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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."
[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/
To stop ISP's from cheating have Netflix host the speed test.
Well, maybe if things we public, we'd get an idea of what's happening.
It's better than relying on Speedtest where everyone games it.
It's 2015 and about to be 2016 and I'm on 1.5Mbps/.25Mps according to Speedtest where I am - when shit is REAL slow, I get the same numbers from Speedtest.
Let's SHAME ISPs for their shitty service, OK?
I'm on ATT, btw.
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.
i pay for 100 down, i generally see 120 down in the NYC burbs on ethernet
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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?
"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.
Seconding this one big time. A client of mine had Comcast Business setup for their business (sadly, the only option available other than the T1 line we were replacing). When the installer was there, he wanted to show off, so he ran the Comcast speed test and it showed somewhere in the neighborhood of 50mbps. Once he left and we tried our own speedtests, we were lucky to pull 20mbps from any other source.
...then my ISP only be entitled to payments of up to $49.99 a month from me.
or the location its being downloaded from
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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...
You mean you didn't choose the Official Network Neutrality Test Site? No wonder your speed sucked.
Underneath, deep packet inspection is going on, except to those choice testing websites because we all know that there's no real data of any resaleable significance going to *those*.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.
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.
if you use VPN and try a speedtest not only is the routing different from the speedtest back to your computer, but you're also going through the VPN provider which will slow the speed down.
how do you know it's the ISP and not the server you're downloading from?
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.
I pretty much only use a speed tester to check to see if I have max speed in around my local network. Using it to test speed coming from the provider is a fools errand.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It's a torrent - there is no central server.
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?
Maybe downloading a big file through bittorrent will give you the most accurate speeds. The ISP won't want to restrict them if they know they're measured.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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 a *very* remote area and when I connect to my home machine (which I just did) I get varied speeds but not by a whole lot - things don't really slow down. I'm paying for 10/1 Mb service. I get somewhere around 12.5-14/1.5. I am so remote that I had to actually pay for my own lines to be upgraded as well as a CO to be put in because I'm that far from the village.
I don't get cable so cable is not an option. I used to have satellite and, for a while, directional wireless. I'm kind of happy with it. To be honest, it's more than I need. I think the slowest that I've had was a 900 baud acoustic coupler/cradle modem critter from back in the 80s though a friend had a 300 baud for a spell. I'm kind of grateful for what I have.
It's good that I'm grateful because I'm not even sure that I could pay for fiber to be run. I mean, yeah, I can pay for it but I don't think anyone's gonna provide me service out in my home area. I'm about 24 miles outside of the Rangeley, Maine village center. There's a tower not too far away and it even has 4G now. I can use that as backup but I don't really bother.
The DSL is more than adequate and if another company offers me a better service package then I can always use them - I am not stuck with a single company this way and a monopoly is not an issue because others are willing to provide me the service. I do, by default, still use the original company (though they sold and later changed their name) but that's because I'm happy with them. I did use GWI for a while but I'm back on Fairpoint. Fairpoint was, a long time ago, CommTel.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That seems witty and bright but, really, it just means that there are multiple servers and that makes it more difficult to diagnose. I also have no idea how you changed your username to speak on behalf of the other person. Perhaps you're certain they were speaking of the same thing?
If you want to use .torrents to do a deterministic test then have a friend (or just use a server) create a .torrent file for you and you alone - something with a unique username. Then, if you want, you can both use Wireshark simultaneously and compare results. You'll want to do this with more than one friend with each using an ISP that is not your own and, again, for a full picture use and compare Wireshark results. (Which can also detect packet injection.) You may need to do this with multiple friends because it's unlikely that they've got upload bandwidth enough to match your download bandwidth.
Downloading a random torrent from random people is not a good way to say the ISP is screwing with you. Oh, they probably *are* screwing with you but the test proves nothing unless you control the environment. Key point being, unless you're controlling the test environment you can't really point, say, and prove that it is your ISP. It probably is your ISP, they're a bunch of crooked pricks, but you can't really say it for certain. A nice private tracker will help you facilitate such a test.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Depending on how long DNS requests are delayed.
Rick B.
And this is why the NY AG would get very little info out of all this—They have no way of knowing if the person has the proper modem and router to take advantage of the full speed their connection offers. When I got 100mbps initially I couldn't break about 60mbps, as my modem was only DOCSIS 2.0 ... then also finding out my router was hamstringing me as well. Once I had a DOCSIS 3.0 modem AND replaced the terribad $40 Netgear router with something much nicer, I was able to finally hit 100mbps. Then you have the case of if people are using wireless instead of a wired connection, etc.
Why would you rent a modem from your ISP when a nice Motorola one is only like $60? Or even if its provided free, their supplied ones are most often garbage... and even worse are often modem/router combos.