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Internet speed guarantees must be realistic, says Ofcom
- userbinator 9y agoMany 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.
- olegkikin 9y agoThat's actually not a problem. You can always connect to 10-20 good servers (like linux distribution ones) and fully saturate your domestic connection.
- olympus 9y agoBut when I can't even get that speed under favorable conditions then it is dishonest to advertise that speed. If you can't even get that speed when connecting to the ISP's own server a few miles away then you aren't getting what you pay for. When car companies advertise the fuel efficiency of their cars those are realistic numbers for regular driving because there is a standardized testing protocol. You can trust the number because it is regulated, so why can't we hold ISPs to the same standard?
- userbinator 9y agoIf you can't even get that speed when connecting to the ISP's own server a few miles away then you aren't getting what you pay for. That I agree with --- the connection from your house to your ISP should always be at advertised speed, but beyond that it's basically impossible to guarantee anything.
- mjevans 9y agoActually it needs to be /through/ the ISP. Them selling you a fast speed is worthless if their peering points are saturated beyond any sane value.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoHow is it impossible for an ISP to guarantee bandwidth within their own network, including to/from interconnection points/exchanges?! Maybe not at every point in time (if you accept some overbooking), but that doesn't mean that you can't at least guarantee bandwidth for > 99% of the time. The ISP's advertised bandwidth should be available essentially always, with rare exceptions for unusually high levels of traffic, between your connection point and some exchange location where other ISPs can interconnect with your ISP without paying your ISP any money. The ISP doesn't have to guarantee that every server is reachable at advertised speeds, but they should guarantee that if ever anyone wants to send packets in your direction at the speed of your link, they should be able to either bury their own lines or buy transit from a market of transit providers to deliver the packets to some point in their network, and that those will be delivered without major packet loss at full rate.
- closeparen 9y agoOverselling of the last mile infrastructure. If you want to see what a not-oversold last mile connection (with a real minimum speed SLA) would cost, take a look at the “for business” pricing and weep. Most people’s usage is bursty, so the present oversold state is probably the least bad option compared to having a fixed <1Mbps line speed or paying thousands per month for a truly dedicated 50-100Mbps.
- gaius 9y agoIt WAS bursty when most people were browsing but it's continuous if they've streaming these days.
- throw_away_4567 9y ago
- Feniks 9y agoRegulations don't fall out of the sky. Ban lobbying and stop corporations from financing political parties. That would begin to solve this I guarantee it. But so long as your ISP has the ear of lawmakers you're SOL. We're going to have to act if we want to live in a different world.
- lostboys67 9y agoMM so you mean stop Rupert Murdoch throwing a hissy fit and bully his direct competitors then - BTW you do realise that OFCOM was set up to keep him happy (source direct quote from the then chair of an all parliamentary group on telecoms )
- chatmasta 9y agoAn ISP should be able to provide a max throughput from your house to anywhere on the internet, where max throughput is defined as the size of the bottleneck controlled by the ISP. Of course you won't get 50mbps to a server with 2mbps ingress, but you should know when your ISP is the bottleneck.
- II2II 9y ago> even those expensive services with SLAs etc. very carefully define to what part of the connection such guarantees apply. That can be done with consumer broadband as well. The problem with current marketing practices (at least in this neck of the woods) is that you can have a defective line on the ISP's side of demarkation box or be renting defective equipment from them, and they will still try to deny responsibility. Then you have things like congestion. It may be mostly outside of the control of the ISP, yet it can still be estimated in order to ensure that marketing claims are in line with what is being provided. The list of reasons provided by the article just reeks of blaming the consumer. Sure, the ISP should not be responsible for the consumer's poorly configured networks or computers. On the other hand, they should be accountable for problems on their end or misrepresentation of service levels.
- woolvalley 9y agoThe standard is servers in large data centers with effectively unlimited bandwidth speed compared to residential customers, like netflix, google, amazon, steam, microsoft, apple, etc.
- throw_away_4567 9y agoIn fact these people distribute content via deep caching and multicast provided by the ISP's and the CDN's - all those people (apart from Apple) have distributed infrastructures.
- mfjordvald 9y agoYou're probably not going to get 1Gbps from a distant server even if that server is not overloaded. I run some traffic heavy servers and even while my servers can be perfectly capable of pushing more, one of the links between me and you is congested so we're both getting shafted. Cogent is especially guilty of this. Basically the entire Internet is a mess, last mile is a problem, but so is all the major interchange points between carriers.
- Drakim 9y agoIt 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.
- e_proxus 9y agoSweden 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.
- wmf 9y agoImagine 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.
- SerLava 9y agoThey should force the cable companies to automatically discount the monthly cost if, say, 30%+ of the actual use falls more than, say, 10% below the advertised speed. I mean it makes perfect sense. And oh, what fire it would light under their asses.
- foota 9y agoI don't think this would work since you can't effectively measure bandwidth available without stressing the system?
- tryingagainbro 9y agoAs 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 ?
- olympus 9y agoYou 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.
- dawnerd 9y agoI noticed a huge difference and it’s just me and my server (and two cats but I don’t think they’re using Netflix...). Normal day to day sites, no real difference. Loading up a steam game or the like, huuuuuge improvement. Also no talk about upload speeds which are an even bigger part of making the web faster.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoMake sense, regular sites are usually under 10mb (2+mb average) https://www.wired.com/2016/04/average-webpage-now-size-original-doom/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/average-webpage-now-size-origi... so load times are essentially the same if you have a 10mb connection or 1000mb
- throw_away_4567 9y agoBig issue is wifi; if you live 50m from your neighbours, no problem, but most people are sharing the wifi bearer with 10's of others.
- dawnerd 9y ago
- shmerl 9y agoGood luck imposing anything in US now, with the current corrupted head of FCC.
- AliAdams 9y agoAs 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.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoYes, that sounds like a very good idea for both sides. It's annoying as hell when as an informed consumer, you have essentially no chance to figure out what the products even are that are competing for your money. How the hell am I supposed to decide between products that only guarantee that they won't provide more than a certain level of service with no lower limit? Just imagine supermarkets filled with "up to" products ... WTF?
- mrguyorama 9y agoIt's a disgustingly unhealthy market when the only possible way to find the best product for you is to buy service from each available option for over a year (in order to get the true, not stupid introductory price)
- kalleboo 9y agoMore transparency from ISPs would be amazing. Despite their flaws, one thing I love about my ISP is that they openly publish the utilization MRTG graphs for their local fiber connection nodes. So you can see where I live, they're starting to get close to saturation http://qos.plala.or.jp/traffic/flets/kagoshima.html http://qos.plala.or.jp/traffic/flets/kagoshima.html but in other parts of the country they've already started to peak out http://qos.plala.or.jp/traffic/flets/chiba.html http://qos.plala.or.jp/traffic/flets/chiba.html
- gnicholas 9y agoWhenever 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.
- walshemj 9y agoNo offence ment but if you have drunk so deep of the apple hype and abandoned ethernet you have to take some responsibility here. Unless of course you are a wireless CCNA and have set up your wifi using professional standard gear.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- smudgymcscmudge 9y agoThis is where it's useful to have a router that will run a test with speedtest.net from the router.
- comex 9y agoOr just get a USB 3 to Ethernet adapter (several in the $11-15 range on Amazon), which gives you more flexibility to run different kinds of speed tests and troubleshooting, and can also come in handy during travel. Even works on iOS or Android when combined with a different adapter.
- tw04 9y agoSpeedtest.net is a horrible way to test your internet speeds. The isps intentionally prioritize traffic to them because it makes them look good, and speedtest doesn't offer any actual services that could create legitimate traffic. At the very least use fast.com, which is run by Netflix and will show you what kind of performance you'll get to a real site. Ideally you'd test against multiple sources though, especially now that Netflix has started giving ransom money to some of the larger residential isps.
- jumpkickhit 9y agoI 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.
- Freestyler_3 9y agoI just tried, gave me 240/40 as result. (speedtest.net gives me 510/460 Looking at their servers... okay not so many. But shouldnt the speeds be more correct, and only the ping higher for further away places?
- cosmie 9y agoFurther away places also mean increased chance of hopping through intermediate networks which could introduce their own bottlenecks.
- kalleboo 9y agoSpeedtest.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 http://beta.speedtest.net/results
- koyote 9y agoEh, I guess this is US only? I am getting 40/30 here in London whereas speedtest.net gives me 900/900. That is a massive difference.
- plopz 9y agoAt some point certain ISPs were disabling throttling specifically for speedtest.net which is why netflix made fast.com. Perhaps thats whats happening with testmy.net?
- SeanDav 9y ago
- Kenji 9y agoOh, the joy of statistical multiplexing. I'm happy if someone steps in to force companies to release more accurate numbers. Many factors can influence browsing speeds, he said. These include how wi-fi signals travel around a home how well ethernet cables work how computers handle net protocols whether a computer can process higher speeds anti-virus software peak-time congestion Okay, come on, in a reasonable setup, all of these except for the last one account for a couple of milliseconds latency increase and a bit less bandwidth (unless you have bad WiFi). The real deal breaker is what happens at the ISP's side, outside of your control. This can add seconds of latency/jitter and reduce your speed to pretty much 0.
- rikkus 9y agoI’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.
- m3kw9 9y agoAny guarantee is unrealistic, depending on who you ask. There are so many points of potential slow downs that it is. Not realistic. To say a minimum.
- ncallaway 9y agoThe 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.
- dboreham 9y agoAgain (as above) I feel I need to speak up that we have a bigCableCo connection (Charter) that delivers 1.2x the sold throughput. From talking to the local guys there, they have a policy to over-provision connections by about 10% so they can be sure a speed test will deliver what the customer paid for. When I ran an ISP it was common for customers to run a speed test, see a speed less than they had paid for, and immediately call us. Often the reason was their router or their WiFi, or some flakyness in the speed test site, but sometimes it was our network. We always investigated and resolved the problem to restore their expected speed. This being the case, I find it quite hard to believe that there are ISPs who as a matter of course just don't ever deliver the advertised speed. They would be receiving constant calls from disgruntled customers, which surely would cost them more to answer than it would cost to fix the network??
- CamTin 9y agoYou can easily (through shoddy, cheap outsourcing body shops in India, Phillipines, etc.) get support costs low enough that just taking the calls is cheaper than fixing things, at least until the end of the financial quarter, and that's what really matters to management. I say this from experience in the web hosting industry, but I don't see any reason it wouldn't apply to ISPs.
- smallnamespace 9y agoIn 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.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoWell, 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.
- Tyr42 9y agoI mean, they can during a run on the bank without declaring bankruptcy.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoNo, they can't. First of all, only paying out part of the balance at once is very different from paying out part of the balance instead of the full balance. A bank can not unilaterally declare that their 100 dollar debt to you is paid by giving you 50 dollars. If they pay out 50 dollars, they still owe you 50 dollars. But more importantly: No, they can not even unilaterally delay the payout. If you have demand deposits of a million bucks with a bank, that means that you can at any point demand they pay out a million bucks, and when you demand that, they are legally required to do so, and if they can't fulfill a legal obligation to pay, that is exactly the definition of bankruptcy. If they fail to immediately declare bankcruptcy, the management is on the hook for any losses due to that failure of theirs. Banks might limit what their ATMs pay out per person per day or something, say, but that does not change anything about their obligation to fulfill any requests to pay out your balance immediately. Just because the ATM doesn't allow you to demand a payout of a million dollars, doesn't mean they have any legal option to refuse if you go to the cashier and express your demand that they pay out a million dollars right now. At best they might not have a million dollars on site, in which case they possibly might be allowed to have you wait for however long it takes to move the cash from the central bank to the branch that you are at, but that is certainly not more than a day.
- chopete2 9y agoW{{\78[8
- tialaramex 9y agoLot 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?
- wastedhours 9y agoDistance from pieces of the infrastructure also doesn't always help, I live 100m from the cabinet, and 500m from an exchange in a large development, but they've not managed to lay fibre apparently (guessing investment in Zone 1 London isn't the best political/PR decision for Openreach...), so it's only ADSL "up to 16Mb", but rarely top 2-3.
- SeanDav 9y agoA 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.
- andrewingram 9y agoMy 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: https://support.hyperoptic.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205590822-What-download-speeds-should-I-see-using-a-wireless-connection- 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.
- bronzeage 9y agoThe 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
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoWell, 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.