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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."
To stop ISP's from cheating have Netflix host the speed test.
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 use BitTorrent to measure my connection speed, and I have never once gotten less than the advertised speed. In fact, I usually get more.
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?
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.
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.
My ISP has a monopoly because their franchise agreement gives it to them, ignoramus. That's not capitalism. It's not regardless of current law, it's because of it. A healthy dose of capitalism is exactly what the ISP market needs.
Capitalism won't help. ISPs will avoid competing in the same area. It's too expensive for the small ones to lay cable of their own, so without the law forcing larger ones to share their networks there will be zero competition.
The best option would be government owned fibre, with franchises to run and maintain it and open access for all isps.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC