ISPs Offer Faster Speeds, Why Don't We Get Them? 688
Ron Williams asks: "I'm infuriated every time I see that companies are raising their speeds when they can't maintain their current speeds. Here's my biggest issue: my grandmother signed up for the 3Mbps DSL plan through Verizon, however a speed test said she was only getting 750Kbps. Why pay for the extra bandwidth when she's not getting it? She downgraded to the 768K plan expecting to still have 750K. Wrong, instead her speed dropped to 300K. So, how about instead of companies constantly claiming to increase their speeds, they get their actual speeds correct. Comcast has done the same thing, I had their 6Mbps plan at one point, I got 2.5Mbps usually and sometimes 3Mbps, so they're all doing the same thing. In closing, with all these speed increases, why is my Internet not getting faster?" What practices and tools do you use to test your bandwidth speed and how have you approached your ISP when the performance repeatedly fell short of your expectations?
One thing to note is that you'll never get the top speed advertised for any connection due to transmission overhead; even so, you should be able to get close (within about 10-20%). Also, ISPs oversell their bandwidth, so if you run your speed tests when other customers are using their connection, you will notice the performance hit.
SLA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bit Versus Byte (Score:5, Insightful)
Myself, I have 512Kb/s down, and as a rule of thumb I divide by 10 to get it in bytes. I get at best 54KB/s downloads, which works out by this rule.
I know, a byte is 8 bits, but as a rule of thumb, dividing by 10 seems to include overhead.
I know my 512Kb/s ADSL connection doesn't rate against these 3Mb/s cable connections, but, this is my experience, learn from it what you will.
Re:Shocking! (Score:3, Insightful)
Irrelevant. They sold her on 3 Mbps, they aren't delivering it. It's not my business or yours what she wants it for.
Re:No surprise here move along (Score:5, Insightful)
My cable connection (Comcast) is the same, and specifically includes a disclaimer that no guarantee is made that I will actually receive the rated throughput.
In practice, it blazes in the off-hours, sludges out during prime time. And the most noticable effect when it's bad is latency, not throughput.
Re:Shocking! (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you implying that DSL is not shared? The only part of DSL that is not shared is from your house to the CO. From there it is shared as the bandwidth in and out of your CO is shared by everyone that terminates in that CO, I guess the only person you would not share that CO bandwidth with is if you were connecting directly to one of your neighbors.
On a side note. I have Comcast. I can always got my advertised speed any time of the day or night. Not all areas are maxed out or "oversold".
Re:Why? I'll tell you why. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they rip you off, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bit Versus Byte (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking at the submitter's ratios, it doesn't look like they did the conversions wrong, though. 3 Mbps is around 400 kb/s max, not 750 kb/s max. So they actually do have a problem, but it's always good to remember these conversions when discussing ISPs.
Your link is probably fine... (Score:3, Insightful)
connects to
Your 6MB Cable
connects to
Cable Company
connects to
A slow or oversold internet connection
Here is a basic "How to" for calling your ISP... it sucks, and its a tad humiliating for most alpha-geeks... but sometimes we have to play by their rules to get our pr0n and warze faster.
1. Connect one PC to your cable/dsl modem (nothing else...)
2. Reboot your PC and your modem
3. Retest your speeds using a major speed test site
4. Call your ISP and explain your issue
5. Listen and follow their instructions (even if its a painful script... do it)
6. Respond with kindness and friendly responses (remember, they hold the key to escalating your issue or closing it without resolution)
Hopefully your ISP will recognize their is an issue and resolve it. Otherwise - tell them to go pound sand and move on to the next.
Think speed limit, not average speed (Score:3, Insightful)
In my case, I consistently get speed measurements **faster** than my plan provides, but I'm with a new and small ISP and I expect things to get worse as more people sign up.
Gas Mileage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SLA? (Score:5, Insightful)
She downgraded to the 768K plan expecting to still have 750K. Wrong, instead her speed dropped to 300K.
Using your example, the user has thus now bought a car that only does 60MPH and now magically the traffic has slowed to 30MPH
Re:SLA? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No surprise here move along (Score:5, Insightful)
My cable connection (Comcast) is the same, and specifically includes a disclaimer that no guarantee is made that I will actually receive the rated throughput.
Doesn't matter. If they never give you the speed you pay for, it's fraud. Otherwise, why wouldn't they sell you 12M internet?
Re:No surprise here move along (Score:3, Insightful)
Because that would be fraud. However with the absolutely perfect set of circumstances with their current setup you would get what you thought you were paying for. Like every other time in life, the perfect circumstances never happen and they can pass that off as not their fault.
Is if fraud when hard drive companies sell you a "250GB" HDD? It's the same thing here, you pick the description that makes you look the best.
Just be thankful... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to fascism, kid. (Score:5, Insightful)
In most parts of the world this is better known as 'corruption'.
Excellent comment. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately what you outline is the only effective tactic in dealing with someone that makes $10 per hour, is reading from a script, doesn't really care about their job and knows that they will not get in trouble no matter how nonsensical they are as long as they are reasonably following written procedures. Be nice, and you might land on the nice side of the procedures. Be angry or uncooperative... You'll be following the worst parts of procedures to the letter.
Re:SLA? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, it is DSL... (Score:4, Insightful)
Before complaining about your DSL line being slow, I think you really should read up on how DSL (and most likely ADSL to be specific) works. You are hardly ever going to get max bandwidth out of a service line though I honestly cannot complain about the speeds I am getting with Cable. So, remember, before starting a bitch-fest...know what the hell you are talking about...
Re:SLA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes that's wishful thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
So I call their tech support, am as nice as it gets (it's not that guy's fault anyway), follow the instructions so he can be sure that indeed I can't log in (can't he just reset my password anyway?), and dutifully recite to him all what software I'm using and how when he asks about that. (With the small hickup of him running out of pre-scripted answers when I tell him I'm using RASPPPOE on Windows 2000. Apparently his sheet only included that under XP.) He also asks for my invoice number to be sure it's really me. Remember that detail, it will be crucial in a jiffy. Since it's a daughter company of the telco here, I get the invoices combined, and he aggrees that the one on the telco's invoice is all he needs. I read it to him, he's satisfied with it.
Anyway, we have a nice civilized talk and he promises that he'll change my password right away and, as is their (idiotic) policy, I'll get the new one by post. Ok, so I'll be without net for couple of days, but I thank him kindly anyway.
Now let's think about it for a bit, before we delve deeper in this Lovecraftian madness:
- DSL is a P2P connection, so even if my password were to get to someone else, they can _only_ log on from my apartment. It's not like someone can trick them into giving them a password that'll work from somewhere else.
- the new password is sent by post to my home address, so they can freakin' know that _I_ am going to be the one receiving it anyway.
- my phone line is from the same telco and goes through the same exchange, so they could jolly well know that it was me who called, or at least it was from my phone.
A week goes by and I still don't have my flippin' password. By now I've dug out the old ISDN card and I'm using an expensive call-by-call account somewhere else to even read my emails.
So I call again, get someone else on the phone, read them the invoice number, they say "yep, I'm changing it now, you'll get it by post." A week later I call again. Then twice a week. Then every 2 days. The same freaking circus repeats every single time. Read them the invoice number, get told "yep, I'm changing it now, nothing happens." Eventually, after a month and a half, it becomes bloody obvious that they're lying shamelessly and they won't do anything.
So I'm annoyed, escalate it to hell and back, until eventually someone tells me what's the problem: my invoice number doesn't match the one in their database. Apparently when I moved they gave me a new invoice number, but here's the catch: the telco and their ISP department had given me different ones.
So for a whole bloody month and a half, the retarded tech support drones had just lied to me. None of them bothered telling me "oi, that number doesn't match." None of them bothered using their freaking brains, and figuring out that there are ways to authenticate me otherwise (e.g., tell me to come personally to one of their offices, if they're that paranoid, or call back to my home number to make sure it's me, or whatever) instead of following a script like a lobotomized robot.
That's what a month of being nice and polite and patient to lying idiots did for me. Yeah, it soo helped.
Re:Gas Mileage (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't work. (Score:3, Insightful)
The service has been rock solid. My ISP simply delivers, except when they don't. Thus, when I have no Internet, I raise hell. No, I won't plug in another computer, I just tested this network card, plugged in a crossover to my laptop, and it's fine. Hell, I even set up a DHCP server on my laptop to make sure that works. Now, could you tell me who pulled the plug on your end?
And invariably, whoever I was talking to eventually checks with the Powers That Be and lo and behold, they're doing something on their end, and I'll have Internet back in a day or two. I express my annoyance at being cut off, and I wait, and in a few hours, I have my connection again.
Playing stupid doesn't work with techsupport people. Being nice might -- a little empathy, a little humor, I know it's just your job, I know your script, but trust me, let's just skip to the part where you call someone else at the company. Most importantly, if you're not a clueless user, prove it.
Maybe it's arrogant, maybe some techs won't like you acting smarter than them (even if you are), but really, they don't like going through the script any more than you do.
Re:Bandwidth Speed Tests (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bandwidth Speed Tests (Score:2, Insightful)
Ye Olde Competition (Score:3, Insightful)
When the users aren't clued-in enough to appreciate real differences between service/product A and service/product B, claimed differences become more important, from an economic point of view.
If provider A claims N Mbps, provider B better counter with similar speeds or lower prices. If the users, by and large, wouldn't actually know a Mbps if it hit them on the head, then the easiest and most profitable way to compete is claim to provide N+1 Mbps. After all, for most light web browsing / chat-room / e-mail users, 1Mbps and 10Mbps connections provide similar experiences. What the service really is capable of is less important than the way the users feel about it.
The same circumstances drove claimed CD-ROM drive speeds into meaningless exaggeration in the late 90s. The same circumstances drove Intel to chase gigahertz rather than real-world performance in the Pentium IV line. The same circumstances cause Wi-Fi equipment vendors to make wild claims of 100+ Mbps speeds, when users will be lucky to see a tenth of that.
The phenomenon applies to other fields as well. Digital cameras make a big deal about megapixels, because that's easy to measure and compare, even though image quality is about more than megapixels, even though other, non-image-quality issues may be of far more importance. Plenty of owners of status-symbol watches have no idea what "jewel" means in that context, but are confident that more is better. Few owners of cars with badges like "DOHC" or "VTEC" can give a coherent explanation of what those badges mean, but the badged cars sell for a premium anyway.