5 ms·
They 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
by SerLava 9y ago
They 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?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoYou are correct in theory. However, the present system is so bad that it routinely fails at (eg) streaming Netflix even though this uses less than your advertised bandwidth (by a wide margin). So at present, it would just be a matter of automatic documentation of failures -- and the situation would be much improved if we were up against the limit you propose.
- foota 9y agoFair point.
- wtallis 9y agoYou can't do it properly from an endpoint, but the ISPs are already monitoring it internally. They know when and where they have serious congestion.
- notyourwork 9y agoThis is precisely why ISP's should have to operate more transparently as a common carrier and not as a private business milking a cash cow.
- chii 9y agoIf an electric utility company did the same, with 'up-to 240volts' - they'd get their ass sued out of existence. Why can't the gov't establish standards for such things, like a minimum speed (from the IPS's own servers of course, you cannot expect that they control it all).
- hueving 9y agoThey would just game it then and underinvest on peering (similar to what happened in the netflix/Comcast scenario). What good is 1gbit guaranteed to your ISP if the entire ISP only has 10mbps to the rest of the world?
- gsich 9y agoWhy not? If the ISP provides a server you can download a file from, you can see your speed, the ISP can see the speed. Yes there might be issues with your PC and such, but this can be easily tested.
- foota 9y agoThat would be stressing the system. My point is as a consumer, you can't continuously measure your maximum bandwidth without using it all.
- gsich 9y agoWell you always have Layer 1/2 data. DSL modems, cable, LTE ... will show diagnostic information on which you can estimate some bandwidth, more or less.
- m12k 9y agoYeah, it'd be perfectly reasonable if it was prorated. So if during a month they managed to provide an average of 70% of the promised speed, I should pay them 70% of the subscription cost.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoAverage is not a good measure for that, because there are lots of hours during the day where even the worst ISPs don't have any congestion, and still the connection can be unusable during peak hours. The right measure would be the minimum throughput that you achieved, maybe minus a few minutes of congestion per month that are ignored. If they sell you a 100 Mb/s pipe, that should mean that you should essentially never notice that it's not actually reserved 100 Mb/s. People don't buy 100 Mb/s because they want 100 Mb/s at 3 am, they buy 100 Mb/s because they want 100 Mb/s when they need it, which in most cases is during peak load times (which is why those are the peak load times).