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Thumb On the Scale? Study Finds 5 of 7 Broadband Meters Inaccurate
stox writes "For the 64 percent of Americans whose internet service provider imposes a broadband cap, and for those lucky enough to have a meter, I have some bad news. The president of the firm who audits many of the country's broadband meters says that he can't certify the measurements produced by five out of seven of his clients' meters because they don't count your bits correctly
Yes, because by under-reporting they can charge you ...wait you're just one of those idiots that doesn't RTFA right?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
DD-WRT has a meter I find it to be very accurate. I guess it could be used as evidence if things do not match.
Depends on your ISP, I'd wager. You might get reasonable people in the billing department you can argue with.
If not, good luck with that. It'd be nice if everyone and their mother had a non-shit router, the ability to understand metrics, and the willingness to go to small claims court, but, as a wise woman once said:
Ain't nobody got time fo' dat.
When they were enforcing the 250 gig cap, they were within 1% of my dd-wrt tally. Now that they're not enforcing the cap, their reading is waaaaaay under my actual usage. I wonder if they're no longer counting traffic that stays in the Comcast network.
Perhaps we need a weights and measures type certification for ISPs?
In the US it's per County, so that will be interesting!
no other explanation is necessary. For the old folks here who used to have a landline phone service in the old days, do you remember all those mysterious little "charges" they tacked on your bill? Like $1.05 "User Service fee" and $0.87 "DCF Maintenance fee" or some crap like that? Well even the federal gov't realized they were just plain thieves and sued them, which they settled for a few dozen million dollars. And went right back to doing it again.
Also there was the dial-up modem scam the telcos used to pull... Dvorak's summary
So this means that they can't legally do 'metered billing,' as the meter is known and proven to be inaccurate, right?
right?
anybody?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Building an incorrect bandwidth meter is easy. Incorrect meters will calculate your bandwidth like ( 'MTU size' * 'number of packets' = usage), which will over estimate usage by a large margin (30% off is common), since a large number of packets are much smaller then MTU, DNS replies for example. It is 'somewhat' more accurate to take ('average packet size' * 'number of packets') per user, since different usage will come up with a different avg_pkt size. Counting each packets size and keeping track of it is the most accurate, but also the most resource intensive therefore the least likely to occur in bulk by the ISP.
Another place that can cause a significant skew in total bits is where bandwidth is monitored. Most ISPs count traffic before the restriction of your slow connection, therefore packet loss and re-transmits get counted against you (if the ISP uses no, or a bad queuing discipline this can end up being a significant amount of bandwidth). Monitoring how much was downloaded is best done on the CPE, such as the cable modem or dsl modem, but that would lead to firmware hacks and such to lie to the provider.
I don't know how many on slashdot know networking, but there are different ways of measuring bandwidth. Are we measuring layer 2, or layer 3? Further, layer 2 can often have multiple encapsulations before even taking layer 3 into consideration. Take for example DSL which frequently uses PPPoE, which means we have both PPP and Ethernet frames in addition to the IP data and everything encapsulated therein. And if you include DSL interleaving, then do we also include the packets that had a bad checksum and were therefore discarded? (in many cases there are a lot of these) That *is* data usage by all definitions. Do we also include ingress packets that were dropped due to bad checksums? Again, that is data usage.
In my opinion, the problem is that there aren't any standards defined for measuring bandwidth. Also in my opinion, that definition should be layer 3 traffic only and nothing else.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I guess it really doesn't take any facts for the idiots to start clamoring about how all business' are evil.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
They tell me to download from "localhost" where ever that is. Wow is that site fast! Everything I've ever used is hosted there too!
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.