It always puzzled me that internet companies can simply say that the speed is "up to" a certain number. Especially since, they will often sell various tiers of speed, proving that they ARE capable of delivering a faster speed.
Imagine paying for 50mb/s internet and only getting 23mb/s. So you upgrade to the 75mb/s plan and now your real speed is 46mb/s. Why couldn't you get that higher speed for the original plan? It seems bizarre that this setup would be legal anywhere in any country.
If you can simply provide "up to" on something, then I wanna sell you a box for ten bucks that contains up to a million dollars!
Edit: Obviously speed depends on a million factors, but I don't know if I've ever experienced even half the speed I was paying for, even when I control both end points.
Imagine paying for 50mb/s internet and only getting 23mb/s. So you upgrade to the 75mb/s plan and now your real speed is 46mb/s.
In reality you'd probably still get 23 after upgrading. The state of New York is suing Spectrum over this issue; customers complained about slow speeds so Spectrum told them to upgrade to a faster plan but their speeds didn't improve at all because the congestion was still there.
Sweden has solved this in a pretty good way I think. As an ISP you have to disclose a range (e.g. 12-24 Mbit/s) and pledge to keep that lower limit. In some areas you see instead the range of 1-XX and then you know as a customer that the connection is less reliable.
They’re selling best effort service at a fraction of the price of what dedicated bandwidth costs. We’ve got a 100/100 symmetric line at work. We can pick from several different business Internet providers, but they all cost many multiples of what my symmetric gigabit line at home costs. It’s a different product offered at a different price.
This is not unique to ISPs. You can buy an over-subscribed VPS for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated server.
Where I used to live many years ago. I paid for up to 30. Got about 23. Then I switched to cheaper 10 and still got 23. And told all my friends and they got the same. They had 3 tiers all providing identical service beyond who was willing to pay for 10,30 or 50. Did this for 3+ years.
Actually, this is an interesting topic, because there are court decisions on this in Germany.
So if an ISP has, say, a 25mbps, 50mbps, and 75mbps plan, the 50mbps plan has to provide 25 or more, and the 75mbps plan has to provide 50mbps or more.
You know how ADSL (and related tech) works the speed you get depends on the distance from the exchange I don't know how it works in the USA but I ca test my line and at 6k yards it said I should get 3.5 ish which is what I get .
I suspect a lot of BB speed complaints are down to poor wifi installations and local congestion in the wifi bands
The classic excuse I'm receiving from Virgin Broadband at the moment is "we're currently upgrading the network in your area, there may be some speed disruption for several months." I'm paying for 100mbps, a few weeks back I tested it during one bad spell; I was receiving less than 1mbps.
I was struggling to sync my emails, never mind watch Netflix.
> It always puzzled me that internet companies can simply say that the speed is "up to" a certain number.
I always imagine it like this:
Them: "This plan gives you up to 23mb/s."
Me: "So you're saying you guarantee I will not get more than 23mb/s?"
Them: "Right."
Me: "OK. I'll pay you up to $40 a month for that."
Same for "Unlimited" when it actually has clear limits. Or camera manufacturers sell "Weather resistant" equipment but never specify what it means exactly and will void your warranty if there is water damage.
Tangentially related: We used to have a bunch of "$2 Shop" stores - I think other countries have the equivalent "dollar store", "pound shop" etc. Due to inflation they've all now become "$2+ Dollar" shops or "$2 and up" etc.
In reality of course they still sell the same sort of cheap stuff but it's funny how the name has gone from a shop that guarantees cheap prices, to one that guarantees not to be really cheap, since any price is now valid except ones below $2.
As someone with a company in the ISP space, this is awesome news.
One of the biggest problems in marketing that our team has come across, particularly in consumer broadband, is that as a company attempting to be open and honest about speeds and pricing, it can be hard to compete with the older players using bamboozling pricing and inflated speed claims to trick consumers thinking that they are giving a better deal.
These restrictions will level the playing field in the right direction for a more informed and better served consumer.
At a time of some very bad calls around internet legislation in the UK, this is finally a decision I think we can all applaud.
In a weird way, this is the same problem that banks face.
Fractional reserve banking is actually in society's best interests: it's fine if the bank takes $100 in deposits, then loans out $80 or $90, rather than just having the money sitting in a vault doing nothing.
In the same way, it's probably better for the overall efficiency of communications for ISPs to oversell capacity and then allow bursting on top, rather than not overselling and wasting bandwidth when there's no congestion.
They face the same problem though: banks have an incentive to lower reserves until the smallest shock will bankrupt them, and ISPs make more money by overselling past what is wise or reasonable.
Same solution: for banks we regulate margin requirements, and for ISPs we should regulate how much they can oversell.
That's not how it works. Fractional reserve of 10% means that $100 of deposits could theoretically turns into over $900 (The central bank loans $100 to you, you can then loan $90 to Pete, Pete can then loan $81 to Sam, Sam loans $73 to Gill, etc.). Here's an example of how it works (for 20%):
That's why people talk about banks being too big too fail now. If one bank fails, where do the loans go? No-one can pay off the loans immediately as they all only have 10% of the assets. So we can't call in all the loans. But another bank can't afford to buy the failed banks assets as they would have to up their reserve, but that money doesn't exist any more as the original bank is bust.
One large bank failing would mean a huge chunk of theoretical money would just, poof, disappear.
That's why some people say it's fraud, etc. Not that I'm agreeing one way or another, but $100 of deposits is worth much more than $90 in the system.
Here's a table showing the total money that could theoretically enter the system for each fractional reserve percentage:
Well, first of all, banks cannot simply claim that they don't have all your money available and give you back only half instead. Once they reach a stage where that is their problem, they are bankrupt, and you get to sell their assets to recover your money.
I think it's much simpler in the case of ISPs, because there is no risk involved for the customer: You don't need to regulate how much they can oversell, but rather simply that the customer must not ever notice that the network is oversold.
Many factors can influence browsing speeds, he said. These include
...and not one mention of the server at the other end. Whenever discussion of Internet connection speeds comes up, I always ask myself, "speed between what?" Even if you have a 1Gbps connection to your ISP, you're not going to get anywhere near that if the other end is on a different continent, a small site behind the Great Firewall of China, or a heavily overloaded server.
Thus, in some sense, ISPs have always been advertising maximum speeds, and even those expensive services with SLAs etc. very carefully define to what part of the connection such guarantees apply.
Lot of people in here moaning about cable speed problems caused mostly by congestion.
This article is about the UK, where most people with broadband Internet get it via their telephone line, ie VDSL, and so aren't subject to congestion in the last mile.
In most cases this means their "speed" is a property of the VDSL standard, the length and quality of copper cable in the ground between them and the VDSL node (a relatively new bigger green street cabinet for most of them, vaguely near their older smaller "BT" cabinet).
VDSL works basically the same way as your ancient "analogue" telephone modem, except with way, way higher frequencies and more sophisticated encoding because it wasn't designed to cost $10 and work over actual telephone calls, just make it for about a mile down a copper cable to a $$$$ specialist box.
Short, high quality telephone cables can easily support the same sort of bandwidth you regularly see from say, 100baseT, ie 100Mbps. But very long, poor quality ones will do much worse, VDSL needs to tweak things to give those poor souls some sort of service, while also delivering a really good service to people who are closer, as automatically as possible. Higher frequencies get smushed worse over distance, so the closer people get a wider _band_ of frequencies, more literal _bandwidth_. The consumer equipment and the big green box in the street negotiate how best to get a signal between them, then if necessary the big green box throttles this down to an agreed speed, the actual "maximum" which may be higher than the advertised "Up to..." speed in countries where a regulator demanded such a pointless change to advertising.
The end result is usually if you live 100 metres from the cabinet, you get nice fast broadband and it doesn't matter which ISP you pick. And if you live two miles from the cabinet you get shitty ADSL at 1Mbps and can't watch Netflix and again, it still doesn't matter which ISP you pick.
So in a way the irony is that ISPs advertise speed at all. Speed has almost nothing to do with your ISP if you're using VDSL, which most UK households are. Imagine if car manufacturers started advertising the quality of roads you can drive on. It's the same roads for all manufacturers - who cares?
The big lie is that connection speed within the ISP means nothing. Most of the time when I experience packet loss / congestion you can clearly see it's in the connection from the ISP to other providers, and some providers are cheap you will suffer high packet loss and congestion exiting their network. The advertised speed is meaningless when 1 in every 30 packets is dropped. Just small packet loss is enough to slow TCP
Well, packet loss here really is a bandwidth problem, though. The packet loss happens because some link is saturated and packets are arriving faster than they can be transmitted, and TCP simply reacts by adjusting the sending rate so as to not exceed the available bandwidth at the bottleneck.
Still true that the problem often is more the peering than internal infrastructure, yeah.
I used to love speedtest.net, but since finding testmy.net which keeps a log of your previous tests, I haven't gone back.
I typically receive the correct up/down ratio, though intermittent issues may lower it for a day or less. Though various ISPs over the years. It would be nice to have a consistent as-advertised speed though if you happen to live in an area where that isn't happening.
Speedtest.net also logs your previous tests, but you have to create an account/login to preserve them across cookie expiries http://beta.speedtest.net/results
testmy.net seems to be mainly USA based, but for those outside the US, you can set the default server to one located much nearer your own location. They offer a few international servers and London, UK is one of them, plus alternatives in EU, Asia and Australia
My favourite questionable practice is from Hyperoptic. They advertise gigabit broadband, and this is accurate.
But the wifi hotspot they provide is only capable of a small fraction of that (theoretically 130mbit, practically 70mbit), but you can get the full gigabit if you use ethernet. This discrepancy isn't mentioned at any point until you start digging around in the FAQs or in some forums around the internet:
A few years ago I subscribed to a 8 MB service with a major ISP (Virgin). I was getting around 500k. Virgin insisted it was an issue with my router/my line/my computer/everything under the sun and nothing to do with them. When I pointed out that I had signed up for a 8 MB deal, they said that legally they did not have to do anything unless my performance went below 300k! I cancelled the contract and was forced to pay an early termination penalty.
I went with a smaller ISP (Fast.co.uk - those guys are brilliant!) and immediately started getting around 6 MB. Same computer, same router and same lines as before.
It boggled my mind that a big ISP could get away with this borderline fraudulent behaviour.
I’m not really bothered about speed. Just reliability. If my home broadband could actually stay up then I’d be able to work from home without tethering to a phone in order to get a reliable connection.
Whenever my internet is sluggish enough for me to call Comcast, they always blame the fact that I'm using wifi — and suggest I switch to ethernet to get higher speeds.
I tell them that all of my devices are newer and therefore do not have ethernet. And I point out that all of the service techs they send out do not have ethernet-equipped devices either.
This generally does not convince them. Sometimes they are convinced if I can do a transfer over my network (Time Machine backups, etc.) to show that the wifi is blazing fast, and that the bottleneck is their connection.
It would not convince me either. Usually™ Wlan is very slow, partially due to the equipment ISPs sell.
Having a new device does not mean you can't use ethernet. Every PC has it. Buying a notebook without it seems backwards, in either case you can use a USB 3.0 ethernet adapter.
The problem isn't a lack of a guarantee. The problem is _never_ getting the service as advertised.
If I buy a 50 Mbps plan, and I get 50 Mbps 60% of the time and between 20-30 Mbps 40% of the time, I could live with that.
My problem is that has never been my experience with major cable providers.
I pay for a 50 Mbps plan and get 20-30 Mbps 50% of the time and 10-20 Mbps 50% of the time. That's not simply a lack of a guarantee. That's a complete failure to provide the service that was advertised.
No the problem is unethical companies that sell 6mb dsl from a DSLAM fed by 2x t1s, or that refuse to upgrade their peering links because they want their peers to pay them too.
As the article points out the real speed depends on a lot of factors. Also, not all servers can serve you at your max speed. Currently what would be a decent speed, meaning you experience no lag...20 mb, 50mb ? Has anyone gone from 50mb to a lot more and felt a huge difference ?
You will notice a difference if you live in a house with multiple people streaming at once. The most typical use case is a big family that wants full HD on their tablets plus a 4k stream in the living room. That requires a 100 mbps connection due to speeds slowing down in the evening (part of what the article is about), and needing a bit of extra speed to prevent buffering.
The upload makes it really nice, with all the cloud storage its really easy to back up a device in the cloud when I am wiping it. Faster than usb transfer.
[+] [-] Drakim|8 years ago|reply
Imagine paying for 50mb/s internet and only getting 23mb/s. So you upgrade to the 75mb/s plan and now your real speed is 46mb/s. Why couldn't you get that higher speed for the original plan? It seems bizarre that this setup would be legal anywhere in any country.
If you can simply provide "up to" on something, then I wanna sell you a box for ten bucks that contains up to a million dollars!
Edit: Obviously speed depends on a million factors, but I don't know if I've ever experienced even half the speed I was paying for, even when I control both end points.
[+] [-] wmf|8 years ago|reply
In reality you'd probably still get 23 after upgrading. The state of New York is suing Spectrum over this issue; customers complained about slow speeds so Spectrum told them to upgrade to a faster plan but their speeds didn't improve at all because the congestion was still there.
[+] [-] smudgymcscmudge|8 years ago|reply
Edit: I realize it isn't a good joke.
[+] [-] xkpd3|8 years ago|reply
I don't need a guarantee. I want per-mbit prices. Like you pay what you get. Limit the rate by saying: I will pay up to 100mbit for example.
Then the can give you less for less money. But this would not be in their interest anymore.
[+] [-] e_proxus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
This is not unique to ISPs. You can buy an over-subscribed VPS for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated server.
[+] [-] Namrog84|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuschku|8 years ago|reply
So if an ISP has, say, a 25mbps, 50mbps, and 75mbps plan, the 50mbps plan has to provide 25 or more, and the 75mbps plan has to provide 50mbps or more.
[+] [-] walshemj|8 years ago|reply
I suspect a lot of BB speed complaints are down to poor wifi installations and local congestion in the wifi bands
[+] [-] slipstream-|8 years ago|reply
So, scratchcards then?
[+] [-] drrob|8 years ago|reply
I was struggling to sync my emails, never mind watch Netflix.
[+] [-] mrmondo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathan_long|8 years ago|reply
I always imagine it like this:
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
Having their cake and eating it too!
[+] [-] Nition|8 years ago|reply
In reality of course they still sell the same sort of cheap stuff but it's funny how the name has gone from a shop that guarantees cheap prices, to one that guarantees not to be really cheap, since any price is now valid except ones below $2.
[+] [-] richev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BenjiWiebe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AliAdams|8 years ago|reply
One of the biggest problems in marketing that our team has come across, particularly in consumer broadband, is that as a company attempting to be open and honest about speeds and pricing, it can be hard to compete with the older players using bamboozling pricing and inflated speed claims to trick consumers thinking that they are giving a better deal.
These restrictions will level the playing field in the right direction for a more informed and better served consumer.
At a time of some very bad calls around internet legislation in the UK, this is finally a decision I think we can all applaud.
[+] [-] smallnamespace|8 years ago|reply
Fractional reserve banking is actually in society's best interests: it's fine if the bank takes $100 in deposits, then loans out $80 or $90, rather than just having the money sitting in a vault doing nothing.
In the same way, it's probably better for the overall efficiency of communications for ISPs to oversell capacity and then allow bursting on top, rather than not overselling and wasting bandwidth when there's no congestion.
They face the same problem though: banks have an incentive to lower reserves until the smallest shock will bankrupt them, and ISPs make more money by overselling past what is wise or reasonable.
Same solution: for banks we regulate margin requirements, and for ISPs we should regulate how much they can oversell.
[+] [-] mattmanser|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_multiplier#Table
That's why people talk about banks being too big too fail now. If one bank fails, where do the loans go? No-one can pay off the loans immediately as they all only have 10% of the assets. So we can't call in all the loans. But another bank can't afford to buy the failed banks assets as they would have to up their reserve, but that money doesn't exist any more as the original bank is bust.
One large bank failing would mean a huge chunk of theoretical money would just, poof, disappear.
That's why some people say it's fraud, etc. Not that I'm agreeing one way or another, but $100 of deposits is worth much more than $90 in the system.
Here's a table showing the total money that could theoretically enter the system for each fractional reserve percentage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#/me...
[+] [-] zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC|8 years ago|reply
I think it's much simpler in the case of ISPs, because there is no risk involved for the customer: You don't need to regulate how much they can oversell, but rather simply that the customer must not ever notice that the network is oversold.
[+] [-] userbinator|8 years ago|reply
...and not one mention of the server at the other end. Whenever discussion of Internet connection speeds comes up, I always ask myself, "speed between what?" Even if you have a 1Gbps connection to your ISP, you're not going to get anywhere near that if the other end is on a different continent, a small site behind the Great Firewall of China, or a heavily overloaded server.
Thus, in some sense, ISPs have always been advertising maximum speeds, and even those expensive services with SLAs etc. very carefully define to what part of the connection such guarantees apply.
[+] [-] tialaramex|8 years ago|reply
This article is about the UK, where most people with broadband Internet get it via their telephone line, ie VDSL, and so aren't subject to congestion in the last mile.
In most cases this means their "speed" is a property of the VDSL standard, the length and quality of copper cable in the ground between them and the VDSL node (a relatively new bigger green street cabinet for most of them, vaguely near their older smaller "BT" cabinet).
VDSL works basically the same way as your ancient "analogue" telephone modem, except with way, way higher frequencies and more sophisticated encoding because it wasn't designed to cost $10 and work over actual telephone calls, just make it for about a mile down a copper cable to a $$$$ specialist box.
Short, high quality telephone cables can easily support the same sort of bandwidth you regularly see from say, 100baseT, ie 100Mbps. But very long, poor quality ones will do much worse, VDSL needs to tweak things to give those poor souls some sort of service, while also delivering a really good service to people who are closer, as automatically as possible. Higher frequencies get smushed worse over distance, so the closer people get a wider _band_ of frequencies, more literal _bandwidth_. The consumer equipment and the big green box in the street negotiate how best to get a signal between them, then if necessary the big green box throttles this down to an agreed speed, the actual "maximum" which may be higher than the advertised "Up to..." speed in countries where a regulator demanded such a pointless change to advertising.
The end result is usually if you live 100 metres from the cabinet, you get nice fast broadband and it doesn't matter which ISP you pick. And if you live two miles from the cabinet you get shitty ADSL at 1Mbps and can't watch Netflix and again, it still doesn't matter which ISP you pick.
So in a way the irony is that ISPs advertise speed at all. Speed has almost nothing to do with your ISP if you're using VDSL, which most UK households are. Imagine if car manufacturers started advertising the quality of roads you can drive on. It's the same roads for all manufacturers - who cares?
[+] [-] bronzeage|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC|8 years ago|reply
Still true that the problem often is more the peering than internal infrastructure, yeah.
[+] [-] jumpkickhit|8 years ago|reply
I typically receive the correct up/down ratio, though intermittent issues may lower it for a day or less. Though various ISPs over the years. It would be nice to have a consistent as-advertised speed though if you happen to live in an area where that isn't happening.
[+] [-] kalleboo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koyote|8 years ago|reply
I am getting 40/30 here in London whereas speedtest.net gives me 900/900.
That is a massive difference.
[+] [-] Freestyler_3|8 years ago|reply
Looking at their servers... okay not so many. But shouldnt the speeds be more correct, and only the ping higher for further away places?
[+] [-] SeanDav|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewingram|8 years ago|reply
But the wifi hotspot they provide is only capable of a small fraction of that (theoretically 130mbit, practically 70mbit), but you can get the full gigabit if you use ethernet. This discrepancy isn't mentioned at any point until you start digging around in the FAQs or in some forums around the internet:
https://support.hyperoptic.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205590822-W...
But I plugged in a proper wifi hotspot (one capable of at least gigabit) and I got the full advertised speed.
I believe this is an intentional trick to avoid saturation of their network.
[+] [-] SeanDav|8 years ago|reply
I went with a smaller ISP (Fast.co.uk - those guys are brilliant!) and immediately started getting around 6 MB. Same computer, same router and same lines as before.
It boggled my mind that a big ISP could get away with this borderline fraudulent behaviour.
[+] [-] rikkus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|8 years ago|reply
I tell them that all of my devices are newer and therefore do not have ethernet. And I point out that all of the service techs they send out do not have ethernet-equipped devices either.
This generally does not convince them. Sometimes they are convinced if I can do a transfer over my network (Time Machine backups, etc.) to show that the wifi is blazing fast, and that the bottleneck is their connection.
[+] [-] Freestyler_3|8 years ago|reply
These people on the phone can only work off their check lists, once they hear something that gives them an easy out they will start blaming you.
[+] [-] Nullabillity|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smudgymcscmudge|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|8 years ago|reply
Unless of course you are a wireless CCNA and have set up your wifi using professional standard gear.
[+] [-] m3kw9|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncallaway|8 years ago|reply
If I buy a 50 Mbps plan, and I get 50 Mbps 60% of the time and between 20-30 Mbps 40% of the time, I could live with that.
My problem is that has never been my experience with major cable providers.
I pay for a 50 Mbps plan and get 20-30 Mbps 50% of the time and 10-20 Mbps 50% of the time. That's not simply a lack of a guarantee. That's a complete failure to provide the service that was advertised.
[+] [-] ikiris|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chopete2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kenji|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shmerl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tryingagainbro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olympus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Freestyler_3|8 years ago|reply
going from 20 > 500 (and 2>500 up)
The upload makes it really nice, with all the cloud storage its really easy to back up a device in the cloud when I am wiping it. Faster than usb transfer.