Australia Considers Making It Illegal For ISPs To Advertise Inflated Speeds (vice.com)

The Australian government is currently considering a bill that would make it illegal for internet service providers to exaggerate speeds, or else face a fine of up to $1 million. "One constituent says he's being charged for a 25 megabit per second download speed and a five megabit per second upload and he's actually getting less than one tenth of that," said Andrew Wilkie, the Member of Parliament who introduced the bill. "In other words, people are getting worse than dial-up speed when they've been promised a whizz-bang, super-fast connection." Motherboard reports: Internet speeds can vary based on how many people are on the network and even the hardware you use, but while we can't expect ISPs to deliver maximum speed 100 percent of the time, previous probes into their performance have shown many ISPs in the U.S. aren't delivering even the minimum advertised speeds a majority of the time for the average user. Under the proposed Australian law, ISPs are simply required to be more transparent about what consumers can expect with a specific plan. Rather than advertising only the maximum speeds, they would have to include typical speeds for the average user, indicate busy periods, and clearly list any other factors that might impact service. The bill was only introduced this week, so it's yet to be seen if it will gain traction.

Comments

One Meeeelion Dollars!

[Anonymous Coward]

(cue laughter from the gathered telecoms executives)

One Meeeelion Dollars!

Re:One Meeeelion Dollars!

[Calydor]

Well, if it's a million dollars per day it's going to start hurting.

Re:One Meeeelion Dollars!

[PPH]

it's going to start hurting

Just check your Telstra broadband bill for the surcharge to cover the penalty.

Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[Attila Dimedici]

I would assume that Australia already has laws against false advertising. So, this would be redundant. I do not see how this is any worse than much other false advertising.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[Anonymous Coward]

no, we have other existing minimum speed guarantee laws that somehow counter the advertising laws.

it used to be just 1.5mbps, so if you were getting lots of issues on your line but you were getting 3mbps, telstra (they own practically all the copper networks in australia) would just tell you to fuck off.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[AmiMoJo]

They always word it as "up to" speeds to get around that. With ISP speeds there is a specific issue that the "up to" speed is only available to a tiny fraction of customers. Worse still the true speed you will get is hard to calculate - it depends on how long your bit of copper line is, what condition it's in, how congested your area is...

It's similar to car MPG ratings. Most are complete bollocks, and it's almost impossible to anticipate what a particular customer will be seeing with their driving style and routine. But at least there are some rules to make comparing cars somewhat useful. If there were no rules the numbers would be even sillier.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[Anonymous Coward]

I get that "up to" just means that a is less than b, which is trivially true if your talking inflated speed claims. However just like "tiger nards horn may cure the common cold and may be present on the same planet as our miracle placebo" it's technically true (has anyone proved they don't... yet?) but still utterly meaningless and really shouldn't be allowed in advertising.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[thegarbz]

I would assume that Australia already has laws against false advertising. So, this would be redundant. I do not see how this is any worse than much other false advertising.

They do, but what they are doing is not false advertising, just dishonest. ISPs advertise the maximum speed and they are right that those are the maximum speed a customer (just not *you*) could theoretically attain. What they are suggesting here is not that the false advertisement stops, but the idea of a maximum being advertised stops and instead people get an average.

Kind of reminds me of the days people were advertising $50 boom boxes with 2000W power output with lots of fineprint saying what that one specific condition is that would allow it to produce that power for a split millisecond.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[bane2571]

I looked this up a decade ago so my recollection or reality might be a bit different now but there are roughly two things that side step the false advertising:
The first is that every plan that deals with speed advertises "up to" that speed and usually make it clear that that is the theoretical maximum.
The second is that most of the connections are referred to as some form of "Broadband". Which is defined as somewhere around faster than dial up.
So if your up to 100mbps line is getting 1mbps you're still "up to" and you're still "Broadband" so the ISP is covered. You can switch if you want but you'll need to pay out your 24 month contract that you're locked into.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[rtb61]

In seems this case ISPs are simply retailing a shit service provided by the NBN the wholesaler. A purposefully designed shit service crippled not only in design but also in contractual implementation.

The system was purposefully designed to be a strangle band service. The wholesaler sells total bandwith allowed to a reseller and even when the wholesale can provide much more, they actually strangle off the service and cripple customer experience. So either the retailer buys more than they need or the assit the wholesaler in strangleband (instead of the retailer paying for bandwidth and when that is exceeded they are charged extra at a higher cost). Why purposeful strangle band, because it seems one corrupt family, seriously just one family, wants the service crippled to ensure their media empire profits, the Murdouch family and News Corporation.

They pretty much seemed to even set up the scam (via promotion in their media empire), where a gullible public were fooled into accepting speeding billions of dollars on a run down HFC network and comparing the cost of a decades old network against the cost of a brand new network, as if they were fucking equal (think comparing a brand new car with the latest technology, with a decades old car with crap old technology as if they were the fucking same, see old car cheaper way to go).

The NBN is a major con, a fraud, a chance for corrupt corporation to cook an election to make billions on old shit that was going to be scrapped and that has crippled Australia's entire broadband infrastructure for decades to come but that's OK because if profits one POS company, you know them, NEWS CORPORATION no matter where in the world they are pretty much a pack of cunts (what they did in Australia pretty close to treason).

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[mjwx]

I would assume that Australia already has laws against false advertising. So, this would be redundant. I do not see how this is any worse than much other false advertising.

Yes, but they're currently getting around that by advertising the maximum theoretical speed which technically isn't a lie, I.E. up to "24 Mb" for ADSL 2. What this bill will do is force them to advertise the average speed of customers which would be closer to 7 Mbit/s.

It should be noted that the bill was tabled by Andrew Wilkie, an independent and long time parliamentarian who actually represents average people. One of the few members of the Australian parliament who deserves the title "the Honourable".

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[Attila Dimedici]

You are the third or fourth person to more or less give me this answer. It seems to me that the problem is a poorly worded false advertising law...or perhaps stupid ISPs (if I ran an ISP and my top speed was less than my competitor's, but my typical speed was faster, I would promote that fact rather than the "up to" speed).


Personally, this answer seems to me to mean that the law is unnecessary. I long ago learned to pay attention to advertising qualifiers such as "up to" and "as much as", etc..

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[Bengie]

"mbps" is very imprecise. Assuming a 1Gb link, 3Mb/s is 0.3% of the utilization, which means the link is at 0% utilization 99.7% of the time. You could claim that you're getting 0Mb/s 99.7% of the time and that is statistically true. You just need to play with the window over which you measure bandwidth.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[mjwx]

Personally, this answer seems to me to mean that the law is unnecessary. I long ago learned to pay attention to advertising qualifiers such as "up to" and "as much as", etc..

Actually that's exactly why its needed. Most people dont pay attention to advertising qualifiers. "Up to" is designed to deceive the reader, more so that "up to" will be in small print and 24 MB will be in massive print. Fibre and cable broadband are capable of delivering their max line speed (I.E. if it's advertised at 50 Mb/s you can achieve that on the local loop). Most broadband in Australia is ADSL, with ADSL connection speed varies based on your distance from the exchange and line quality so an "up to" of a theoretical maximum is not indicative of service quality.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[kenh]

The second is that most of the connections are referred to as some form of "Broadband". Which is defined as somewhere around faster than dial up.

In America, according to the FCC, the term "broadband" has a very specific meaning - it was actually a cause of great gnashing of teeth here on Slashdot, when the average Slashdot reader apparently thought the FCC defining down the term for "mobile broadband" meant their *home* broadband connections would slow down.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[kenh]

They do, but what they are doing is not false advertising, just dishonest. ISPs advertise the maximum speed and they are right that those are the maximum speed a customer (just not *you*) could theoretically attain. What they are suggesting here is not that the false advertisement stops, but the idea of a maximum being advertised stops and instead people get an average.

That is fantastic! Replace a concrete limit on connection speed with an absolutely meaningless "average" metric. If "people" can't understand what the phrase "up to" means, will they have any better grasp on what "average" is?

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[Anonymous Coward]

> It’s similarly to car MPG ratings.

Yes, except that in the case of MPG ratings, they are being tested and reported by a third party. For ISP speeds, it’s all self-reported. Or, rather, it’s whatever marketing wants to print.

Re:Don't they have laws against false advertising?

[another_twilight]

if I ran an ISP and my top speed was less than my competitor's, but my typical speed was faster, I would promote that fact rather than the "up to" speed

Most of copper is owned by Telstra, the privatised version of the original public utility. Only a few companies (three, I think) have their own kit in exchanges. This means that to a large extent, speed is constrained by equipment owned by only a few players. There's very little room to run faster or have better average speeds when you're reselling someone else's service and trying to differentiate on service, pricing, packages etc.

I long ago learned to pay attention to advertising qualifiers such as "up to" and "as much as", etc.

Congratulations. Your virtue has been noted. Meanwhile, Australia has consumer laws that are designed to try to stop people to the left of you on the bell curve from being exploited by clever wording, misleading omissions or incomplete information. The ISPs are obeying the existing consumer law. It has been recognised that this is causing confusion and frustration for a large number of customers, so a bill is being proposed to help reduce that.

Personally, this answer seems to me to mean that the law is unnecessary.

Yup, if only everyone were as wonderful as you.

There are a great many problems with broadband in Australia. The mess that the recent federal government made of the original NBN plan has not helped. We went from FTTP for everyone, to FFTP, FTTB, FTTC/DP/D, FTTN and HFC because it would be cheaper in the short term. Plans that are being offered include 100Mb down that's only possible on FTTP, but ISPs (well, Telstra, at least) aren't making that clear. Another ISP/provider with an aging cable infrastructure that isn't going to be incorporated has been telling existing customers that they are going to be terminated as soon as an NBN service is available and that if they don't switch within 30 days, they'll be cut-off. This is against the guidelines of letting people have 18 months to evaluate alternatives and come to understand the new services being offered (and to see how they play out in a given region). Optus, the provider in question, is claiming that their existing contracts allow termination within that time frame and as their cable infrastructure isn't going to get used, they're bailing on having to support it for any longer than necessary. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are finding this hard to follow.

So no, regulation is very much necessary, regardless of how virtuous you are in reading the fine print.

Yep.

[ledow]

Same in the UK - they are going to have to advertise a guaranteed minimum as well as their headline figures.

We all know this was going to be abused from the second people started advertising "up to". They never really used to game it in the modem era, because it was 33.6K or 56K (or whatever) and your modem knew the difference.

Either we need to start charging based on the speed available (i.e. basically per gigabyte, which means most people on slow connections won't be able to consume enough to make money on) or we need to guarantee a figure (minimum or average, it doesn't matter, so long as you can get your money back if they can't reach it).

It's like saying that I'll give you "up to" 500g of sweets if you pay me a certain amount. And then only giving people one small jelly baby. It's fine to be approximate, it's fine to have variation, it's fine for there to be reasons for it, but it shouldn't be the norm.

I live in a major town inside Greater London. Highly developed area. Very dense development. Right in the middle of thousands of houses, roads, rail links, etc. And they will guarantee me "up to 5Mbps" on ADSL, "up to 15Mbps" on VDSL. That's just not worth me paying the standing charge for the line for, let alone the actual total cost.

I bought a 4G router instead and get a consistent 30Mbps from it. No guarantee, obviously, but I can change SIM card to another provider whenever I feel it's not meeting my needs, and I have no monthly ongoing tie-in.

But when 4G is at least 6 times better than what they'll promise on me on home broadband, there's something wrong.

3G was viable to use as a broadband replacement. 4G is more than adequate. When 5G becomes the norm, home broadband is going to take a massive hit, unless they buck their ideas up and start guaranteeing some service that we can't get elsewhere. And I guarantee that we see 5G in the rural areas before we see decent broadband speeds... purely because it then kills two birds with one stone - a single point covering hundreds of households for broadband and mobile phone coverage with no additional wiring required.

Telcos are going to drop home broadband eventually, and just start dealing in leased lines and 5G-antennas for nearby households.

Re:Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

Either we need to start charging based on the speed available (i.e. basically per gigabyte, which means most people on slow connections won't be able to consume enough to make money on) or we need to guarantee a figure (minimum or average, it doesn't matter, so long as you can get your money back if they can't reach it).

Sadly people don't really do complexity well, so it has to be simple. How about, if you advertise 50Mbps and your average speed really is 50Mbps when you actually use data, then your bill is as expected. If your average speed is really 25Mbps, your bill is cut in half. The key has to be that the average is only calculated when you saturate your link, or attempt to. You also need to do it often enough to be statistically significant.

Its a little work to define, but if the average user could notice they are not getting what they paid for, then the bill should be reduced to what they got.

Re:Yep.

[flightmaker]

I wholeheartedly agree with this but we really should go further. The phrase "up to" should be illegal in all advertising not just broadband data rates. For example,

This paint "Lasts for up to 7 years" - bullshit, if it peels off the day after that's fine
This toothpaste "Removes up to 100% of stains" - bullshit, it doesn't have to do anything.

The term "up to" is over used everywhere and is obviously designed by advertising agencies to confuse the gullible.

Please, let's replace "up to" with "at least" in all advertising then everybody will know where they stand.

Re:Yep.

[linuxwrangler]

I don't think even that goes far enough. I would argue that the *only* bandwidth number one could advertise is the 95th percentile minimum guaranteed speed. That would encompass both speed and reliability in one number. They should also be required to list maximum latency even though most of the population won't understand it - at least at first.

As to advertising in general, I personally think that it is false advertising to show any product other than how it is regularly delivered and commonly and properly used. No doctored up glam shots of a fast food burger - show it as it typically appears right after you peel off the greasy paper. Same thing for any ad that requires a disclaimer of the "professional driver, closed course, do not attempt" variety.

Re:Yep.

[AmiMoJo]

How about, if you advertise 50Mbps and your average speed really is 50Mbps when you actually use data, then your bill is as expected. If your average speed is really 25Mbps, your bill is cut in half.

That would be a good start, but things like latency and packet loss are also pretty important for a lot of applications.

Re:Yep.

[Calydor]

As the old saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of backup tapes racing down the freeway.

Re:Yep.

[dryeo]

Interesting speeds you get. I'm in rural BC, lots of trees and rain. The other month (Nov) the phone company lit up their new cell tower and pushing their 4G home internet which I signed up for as dial up now a days is insanely slow. The best speeds I've seen have been about 15/1 (usually more like 12/1.5 and now in the evenings, it is more like 1/3 and even watching a crappy youtube video results in lots of time outs. It seems that it is just as easy to oversell 4G as any other type of connection and while it does solve the final mile cheaply, it sure has its limits. Being Canada, it sure isn't cheap either.

Re: Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in SK in a smallish town, I pay for 150Mbps down and 15Mbps up.

Literally every time i've tested, i receive around 175Mbps down and 20 Mbps up.

Re:Yep.

[kenh]

Please, let's replace "up to" with "at least" in all advertising then everybody will know where they stand.

If an ISP offers "at least" 5 Mbps connection speeds (for example), that means they commit to providing every user with a 24x7, 365 dys a year 5 Mbps connection between their house and... what? The head end office? Any Internet resource anywhere in the world? what? Such a claim would invite lawsuits.

Re:Yep.

[kenh]

Its a little work to define, but if the average user could notice they are not getting what they paid for, then the bill should be reduced to what they got.

Imagine two users - one gets a solid 50 Mbps connection to Amazon/Google/YouTube/Facebook/Netflix and the other gets an average of 2.5 Mbps connection to an obscure Asian anime fan website, should the "average user" pay 100% of their bill, and the "anime user" only pay 1/20th of their bill, because that's what they actually "got"?

Re:Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in the last week or so I have noticed TPG advertising on the side of buses here in Perth which is something along the lines of '27Mbps average evening speed'. So they have certainly upped their game.

And a couple of days ago I got an email from TPG (I am a customer) which told me that I can't get the speed I signed up for and they offered me the option to quit my contract (with a $110 refund), change to a lower tier speed (with the refund), or keep my current contract.

I signed up for the 100Mbps tier but apparently can only get 95.6Mbps. I will keep that rather than dropping to a 50Mbps plan from them (or someone else). It isn't 100, but is near enough. I want the highest I can get and that speed won't be beaten by anyone else at my place.

So I'm actually quite happy with the recent changes in honesty, at least at TPG.

Re:Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine two users - one gets a solid 50 Mbps connection to Amazon/Google/YouTube/Facebook/Netflix and the other gets an average of 2.5 Mbps connection to an obscure Asian anime fan website, should the "average user" pay 100% of their bill, and the "anime user" only pay 1/20th of their bill, because that's what they actually "got"?

Why not? This is "pay for capacity actually used", plain and simple. Both users may have theoretical 50Mbps from ISP to house - but the ISP has no interesting content on their own. They have a good connection to Google/Flix/... so those using that capacity pay.

Those connecting to an obscure low-bandwith site pays for what they use - which may not be much.

A fair and exact payment plan would be something like "a fixed fee to provide infrastructure, then a per-byte fee for data transferred". And obviously, profit extraction on top of that.

No issues with what happens when too many download and the speed drops for all. No issues with big user vs small user.

Re:Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

My ISP sells dedicated residential bandwidth and their definition of dedicated is that you will not see any congestion on their network nor to their transit provider. I think that's acceptable. It's actually the same guarantee you get as an enterprise user short of purchasing private channels to specific locations. They actually do not use any form of QoS and residential shares the same network as the enterprise users. The only difference is the layer 2. Enterprise gets 10/100Gb fiber active Ethernet, while residential uses *under*-subscribed PON. 0.14ms pings to internal servers from home.

Re:Yep.

[Bengie]

You just described a horribly simplistic representation and solution of the problem. Not all bytes are equal. A low bandwidth usage probably use more expensive bytes than a high bandwidth usage. It's more than likely cheaper to burst an 8Mb stream at 1Gb/s than to trickle a 3Mb stream steadily. And that's but one example.

Worse than dial-up?

[pgn674]

2.5 Mbps is 45 times as fast as 56 kbps.

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[Anonymous Coward]

With adverts, trackers and miners slowing things down it won’t make a difference. It’s like choosing between a turtle and a snail.

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[Anonymous Coward]

2.5 Mbps is the modern equivalent of dial-up when it comes to broadband.

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[Anonymous Coward]

2.5 Mbps is 45 times as fast as 56 kbps.

Technically true, but thanks to ads, Javascript libraries, ads, linked fonts, ads, embedded video, ads, animated GIF versions of videos, ads, etc., web page content has bloated, frequently by more than that factor of 45, since the days of 56k, so the effective speed isn't a whole lot faster.

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[thegarbz]

Oh you must be an ISP. You read a statement and then pointed out the *maximum* from that statement ;-)

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah NO. my parents home is currently on just over 2megabits. It is perfectly usable for web browsing, email and gaming. No they can't use it for video streaming but it is a perfectly viable connection and a shitton faster than dialup ever was.

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[Anonymous Coward]

It hasn't increased by anywhere near a factor of 45 and the reality is Ads are easily blocked. up until very recently I was on an ADSL connection that ranged from 2-3 Mbps, yes it sucked, but it wasn't anywhere near the agony of using a dialup back in the day. The only thing that is really unusable on such a connection is streaming video or large downloads (though I would just schedule those for night time).

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[martinX]

He probably meant ADSL.

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[kenh]

Technically true, but thanks to ads, Javascript libraries, ads, linked fonts, ads, embedded video, ads, animated GIF versions of videos, ads, etc., web page content has bloated, frequently by more than that factor of 45, since the days of 56k, so the effective speed isn't a whole lot faster.

What utter hogwash - you conflate network connection speed with page render time, which is (as you point out) a function of not only connection speed but page content. Would you make the opposite claim that the pure-text web was "faster" on 14,400 baud modems than the "modern" web with larded-up webpages and "up to 25 Mbps" connection speeds?

Re:Worse than dial-up?

[Bengie]

Back when I had dialup, I got a flat ~200ms ping. When I had cable, I had anywhere from 30ms to 2000ms. Dialup was 10x faster than cable.

This is how you destroy your site and lose visitor

[Anonymous Coward]

For the second time in a week or two, you let someone take down your website and didnâ(TM)t even notice it for two or three days.

Theyâ(TM)ve always been thieves

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember years ago when Australian ISPâ(TM)s would only serve up cached websites and update once per day. How awful was that?

Re:Theyâ(TM)ve always been thieves

[nonBORG]

Had this problem with an ISP here, a website I was trying to access went down for a while and because the ISP served only the cached version it kept saying it was down. I eventually figured out that if I changed the address to https (from http) I would get a secure link to the website which bypassed the cache. Not always possible if there is no secure version of the site.

Funny I would have thought that false advertising was already illegal but apparently they need to make a new special law for ISPs in Australia? Are we to assume that it will only be ISPs in Australia that will not be able to make false advertising claims?

Re:Theyâ(TM)ve always been thieves

[marka63]

It is and the ACCC fined large telcos and made them pay back the differences between the plan the customer was on and the plan that was achievable on the link. Customers that were affected could also cancel their contracts with no penalty for early termination.

The ACCC also drew up new advertising guidelines which require ISP's to advertise the rate achievable in peak times.

Going forward, if after connection, it is found that the rate you signed up for is not achievable on the link you can downgrade the contracted rate to what is achievable or pull out of the contract.

https://www.accc.gov.au/public...
https://www.accc.gov.au/consum...

Re:Theyâ(TM)ve always been thieves

[kenh]

It's because they think the average Australian can't understand that offering someone "up to 25 Mbps" connection isn't the same thing as offering them a "guaranteed 25 Mbps" connection.

Worse than dialup

[Anonymous Coward]

> One constituent says he's being charged for a 25 megabit per second download speed and a five megabit per second upload and he's actually getting less than one tenth of that ...
> "In other words, people are getting worse than dial-up speed when they've been promised a whizz-bang, super-fast connection."

Let's do the math: 25Mbps/10=2.5Mbps. Dialup speed was 45Kbps at the max. So 2.5Mbps is less than 45Kbps, wow!

price advertising is also fraudulent

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they can also fix the problem where they advertise "$79.99/mo" but when your bill comes it's $126.38 because of all the extra BS fees they didn't include in the advertised price.

Re:price advertising is also fraudulent

[dwywit]

It shouldn't be difficult to collect stats from the modem. Every day that the connection can't achieve that full speed triggers a discount on the bill, say 1% for each day the speed isn't reached.

Every day the speed can't achieve 67% of that speed triggers an additional discount, say 2%.

Can't get to 50% of that speed? Another discount - this time 5%.

No doubt this will result in much higher monthly bills, to cover the penalty discounts, or it might result in more realistic pricing to provide the service - you know, the ISPs and telcos might put some money into better infrastructure. I'd be happier if my bill was 50% higher, but came with a guaranteed speed.

But that's not going to happen. The clusterfuck here known as NBN means Telstra stopped investment in the landline/broadband services years ago. ADSL2+ here is about 1/3 of the theoretical maximum, but I pay the same as someone in town next door to the exchange getting ~22Mbit. I accept that there are technical limitations on the copper (distance), but why shouldn't my pricing reflect the actual service I receive.

If some ISP put a 4G repeater nearby, I'd be on it like flies on shit.

Is he actually running slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is he just having wifi issues with his home network?

and he's actually getting less than one tenth of..

[grep -v '.*' *]

Sorry, your bits are too big and heavy. Try moving the modem closer to the wall, or better yet just move closer to the CO. It's really that fast there!

Oh, and also your bits seem to be slightly off-color. Try adding more beige and see if that helps in the interim.

Let us know when you've completed your move and we'll bill you, I mean hook your additional location right up.

Strewth and also blue ruin

[Hognoxious]

Interfering in the market when if they just leave it alone people will switch supplier if they get bad speeds.

Next they'll be taking everybody's guns, introducing socialised medicine and allowing poofters to get married. Married to other bloomin' poofters, that is.

It's political correctness gone mad.

(cayenne8 is on holiday)

Re:Strewth and also blue ruin

[dwywit]

Thank you for filling in ;-)

Unfortunately, the retailers buy capacity from the NBNCo. They compete almost solely on price, which means they don't buy enough capacity to cope with peak demand - hence the slowdowns between 4pm and 11pm when everyone's watching Netflix. Speeds are generally much better outside of those times. Retailers should be offering tiered pricing based on actual performance. Discounted rates during peak times, but a big discount from midnight-5am. It would help if Netflix made the download-watch-later option available - that way you download Altered Carbon episodes between 2am and 4am, then watch them that evening.

that is a freakin awesome dialup

[Anonymous Coward]

worse than dialup speed? fuck man I would have killed for a 2 megabit dialup connection. hell I spent a small fortune getting ISDN installed for a DOV connection to give me 128k. We do have a subsection of Australia getting substandard speeds but no need to exaggerate.

What about physical limitations?

[thegarbz]

So this is all good and find in theory where everyone is on fiber and perfect copper, but the vast majority of Australia is on ADSL2+ which has a theoretical speed limit of 25/5 and a practical speed limit that is very much dependent on each individual customer and not at all in control of the ISP or how much bandwidth they are able to allocate to you.

I was on a pretty good ISP and never experienced peak hour slowdowns (though I left Australia before Netflix became a thing there). However that doesn't change the fact that my 25mbit plan was never going to see more than 21mbit (I was close to the exchange) and my father on the same ISP in the same area was never going to see more than 7mbit.

How are they supposed to advertise this kind of service?

Re:What about physical limitations?

[lordlod]

So this is all good and find in theory where everyone is on fiber and perfect copper, but the vast majority of Australia is on ADSL2+ which has a theoretical speed limit of 25/5 and a practical speed limit that is very much dependent on each individual customer and not at all in control of the ISP or how much bandwidth they are able to allocate to you.

How are they supposed to advertise this kind of service?

The same way they do now, don't mention performance. For ADSL customers performance isn't a differentiating feature when choosing an ISP. That is in the pitch, then they offer a detailed page like Internode's that goes into a fair bit of detail and allows you to guess at your speed.

The target of this is the NBN resellers. Particularly dodgy operators which offer 100Mbps plans over a wireless link that they know maxes out at a tenth of that, or under-provision the backhaul so everyone is crawling along.

Of course you can't avoid that this is really about a political party that promised fantastic internet with unicorns and sparkles, delivered a mule with fleas and desperately wants everyone to blame the stablehand.

Re:What about physical limitations?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is mainly in response to NBN connections where the bottleneck is at the exchange not the end user. They get around this by gathering statistics and advertising average evening peak speed. Then when the assigned government body complains they hand over the data or get a series of escalating fines.

Re:What about physical limitations?

[complete loony]

This discussion isn't about ADSL, but NBN connections. At least on an ADSL plan, once you knew your link speed, you would get that much bandwidth all day. Now that people are swapping to NBN, and ISP's aren't paying their extortionate rate for bandwidth, your actual throughput will vary.

I hate the fact that we are building this brand new network, with enough capacity to provide for our bandwidth needs for the next 50 years. But we're not allowing people to use it unless they pay a stupid amount of money. How much of this new infrastructure is sitting idle?

Would we be as complacent if the government built a new road network, but then set speed limits per car based on the wealth of the driver, allowing only 1% of the capacity of the road to be used?

Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Over Subscription (aka. Contention Ratios) was already shit with ADSL with "recommended" ratios of 50:1 for consumer plans and 20:1 for business plans.

It's only going to get worse with NBN where I've already seen CR figures of 4,000:1 in their publicly available wholesale documentation for RSPs (Retail Service Providers).

Re:Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

interestingly those huge contention Ratios actually are ok.....if video streaming wasn't so popular now. Most home users use a tiny fraction of their connection, well under 1%, but unfortunately at specific times of the day (like 6-9pm) they are more likely using about 5-10% on average. The old contention ratios just don't work well with the new consumption models.

"Fast, Cheaper, Sooner"

[jezwel]

The words of our current PM, when they won government and switched from 93% fibre to the premise to a mish-mash of whatever technology seemed cheapest to deploy for that area.
The result has been an explosion of additional costs to remediate the chosen technologies, such that both cost and completion time-frame are now worse than the 93% FTPP plan.

You know what is *not* included in the new cost model?
Legislation and regulation costs & effort dealing with the vagaries of the mish-mash network that needs remediation, or for several chosen technologies (FTTC units and CoaxTTC), actual R&D for stuff that doesn't exist yet.

Up to

[fox171171]

"Up to x speed" is intentionally deceptive.

Kind of like mixing 100% beef and 100% earthworms in a 50:50 ratio and then advertising it as "Made with 100% beef". It's true, but deceptive.

Re:Up to

[kenh]

"Up to x speed" is intentionally deceptive.

No, it isn't - it clearly states that "X speed" is the maximum possible, it makes no claim about average or minimum speed.

Legend has it that P.T. Barnum had a sign in his "oddities museum" in NYC that promoted the "Egress" with numerous arrows directing museum-goers to see the "Egress", only to have the customer arrive at a door marked "Egress" that was actually the exit. Who's fault was it when the patrons walked out the exit - Barnum clearly indicated what it was, is it his fault his customers didn't know what an "Egress" was?

Re:Up to

[fox171171]

"Up to x speed" is intentionally deceptive.

No, it isn't - it clearly states that "X speed" is the maximum possible, it makes no claim about average or minimum speed.

Legend has it that P.T. Barnum had a sign in his "oddities museum" in NYC that promoted the "Egress" with numerous arrows directing museum-goers to see the "Egress", only to have the customer arrive at a door marked "Egress" that was actually the exit. Who's fault was it when the patrons walked out the exit - Barnum clearly indicated what it was, is it his fault his customers didn't know what an "Egress" was?

It's not his fault they don't know, but it seems pretty clear that he did know that many would not. So he was telling the truth, just like my two examples, but also being intentionally deceptive.

Fraudband

[Anonymous Coward]

They wouldn't be having this problem if the lying criminal fucks in government hadn't sabotaged the FTTP rollout.

Lossy Technologies and Internet Speed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those that are un-familiar with Australia and its infrastructure, most of Australia has had relatively slow internet. NBN (or the National Broadband Network) was designed to rectify this issue delivering people with high-speed internet. Originally Australia was to get fibre to the premises to every home, but to cut some corners and costs the liberal government decided to use a multi-technology mix. Meaning lossy technologies like fibre to the node, which use fibre to a certain point and using copper rest of the way over VDSL. NBN-CO the wholesaler has several speed tiers which can be provisioned on their lines (12/1mbps, 25/5 Mbps, 50/20Mbps or 100/40Mbps). The only issue is that when your on any one of these speed tiers the limitations of the technology mean that being an a 100/40 speed tier means you may not ever receive half of this speed or for some even a third of it due to the distance from the node and quality of the copper cables. While this blame is being passed on retail service providers, you have to admit advertising any speed is going to be difficult. Every address will have a completely different obtainable speed. You are paying more to be on a different speed tier which will not necessarily reflect in a speed at the end users address. Also the public expectations for what speed tiers mean and what speeds you will receive needs to be changed. People doing a speed test 4 rooms away over wi-fi with 6 people using it at the same time is not going reflect the through put of what the service is delivering.

Faulty Math

[kenh]

. "One constituent says he's being charged for a 25 megabit per second download speed and a five megabit per second upload and he's actually getting less than one tenth of that," said Andrew Wilkie, the Member of Parliament who introduced the bill. "In other words, people are getting worse than dial-up speed when they've been promised a whizz-bang, super-fast connection."

When has dial-up ever been 2.5Mbps or even 0.5Mbps? The best dial-up I was ever aware of was 0.056Mbps, AKA 56Kbps.

Re:Faulty Math

[Bengie]

USR shotgun teck. 112kbit/s! Modem bonding. The ISP needed to support it and it used two lines.

Sure, let's exaggerate, too... that'll help!

[zarmanto]

So this quote presents a bit of an issue:

"... he's being charged for a 25 megabit per second download speed ... and he's actually getting less than one tenth of that," said Andrew Wilkie, ... "In other words, people are getting worse than dial-up speed ..."

So, for those of us who still remember surfing the web over actual dial-up -- or even for those of you who can look up those speeds and do a little bit of really easy math -- the peak speed of a legacy POTS based dial-up modem connection was 56kbps. One-tenth of 25mbps would still be 2.5mbps, which is roughly on the order of 2500kbps. So unless that "less than one tenth" quote really meant less than one thousandth... those broadband users are probably still getting dramatically faster speeds than dial-up.

Mind you, the exaggerated performance figures routinely offered up by ISPs is indeed a yuuuuuge problem... but when Mr. Wilkie uses his own set of exaggerated numbers to illustrate the severity of the problem, all he's really doing is undermining his own credibility -- which, make no mistake, the ISPs will almost certainly recognize and point out, in their rebuttal.