Slashdot Mirror
NY Attorney General Wants Public To Report Broadband Speeds (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating ISP speed and service claims. He's asked consumers to help by testing their broadband speeds and reporting the findings. "New Yorkers should get the Internet speeds they pay for. Too many of us may be paying for one thing, and getting another," Schneiderman said. "By conducting these tests, consumers can uncover whether they are receiving the Internet speeds they have paid for."
Speeds vary depending on where you're getting data from
[DISCLAIMER type="big-corp"]
What, users re getting speeds of 128Kbps on our advertised 10Mbps?
Well, that's just fine. They were told that they could get speeds UP TO 10Mbps. 128K falls in that range.
[/DISCLAIMER]
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
... and I don't even live in New York. With the partnership of a U.K. company/agency, SamKnows, the FCC has been doing this for years nationwide, and more reliably.
I can only imagine that the big cable companies will do everything in their power to make sure that all the links to the major Speed/Bandwidth test providers are set to have the utmost in priority for the NYC area. Those who were promised 50/50 and were reports 25/25 now show 50/50 or more nearly everytime.
While good in concept this will ultimately fail due to the shadiness of the Cable Companies.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
NY Attorney General Wants Public To Report Broadband Speeds
Strongly suggests that the Attorney General would require people to do this. This could have been worded better to indicate in the headline that this is fully voluntary. Of course, accurate wording would not be as helpful in the standard slashdot demonization of all things liberal.
As usual, thank you "failure machine" samzenpus. I would expect nothing better from you.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
To stop ISP's from cheating have Netflix host the speed test.
What about the real issue. The fact that we pay so much for so little to begin with. Then theres throttling and caps... What the?
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Dude has a pretty good track record of going after crooks.
How will the reporting distinguish when someone's connection is getting f'd up by the crappy wifi connection with interference from all their apartment neighbors?
Is there going to be a standard test setup requirement? Over wired connection?
Personally, I have paid for 50mb+ pipe. When doing large downloads, what I see is ~5 seconds of 50-55mbit, 25-30 seconds of precisely 12mbit, repeat. Its pretty clear that what my ISP is doing is hard throttling me at 12mbit most of the time and allow brief spikes of full speed traffic.
This includes when I'm doing downloads at 4am when there is no traffic on the network.
But any time I run a speed test I get the full 50+ mbit result that I'm paying for.
"up to". They all pretty much just say that they won't be giving you MORE than the listed bandwidth.
My roommate is paying for a 50Mb connection from Comcast. If he speed test with most external test servers, he gets 50Mb or better. If he speed test with a Comcast test server, he gets 175Mb. Something fishy is going on here.
...then my ISP only be entitled to payments of up to $49.99 a month from me.
Surely an Attorney General should realize that all the ISPs have all covered their asses with that little caveat.
All the good AG has to do is go to https://www.samknows.com/
They collect data about ISPs worldwide from people like me and you and report to governments and other interested parties. I get a monthly report with graphs that show my up/down speed, my latency, my lost packet percentage for each day of the month. Helpful for me, helpful for others.
For the NY AG, they will tell him the claimed vs actual performance of each ISP with lovely charts, graphs and great detail.
This costs me nothing. They sent me a 'whitebox' from the UK which is connected to my router. I'm pretty sure they aren't spying on my pron sessions, but don't really care. You can join the 440,000 of us in the program too.
Additionally, http://www.dslreports.com/ collects a great deal of information about ISPs. Mostly anecdotal, voluntarily submitted by site users. You may find this site useful too.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It says so...very clearly on page 23 of the fine print. It is the section entitled "You give us money and we might** give you service". **One day per year, on Feb 3rd during the hours of 2-3 am EST. Your results may vary, it which case your equipment is to blame. If you don't receive the advertised speeds during this time frame please contact customer support and we will be happy to walk you through the troubleshooting steps on our website that don't work.
Since most people don't use their internet bandwidth most of the time, all ISPs I am aware of oversubscribe (that is, sell more bandwidth - in some cases, vastly more - than they can deliver at any given instant). To manage their bandwidth, ISPs will throttle traffic that is lower class - say, regular internet data - to allow more important traffic - say, telephone service - to flow more freely. Indeed, some, and very possibly most, very likely throttle various kinds of internet data traffic differently.
This is not inherently a problem, in a sense it's just the economics of the situation.
There are problems with measuring it this way: it's pretty easy to set quality-of-service of speed testing sites and/or protocols to higher than regular traffic. It's also very possible that this could happen as a side-effect of doing other things: say, an exception policy on firewalls to not inspect this sort of traffic. I have no idea if ISPs are doing this, intentionally or accidentally, and I would hope someone is paying attention now that people are looking, as this could turn into the next Volkwagon-style "subverting the test" scandal.
Further (although this is harder for most), ISPs could arrange to transiently limit traffic: so, after 5 minutes of high-bandwidth traffic, say, they may drop your effective bandwidth since you're taking what they consider an 'unfair share' of the (real) available bandwidth. This wouldn't be caught in a speed test.
Also, the issues in measuring bandwidth is that things will generally be bad at hours of peak usage, but you can easily average statistics which say your bandwidth is fine, while being fundamentally inaccurate for peak periods. Problems at these peak periods will have disproportionate impact, and someone who is unscrupulous would suggest that these impacts would make people stop using a 'regular' service and want to switch to the ISP's degenerate, paid, 'local' service.
Because of some of those side-effects, going to specific testing sites won't tell you the problems really happening. To deal with this, various places like Google Youtube would have to coloc a testing service with their media content infrastructure which is indistinguishable from regular traffic, or collect data on the bandwidth failures for traffic going through individual ISPs and backbones (given the nature of internet protocols, analyzing the results of this test would be legitimately difficult to pin stuff on individual companies). You should be able to generate metrics about peak period congestion for a given region, however.
Even if you get good data, the what's happening isn't always clear: where you get in a legitimate gray area is if you are an ISP, sell a service that competes or 'optimizes' traffic to certain sites: as a side effect, other sites in effect get deprioritized. This turns into a black area if, at the same time, you don't maintain links with sufficient bandwidth to meet customer demand.
Another legitimate gray area is dealing with asymmetric traffic: handling the difference in bandwidth between what you give and what you get, and how you handle that difference. Poorly handling that - which happens today - could lead to routing traffic 'around' the shorter-path due to congestion, which has the effect of diminishing effective bandwidth, and making it "someone else's fault". Other poor handling is to just decide to ignore an increase in bandwidth usage on certain links because it's inconvenient or nobody is willing to pony up the money for your disproportionately large access link fees.
It's a total black area to throttle traffic to certain destinations for which you have a competing service, and other than insider knowledge, I don't know how you would detect this. Another serious dark area is letting your infrastructure keep earning you money beyond its effective lifespan to avoid the capital investment required to upgrade links and components. And, beyond that, the real problem is instituting an intentional scarsity (by not using dark fibers, for in
The plan I signed up for says speeds of up to 50mbps. As long as I get between 0 and 50mbps, then I am getting what I pay for.
Broadband is a shared environment. If you are the only one on the network you get full speed. When when others are on as well you get much less. So depending on the contract, you are possibility getting the speed you pay for but only under ideal circumstances.
A North Carolina town has passed a law against unplugged ethernet cables because they're worried all those gigabits will just leak out onto the ground and soon flood out all the tobacco plants.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They create a site for testing the speed of your Internet connection... and then they ask you to make a screenshot of the test results, go to another site, fill out a form by hand-copying the test results, and submit the form along with the screenshot? Is this some kind of joke?
and bitch slap the big three fuckhead providers.
He has a very narrow track record; it's political. They're crooks, but it's a very political selection of crooks.
Cable companies have more of an incentive to mess with the traffic to make things appear faster than they really are. It's hard to do that with ADSL as the pipe just isn't fat enough and users would notice. I can consistently get 10Mbps regardless of the time of day, type of traffic, or server I'm connecting to (ie assuming the server isn't overloaded anyway). I know 10Mbps just isn't enough for some although if I was slightly closer (ie in town instead of outside of town) I'd be able to get 25Mbps which is more comparable to what cable companies are often providing in the real world. I tried cable once and never again. Particularly given my only option now is Comcast (Comcast bought Patriot Media which bought RCN in my neck of the woods).
Heh. I think 1.5 mbps is good enough for me. AT&T's reliability is good. AT&T service is mediocre, but reliability means it is mostly unneccessary. I think AT&T's problem, is its high prices.
I wish they'd lower their prices. That is my complaint.
The answer is to break up the ISP regional monopolies. More competition will breed better service and innovation. What we have now is a steady as she goes model. If we had stuck with ATT&T as THE long distance company we'd still be paying horrendous rates and using the second cousin of the Bakelite phone.
Used to be 75/75mpbs with verizon fios for 2 years and after signing the second contract for another 2 years in that same week the speed dropped to 10/20mbps which is 24/7 and they can't do anything about it. I used a Network tool to see the problem and found out they are dropping packets like crazy. It's throttling and no way there is congestion 3:00 am in the morning. But if I use a vpn or proxy it stays at 75/75.
now this is something government should be doing. You go get gasoline. No one ever measures the gallon/liter, you trust government to certify this. You buy milk. You trust that the number on the carton is true. I live in a good place. We have Fios and Cable on the same street, and in a world with at least duopoly, they don't play games.
I live in Canada, and we have likely the highest cost/bit price in the world. I don't know if its what they are looking for, but I wouldn't mind seeing a side by side comparison of bucks/bits. I don't know if its better to shame my ISP into lower prices, or if its better to show opportunities for outside companies and where they can move in and have an easy time gaining market share by offering slightly lower prices and still make healthy profits.
Hey Eric, there's new technology that only I have and is only for myself, so if companies use the old technology to expand the internet because that's all that can be done from now on because science has reached it's end, that's one of the ways to the destruction of the solar system and you. Good luck making it to another solar system! I'm pretty sure you or anyone's descendants will not survive a planetary crash into the Sun.
Depending on how long DNS requests are delayed.
Rick B.