps links are cheaper than 1x10Gbps link).
There is one other possibility, which is that the ISP deploys a shaper (these, despite what people think, and generally good things), but for whatever reason, you're being shaped to hell. This can happen if your account isn't loaded into the system properly, etc. Diagnosing this is even harder, but generally involves bitching lots and lots till they eventually listen. You can attempt to diagnose it if your ISP doesn't use port-based authentication, you can connect in with someone elses (eg a friends) account, and see if you get bad performance from his/her account at your site. If you don't, then its gonna be a shaper problem.
Might there be an alternative fix for your issues
How about a dish that might improve your cell coverage or, if there is a reasonable service within say a few miles, something like a client bridge to someone that has a better service?
Not too sure about the technical issues but throw the idea into the mix for others to comment.
I have been in the same boat and there was little that they could or would do past the basics. This was AT&T, they did run diagnostics from their end and they did send out a tech to check that I had no wire issues at my site. Since I do structured cabling it was all up to snuff. They then tested a number of pairs to my local and found a pair that were good and moved me to them. The connection still sucked. All this has no relevance to your issue. The problem you have is that the DSLAM you are coming off of is fully apportioned out and there are simply allot of users in the evening competing for that limited bandwidth of the back haul. You have a number of possible options. The first is a bit of social engineering and see if you can get someone at the ISP to step up and fix or request that the build out team fix the issue. Pressure from others using the same service in your area might help here. Another option might be to go with a satellite internet service, your mileage may vary with this one. My option when I could not get AT&T to do the right thing was to go with a cellular WAN card. In my area the coverage was crap and only became a good option after I put a high gain Yagi antenna on the roof pointing at the cell tower. I went from a -102dBm to -59dBm (1 bar to 5 bars). In terms of speed I went from around 100Kbps to over 1.5Mbps on Verizon's 3G network. Last is to see if there are any wireless internet providers in the area, allot of rural areas have one serving communities that are otherwise neglected by the major players.
Good luck with that, read your agreement - here, check out satellite internet provider Hughesnet's disclaimer:
And let me say, if you have DSL you have WAAAAY better speed than Hughesnet.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
As for what you can do, it's what many others have said here: your contract probably states that 6 Meg is an "up to" or "best case" figure. But check it just to be sure. But one thing that I'd suggest, if you can, is to try a smaller ISP with personal service, even if they cost a little more. Avoid the Big Bad Telcos(tm) like the plague. Here's why.
Especially if you're in a rural area, then it's a safe bet that, no matter which ISP you use, the signal is actually getting to your house over the Big Bad Telco's lines. Ex., I use Hiwaay info services here in Alabama, but they use ATT's copper and equipment. BUT ... if I have a big problem, Hiwaay deals with ATT for me and gets the issue resolved. You get what you pay for.
If you're in the middle of nowhere, you're lucky to get DSL at all. DSL is piggybacked via an RF carrier on your POTS line. Like most spread-spectrum/"stacked bandwidth" services, as the signal degrades, your bandwidth degrades, too. So ... that's one thing you can check. A smaller ISP might be more willing to send a tech with test equipment. The tech can run all sorts of QOS and noise tests on the lines. Who knows? Maybe the line is badly grounded at a nearby neighbor's house, and that's eating half your bandwidth.
Here's the thing: the Big Telco doesn't care. They oversell their bandwidth like mad, realizing that most people are just checking email and Facebook. Not high-bandwidth usage. The few who need lots of bits per second are just not that important to them. As long as you have a connection, they'll say, "that's as good as you can get."
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
If you live live in a state where the telco is regulated by a public utilities commission, call them and file a formal complaint. Call the telco and give them your case number. They will have a lot of incentive to fix the problem. But do this only after a good faith effort has failed.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Especially the fine-prints
In many cases, the ISPs include "best effort" in their fine-prints so when their customers complain of the ridiculous low bandwidth that they are getting - like your case of 0.1mbps - them ISPs will tell you that the package they sell you, the 3mbps speed, is meant to be "Best Effort"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
more likely moisture in the line does you phone have a lot of noise on it? if so they you need to call phone line repair.
Where are you testing to? If you are testing to a server that is past your ISP then how can you hold the ISP responsible for lines that they don't own? The speeds are almost always up to XX from your location to the ISP not to a random speedtest site. First I'd verify that your test is accurate for your line and doesn't include other wires that they don't own.
File a complaint with the FCC, I've done it and got good results.
speeds that low may be some kind line issue and not the system being over loaded.
OK, one other thing: it's that piggy-backed RF signal thing again. Take your DSL modem out to the demarc box (i.e., the telco's actual junction, typically mounted outside on the wall of your home). If you're lucky, it's one of the newer ones with standard RJ-11 plugs and jacks. Unplug your entire home and connect the DSL model *directly* to the Telco.
If your bandwidth improves noticeably, YOU have a problem with YOUR wiring inside your home.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Part of the reason that ISP's advertise speed as "up to" is because of the way ADSL actually works. Conditions play an enormous part in the connection speed and line quality, and the majority of these are (here in the UK, at least) completely out of the remit of the ISP itself. Distance from the telephone exchange, quality of wiring both internal and external, ratios of how many users on particular line, even type of telephone exchange. These factors can all make big differences. Case in point; in one property a stones throw from the exchange I got 6mbps, when I moved house a mile further away from the same exchange I got 500kbps with the awful wiring the landlord had hacked together, and 3mbps afterwards.
The first thing I always recommend to anyone getting unsatisfactory speeds is rewire your telephone sockets and place the modem as close to the master socket as possible. Also use decent quality sockets. Running a modem from a 10 metre telephone extension cable attached to a junky POS extension socket isn't going to do you any favours.
I work for an ISP. I've been a lowly tech support agent all the way up to NOC admin to my current position as a DB Admin. I know the ins and outs of ISPs infrastructure, why things are the way they are as well as am now involved with the lawyers due to projects I'm involved in, so I've gotten a heavy dose of the way policy is written and why.
First let me say, I don't want to defend your ISP, they are most assuredly one of my employers competitors. So yes, they suck, switch to us... but I wont tell you who my employer is... so whatever. The point being, I'm not trying to defend the industry here, I'm probably one of the biggest advocates for what your complaining about at my company and I'm not shy to bring it up with executives. But if you had a better understanding of the situation it might help you improve your situation and possibly relive some of your anger.
US telecommunications companies have been task with bringing broadband to rural areas by both the FCC and the President himself. They are under constant pressure to increase broadband availability to customers. Just a few years ago it was well under 50% of people had access to broadband. Now it's well over 90%. Recently the broadband stimulus package basically paid ISPs to put in even more rural broadband. For an understanding of how much it cost I think they invested around 8 BILLION dollars and that raised the percentage of the public capable of getting broadband by about 2% to 3% The cost is enormous.
Now, you may think that's great... and it is. But there is a problem with that. In your case you live on the side of a mountain. I would love to live there myself, you probably don't have a lot of neighbors and having broadband out there is a great thing. But networks are called networks for a reason. You'd at the end of a loop... that loop leads back to a DSA along with all of your neighbors, and then that DSA has a trunk that leads back to the CO along with all the other DSAs in your area. So what's the problem? Distance. Depending on the service you have, there is a limited distance that you can be from that DSA to actually get any service at all. This distance also limits the number of people that DSA can serve because their homes must be within that distance to get service. In areas like you describe, I've seen DSA's serve as few as 10 homes. When you're dealing with a phone line that's not a big deal. Strait dialtone fits on a relatively cheap card, and when trunking back to the CO uses a fixed, almost unnoticeable amount of bandwidth. Then you have the local customers come in and want internet. The ISP says no. Then the local government gets involved and DEMANDS internet... the ISP still says no. I've even seen local governments file (and lose) lawsuits trying to force the ISP into these situations. Then the Feds come and offer to pay for the DSL cards and the new truck... well ok... if you're going to pay for it.
Now you have a DSA with 10 customers on it, 5 wanted 3MB service, the feds paid to have 2 T1 lines installed. That will work, and they likely wont have any bandwidth problems. Fast forward 3 years. You now have 10 customers on the DSA, they ALL have 5MB service and ALL have netflix accounts. Hence the situation you are in. The customers demand the ISP upgrade. Those 10 customers combined are paying about $350/month total. To add more trunks to the DSA will cost $300k. It's not hard to do the math there... it's not going to happen. So then they go to the local government and ask them to complain again... the local government says "You have internet, what are you complaining about?" and the feds? They got their 95%+ served number for the next election, they don't care about you.
Your only hope is your ISP. Period. I absolutely guarantee your service agreement was worded in such a way that your speed is not guaranteed. It probably says something like "Up to 3MB of data!" etc... What you can do is get a local technician out there on a service call... talk to him about your DSA. He'll likely tell you. How many other
It's definitely your ISP's fault. More than likely you have CenturyLink who are well known to pull this kind of shit.
nazi germany look like a free speech zone.
then you will get a different support staff, a different supervisor, and maybe a different result.
They're not providing you with a lower speed just to be dicks. They are using phone lines, and are subject to the condition and distance of the lines between you and your telco's switching office.
The only time you're going to get right up at their max of their top tier service is if you live within a quarter mile or so of the switch. It's all downhill from there. And if you are in an old infrastructure part of town, your crummy old lines, decaying corroded splices, and watery lines are going to reduce the amount of speed they can provide you.
Most respectable ISPs won't allow you to sign up for a service tier that won't get you any more speed than the tier below it. If your part of town is qualified to 768 and you ask for 2mbit, they should tell you that you can't get that there, that 768 is all the faster that the modem is going to negotiate to. I haven't ran into a DSL ISP yet that doesn't offer different speed tiers. Make sure you're in the appropriate tier. This won't make your speed any faster, but could save you some money rather than paying for speed that you can't possibly get.
If you want to improve this you can (A) move or (B) hound the appropriate office at your local telco about upgrading their infrastructure in your part of town. There is no option (C), and just because someone else they serve gets faster service doesn't mean you're entitled to it too.
If you need an analogy, try complaining to ford that you can't get your new mustang to do over 70 on that gravel road to your house. Move, upgrade the road, or switch to a more appropriate product for your situation.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Get a leased line, speeds are static. Or get a big pipe and start your own isp. Most companies aren't interested in rural areas due to lack of profit. You just have to break even to get it to work.
There are many, many local wireless ISPs starting up, each using an array of different equipment. The Quality can vary quite a bit, from ISP to ISP, but they generally fare on the good to excellent side. If you can find a local ISP to set up towers as needed, they may be willing to invest in a new customer and (hopefully) others near by in similar circumstances. Being able to call your ISP and talk to real people is always a bonus. And if you need to inform them of QoS issues you will actually stand a fair chance of having it fixed and/or your traffic prioritized.
Why do you think they put an asterisk by the speed ratings? Anyways, satellite internet is probably your best option.
Your problem might sound like a typical bottle neck, and Intermittent issue are always a pain to trouble shoot. Be sure to check your modem when you get slow speeds like that. If you're getting a lot of errors then the issue isn't a bottle neck. The reason I bring this up is that I have Naked DSL at home, and no phones plugged into my home lines since there is no dial tone. However periodically I would be disconnected at and have long periods that my speed was being hampered. When I got a tech out to check they discovered that my house was connected to several other houses as well so even though I had no phones to cause issues they did. It must have been a security system in one of them but the tech fixed the wiring and all is well. If it really is too many people on the line all at once then their probably isn't much that can be done in the short term.
I got sick of hearing AT&T tell me that everything was working fine, so I measured my actual DSL speed. Every 15 minutes. For more than a year. As you can guess, EVERY measurement was, as advertised, "up to 1.5 Mbps". Usually less than half that. Results here: http://hacks.ayars.org/2012/05/for-past-several-years-weve-gotten-our.html
You can't force the internet to come to you.
If they cant stop charter from advertising their best plan vs the worst plan and claiming theirs is faster you have no chance.
They refused, because they don't try to fix anything unless it is below 40% of the advertised "up to" speed. I told them, well, if I gave you 40% of the amount you charged for my services, without even trying to pay for the whole month, you wouldn't find that very acceptable. That got me, unsurprisingly, nowhere.
I wrote a letter (submitted online) to the Better Business Bureau, for false advertising. It took about three business days for someone at the ISP (a supervisor or manager) to call me and say that they put me up to 5 Mbps, and apologized for the inconvenience.
I thanked them, and said that my issue was entirely that they would not attempt it. After all, it can't really cost them that much to make the switch twice. Though it could have cost them a customer to not make it.
three "maybe-bits?" .. or may be NOT....
I live in Houston and work in IT. Every DSL contract I've seen says "up to ...". The advertised speed is the cap they put on the connection. The actual download speed that is (not quite) guaranteed at 256kb/s.
I couldn't think of a good conventional way, so obviously the answer was a Kickstarter project. Here's the gist.
Open a call center in India tasked as customer support -support. For $60 yearly or $40 for 6 months you can subscribe. You call or e-mail with an issue with service with a vendor, give them the appropriate vendor support number and your details as needed (you've paid, so they keep your personal information secure). You even have the option to setup a profile where all this is available to the service, speeding up your time logging the ticket (vendor names / numbers / account numbers).
THEY (India call center techs) call your vendor to handle the complaint process on your behalf. They handle the time waiting on hold, arguing, negotiating, demanding, etc. They could even call you back to conference you in as necessary (authorizing them to speak on your behalf, etc.). They will handle all of the uncomfortable discussions, demanding to be escalated to a manager, getting credits to your account, everything.
In many cases, the business model would even save money because the calls would be local!!!
Further, they could e-mail you links to recordings of the calls for your approval later. "Calls may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance." YOU BET!
For particularly difficult situations, like a vendor with a horrible cancellation policy, captive market, or just crappy service, they can call up to 4 times daily on your behalf, brow-beating the vendor's support infrastructure. For $10 extra, we will "call bomb" them with a minimum of 10 calls a day for a week.
an local small teleco has been unable to reliably deliver advertised speeds to me. I finally got teed off enough to start arguing about it and basically got no where. I wanted a reduction in price or dropping the landline and doing dry dsl but they would not do that. The end result is they lowered my rated speed from 4 to 3 Mbps and at least now the thing is fairly reliable (Ironically when it was set at 4 the best I was getting was around 3.4). It still pisses me off as they continually advertise 6 and in fact even have run fiber into some new developments (no doubt due to payola from the developer) but until they do another town wide upgrade cycle I am stuck paying outrageous prices for crap service. So I guess the point of this rant was that you should see about dropping your speed down and if that at least gets you a stable connection 24/7. You should check your rooter for up and down margins and attenuation when it goes bad. Mine was especially prone to do so between about 4pm and 9pm, basically at times of high electric use.
Keep a log of your speed test results, time of day, and your DSL modem's negotiated speed to the DSLAM.
Basically document that they are over subscribed on the back haul, then start calling your local or state utility and consumer protection agencies. File a complaint, follow up, get copies of the telco's responses to the complaint, demand a resolution.
And then when you don't get it, take all your documentation and file a small claims suit.
Ask for the percentage of your monthly fee back that you are not getting in bandwidth. Get you neighbors to do the same.
Collect your winnings. Don't discontinue service. Wait six months if its fixed good, if not rinse and repeat.
After a few times of going before the same judge, and loosing they will fix the over subscription.
Note this only work on telco's and only in states that require telco's to file tariffs. Which means they can't stop providing service to you as long as you pay your bill, and they are required to provide the service you pay for. Doesn't matter about any "up to" claim they make, what maters is the filed state tariff.
Been there done that, and CenturyTel kissed my ass, after they installed a new equipment upgrades and a fiber feed.
BTW if you really want to piss them off, call up your 911 coordinator for your local county, get a few new 911 addresses on your property. Then call up the telco and order new service at each address. Get your neighbors to do the same. The head of your local office will be standing on your doorstep very shortly playing "lets make a deal". Those same tariffs, normally have provisions on build out distances for new service. Where I am its the telcos are required to build out seven miles form the end of existing lines at no cost to the consumer. In rural areas this will get there attention very quickly!
Listen to this guy. I work in the industry, too, for a regional ISP in a very rural area, and I have a couple of things to add.
To begin with, I know it hurts to hear this, but sometimes reality bites: the residential ISP business model is BASED on oversubscription. Period. Anybody else who tells you otherwise is lying or doesn't know what they are talking about. When an ISP sells a residential or SMB customer a 3Mbit/s down asynchronous connection at under $100/mo, it's guaranteed they don't have the bandwidth to back this up for you and everybody else they have sold a connection to. All of the usage models for scaling up bandwidth are based on bursty usage by their customers. They simply cannot afford to have every single customer of theirs pulling down their 3 megs all simultaneously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thus all of the "up to" language that was surely a part of your "contracted" rate.
But thanks to recent inventions such as Bittorrent and Netflix, certain customers *are* constantly filling their pipe 24/7. And people wonder why ISPs are in such a hurry to institute pay-per-use models...I mean, what other industry that resells scarce, shared-resource services sells it to you at flat-rate all-you-can-eat pricing? Electricity? Water? Telephone? Fuel? None of those.
Now, it absolutely could be argued that if you are seeing 100-200kbit/s down at certain times of the day, they aren't keeping up their end of the bargain because they haven't scaled up their upstream bandwidth to cope with increased demand (especially if they are continuing to install new customers). A successful last-mile ISP will be watching their usage, constantly running the numbers, and making sure that they still have enough capacity to meet demand at any given time. Of course, this is all still done within the assumption of "bursty" usage models, so if they have 10 customers each provisioned at 3Mbit/s down, their models are not going to suggest to them that they need to have 30Mbit/s of total capacity available. So if all of those customers are filling their connections 24/7, then that creates a problem.
And the problem is a real economic problem. The previous poster was correct in saying that the ISP is not making money off of you hand-over-fist. If they are strictly an ISP, I guarantee you they are barely squeaking by. (If they are a regulated incumbent telco with an ISP side-business, like a Verizon or Frontier or CenturyLink, that's another whole story...) ESPECIALLY if they are a rural ISP. Verizon/Frontier sells, what, 3Mbit/s DSL for around $30/mo to residential users? That's great. I *guarantee* you that IF we are talking about a rural ISP, they are LUCKY if they are paying a rate of $30-per-MEG-per-month to their upstream. That would be CHEAP. And you expect them to turn around and sell you a 3 MEG all-you-can-eat circuit for $30/mo? That would mean you are paying them 1/3rd of what that kind of bandwidth actually costs them to get for you. That's called a money-losing proposition.
So, to the OP: by all means, complain to your ISP. For all we know, your problems are not related to constrained throughput as a result of peak usage, and are instead being caused by a physical problem with your circuit. But keep in mind that there's a reason that to this day, getting a connection with an actual contracted SLA is not cheap. There's a reason why you can still find yourself paying $300-500/mo or more to a telco for a T1 (~1.5Mbit/s synchronous) circuit where that throughput is guaranteed. If you actually need 3 megs down guaranteed to you 24/7, then you're going to have to pay dearly for it.
The problem is that nobody is willing to pay what it actually costs.
-- Nathan
24Mbps ADSL2+ and since I'm 4km's by cable I only get about 1.2Mbps at best. If only it was as the crow flies (2.2km's).
I was a bit annoyed - but what can you do. Saying that my download quote of 100Gb would be gone pretty quickly at any faster speeds. (Yes we have download quotas here downunder). The plan also just switched from a 50gb on peak 50 gb off peak to anytime 100Gb).
I'm not sure what the appropriate solution is - maybe a discount based upon what my average speed is and what my monthly payment is
ie $70 / 24
So I pay them $3 a month for 1Mbps - sounds fair.
that the contract says up to 3.0 not guaranteed 3.0
"My '3mbps' fluctuates between about 2.7 during the day down to 0.1 or 0.2"
This is due to the 5% who are the high usage "terrorists".
Are you one of them? Or are you going to keep quiet?
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
When an ISP sells a residential or SMB customer a 3Mbit/s down asynchronous connection at under $100/mo, it's guaranteed they don't have the bandwidth to back this up for you and everybody else they have sold a connection to.
So, they're selling something they cannot provide.
Isn't that fraud?
But thanks to recent inventions such as Bittorrent and Netflix, certain customers *are* constantly filling their pipe 24/7.
You mean, they're actually using what they bought?!? The horror.
And people wonder why ISPs are in such a hurry to institute pay-per-use models.
What's stopping them? They could do it right now. They could have done it 10 years ago. Just drop the "unlimited" crap and start offering tiered plans.
if they have 10 customers each provisioned at 3Mbit/s down, their models are not going to suggest to them that they need to have 30Mbit/s of total capacity available
If I sell 10 customers 3 cars each, I better have 30 cars to deliver.
Maybe not in the US. In Australia download caps are the norm, so you pay more for 200G than 60G. You can get unlimited, although normally that is unlimited* (fixed amount peak, unlimited off peak).
On the whole I would have to say our system works pretty well.
As it happens I also have a rural property, and use mobile wireless from there. Most people in the area seem to use their phones during the day, so I get excellent night-time speeds. I use a portable antenna to improve my signal (my neighbour has a roof mounted one).
For all the venom directed at them, Comcast has done a great job of providing me with business class service in a residential area for about $70 a month. Up to a /29, 5 Mb/s down, 1.5 Mb/s up. No traffic shaped or blocked.
Sure, one might see 20 Mb/s bursts on the heavily blocked and shaped $19.95 residential traffic service. But, my rate is guaranteed 24x7. I can get bettter if I need.
And, often I do much better than 5 Mb/s down and 1.5 Mb/s up.
You pays your money and you makes your choice.
In Liberty, Rene
Well, the secret about DSL is that everyone is plugged into the same DSLAM and that has limited bandwidth. Plus they could be enacting QOS on the ports too, for example maybe prioritizing traffic from commercial users.
The first thing I always recommend to anyone getting unsatisfactory speeds is rewire your telephone sockets and place the modem as close to the master socket as possible. Also use decent quality sockets.
And Monster Cable DSL cable. Right.
Most newer DSL modems have a built in web server, and you can look at the DSL link information. You can find out what rate the DSL line is running at, and its error rate. If those numbers are satisfactory, the ADSL portion of the link isn't the problem, and you can eliminate phone line and local cable quality as an issue. If the ADSL portion of the link is not good, get it fixed. The DSL modem will downshift to a lower speed if the physical line quality is not good. So if the speed is low, that indicates a line problem. Errors or low ADSL link speed are the telco's problem and can be addressed by normal repair techniques.
Mine, for example, is currently running at 6016 kbps up, 768 kbps down. ADSL transmit total error counts are 0 out of 9099204, and receive total error counts are 0 out of 6602998. So the ADSL link is in good shape. This reflects the fact that the local DSLAM is at the end of my driveway. (On the other hand, the local WLAN error rates are very high.)
Then run a DSL speed test program, one that reports packet loss rates. That will give you a sense of what's happening upstream. Then you know what to complain about. Ask how many people are on your DSLAM and how much upstream bandwidth it has. The telco will usually tell you this if you persist and have a clue. :
You're not using Windstream are you? I had the exact same problem a months ago. It took numerous calls and numerous visits from techs to finally get the problem sorted out. I was getting the same under 1Mb during the afternoon and evening, but very late at night and early in the morning getting the full 3Mb. The problem was too many customers on the DSLAM, and upgrades were required. Late afternoon and into the evening is when home users use the internet the most, hence the reason why the speeds slowed down during those times when the DSLAM was overloaded. After the upgrades were made at the DSLAM the problem was resolved. You need to bug your internet provider until you get results. Have friends, family, and neighbors that you know have the same provider in your area do speed tests during the slow speed hours and if they too are seeing the problem have them to call and report the issue as well. It takes multiple customers complaining to get anything done about the problem.
All of the comments I'm reading are making the assumption you've actually tried getting the ISP to send an engineer out first.
They're assuming the ISP is maliciously shorting you on service and talking about calling lawyers, BBB, FCC, cancelling service, etc. Yet it's worth making sure you actually have called the ISP and had them send an engineer out.
My cable internet from Cox was similarly terrible. I'd convinced myself they were spreading their connection too thin amongst too many houses, that they knew they were giving me a fraction of the bandwidth their ads promised "up to." I looked for FIOS but it hadn't rolled out to my area, I hated Uverse previously. Not being able to find a decent alternative, I decided to deal with the inevitable stupidity of the dreaded tech support call. I knew I was going to waste an hour being told to turn everything off and back on, that I would be talking to a guy in India... and that was after it took me half an hour to find an actual customer service as opposed to sales number.
The call was predictably painful but, after a few tests, they sent someone out... And the guy was utterly amazing.
He got to the appointment a little early, while I was still heading home. I found him at the top of the phone pole outside the house already re-running cable. He had checked it, it was noisy, so decided to re-run the line in to my house. The house had been used as a nursing home at some point so there were splitters to every room. He pulled all of those out with a clean run to where I actually wanted the line to come in. He tacked the cable up neatly, he disposed of the old garbage.
Inside, he rewired the plug where it came through the wall then showed me how to hit up my cable modem at http://192.168.100.1/. Recognizing I work with the net and was curious, he then explained the signal to noise ratios, the power levels, the frequency spread. He explained what the previous values were, what I should be looking for in general, in best cases and showed me how what I was getting now was within it. He then asked me to pull up the speed test of my choice and we confirmed I was getting everything I was promised, not just an "up to" fictional value.
I had lousy cabling left over from half a centurty of abuse to an older house. I wasn't being ripped off by the cable company, I just had such a stupid amount of noise very little signal made it through and even less when others jumped on in the evenings and added to the noise.
Yet I'm a coder. I know the web pretty well. I knew tech support would be a terrible waste of time so I didn't call them for months, getting angrier and angrier at the perceived terrible service.
The moral of all of this is: Before you assume malice, incompetence, cheapness, etc., give them a chance to send a tech. You may find the answer's much simpler and doesn't require going to war.
And, yes, I totally recognize I got a tech in a million. I made a point of calling Cox to make damn sure his bosses heard my praise. But the core's still there - it's not always as nefarious as we like to assume.
I work for a rural ISP that sells DSL. Typically if you're dealing with lower level support, you're going to get a lot of runaround. Also, if you can, get as much data as you can from your DSL modem, as lower techs typically won't have this. If you can get into the modem, get your up/down SNR, up/down attenuation, loop length (if available), tones / bin distribution, and whatever else you can find for line stats.
When you get on the phone with a reasonably informed tech, ask if they can tell you what their downstream link is showing for utilization. If the link that feeds your central office is saturated (which given the times you're having issues, sounds like they over-subscribed your area) then you will see speed issues. There may also be contention for the link from the central office to your local DSLAM.
Lastly, don't use speedtest.net as your only speed testing mechanism. For one, it typically selects servers based on latency from what I've seen, which doesn't mean you'll get good throughput to that server. Use several different speed test sites. As far as only seeing 2.7 mbps, this is to be expected. You have some portion of that 3mbps devoted to overhead, which is still part of your 3mbps traffic. Speed test websites aren't able to take this into account. Typically ISPs will over-provision for this though.
Are you kidding me? Thousands of Telstra customers connected to DSLAMs on roadside cabinets have been suffering from "backhaul congestion" for years. The TIO can do nothing about it because the guarantee is only for line sync, not throughput.
Only now - in 2012 - is Telstra addressing this with their "Top Hat" rollout, which put extra boxes on top of the existing cabinets containing line cards capable of VDSL2 and with gigabit ethernet backhaul to the local PoP.
I guarantee there is no minimum guaranteed connection speed in it. If you need guaranteed speed/uptime you should pay the extra for a business-class line since those come with a service level agreement.
...that is, TRUE PtP is expensive. Most rural wireless providers are going to be running most of their residential & SMB customers off of PtMP systems: one antenna, multiple customers. Even better, these systems are all half-duplex.
True PtP is a really cost-prohibitive option. It doesn't scale well for the provider since there is only so much spectrum and tower space for antennas to go around, so the customers that actually need a dedicated, high-bandwidth option with an SLA are the only ones who are going to be willing to pay what it costs for an actual PtP connection with an antenna dedicated to them on the ISP's tower.
That's not to say that PtMP cannot work, or work well. But it is important for everybody to keep in mind that it is a shared-resource kind of connection, not unlike DOCSIS.
-- Nathan
I had a similar issue in Sunland, CA. I would get 6 to 7 mps, then in the evening it would go down to .5 or so. They would test it during the day, and it was of course, fine then. After many calls to the phone company (ISP), they finally sent out a technician. He called a number he knew at a local station, and they switched me from one main trunk line to another (I forget the term for it). After this it was fine. You might just have to persist with the provider. Squeaky wheel strategy.
Where I live, they always come up 'just short'. With a 3 Mbps down connection, I should be seeing 375 kbps, instead of 364 kbps. I changed the DNS because the DNS they provide is either slow or drops (a lot).
ftfy.
We tried DSL in 2000 when we lived too far from the exchange. We kept an open ticket for 3 months before cancelling.
While we had it, however, we couldn't connect at night. My DW found the connection magically appeared when she called me at the office. Eventually I figured to call my office phone from home, put myself on hold for a few hours while we did the net stuff, then disconnect.
We went back to dialup, far less hassle and a solid 49K.
ac posters look better on the wall
Really? Because yours is the only industrialized nation that I know of that has data caps on landlines.
Let me introduce you to Canada and the UK.
I have yet to see a DSL provider that does not state in very small print that the connection is "burst" or "variable" or "up to".
Burst is actually kind of silly. It really screws with data rate prediction required to get smooth performance in multi-player games. So, you start playing, the game figures out the rates, everything's smooth, then the burst is over, you lag all to hell, as the game has to renegotiate the data rate. For downloads, no big deal, but for real time stuff like games or voice/video chat this is a problem... It's not that you connection is too slow after the throttle either, after a while you'll get smoother connection -- It's that initial period of "increased" performance that's screwing up the rate guesstimation.
OK, so here's the silly thing: If you have "bursting", start a D/L of a largeish file. Then, watch the data rate drop after a little while. Now, hit the pause button on the download. Wait a sec, then resume it. Tada! You can burst the whole D/L by re-establishing the HTTP connection -- Not that the pipes have changed at all, just that they throttle on a per connection basis. (How else would you do "bursting"?)
So, two things:
0. Use a Download Accelerator. I use the Firefox plugin: DownThemAll. Acceleration works by opening multiple connections to the source at different parts of the file -- per connection throttle? Increase connections until max bandwith is reached, heh. If one part of the file gets done before the onthers, it splits a remaining segment and starts a new connection; That actually boosts DL speed even more. It's too bad DTA doesn't have an option to open N connections each only S size chunks, and roll across the file... Guys? There's a viable plugin idea if you need one.
1. My new game client / server code has a "rolling" connection system to bypass time based throttling (bursting). It's all about the port numbers -- that's how they identify the connection. In my games I use UDP, but it falls back to TCP; Point is: this also works on TCP. What I do is open a new connection every once in a while, and send some data across it while the current connection is open (It's just port number changing in UDP). I track the speeds and latency of each connection (port number), and detect the timer duration at which the throttling happens by tracking data rates, then I set the connection roll over rate to be less than that. So, on non bursting lines, rolling rarely happens. I can also have more than just two ports open -- I can max my neighbor's 10Mbps bursting DSL line with just 6 concurrent rolling connections. Note: The server port doesn't have to change, seems that most per connection throttling is based on client port number.
It's weird, but shorter connections seem to cope with buffer bloat a bit too; Not sure why...You'd think the buffers were connection independent? Tuning the data rates helps combat BB lag even more though.
I'd write a RFC for this maximal bandwidth optimization technique, but let's just keep it between us geeks, OK?
P.S. My game server defaults to port 80, and displays a simple TCP / HTTP / HTML page about the current game in progress and where to D/L the game if you hit it with a browser. If you hit it with the game client, then the client's HTTP header tells the server to go into game protocol mode. Note: it's not a full HTTP 1.1 stack, just canned response with inserted real time stats, to reduce attack surface while giving the server a bit of info for HTML browsers & apps. Yeah, that's kind of weird eh? Except when you consider that to a deep packet inspection my game protocol initially looks like a "high priority" TCP/HTML query... heh.
I had a similar situation with my DSL ... it was fast during the day but slowed dramatically in the evening. It turns out that there was a tap on the line someplace. The first two techs were clueless, but finally somebody brought out a special piece of diagnostic equipment and found that there was a tap on the line exactly 2200 feet (or whatever) from the house. (I would guess they send a burst down the line and wait for a reflection.) A day or two later they sent someone out to remove the tap and all was well.
Good luck!
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
ISPs don't guarantee average or minimum bandwidth for their consumer contracts. That's why they are so cheap. They are clear up-front about it. But even if you were temporarily confused about the issue and think you aren't getting what you want, you can always cancel the contract and get your Internet service elsewhere.
What you can't do is force the company to give you something that is ordinarily much more expensive, namely a guaranteed minimum bandwidth. If you want a guaranteed minimum bandwidth, you need to pay for one of their business plans (if they have them). They are usually several times as expensive as the consumer plans, and for good reason.
(Also: you made the choice of moving out to the boondocks. I really don't see why you think the world owes you cheap and fast Internet access. Access to utilities should be a big consideration when choosing a place to live.)
When GF complains about download speed, and I'm not doing anything,I say: " Right-click and select Ask for more peers."
Instant satisfaction guaranteed.
On-topic however,I had this problem with the upload speed on a coaxial modem recently. It went from 0.9Mbit/s to the 5 I pay for just by reconnecting all the cheap cables. Making new ones on the to-do.
Also had a download speed issue. I took several traceroutes over a period of time 1-2 weeks, and the ISP discovered a server in Amsterdam with some clock/scheduling issues. Problem solved!
But where do you live?Many but not all countries have bodies that take care of disputes. 27 of 30 advertised is pretty good though.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
If I'm not correct the internet was built on everyone sharing everyone else's excess bandwidth. Lets all dig deep and do it again!
Wouldn't that be nice!
That was before throttling , before state full packet inspection. And all this throttling is because cable doesn't want the internet to seriously compete with regular TV. Because of TV the internet gets the shaft! I remember real high speed and this orwell version dosent cut it.
Maybe the secret is to break up local TV delivery from local Internet delivery?
Do a real AT and T number on them.
Separate all TV broadcasters from purely internet companies.
Forms of conflicting media shouldn't be allowed.
So, they're selling something they cannot provide.
Isn't that fraud?
Only if they lied to you, and they told you it was up to and not guaranteed speeds.
If I sell 10 customers 3 cars each, I better have 30 cars to deliver.
You're not selling cars, you're renting them. When only 2 people show up to rent a car on any average day of the week, only a complete fucking retard would pay to keep 10 of them available.
In the UK this problem was also an issue in rural areas, and still is. As stated above most advertise 'up to' as the bandwidth, The government saw this as flase advertising so the ISP's just changed the way the advertisements and contracts were written instead of improving the service provided (as it can be VERY expensive with miles of fiber optic being layed). Now the Government and ISP's aswell as mobile companies, are trying and rolling out 4G broadband with the 4G toggle that can be pulgged into a designed house router and unplugged and used elseware 'on the go'. I know that the US already has 4G although a slower standard or version. this could be an alternative, providing that you are within the signal range to a 4G broadcast tower, plus it may give you more freedom than you were expecting.
Your carrier should be willing to handle the spike better than they are doing. Something is wrong on their side. You could try complaining to the utility commission to get their intention. Most likely they stopped investing in their DSL infrastructure years ago, and just don't care. Ultimately that might work but you aren't assured of anything.
If you want guaranteed bandwidth though you have to go for a premium solution: T1/DS1. But a DSL add on is often $10 / mo while even a cheap T1 is still going to be around $200 / mo; and in a rural location could be as much as $550 / mo. So assuming you aren't going that route you need to look for another inexpensive broadband solution. The FCC has been taxing all Americans to bring broadband to America. There are also things like satellite internet which are reasonable at the $40-100 / mo range.
You should contact your ISP and have them check the line.
Dramatic speed decreases in the evening might indicate a damaged cable. There may be a fine gap in the wire which widens when the temperatures falls in the evening.
I used to have DSL and every Spring the connection was horrible. One Spring a tech came over (after calling 3-4 times) and tested the lines in the house (everything was fine). He ended up finding a loose wire about a mile down the road he told me and my speeds jumped dramatically. The next thing the same thing happened with my download speeds (and internet connection in general). This time the tech came over (again after 3-4 calls), tested the lines in the house (found nothing) then he decided to check the box behind the house. One of the wires was broken, got fixed and my speeds again went back to normal.
So just keep calling your provider, if you bug them enough they will send a tech out.
Mod up.
Only if they lied to you, and they told you it was up to and not guaranteed speeds.
The words 'up to' imply that I can, under some circumstances, get, well- 'up to' that speed. If they oversold their bandwidth, I never can get 'up to' that speed.
When only 2 people show up to rent a car on any average day of the week, only a complete fucking retard would pay to keep 10 of them available.
And only another fucking retard would think it fine to rent those 2 cars to 10 people.
Besides, isn't the point that, due to streaming video and torrenting and other uses, more and more people are using more and more bandwidth, thus causing the problem to begin with? That's like a car rental agency (to go with your example) that only had two customers renting a car last year, but has 10 people renting a car this year... but never bought more cars. The telecoms need to take some of their Billions in profit and put them into infrastructure.
A lot of ISPs set the target signal-to-noise ratio too low, telling the hardware to try to run the line too fast, in an attempt to boost their "average line speed" stats. Line quality varies according to how many other lines in the same bundle are in use, so while you may have a signal-to-noise ratio that's fine at offpeak times, you may be getting too many errors at peak and losing packets. Ask your ISP to increase your target SNR. I had a similar problem to you, and went from a target SNR of 3dB up to 6dB. I lost about 200kb off my peak throughput, but I get it pretty much constantly now.
Read the contract. I would put money on the fact that it says "speeds up to 3Mbps"
I notice downloading or bittorrent can kill even a respectably fast cable service. On 1mbps DSL (the fastest DSL I can get where I live,) downloading anything (game patches, windows update, Linux ISOs) can drive the latencies up to upwards of 2-3 seconds. Yes, seconds. I've had this happen with a couple of different services, so it doesn't seem to be specific to one vendor.
It's kind of funny that I bitch about how much 1mbps service "sucks," given that I started out on 9600 bps connections. You lose perspective pretty quickly. I was dropping $200 a month for 256K ISDN back in the mid 90's and didn't seem to have as many problems with that as I do with 1mbps connections now. QOS for streaming services and voice would probably help if I could ever get it to work correctly.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Firstly, DSL does not generally fluctuate in data rate unless: 1. There are bad connections between the subscriber and the DSLAM 2. The line was oversold ( customer too far in wire distance from the DSLAM to support the data rate "contracted" ) I have experienced this problem. After complaining for a year or so, my neighbor let it slip that another neighbor accidentally dug up the lines and severed a cable a year or 2 before. The phones were all screwed up for a couple days after said neighbor did his own splicing job and did not get it professionally repaired at the dig site. The wires were all re-assigned at the box at the end of the street. So for a couple days after every rain speeds were awful, but the more you use it the better it would get. This is a classic characteristic of wet lines. If the line were oversold, it would be pretty consistently bad. Upshot is, your ISP may not even be accountable if they don't own the lines and you will likely find disclaimers in the contract.
My wife and I recently moved in with supportive older and less tech-knowledgeable couple helping us in our difficult unemployment situation. As part of the move we encountered the same problem of "the actual bandwidth profile wasn't close to the paid and expected Bandwidth profile" because the homeowners didn't know much about computers. The house has been for years actually performing at roughly 1.4Mbps download speed and .2~0.4Mbps upload speed when they paid for 2Mbps dl and .512Mbps upload.
Step 1)We checked with dslreports.com and speedtest.net, then called the ISP to rectify the problem. They reluctantly replied to the homeowners that they live in a legacy home area and that there was nothing they could do and then hung up. So the next time we called them with us present to discuss and further complain to improve the quality of service(QOS) considering all the years that they have been paying and not getting the expected QOS. They brought in a techie and discovered it was a squirrel that chewed through the lines and had the outside phone line replaced at no cost.
Also related
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Step 2)It was obvious they were living with 1997-style Internet profiles so we suggested them to upgrade considering the number of people in the home using the internet. We are testing a 25Mbps download and 7 Mbps upload now. It was installed and wired to a new VDSL modem. There is only one VDSL line in the entire house which meant only one computer was directly wired to the new VDSL modem and getting the full 25Mbps. The other 3 devices were using wifi, but the bandwidth was trickling to the other devices because the new encryption defaults from the new VDSL modem make it so. The 3 wifi devices were getting 2Mbps download ~ 5Mbps download which is definitely lower than the QOS 25Mbps download as advertised. We called the ISP to mention that and their answer was that's how it works.
Step 3)Lowering the encryption standard to up the wifi speed is an option but it makes the wifi more vulnerable to wardriving. Tried it but the QOS was still below the threshold. I decided to download new drivers for the the wifi dongles I had. It helped but it was still performing below the QOS.
Step 4)Considering buying a better quality router which does better-performing wifi encryption, but not at the expense of the expected QOS. We haven't done this yet because haven't read any comparison on VDSL routers discussing wifi encryption performance yet.
Step 5)Wired the devices physically where I could using "Fishing Line" to pass it through the hard to reach places. Masking tape and some 30feet thin rope was used to place the ethernet cable in the house. The "Fishing Line" cost 20$. NOW there are 2 devices in the house running at the full QOS 25Mbps dl / 7Mbps ul profile. The other devices have to make do until we find better wifi encryption hardware.
My first question would be are you properly measuring the bandwidth. Sorry speedtest numbers are not going to hold up in court. I believe speed test is going to test the DATA transmissions speed but doesn't take into account protocol overhead. Are you sure the issue isnt in house? Your router? Your pc's ip stack?
If your getting 2.7 and your paying for 3, your getting what you payed for. Get on with your downloads.
Because they charge for services that don't even exist. Sprint for instance charges me a 'smartphone data premium fee'. But since I live in Raleigh NC there is NO data connection at all. Not 4G not 3G not any kind of G. Hell we're happy to make phone calls. My neighbor can only use her cell phone in her driveway.
You don't have any idea what you're talking about. Per subscriber bandwidth limits, policing and traffic identification devices are much more sophisticated than you are describing.
Good luck with your RFC.
AC
Fair enough - I realize rural broadband is a money losing proposition. It is indeed Frontier out where I am, but being a money drain doesn't exactly encourage them to invest in it.
Where do I support this? I'm in!
Sounds viable to me - surely someone will actually do this!
I simply contacted my DSL rep and informed him that since they provided 11% of my contracted bandwith (they say they provide "up to") I told them I was going to pay them up to the amount on the bio.
Then I informed them that they were going to start billing me every three months instead of Monthly. They asked why they should do that and I informed them that I had cable internet also, and I had a cell phone, so they did not offer me or anybody else, a single service, so it was my way or they can considder themselves fired.
How?
When I had Comcast, this was never an issue for me. Games are sensitive to latency assuming you are already meeting the optimal bandwidth required by the game. Perhaps on first launch of the game it will attempt to calibrate the best settings via a client to server benchmarking, but I've never experienced the issue you speak of. I suppose that's because my download was at minimum 8mbps and burst-able up to 24mbps even if for a few seconds or so. So in theory, a game benchmarked on a 24mbps connection should function the same when stepped down to 8mbps when I'm using less than 2mbps at any given time. So for me at least, raising and dropping the cap is well outside the scope of bandwidth my games require anyways. Basically moot.
Life is not for the lazy.
The telecommunications industry is arguably the most powerful lobby in Washington. Once upon a time, phone service was just as hard to get, and shitty when you could (Google the term "party line", youngsters). That didn't change until regulations forced it.
You have to take into account the inherent protocol overhead. For TCP/IP over ethernet I have seen different numbers but I usually figure about 10-15%. If you have DSL that means you likely also have PPPoE to deal with, which introduces further overhead. If we assume 10% overhead, that puts you right at 2.7 Mbps, so it seems that your line is performing exactly as it should when it gets 2.7 Mbps.
Furthermore, your ISP probably states that you will receive speeds "up to" 3 Mbps, which you are.
Also, they probably also state that they guarantee the "up to" 3 Mbps speed to the DSLAM which is the only part of your connection which does not share bandwidth with other users.
So for all of those reasons, I'd say you have a minimal chance of your ISP caring about the trouble your're experiencing. If their network is overloaded to the point that you get sub 1-Mbps speeds during peak demand then they ought to upgrade their capacity but they're not obligated to do so.
Same thing happened to me, they told me I have a noise of 50db so my line will be un-stable, but they don't want to install a repeater.
Get your legislator to introduce a bill to tax the maximum measured difference between advertised speed and actual throughput as measured by broadband.gov. The larger the gap, the larger the tax. In order to work, the tax has to be larger than the profit from overselling bandwidth.
File complaint with FTC and FCC. I filed a complaint with FTC a few weeks ago and plan to file with FCC after I give my ISP and FTC 30 days to take action. If both FTC and FCC do not resolve my issue I'll seek a law firm who wants to do a class action law suit where I don't pay anything.
Here are my ISP complaint notes.
I expect to get what I pay for based on ISP advertising. My downstream is consistently almost 100% of advertised yet upstream is consistently 80%.
Because childish and divisive remarks have been a core of the Republican strategy for over a decade, especially aggressively against Obama. You don't think the "Socialist socialist socialist!" stuff is just spontaneous, do you? Or the Birther nonsense? Or the attacks on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?
That's purely aside from their actual policies, most of which involve fiscal irresponsibility while blaming the other party for social spending while they increase military spending without raising taxes to pay for it, or suddenly discovering that Federal debts are a problem after they've tripled the debt and are getting kicked out of office (you don't think that timing was accidental either, do you?)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Call the public services commission. I work for an ISP (Telco) we are regulated by the PSC and the FCC. Notifying them, the better business bureau, and the village/town/municipality where you operate would make enough noise. Hell, I might through in the FCC, but I don't think that would do anything.
A lot of our field techs/linemen know and work the the municipality and the linemen with the electric and water utilities. Make enough noise and you will get service or at least an answer. Likely, the backhaul from the Central Office to the their meet point for the Internet if full and oversubscribed from 5PM to 9PM. Someone suggested that the cross connect from the DSLAM to the the router in the C.O. might be full, but we have never seen that to be the case where I work because we have GigE and Ten-GigE fiber running through our distribution network. Even, the old ATM based distribution networks (late 90's tech) had OC-3's and OC-12's so having enough bandwidth between the C.O. and the DSLAM has never really been an issue.
Good Luck!
Crap! I just kissed my karma good-bye.
The US, Canadian, and UK ISPs that impose data caps on their customers got the idea from the Australians. But in return, the "can't run a server at home" idea was a US cable company invention, back when they had really limited upstream capacity and were worried about people hogging their neighborhood bandwidth running porn servers (especially when the telco was running "Get DSL so you won't have to worry about web hogs" ads on TV.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The bandwidth you get from ADSL is going to depend on the quality of the lines between your home and your DSLAM, but those aren't going to vary radically by time of day - either you'll get full speed, or lousy speed, or medium speed, or whatever, but it doesn't depend on what your neighbors are doing.
If your bandwidth's dropping at night like that, it's almost certainly because there's not enough bandwidth from the DSLAM back to the ISP's main routers. It's possible that your neighbor's kid has discovered Bittorrent...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My advice - get yourself signed up with "Samknows" at http://www.testmyisp.com/. If you get picked for the sample population, samknows will send you a device that probes the network and reports back. It only samples when the connection is idle (it won't perform tests when you're actively using the connection.) You need to agree to let samknows contact your ISP to gather information on your contracted connection.
You'll get monthly status reports showing what their tested results are, and these reports include bandwidth, latencies, etc.
Here is where it gets good - your operator knows that you'll be testing them (by matter of samknows contacting them) and they also know that your results will be rolled into the national broadband reporting stats that get published widely. So you might get better service. I know that within a month of getting my samknows box that Comcast sent us a new modem, with some oddball excuse for why they were refreshing the equipment. Our throughput was already pretty good but seems that it got even better.
There is only one more catch, if you are on a data cap plan (or a heavy user) this sampling adds about 25 to 50 GB per month of traffic. I think they make that part pretty clear when you go through the signup process.
That's not an issue of who's offering the service, it's an issue of the technology they're using to provide it. Verizon's giving you those speeds because they're using DSL, which carries data over dedicated telephone copper lines, and the speeds you can get depend on your distance from the telco office and the quality of the copper (which was designed for low-bandwidth analog voice.) Newer DSL technology isn't going to be significantly faster - that's about as fast as you can get at residential distances. That's why VZ is rolling out FIOS where they can, and AT&T is rolling out UVerse (which uses fiber to the block and newer DSL for the very short distance from the box on your block to your house.) Calling it "crippled themselves by simply relying on old DSL technology" is bogus - you're talking about replacing their entire wiring plant.
Your cable service uses different technology, running shared media for multiple households. Yes, DOCSIS 3 gives them better bandwidth than DOCSIS 1 did, but it's using the same cable plant - those upgrades are comparable to what happened to DSLAM evolution back in the late 90s. The fact that your bandwidth sometimes drops to 3 Mbps is consistent with the fact that you're competing with your neighbors for bandwidth - DSL wouldn't do that unless the backhaul from the DSLAM to the main routers was badly oversubscribed. The cable plant issues for your carrier include how many households they're serving on a given cable segment, and whether they're installing more head ends to keep up with demand.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I had a similar issue with my internet service recently. It took a few months to fix but what I did was kept calling my isp. Having them come out to service the line over and over again. That did not work so I found an email for the regional manager. That didn't work so I finally contacted the better business bureau and made a FCC complaint. The better business bureau got their attention but the FCC finally got them to fix my issue. Just make sure to document as you go.
Many people assume their options are "cable," "DSL," and "cell." In a lot of places, especially more rural ones, there's a fourth option: fixed-wireless/WISP service. WISPA, a trade association for fixed-wireless ISPs (think wi-fi with bigger antennas), would be glad to point you towards a local WISP. (Disclaimers: I used to work for a WISP for several years, and the WISPA Web site is fairly US-centric.)
2 years ago, I had a similar situation, except that I live in LA county in the city. During certain times my DSL would be perfect, then it would drop down below 200 Kbps for hours. I kept calling and they'd threaten me like, "If we send someone out and its your fault you gotta pay this huge fee, etc." One day I got fed up and called back and said, "send your guy out." He showed up, couldn't find anything wrong in my apartment. About 20 minutes later he found the problem on the street, there was a stretch of extremely old cabling. He told me that this is actually very common, because of how things are being upgraded, etc, etc.
I'm not saying this is your same problem, but it sounds like what was happening to me. At certain times, the main line gets taxed hard and can't keep up. Especially in a rural area, they probably didn't intend to deliver DSL on those lines. So, it might be worth a shot to call them up and ask them to look into it.
Except when you consider that to a deep packet inspection my game protocol initially looks like a "high priority" TCP/HTML query... heh.
Yeah, the WebSocket protocol defined by RFC 6455, which involves starting an HTTP connection and then handing that connection off to some other app to run a framed message protocol over it, is going to play havoc with throttle algorithms.
Even if you were getting the speed they promise, you're not allowed to use it. For example, if you get 5 Mbps down and actually saturate that connnection, Comcast calls you a "heavy user" and will warn you about your usage and even throttle you. The problem is that they oversell their lines, like overbooking planes. Most of the time it's not a problem because most people don't even come close to saturating their connection (like there will almost always be cancellations and no shows on planes), but it is a problem when everyone booked on that flight shows up. Same for ISPs. They're promising you something they can't deliver and when you try to use what they promise, they punish you for it. There need to be regulations in place to prevent this. Stop over selling the service. Give customers the speeds you advertise. And allow people to saturate the connection. If i have 5 Mpbs down, I should be able to download 5 Mb of data every second, all day, every day. That's what I'm paying for, and i should be able to use it.
What if all that is true? That still doesn't mean the other side must act similarly.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Before you do anything:
Call up your ISP and ask what is the minimum acceptable bitrate for your account, the rep might not have the answer handy, tell him to ask, someone there knows.
Ask if they have a speed test site of their own, use it. (And please remember, that test sites do not take into account overhead in communications like encapsulation, so its a very rough estimate) the speed should still be above the minimum acceptable bitrate for your ISP.
Ask for the loop length, this is the distance in copper wire form your home to the DSLAM. (it really depends on the set up with your ISP but a good rule of thumb is you need it to be under 10k ft for 3mbps, maybe less, ask the rep, again, if he doesnt know, tell him to ask) This is important because if you are at the edge of the acceptable loop length for your provisioned speed package, you might actually benefit from lowering your speed package. (lets say you downgrade to 2mbps, you might actually get a steady speed al the time) Yes this is your last resource, just so you know.
Now that you have some info, if your speed test drops below the minimum acceptable bitrate, then its on them to fix it, but you need to make sure you note when the problem is happening, if its only at certain times of the day, then the rep needs to note that its an intermittent issue, I can't tell you how many customers get screwed because the rep forgets to write this down! Even if your issue gets escalated to the right team, theyll run a test and if they see the speed is fine, theyll close your case, no questions asked. They need to run tests on your line at the time your connection has trouble and if they know its an intermittent issue, they'll run more tests for longer periods of time till they find an issue, or not.
If your speed is above the minimum acceptable bitrate, your options are limited, Tell the rep you want to switch, or flat out that your going to disconnect your service, don't threaten to cancel if youre service doesn't get fixed! Just say that if you cant get reliable service, youll disconnect the service and actually follow through! One of two things will happen, the rep might get creative and try to figure out some loophole to get your case taken care of, (You cant ask for this I'm sorry, the rep might actually need to call in a favor for this, I've seen it happen, and not everyone can do it) or when you call to cancel, they'll try to retain you and actually do something about this issue.
Oh yeah, your ISP might have the ability to change the sync profile for your modem, if they can, tell them to change it, if the rep doesnt know what youre talking about, tell him to ask, this isnt common knowledge even when it is possible. (you might need to talk to a higher level tech for this, do not ask for a supervisor, they mean well, but theyre not a higher level tech!)
If you are at the end of the loop for your speed package, please accept that the solution might be to downgrade service, really, not kidding.
I'm always right, except when i'm not.
I'd mod this +1 insightful, because it is, but it's also %#^&-3 "hopelessly optimistic."
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Yeah, probably. But the alternative was to remain silent.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Seriously. We put our criminals there for a reason.
You know why Aussies have always called each other "Mate" don't you?
It's short for Inmate. From back in the 1800's when Australia had about a dozen different prison colonies established there..
I mean, what other industry that resells scarce, shared-resource services sells it to you at flat-rate all-you-can-eat pricing? Electricity? Water? Telephone? Fuel? None of those.
Speaking from a recent rehab experience, the problem with that statement is my utility providers will come in and install a bigger (physical) pipe (or cable, or whatever) if I want it. My gas provider did... under no obligation for me to buy any more gas, just simply on architect plans that my tankless hot water heater plus my new stove (et al) MAY take more than my service and meter could deliver. My electric provider came and ran new lines (for the entire block on my transformer) for my amperage upgrade... I hope to have the whole house WAY below my current usage once we are done with appliance replacement, wall insulation, etc), but it didn't cost me a dime beyond the meter for the shiny new cables (which were NOT cheap).
I'd gladly pay per GB for my Internet connection at home... all my ISP needs to do is run an OC-48 or higher so I *COULD* burst up to that capacity if I want, and don't charge me more than I'm paying now for an oversold consumer DSLAM if I don't. Same thing with cell service... if I want to watch a movie on my smartphone and it costs me $5 in bandwidth (random number) I can deal with that... but they damn well better have the towers to support me doing it when I want to (I live in metropolitan Chicago, no excuses for rural areas apply).
For us carnivores, "Sucking the marrow out of life" isn't a transcendentalist philosophy but a practical instruction.
Then you upload the recording to youtube and make back the money in ad revenue! cha-ching!
-- savr
Last fall, when temperatures were warm in the afternoon and cool in the evening I noticed drastic changes in the quality of service, depending on the time of day. The problem only got worse as time passed. Eventually, the service quality got so bad late at night (2am - 5am) that the modem could not maintain a constant connection. However, during the day the quality of service was fine. This made things very difficult when dealing with the phone company because they did not find problems during the day. The problem went on for a few weeks and they made several trips to my house and each time they thought they solved the problem... and they were wrong. The problem turned out to be a combination of things. First, some of the wires in a telephone station/box down the road had corrosion on some of the wires/connections that were related to my phone-lines connection. This corrosion was not obvious at first glance, which is why the first few visits missed this. However the guy that did finally notice this said the wires were so bad he was surprised we had any connection. Next there was also a small problem with another telephone box further up the road. This may not have been a contributing factor, but they noticed it when they didn't immediately spot the corrosion problem on the closer box. Next moisture played a part in it. When the temperatures started to drop, condensation started forming in a certain spot and caused a bit of a short. Heavy rain also caused this problem. I was also told by somebody that the expansion/contraction of the lines due to temperature changes may have played a part in it as well... although I am not sure about that. Here are a few suggestions, if your dsl modem lets you monitor things like signal noise and line attenuation, keep an eye on it and log it. If your modem doesn't, consider getting a cheap one with those features from a local store that has a 30-day return policy.... You can use it and then return it. (just be cautious in using the software provided with cheap modems... it can destroy your computer's networking settings beyond repair.) I bought a cheap dsl modem that had those features and wrote a quick program the periodically read that data from the modem's web page. This allowed me to have a log that extended all through the night to prove that this problem occurred regularly on a pattern. Also, be sure that the other lines in your house are not causing interference. The phone company frequently tried to say the problem was not on their end and it was in my home. I disconnected all lines inside my house except the one that connected to the jack with the dsl modem when running my logging program. When they phone company tested that line inside my house, they couldn't find any problems. (if they did find a problem, they would have charged me for their visit).
I filed a complaint with the BBB when I had problems with my cabel company arbitrarily deciding I needed an HD package. Oddly the cabel company called me the day after I filed the complaint to appologize and assure me they would be sending a training package to the local agencies and credit my account. I have found that if you want to get someone's attention, a BBB complaint works pretty well.
I've had good results going through the BBB in the past, too. On the customer side, they can be very helpful. I guess it's because they keep a permanent record of complaints (although, if you search them they're vaguely worded and the whole process is anything other than transparent). Anyway, I've had companies bend over backward to satisfy my (valid) complaints after getting the BBB involved, whereas before they clearly didn't give a shit.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Expecting 3MBit out of copper phone lines is like expecting to reliably shove an elephant through a plastic drinking straw fifty times a second. Certainly, in time, we could develop the technology to shove an elephant through a drinking straw fifty times a second in time and given enough money and effort, but that would be stupid. If you want affordable (relatively speaking) broadband and you can't get a cable modem consider satellite.
Your ISP can only guarantee bandwidth from your DSL modem to their Central Office. Do a traceroute to wherever 'speedtest.net' tells you the closest server is. My guess is it will be between 5 or 10 hops BEYOND the edge of your service provider's network. Despite the rise in "on demand" content the basic design of any IP network is only "best effort." No ISP can guarantee nor have any control whatsoever of your traffic once it leaves their network. I wish more n00b L-users would educate themselves more on how networks actually work before they go fly off the handle and pointing fingers because Netflix doesn't work. Your ISP IS NOT CHEATING YOU! You are just stupid. That's all.
I say WE ALL EVERY ONE OF US join a class action lawsuit and sue the snot out of them. if they want to say their going to provide a certain level of service then they should be forced to provide it even if it takes over providing you so that you average your base speed for every day of the month. It's kinda like the grocery store if the shelf price is one thing and the register price is more they have to provide it at the lower price. If they cant provide the level they say then we should get it for the price of the next lower tier of service.
Unlikely in your case however I thought I'd add it to the pile. In the early days of cable modem there was a case where a customer had bad night time connectivity but would work during the day. Turned out the at night the coating/shielding on the co-ax would shrink exposing the wires to RF Interference, then after sun was up a while the shielding would strech back into place. Needless to say cable replacement and proper termination was the answer.
The backhaul (the point between the CO and the POP) is overloaded, call and ask for a backhaul change - keep calling till you can find someone who knows what that means.
"Technology is too complex today."
If you are paying around $50 a month (or whatever). Continue to call them daily until the problem is resolved. Keep speedtest.net results or other logs for your support calls. If they provide support after 5pm, even better. Call when the problem happen in the evening, every evening. Tell them you can't retrieve the email containing pictures of your nieces and nephews.
Even if they pay their support people minimum wage, a smaller rural ISP is going to hurt when you start eating up their support time (dollars). It might be a lot of time and effort, but why not cost "them" some money for providing an inappropriate service. I say inappropriate because no matter what the contract says, 0.1Mbit is ridiculous. You certainly have the right to continue to contact their support department day in and day out with your concerns. Not likely the contract says they can cancel you for that.
You have no other provider choices and are greatly inconvenienced. Enjoy your nightly call to support. Prepare some coffee and/or popcorn. Ask the support rep how their family is doing. Be nice to the point of guilt on the representatives side.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
I might try and tell my ISP about problems except that every ISP I've ever used makes actually talking to them 1) a huge hassle 2) a major waste of my time. IMHO this is usually because dipshit executives look at customer service as a cost to be minimized instead of an opportunity to be exploited.