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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."
And if you are using a known speed tester and haven't obfuscated the address, some of the providers will give a priority to the speed test so it looks like you are getting better speeds than you actually do.
I tested that with my provider many times over years. (Probably a couple of times a month, it wasn't a schedule, just when I thought about it.)
Known major speed tester, 38
Obfuscated known major speed tester, 18
Relatively unknown speed tester, 18.5
Obfuscated relatively unknown speed tester, 18.5
There has been minor variance in the results, but no more than about 8% appx.
I'm not in New York, and I haven't tested i in 2 years (I figured the 6 years I did test was more than enough), but I doubt it's any different over there since nation wide corporations tend to have the same policies and standard hardware & scripts everywhere.
And if anyone hasn't figured it out, if they know you're testing them, they play nice, the rest of the time, you their bitch.
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...
Generally, the speed of TCP ramps up to the bandwidth of the weakest link and then oscillates around that. If you get high initial speeds but it ramps down after a short period of time (5-10 seconds), then what you are seeing is traffic shaping. It is perfectly legit to do this; and there are good reasons for it, but you should be upfront with customers that it is happening, because what you are really getting is 12 mbit of committed bit rate.