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How the Raspberry Pi Can Automatically Tweet Complaints About Your Slow Internet (ibtimes.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Contacting your internet provider to complain about slow browsing speeds is a tiresome chore which none of us enjoy, but one man has found a solution. He has configured a Raspberry Pi computer to automatically tweet a complaint to Comcast when his internet falls below 50Mbps, well below the 150Mbps he pays for. Wouldn't it be nice if ISPs wrote a rebate check each month to reflect the percentage of their promised throughput that was actually available?
This Raspberry Pi device has to have something really special inside! I am shocked.
Wouldn't it be nice if ISPs wrote a rebate check each month to reflect the percentage of their promised throughput that was actually available?
I'd like a pony, too.
#stupidstory #shouldstayinfirehose #thankstimmy
Wouldn't it be nice if ISPs wrote a rebate check each month to reflect the percentage of their promised throughput that was actually available?
I'm sure what they promise in the fine print is to do their best to try and deliver you atleast some fraction of the advertised bandwidth some of the time.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
How does the raspberry Pi know it's not just the servers being slow.
And if it works, can I have a windows version for my VPN provider PrivateVPN, who suck when it comes to slow downs and strangling torrent uploads.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
You must be new here....
Doesn't this miss the point? ISP's will carry on with this sort of behaviour if everyone just lies down and takes it.
The regulators should of course be doing more, but this sounds like a very useful way to at least increase the hassle the ISP must go through to provide less than a third of their advertised speed.
Not too sure about the rest of the world, but in South Africa the adverts in fine print say "UP TO (x)Mbps".
So if your service is slower, it still falls into their accepted limits ...
1) Automatically measure browsing speed for each web link published on Slashdot.
2) send compliant letter to ISP asking for refund.
3) ???
4) Profit!
OK look, all you idiots hate Comcast, but this guy is clearly spamming. Spamming is bad, right? You people advocated the death sentence for spammers, and this guy is spamming. He's pure evil, right? Oh! He's spamming Comcast, so it's OK.
You're all hypocrites.
No, spam is unsolicited commercial communication. From the summary, this seems that the guy is not soliciting new business, and is providing feedback to a commercial services provider via a channel they themselves put into place for the purpose and are ostensibly monitoring. Not spamming at all.
Disclaimers: I don't have a Twitter account, nor do I live in a country where Comcast operates. Nor do I read TF articles.
Wouldn't it be nice if ISPs wrote a rebate check each month to reflect the percentage of their promised throughput that was actually available?
They do if you want to negotiate a SLA that guarantees it, but that tends to be kinda expensive for the average residential customer. Otherwise you get best-effort.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
My advertised speed is 50 and I get 150 (and yeah, it's Comcast).
My advertised speed is 6, but my WISP was giving me about 1 and about 10% packet loss for over a week, and arguing with me about it. Using ye olde ping command I could see clearly that the problem was in their network (probably in the first radio shack, there are 4 microwave hops before their actual uplink) and they STILL argued with me about it extensively.
It's nice that you're not having problems, but why don't you smeg off and let the people who are have a discussion?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
448/96 kbit/s looks enviously in your direction ...
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
It is not spam when "you already have a business relationship with someone". Providers (ab)use this for telling us about new offers we don't care about. This guy simply goes the other way - and he even has legitimate complaints!
Oh, my, it's not even routing. The script just tries a speedtest service without concern for whatever else might be competing with the Pi for transfer.
The usefulness and appropriateness of complaining like this can be debated, but when he connects to a big torrent and his Pi starts complaining that Comcast is being slow - well, that's just an asshole move.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I don't get the RasPi hate in this thread. The Pi is clearly not intended for applications such as a high powered NAS, but I've got 3 RasPi 2's running OSMC\Kodi as media centers on my TVs and they do awesome streaming full HD movies and TV shows from my 16TB piecemeal server! Of course, once 4k becomes more prevalent, I'm going to have to make a change, but for now my family uses them happily on a daily basis. Does anyone complain when their hammer sucks at tightening screws? Use the right damn tool for the job!
Next, the ISPs will develop a Raspberry PI device that can automatically do nothing in response to the flood of these automated tweets...and the cycle continues...
If you approach the arbitrary/BS monthly cap, you get an automated message. Good job turning that around on them.
You don't need to start stories with "how..." or "why..." or worse still "ten reason why you must ..."
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Consumer internet is never guaranteed a rate from cable providers. There's an advertised speed, and they give you whatever the fuck they feel like. And you'll like it, because in most places they operate you've got no other choice!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Certainly there's nothing special about a Raspberry Pi for such purposes, but they are common and inexpensive. I just wish that Pi Zeros were actually available. I've got some old webcams I'd love to turn into security cameras...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Well, Most ISP specify the speed as "up to", which means that slow speeds are not a breach of contract.
Except ISPs only advertise an *up to* speed. Nowhere does any ISP so you can get maximum bandwidth 24/7.
Unless the device knows what bandwidth utilization is like on the connection, this is nearly useless. The measurement needs to be done at the router or egress port level or for all the raspberry pi knows, there a dozen other devices on the network segment using 90% of the bandwidth for torrents, netflix, etc.
Will do no good. "Speeds are not guaranteed" and pushing 150mbps, down DOCSIS, with an entire neighborhood using the same DOCSIS frequencies...you're NOT going to get the 150mbps you pay for. Not to mention speedtests download so little data it's not an accurate picture.
You should use some simple RF science to figure out why you'll never get those speeds on a reliable basis. Last I looked; they weren't even giving more than 200mbps total on each node
Maybe that's changed; but the real problem is you're on a over-sold network that's shared with who knows how many people. Good luck.
The only thing guaranteed is the connection speed between your router and the cable company head office - buying a 150 Mb/sec data plan from your cable company doesn't guarantee you'll get data from a remote server anywhere near 150 Mb/sec. The actual speed of a connection to a remote web server depends on the various speeds of the links that comprise the path between your Raspberry Pi and the remote server, most of which are not under the control of 'evil' Comcast.
Ken
Comcast (ISP) only guarantees what it controls - the connection speed between your on-premises hardware (router) and their head-end equipment, they have no control over the speed Amazon streams content to your FireStick.
To measure performance Comcast could send test packets from the head-end to your router and calculate the speed at that moment, but that in no way is an indicator of how fast NetFlix streams will arrive at your Roku, since that stream originates outside Comcast's control. Oh, and by the way, now that Comcast and other ISPs are being forced to treat all packets the same, they are prevented by law from doing anything that treats NetFlix, Amazon, etc. streams as a priority on their networks, because, you know - all packets are equal!
Ken
I don't get the RasPi hate in this thread.
Because the neckbeards here have grown into conservative luddites. See also: Uber, systemd, any programming language that isn't C or Perl, etc, etc, etc....
What's to say he couldn't? A pfSense router has monitoring tools built in to track performance. You could easily wrote a minutely cron job to poll the last few values and fire off an email/tweet/whatever to the provider and all that would be needed is a little shell scripting.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Declaring peace on the horrid typo... that should be write not wrote.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Fine. You don't want to spam the poor mega-corp. How about you open a trouble ticket with them instead? http://makezine.com/projects/s...
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog
Except ISPs only advertise an *up to* speed. Nowhere does any ISP so you can get maximum bandwidth 24/7.
This is not true. Many do sell services with a CIR (committed information rate). Of course, you pay more, but it's available.
Even if it's a low 1500 kbps CIR, that may be far better than a 50 Mbps line that's really 0-50 Mbps if you need to run consistent services.
150 isn't that great. I get 1Gb bursts from most websites which would cause ping spikes and jitter if it wasn't for my ISP using an AQM. It's not how slow the Internet is, it's how much faster it could be for the exact same price while they could still make a huge margin. They are purposefully holding us back, it could be better, much better.
Your argument is we should be happy because it could be worse? I say we should be angry because it could be better.
Lots of pictures of, and for, cakes.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
YOU don't get to redefine words. AC gave you the definition of spam, unsolicited commercial email. You don't get to claim it is something that it isn't just because you want to use the word where it doesn't belong.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Having had two consumer WiFi routers crap out in the last 4 years (start dropping packets like crazy), I wonder how he differentiates with issues on his network or on Comcast's when running this speed test. Even something as simple as the cat yanking on the network cable could affect the results.
Thank you for that, I will order a couple of those. These look like they might be useful for many different purposes.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Is procmail compatible with Twitter?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If you were getting only 50Kb of that 500Kb, would you complain about failure to deliver what you are paying for?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The Raspberry Pi sucks
For what? Your assertion is rubbish without describing your use case. If it sucks chances are you're not using it for the right use case and you're probably an idiot for buying into it.
Rewrite the code in Lua (which is usually already installed) or install python if you have the room. https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/s...
Not that I'd recommend participating in such pestering campaigns, mostly due to a lot of ISPs having some form of "no speed guarantee" clause in their contract.
(The article is really more about selling the Raspberry Pi than it is about ISP accountability, and it uses the most (actionable) emotional hook that people have about technology, access speeds.)
Let's just put something in to example. While I'm using some old figures from memory and making some up; let's go with it.
Let's say there's 1000 people in your neighborhood; it's a bit of a remote area so you're happy to have cable. There's a node that sits just outside of your neighborhood that serves all 1000 people. LEt's be kind and say they have 8 channels of DOCSIS 3.0 available in the RF spectrum. Each DOCSIS 3 channel gives you about 38mbps of downstream; so that's 304mbps available.
Here's where the issue comes in; if the node only has one RF line serving everyone; then they've got 304mbps total for all 1000 people. If all 1000 people get on and hammer the connections, that's under a megabit per person. It's probably not that bad, so let's say they have 10 lines coming out. That's 304mbps per 100 people. If they had 100 coaxial lines coming out of the node serving 10 people each; that's still only 30.4mbps available per person if everyone is full on hammering connections.
But the ISP's work on the assumption that not everyone will be hammering at one point...and they hope the average person's usage will be such that they won't notice speed drop.
It's a shared resource; and cable does it as cheaply as they can. Overselling the network on the hopes your customers aren't going to make the same high demands is exactly how they operate. If they did it based on the lowest guarnteed speed; who know how low that would be and they would never be able to market it.
Are you kidding? England for the most part has vastly better internet than the US. You want an 80/20 connection? IT'll run you maybe $28/month. That's a VDSL2 connection to a fiber cabinet located somewhere near you.
The UK, with the exception of some rural areas, far surpasses us internet wise. It's cheaper, faster, and vastly more reliable. Granted, most of the infrastructure is owned by British Telecom and the ISP's merely lease from them; it's vastly different than the free-for-all ISP owned infrastructure we have here. Prices are actually a bit more regulated over there than over here.
Their TV is far superior to ours as well. More channels OTA, more channels for free, 75% fewer commercials and 100% less censorship after 2100GMT.
Yup. We used to have a contract with our ISP. They provided minimal speeds as per our agreement and repaired uptime per our agreement. Failure for them to actually maintain the minimal speed and uptime meant they got penalties. Some of those penalties were actually significantly more than we actually paid them. Assuming a reasonably optimal physical location, you can get a whole bunch of different contracts or even have a lawyer write one for you.
An outage of any significant duration would have cost us quite a bit of money. We had five offices and connectivity was a requirement. We had redundancy in the form of multiple connections coming in to the network connections - as in physically disparate connections. As it would have cost us a bunch of money to go down, there were penalties that were *higher than our bill* if they failed to give us the uptime per the contract and the minimal speeds in the contract.
I suspect that many consumers can actually access this service. I suspect that many consumers do not actually want to pay for this level of service. Yes, the penalties might have been tough for them but we paid them far more overall. I think we only had to do the penalty thing twice (that I recollect) and both times were fairly minimal and we just swapped to fail-overs. I do think customers want that level of service, however. Our main office had an OC-4 at the time. Maybe a T-4? I'm not actually sure of the difference - that's why I paid professionals. It did have a 4 in it!
At any rate... I'm not sure if people are actually aware of what they're wanting and what it costs to get that level of service. We paid a whole bunch for our connectivity. But, we paid for uptime and minimal throughput guarantees. We paid for true 24/7 support. We paid for something like a four hour window to have someone on-site if there was a problem that needed it. We paid for something like a 15 minute window for support. Those sorts of things were all line items in the contract(s) filled.
Oh, we paid out the ass but we got good service. The longest was an outage due to a weather incident and yes, we even penalized them for that. It was only out a few days but we had to flip on the backup, lost some valuable time doing so, and had to pay the costs associated with turning the backup on and buying bandwidth from a totally different provider. So, technically, there are options - the options are just not that feasible. The consumer (myself included) wants the best possible service at the lowest possible price. Most folks are unwilling or unable to negotiate either of those two things unless they really want a big internet connectivity bill.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The Pine A64 just exceeded its kick starter funding. It sounds very promising for cheap 4k media boxes. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
sustainable living
The Pine A64 just exceeded its kick starter funding. It sounds very promising for cheap 4k media boxes. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Well, fairly promising anyway. It can only do 4k at 30 fps. That's fine for digital signage, where the base ($15) model should mop up. It's not as exciting for a media player. I backed the 2GB model, but I'm not planning to do 4k output, only 1920x1200 or less.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"