9 ms·

AT&T drops out of FCC speed-test program so it can hide bad results

299 points by close04 7y ago

dylz 7y ago
I am not a fan of AT&T, but it appears what they didn't want included was their ADSL1 speeds, which are probably utter rubbish for obvious reasons. The problem here is that there are people still on those plans.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  Rubbish or not, the speeds should be included to give AT&T an incentive to move these customers to something more modern.
  - dylz 7y ago
    Agreed. Honestly, (plain) ADSL shouldn't even be a thing anymore.
    - zmzrr 7y ago
      Why not? I have a 14 Mbps stable ADSL connection and it suits my needs. Why should I pay more for something I don't need?
      - ahi 7y ago
        I suspect you're paying more than what I pay for gigabit FTTH, $50.
        zmzrr 7y ago
        I pay 23€ a month. I could pay roughly what you pay for gigabit, I just don't need it
      - dylz 7y ago
        Who said anything about you having to pay more? At least here, in the market that I can choose between FTTH and ADSL1 from the same provider, there's a 990 Mbps difference for the _same price_. Though - my personal opinion is that old copper that no one really wants to maintain is wasted space for cabling that could support significantly higher bandwidth at lower latency. Telcos are already refusing to replace destroyed landlines and instead substituing LTE service or otherwise instead for a decade now.
      - kristopolous 7y ago
        It shouldn't be more. Heck, your local tax dollars probably paid to lay the cables anyway. It should probably be 1/4th of what you're paying
        zmzrr 7y ago
        I am not in the US. And yes, fibre costs more, even double sometimes. I don't need fibre, I don't want to pay double. Leave my ADSL alone.
        noxToken 7y ago
        Then you're likely in a very different situation. A condensed version of the US situation is that telcos here were incentivised through subsidies to upgrade and update the networking infrastructure to deliver more speeds and bandwidth to existing customers as well as connection to more rural customers. By and large, the telcos did not do that in spite of receiving the money.
        Jonnax 7y ago
        You're not in the US, so why did you bring up Google Fiber? Also if you're not in the US why are you talking about AT&T being forced to take away your ADSL? Also the poster you replied to specifically said ADSL1 which has been superceded more than a decade ago by ADSL2, ADSL2+ and VDSL. These aren't fibre technologies and in most countries are sold at the same price.
        rhino369 7y ago
        ISPs don’t make 75% profit margins, so that’s really not possible.
        kristopolous 7y ago
        Profit is a matter of accounting. The telcos specifically are incentivized to have as little calculated profit as possible. Their subsidies and ability to charge different rates is partially based on their accounting. So they play Hollywood accounting tricks (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting). They have been chastised on this repeatedly. For instance, "The FCC Had To Remind ISPs Not To Spend Taxpayer Subsidies On Booze, Trips To Disney World" (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-has-to-remind-isps-not-to-spend-taxpayer-subsidies-booze-trips-to-disney-world.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-h...) here, the $1,300,000 spent by an executive to buy a house for their children's use as college housing wasn't part of the profit. That's simply the cost of running business, as essential as keeping the lights on ... nothing wrong with the twice a week $96,000/year massages either, I'm sure that's got a lot to do with FTTH residential deployment. Oh wait, the taxpayers built that. This has happened a few times, such as with verizon (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-the-salaries-of-veriz_b_9815496 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-the-salaries-of-veriz_b_9...) where the 4 top executive pay (without benefits) was $41 million ... which would have been fine if it was in their operating expense and they could afford it. But they did this because it wasn't and they couldn't. If the telcos make something called "Local Service" unprofitable when compared with "Corporate Operations Expense" (which includes jets, multiple homes, multi-million executive pay, etc) and technically run "at a loss" they can legally raise prices and reduce service. Because they can make things look unprofitable, federal regulation permits them to raise prices to make up for it. It's an perverse incentive, an executive spends $100,000 a year on pet care to make sure local service becomes unprofitable and then they can use a legal procedure to raise prices. rinse, wash, and repeat. So yes, it could be 1/4th the price but no, the free market is the most efficient allocator of goods, we're told. They do things the cheapest we're told, there is no alternative ... yeah, bullshit. High speed internet is $7.67/month in Russia, $5.41 in Ukraine, $6.12 in Venezuela and $63.07 in the USA. Ah, the magic of trusting the market. Can you feel it!?
      - toast0 7y ago
        ADSL1 from at&t tops out at 6Mbps, and 8Mbps generally, so you're most likely on ADSL2 (probably not VDSL, unless you're just plan limited, and not distance limited)
      - axaxs 7y ago
        I feel like this is some form of Stockholm Syndrome. You shouldn't pay more. You should be getting better speeds for the same or lesser price. Technology is advancing and the carriers are purposely holding us back, for exactly the reason you gave.
        zmzrr 7y ago
        ISPs should lay out an expensive fibre network (so expensive that Google Fiber had to give up on it) and I should pay less money? That's just crazy.
        kstrauser 7y ago
        Why? We already paid them $400 billion dollars to get you decent Internet access (see: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...). I think that gives us the right to expect you to have something better than 14Mbps DSL at a decent price.
        axaxs 7y ago
        Absolutely! Even ignoring all the stimulus money and tax breaks probably given, municipalities all over the US are building out their own fiber that is blowing the others away in performance and even price usually.
        keanebean86 7y ago
        > so expensive that Google Fiber had to give up on it Part of that cost comes from ATT and Comcast using their government sugar daddy to make running fiber as expensive and difficult as possible. Example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/att-and-comcast-finalize-court-victory-over-nashville-and-google-fiber/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/att-and-comcast-...
        takeda 7y ago
        If ADSL is cheap I actually would prefer to have it for redundancy. Phone line and cable is generally the only lines that are routed to a home that can be used for Internet.
      - ac29 7y ago
        In my market ATT fiber is cheaper than ATT DSL, and obviously quite a bit faster.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    Or just drop them as customers altogether. It may have actually been wise for the FCC to exclude them instead of forcing the company to drop them.
- zmzrr 7y ago
  How come speeds are not segregated depending on technology? Seems like a shortcoming of this "speed-test program". No wonder they left.
  - Avenger42 7y ago
    From the article: > The 2017 report includes two categories for AT&T, one for its oldest DSL technology and another for its DSL-based IP broadband with speeds of up to 45Mbps. [...] The 2018 report only includes AT&T's IP broadband category, leaving out the company's worst results.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    They fought to have anything faster than ISDN classified as "broadband". Now they get to pay the price for letting the copper rot.
    - zmzrr 7y ago
      Broadband has always meant "faster than dial-up".
      - tastyfreeze 7y ago
        The FCC has defined broadband as 25/3 Mbps since 2015. Prior to that it was 4/1 Mbps. The first FCC definition of broadband was established in 1996 as 200/200 Kbps. You can't really play loosey goosey with the definition. The service is either fast enough to be considered broadband or it isn't. The delivery method is irrelevant.
        dylz 7y ago
        Honestly, by 2018 it should be something like 50/50 or 100/50 as a minimum.
        zokula 7y ago
        Broadband has nothing to do with speed.
- FireBeyond 7y ago
  AT&T: "We don't want these plans included because they're obsolete and they're not the ones we are actively marketing". Also AT&T: "But we are absolutely selling them, obsolete or not, and signing up new customers in areas where that's their option, because we've decided it's not viable to upgrade them. We just don't want them counted."
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Is there a good solution for areas where it will never be profitable to run lines? I mean my company is getting a big local subsidy for a short distance point-to-point connection and it’s still costing us about a million dollars for construction and we still have to pay a monthly maintenance fee.
    - mrkstu 7y ago
      Fixed wireless.
    - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
      They were given $Billions to run those lines anyway. And they didn’t.
kryogen1c 7y ago
The company i recently started managing it for previously went through some business and personnel changes and so doesnt have a good hold on their IT budget. Ive been discovering and recording bills from only at&t for days now. Highlights: 1300$/month for IT support 800% difference in per month rate vs 1 year contract rate Different departments cant talk to each other and have separate accounts. I have att.com accounts and businesscenter.att.com accounts. Is AT&T BusinessCenter different than AT&T BusinessDirect? You fuckin tell me Before i started, we were paying over $10k a month to only AT&T, right now we're <$7k and I'm not done. We have an account manager that i havent talked to. Clearly hes either incompetent or malicious, no desire to loop him in. Never before have i wanted to killdozer a company so badly. I have better things to do than review bills (although clearly not).
- dennnis 7y ago
  Wow, can't change providers?
  - xnyan 7y ago
    lol. You are from SoCal or Europe, right? Sorry, not trying to be an asshole. Those are (almost) the only two places where people on hackernews have more than 1.5 internet choices.
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      New Zealander here. The hopeless state owned telecom was sold off then forced to break up (into a line provider and a separate phone/ISP company). It has taken a very long time to come right, but NZ is now a great place to get internet and many good options are available from a range of companies. Gigabit fibre is here for a huge portion of residential customers. Connections of 2 and 4 gigabit are scheduled for early next year. I just tested a wall plate I mounted and am getting 920Mbps, for about US$80.
    - omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
      Even SoCal has plenty of areas with only a single broadband provider. :/
snek 7y ago
> "Sometimes providers boost speeds for households during the actual FCC speed-testing period," the Journal wrote. "Comcast a few years ago upgraded speeds in some regions without notifying the FCC, making test results look stellar, people close to the FCC program said. The FCC discovered the changes after spotting anomalous data and adjusted the numbers." This whole thing is frustrating. It is made to sound like some kids pulling some harmless pranks or something. What the heck. These companies are deliberately lying and confusing government agencies.
- goodcanadian 7y ago
  The word you are looking for is fraud. People should go to jail.
  - cjslep 7y ago
    They're too busy rolling out IPv6 support-in-hardware and gigabit fiber upgrades everywhere nationally and obsoleting data caps, instead of taking software IPv6 shortcuts and enjoying regulatory capture and turning peering agreements into weapons and maximizing "shareholder value" (which of course we all agree isn't the real value at hand). Only if.
- _red 7y ago
  >confusing government agencies pretty dry humor Seriously though, ATT was a government entity that got its huge advantage from being a monopoly. After they were forced to "split up" (wink wink nudge nudge) they then shed all their unprofitable business and recombined again as new "ATT". At no point have they ever really become a customer-focused company and all their decisions are steeped in monopolistic style thinking.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I have had AT&T Gigabit Ethernet for 3 years. It’s $70 a month, no extra fees, no caps, and I consistently get 900+ u/d. Compared to cable companies it’s a dream. Comcast has a maximum upload of 35Mbps on their highest plan, it’s more expensive, less reliable, heavily over-provisioned and the bills are full of junk fees. Even at the new price of $60/month, AT&T Now was still a better deal than Comcast’s cable offerings - again with junk fees, hard to cancel service and cable box rentals. I’m using Hulu Live Tv now though.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
Good to know, but only if you have a choice of carriers. While I hate to drag the free market into this, having choice (read:competition) would expose this issue and be more likely to solve it.
- fallingfrog 7y ago
  Right but the end result of competition is that one company wins and eats the other, or they divide the market geographically, either way you end up back in the same place.
  - distances 7y ago
    Any competition without local loop unbundling [1] won't be a solution. Without it you simply will never have proper competitive markets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling
  - chiefalchemist 7y ago
    The alternative being what? Gov regulations? Where the companies manipulate the regs and have flat out abusive monopolies? As we have now? I don't see how more of the same is any sort of solution.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  Reminder: initiatives like Hyperboria (formerly Project Meshnet) exist. Using the cjdns protocol and some communications medium (e.g. wires, line-of-sight microwave, WLAN, IPoCP), you can become the ISP for your own local area, assigning IPv6 addresses and providing a bridge (or many) to the 'net at large. The various pages on the topic aren't well linked (due to server migrations, name changes, low attention to marketing… you know how devs are), but the main homepage is https://hyperboria.net/ https://hyperboria.net/, some installation guides can be found at https://projectmeshnet.org/docs/ https://projectmeshnet.org/docs/ (which mostly links to https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns#how-to-install-cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns#how-to-install-cjdns) and generic, somewhat complete documentation is https://docs.meshwith.me/ https://docs.meshwith.me/. cjdns has some other neat features, which are outlined in its whitepaper: https://docs.meshwith.me/Whitepaper.html https://docs.meshwith.me/Whitepaper.html
swiley 7y ago
Just today they were killing my ssh connection repeatedly while I was editing a config file. We should just stop licensing cell companies and make it a free for all like WiFi.
vallismortis 7y ago
Every encounter with AT&T has felt like a scam to me. I tried a mobile hotspot two years ago on a 14 day free trial. One bar of signal, so I returned it the same day I received it. It took them 14 days to "process" the return, and I ended up with a $285 bill (activation fee, two months service). Last year, I was trying to find a carrier that would work with my Sierra Wireless WLAN card, and ended up repeating the same horrible experience - this round cost me $180. Next, I tried Cricket Wireless, which uses the AT&T network. No activation fee, $35/month, works flawlessly. Its not the network, its the company.
zbrozek 7y ago
Comcast told me they'd be able to add my house to their service - no big deal, we promise - until I actually bought the place and called their bluff. New story is that they want $500 for a site survey. And no word on whether it'd be possible to run service. If it is, I get to pay for the wire to buy the privilege of paying them for service. And I wouldn't own the wire. Others a few blocks away were quoted $13k per home. High enough, I thought, to make it obviously-stupid to pay for a survey. Three out of five of my neighbors have Comcast gigabit service. I can get AT&T DSL. It's not cheap; sticker is $50/mo, and it has more asterisks than a mail-in-rebate form. It's not fast; 20 mbps download max. Who-knows-what upload. So why shouldn't that be included as a data point? It's my only wired option, despite decades of subsidies towards universal service. Instead I opted for a 4G modem, but now I don't have a public IP address. Didn't expect that, and it's honestly pretty annoying to be unable to ssh home. I just moved in, and this weekend will be getting set up on some hosted VM to work around this shortcoming. I work for Alphabet in Mountain View. I live less than five miles from my office. You'd think I'd be able to do better.
- lainga 7y ago
  How's the ol' internet balloon coming along?
  - zbrozek 7y ago
    Beats me! But I suspect even if the answer were, "super awesome!" that it would not be helpful here. I think their mission is to try to go from absolutely-nothing to basic-cell-service. I've got decent cell service, so things aren't awful. They're just lame and disappointing.
pgnas 7y ago
Government is for sale, no longer are they for the people , by the people. What good is the FCC if it allows for the truth to be shown? It is no longer useful and has become corrupt.

299 points by close04 7y ago

dylz 7y ago

I am not a fan of AT&T, but it appears what they didn't want included was their ADSL1 speeds, which are probably utter rubbish for obvious reasons. The problem here is that there are people still on those plans.

Nextgrid 7y ago
Rubbish or not, the speeds should be included to give AT&T an incentive to move these customers to something more modern.
- dylz 7y ago
  Agreed. Honestly, (plain) ADSL shouldn't even be a thing anymore.
  - zmzrr 7y ago
    Why not? I have a 14 Mbps stable ADSL connection and it suits my needs. Why should I pay more for something I don't need?
    - ahi 7y ago
      I suspect you're paying more than what I pay for gigabit FTTH, $50.
      - zmzrr 7y ago
        I pay 23€ a month. I could pay roughly what you pay for gigabit, I just don't need it
    - dylz 7y ago
      Who said anything about you having to pay more? At least here, in the market that I can choose between FTTH and ADSL1 from the same provider, there's a 990 Mbps difference for the _same price_. Though - my personal opinion is that old copper that no one really wants to maintain is wasted space for cabling that could support significantly higher bandwidth at lower latency. Telcos are already refusing to replace destroyed landlines and instead substituing LTE service or otherwise instead for a decade now.
    - kristopolous 7y ago
      It shouldn't be more. Heck, your local tax dollars probably paid to lay the cables anyway. It should probably be 1/4th of what you're paying
      - zmzrr 7y ago
        I am not in the US. And yes, fibre costs more, even double sometimes. I don't need fibre, I don't want to pay double. Leave my ADSL alone.
        noxToken 7y ago
        Then you're likely in a very different situation. A condensed version of the US situation is that telcos here were incentivised through subsidies to upgrade and update the networking infrastructure to deliver more speeds and bandwidth to existing customers as well as connection to more rural customers. By and large, the telcos did not do that in spite of receiving the money.
        Jonnax 7y ago
        You're not in the US, so why did you bring up Google Fiber? Also if you're not in the US why are you talking about AT&T being forced to take away your ADSL? Also the poster you replied to specifically said ADSL1 which has been superceded more than a decade ago by ADSL2, ADSL2+ and VDSL. These aren't fibre technologies and in most countries are sold at the same price.
      - rhino369 7y ago
        ISPs don’t make 75% profit margins, so that’s really not possible.
        kristopolous 7y ago
        Profit is a matter of accounting. The telcos specifically are incentivized to have as little calculated profit as possible. Their subsidies and ability to charge different rates is partially based on their accounting. So they play Hollywood accounting tricks (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting). They have been chastised on this repeatedly. For instance, "The FCC Had To Remind ISPs Not To Spend Taxpayer Subsidies On Booze, Trips To Disney World" (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-has-to-remind-isps-not-to-spend-taxpayer-subsidies-booze-trips-to-disney-world.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-h...) here, the $1,300,000 spent by an executive to buy a house for their children's use as college housing wasn't part of the profit. That's simply the cost of running business, as essential as keeping the lights on ... nothing wrong with the twice a week $96,000/year massages either, I'm sure that's got a lot to do with FTTH residential deployment. Oh wait, the taxpayers built that. This has happened a few times, such as with verizon (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-the-salaries-of-veriz_b_9815496 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-the-salaries-of-veriz_b_9...) where the 4 top executive pay (without benefits) was $41 million ... which would have been fine if it was in their operating expense and they could afford it. But they did this because it wasn't and they couldn't. If the telcos make something called "Local Service" unprofitable when compared with "Corporate Operations Expense" (which includes jets, multiple homes, multi-million executive pay, etc) and technically run "at a loss" they can legally raise prices and reduce service. Because they can make things look unprofitable, federal regulation permits them to raise prices to make up for it. It's an perverse incentive, an executive spends $100,000 a year on pet care to make sure local service becomes unprofitable and then they can use a legal procedure to raise prices. rinse, wash, and repeat. So yes, it could be 1/4th the price but no, the free market is the most efficient allocator of goods, we're told. They do things the cheapest we're told, there is no alternative ... yeah, bullshit. High speed internet is $7.67/month in Russia, $5.41 in Ukraine, $6.12 in Venezuela and $63.07 in the USA. Ah, the magic of trusting the market. Can you feel it!?
    - toast0 7y ago
      ADSL1 from at&t tops out at 6Mbps, and 8Mbps generally, so you're most likely on ADSL2 (probably not VDSL, unless you're just plan limited, and not distance limited)
    - axaxs 7y ago
      I feel like this is some form of Stockholm Syndrome. You shouldn't pay more. You should be getting better speeds for the same or lesser price. Technology is advancing and the carriers are purposely holding us back, for exactly the reason you gave.
      - zmzrr 7y ago
        ISPs should lay out an expensive fibre network (so expensive that Google Fiber had to give up on it) and I should pay less money? That's just crazy.
        kstrauser 7y ago
        Why? We already paid them $400 billion dollars to get you decent Internet access (see: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...). I think that gives us the right to expect you to have something better than 14Mbps DSL at a decent price.
        axaxs 7y ago
        Absolutely! Even ignoring all the stimulus money and tax breaks probably given, municipalities all over the US are building out their own fiber that is blowing the others away in performance and even price usually.
        keanebean86 7y ago
        > so expensive that Google Fiber had to give up on it Part of that cost comes from ATT and Comcast using their government sugar daddy to make running fiber as expensive and difficult as possible. Example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/att-and-comcast-finalize-court-victory-over-nashville-and-google-fiber/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/att-and-comcast-...
      - takeda 7y ago
        If ADSL is cheap I actually would prefer to have it for redundancy. Phone line and cable is generally the only lines that are routed to a home that can be used for Internet.
    - ac29 7y ago
      In my market ATT fiber is cheaper than ATT DSL, and obviously quite a bit faster.
- jedberg 7y ago
  Or just drop them as customers altogether. It may have actually been wise for the FCC to exclude them instead of forcing the company to drop them.
zmzrr 7y ago
How come speeds are not segregated depending on technology? Seems like a shortcoming of this "speed-test program". No wonder they left.
- Avenger42 7y ago
  From the article: > The 2017 report includes two categories for AT&T, one for its oldest DSL technology and another for its DSL-based IP broadband with speeds of up to 45Mbps. [...] The 2018 report only includes AT&T's IP broadband category, leaving out the company's worst results.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  They fought to have anything faster than ISDN classified as "broadband". Now they get to pay the price for letting the copper rot.
  - zmzrr 7y ago
    Broadband has always meant "faster than dial-up".
    - tastyfreeze 7y ago
      The FCC has defined broadband as 25/3 Mbps since 2015. Prior to that it was 4/1 Mbps. The first FCC definition of broadband was established in 1996 as 200/200 Kbps. You can't really play loosey goosey with the definition. The service is either fast enough to be considered broadband or it isn't. The delivery method is irrelevant.
      - dylz 7y ago
        Honestly, by 2018 it should be something like 50/50 or 100/50 as a minimum.
      - zokula 7y ago
        Broadband has nothing to do with speed.
FireBeyond 7y ago
AT&T: "We don't want these plans included because they're obsolete and they're not the ones we are actively marketing". Also AT&T: "But we are absolutely selling them, obsolete or not, and signing up new customers in areas where that's their option, because we've decided it's not viable to upgrade them. We just don't want them counted."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Spivak 7y ago
  Is there a good solution for areas where it will never be profitable to run lines? I mean my company is getting a big local subsidy for a short distance point-to-point connection and it’s still costing us about a million dollars for construction and we still have to pay a monthly maintenance fee.
  - mrkstu 7y ago
    Fixed wireless.
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    They were given $Billions to run those lines anyway. And they didn’t.

kryogen1c 7y ago

The company i recently started managing it for previously went through some business and personnel changes and so doesnt have a good hold on their IT budget. Ive been discovering and recording bills from only at&t for days now. Highlights: 1300$/month for IT support 800% difference in per month rate vs 1 year contract rate Different departments cant talk to each other and have separate accounts. I have att.com accounts and businesscenter.att.com accounts. Is AT&T BusinessCenter different than AT&T BusinessDirect? You fuckin tell me Before i started, we were paying over $10k a month to only AT&T, right now we're <$7k and I'm not done. We have an account manager that i havent talked to. Clearly hes either incompetent or malicious, no desire to loop him in. Never before have i wanted to killdozer a company so badly. I have better things to do than review bills (although clearly not).

dennnis 7y ago
Wow, can't change providers?
- xnyan 7y ago
  lol. You are from SoCal or Europe, right? Sorry, not trying to be an asshole. Those are (almost) the only two places where people on hackernews have more than 1.5 internet choices.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    New Zealander here. The hopeless state owned telecom was sold off then forced to break up (into a line provider and a separate phone/ISP company). It has taken a very long time to come right, but NZ is now a great place to get internet and many good options are available from a range of companies. Gigabit fibre is here for a huge portion of residential customers. Connections of 2 and 4 gigabit are scheduled for early next year. I just tested a wall plate I mounted and am getting 920Mbps, for about US$80.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
    Even SoCal has plenty of areas with only a single broadband provider. :/

snek 7y ago

> "Sometimes providers boost speeds for households during the actual FCC speed-testing period," the Journal wrote. "Comcast a few years ago upgraded speeds in some regions without notifying the FCC, making test results look stellar, people close to the FCC program said. The FCC discovered the changes after spotting anomalous data and adjusted the numbers." This whole thing is frustrating. It is made to sound like some kids pulling some harmless pranks or something. What the heck. These companies are deliberately lying and confusing government agencies.

goodcanadian 7y ago
The word you are looking for is fraud. People should go to jail.
- cjslep 7y ago
  They're too busy rolling out IPv6 support-in-hardware and gigabit fiber upgrades everywhere nationally and obsoleting data caps, instead of taking software IPv6 shortcuts and enjoying regulatory capture and turning peering agreements into weapons and maximizing "shareholder value" (which of course we all agree isn't the real value at hand). Only if.
_red 7y ago
>confusing government agencies pretty dry humor Seriously though, ATT was a government entity that got its huge advantage from being a monopoly. After they were forced to "split up" (wink wink nudge nudge) they then shed all their unprofitable business and recombined again as new "ATT". At no point have they ever really become a customer-focused company and all their decisions are steeped in monopolistic style thinking.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I have had AT&T Gigabit Ethernet for 3 years. It’s $70 a month, no extra fees, no caps, and I consistently get 900+ u/d. Compared to cable companies it’s a dream. Comcast has a maximum upload of 35Mbps on their highest plan, it’s more expensive, less reliable, heavily over-provisioned and the bills are full of junk fees. Even at the new price of $60/month, AT&T Now was still a better deal than Comcast’s cable offerings - again with junk fees, hard to cancel service and cable box rentals. I’m using Hulu Live Tv now though.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

Good to know, but only if you have a choice of carriers. While I hate to drag the free market into this, having choice (read:competition) would expose this issue and be more likely to solve it.

fallingfrog 7y ago
Right but the end result of competition is that one company wins and eats the other, or they divide the market geographically, either way you end up back in the same place.
- distances 7y ago
  Any competition without local loop unbundling [1] won't be a solution. Without it you simply will never have proper competitive markets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling
- chiefalchemist 7y ago
  The alternative being what? Gov regulations? Where the companies manipulate the regs and have flat out abusive monopolies? As we have now? I don't see how more of the same is any sort of solution.
wizzwizz4 7y ago
Reminder: initiatives like Hyperboria (formerly Project Meshnet) exist. Using the cjdns protocol and some communications medium (e.g. wires, line-of-sight microwave, WLAN, IPoCP), you can become the ISP for your own local area, assigning IPv6 addresses and providing a bridge (or many) to the 'net at large. The various pages on the topic aren't well linked (due to server migrations, name changes, low attention to marketing… you know how devs are), but the main homepage is https://hyperboria.net/ https://hyperboria.net/, some installation guides can be found at https://projectmeshnet.org/docs/ https://projectmeshnet.org/docs/ (which mostly links to https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns#how-to-install-cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns#how-to-install-cjdns) and generic, somewhat complete documentation is https://docs.meshwith.me/ https://docs.meshwith.me/. cjdns has some other neat features, which are outlined in its whitepaper: https://docs.meshwith.me/Whitepaper.html https://docs.meshwith.me/Whitepaper.html

swiley 7y ago

Just today they were killing my ssh connection repeatedly while I was editing a config file. We should just stop licensing cell companies and make it a free for all like WiFi.

vallismortis 7y ago

Every encounter with AT&T has felt like a scam to me. I tried a mobile hotspot two years ago on a 14 day free trial. One bar of signal, so I returned it the same day I received it. It took them 14 days to "process" the return, and I ended up with a $285 bill (activation fee, two months service). Last year, I was trying to find a carrier that would work with my Sierra Wireless WLAN card, and ended up repeating the same horrible experience - this round cost me $180. Next, I tried Cricket Wireless, which uses the AT&T network. No activation fee, $35/month, works flawlessly. Its not the network, its the company.

zbrozek 7y ago

Comcast told me they'd be able to add my house to their service - no big deal, we promise - until I actually bought the place and called their bluff. New story is that they want $500 for a site survey. And no word on whether it'd be possible to run service. If it is, I get to pay for the wire to buy the privilege of paying them for service. And I wouldn't own the wire. Others a few blocks away were quoted $13k per home. High enough, I thought, to make it obviously-stupid to pay for a survey. Three out of five of my neighbors have Comcast gigabit service. I can get AT&T DSL. It's not cheap; sticker is $50/mo, and it has more asterisks than a mail-in-rebate form. It's not fast; 20 mbps download max. Who-knows-what upload. So why shouldn't that be included as a data point? It's my only wired option, despite decades of subsidies towards universal service. Instead I opted for a 4G modem, but now I don't have a public IP address. Didn't expect that, and it's honestly pretty annoying to be unable to ssh home. I just moved in, and this weekend will be getting set up on some hosted VM to work around this shortcoming. I work for Alphabet in Mountain View. I live less than five miles from my office. You'd think I'd be able to do better.

lainga 7y ago
How's the ol' internet balloon coming along?
- zbrozek 7y ago
  Beats me! But I suspect even if the answer were, "super awesome!" that it would not be helpful here. I think their mission is to try to go from absolutely-nothing to basic-cell-service. I've got decent cell service, so things aren't awful. They're just lame and disappointing.

pgnas 7y ago

Government is for sale, no longer are they for the people , by the people. What good is the FCC if it allows for the truth to be shown? It is no longer useful and has become corrupt.