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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 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
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.
keep shopping, iirc speakeasy (now megapath) has T1s for ~250 a month
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.
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.
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.
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 ----
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.
I work remotely and will burn through the caps even though they say the VPN speeds are decent now
As someone recently off satellite - They lie, and hard.
With satellite, the throughput doesn't suck... Even the daily caps, while they suck hard the first few times you hit it, you can learn to live with.
But the latency! Any sort of interactive connection, from online gaming to VPN to even visiting any website that uses SSL, will absolutely crawl. Expect to search for 10YO clients that let you jack the timeouts up to insane levels (and then, still pray the server-side puts up with you taking literally half a second per roundtrip).
As one option shy of getting a T1, I recently switched to a 3G modem. Still has a fairly crappy cap, but the penalty for exceeding it costs basically the same as your basic service prorated to more bandwidth (I pay $80/10G, with $10/G over). And while it costs basically the same as the halfway-decent tier of satellite, it actually works for what I need (like VPN'ing in to work). I couldn't use it to truly telecommute 40+ hours a week, but for the occasional server-babysitting on the weekend, it saves me a drive.
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 !
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.
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
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.
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.
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. :
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!
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