ISPs Lie About Broadband "Up To" Speeds 547
Haffner writes "Ars Technica has an article detailing the difference between ISP advertised 'up to x Mbps' speeds and the actual speeds, in addition to some possible solutions. They find that on average, the advertised speeds were 'up to 6.7 Mbps' while the real median was 3 Mbps and the mean was 4 Mbps. This implies that ISPs were falsely advertising by at least 50%."
ISP's want your money... (Score:3, Insightful)
News at 11
On the subject of lying (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd say they were lying by up to 100%
Technically correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, some customers are getting "up to" the advertised speed. Since all the advertising says "up to" this isn't lying. Where's the story in this?
Technically.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Prefixed with "up to" this technically isn't false advertising, or at least you could rationalize that. 'Up to' doesn't necessarily mean you will actually get that number. Don't get me wrong, this still sucks.
Re:Technically.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I learned long ago that whenever an advertiser says "up to", you should always translate it as "less than" in your mind. That's what they're really saying; they're just saying it in a way that's misleading but legal.
Re:Sneaky, yes. Lies, not quite. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think Doritos would be allowed to sell bags as "up to a pound" when they averaged 9oz and some had quite a bit less? The big problem is it's one way. When you are promised Xmbps, you get some number, Y, where Y<= X. I would be amazed if more than 1% of the broadband population got higher than their rated speed. If it was a real normal distribution, or when you called to sign up they told you "you can expect to get X most of the time".
But my parents have 12 or 15mbps cable internet. During normal hours (even early afternoon) it is almost never faster than about 8mbps, and that's with multiple downloads coming from what I assume to be a CDN, because most sites aren't anywhere near that. Over the last 5-6 years, the top speed you could reach on their cable line has dropped as more people have signed on, but the advertised speed (and the price) have both increased. They have a medium package since there is no point trying to get more on an oversubscribed line.
I, on the other hand, pay for 6mbps DSL, and get almost exactly 6. I like getting what I pay for, and if I could only get 3, I'd pay for that service level.
If your "up to" only applies to 5% of your customers, you're scamming them. If it was 30%, I think we'd all be a lot more forgiving.
Re:Technically correct (Score:4, Insightful)
If I sold toilet bowl cleaner tablets that hang in the tank, and say they are good for "up to 1000 flushes", would it be OK if they worked for only 500 flushes for the majority of people, and the rated amount for less than 5%? No one would accept that.
When other industries advertise something (the weight in a bag of food, or of some raw material) they are advertising mean, and they have a lot of quality control to keep close to that number. Too much and they lose money, too little and people stop buying or they get sued for false advertising.
But that doesn't happen in broadband. They think it's OK for the speed to be way less than the rated, but it is almost never higher (let alone by 50%). But I have two choices right now. I have DSL that maxes out at 6mbps, and cable that is supposed to go to 24mbps. But if the top cable tier delivers 8, what am I supposed to do? It's the fastest available.
When bags of concrete mix turn out to be light, contractors stop buying because they are being ripped off and can buy another brand. The free market works there. Broadband has so little competition in most places (the majority of americans only have 2 choices, many only have one) that the options are usually "pay and suck up the false advertising" or "have no broadband at all".
They aren't selling 24 and delivering 21, they are selling 24 and delivering 12. That's not a "not always quite there", that's "complete exaggeration."
Re:Sneaky, yes. Lies, not quite. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not clear from TFA whether the histogram displayed there was drawn from the sample of experimentally measured _maximum_ speeds or just the "daily usage" speeds.
If it was the former, then it gives us a snapshot of the underlying distribution of the maximum speed, and we can estimate the probability of "ISP lying about the speed", along with the variance of this estimator, directly from it.
If it was the latter, the distribution of the maximum can still be estimated. However, this is usually difficult to be done in a model-independent way.
Re:I'm running at 100 Percent (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly they need more MBAs.
Mean, median, mode, lame (Score:3, Insightful)
The mean is not the maximum. Remember grade school math?
its a story because (Score:3, Insightful)
Not everyone realizes that other people are getting substantially better internet for the same amount from the same company based on the same agreement.
I think its high time corporate America fully embraces the "Up to" mentality.
Here are some suggestions
1) Restaurants / Groceries (Up to meals) Only give half the people half the portions of food.
2) Gas Stations (Up to 1 gallon for $2.80) Some days we dont have to give any gas but if you go 24hrs without getting any gas we will give you a minor refund of what you paid.
3) Cell phone minutes (up to 2100 family minutes during peak hours) But really only give 50% of the minutes to half the clients and charge them more for the rest.
4) Warranty (We warranty all our services up to 2 years ( meaning we can deny your service before or after 2 years, but after 2 we will always deny it.)
5) Intrest rates ( up to 2% fixed interest rate for the life of the CD ) Up to meaning we dont have to pay anything but at most we will pay 2%.
Can anyone think of any others?
Misunderstanding the meaning of the word "lie" (Score:1, Insightful)
It seems people like to stretch the meaning of the word "lie" to mean "inconvenient to me." You see, as long as someone can achieve the advertised maximum speed, it is not a lie. If it really was a lie, then that would illegal, and opening the companies for not only civil lawsuit, but criminal charges.
Just because most users don't get the maximum advertised speed, and the average/median/mean speed is not the maximum speed doesn't mean the company is falsely advertising their "up to" speeds. There are various conditions that can affect the speed of the connection and this is usually outlined in the advertisement and/or the agreement.
The only thing the ISPs may be lying about is possibly the implication of capacity to support those connections. However, because they don't advertise "we have the capacity for everyone to use 10mbps" you can't really catch them in a lie.
Re:Technically correct (Score:3, Insightful)
It's dishonest and intended to rip off the customer. They don't promise to give you "up to 500 TV channels" - they structure it so that you pay for what you want. Bandwidth should be held to the same standards.
Re:Loophole (Score:3, Insightful)
No, "up to" means that the connection, including provisioning, is capable of transmitting data at that rate. If it's impossible to transmit data up to that rate, then that would be false advertising.
Did also believe the governments MPG ratings? (Score:1, Insightful)
Did also believe the governments MPG ratings?
Re:So just what am I paying for? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well you can't really compare ISPs based on a single number no matter what. I mean even if both were willing to offer you a CIR (which you need to pay more for) there are still different in terms of latency, peering, uptime, etc.
I see nothing wrong with advertising maximum rates, as that is a consideration. Yes it is putting their best foot forward but if you aren't used to that in advertising you are being willfully blind.
Re:The incentives are all wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Pay as you go data plans are unfair. The more data you transfer, the more you pay on average for the same network resources.
We should be asking for 95th-percentile network utilization-based billing
With price breaks for off-peak hours and a premium for prime time utilization.
The guy who downloads a few GB of Linux ISOs from 2am to 6am, or over several days at a trickle... (i.e. rate-limited on their end)
Should not pay as much as the guy who maxes out his connection at prime time when the network is at peak utilization.
The ISP should also allow you to apply QoS markers to your packets and honor them to reduce priority of traffic, and low-priority packets should be less expensive, since you were essentially marking your traffic as specifically drop-eligible in case of any congestion.
It's not a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
"Up To" means "Less Than or Equal To".
What are all the numbers you can name from zero "up to" 6.7? Would you expect to encounter 3 and 4 on your way up to 6.7?
It's misleading maybe, but it's not a lie. They are publishing their maximum possible speed. YMMV.
Oh blow it out your ass (Score:3, Insightful)
So on average, they're delivering 50% of their 'up to' speed and that's alright? What if it was 40%? 30%
How low would they have to go before you would say "Hey, this is a fucking rip!"?
Nobody likes pay as you go (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why we are where we are. Back in the day ISPs constantly tried to offer this. Particularly when the Internet was young and bandwidth was scarce, this was the best way to do it for high end connections. You buy a DS-1 or DS-3 and get the full transfer rate, but pay for what you use (or usually pay a flat fee for some and usage after that). It allowed for the ability to offer higher rates to more people for less money. They'd show businesses how it'd cost less. Didn't matter, people didn't like it because they could get hit with extra charges. They wanted unlimited.
You just can't have it all ways. You can't have cheap and fast and dedicated and so on.
Personally I think there needs to be less bitching, particularly if the complaint is with low end broadband service, which is (at least in my area) what 3mbps is. That is Cox's "value" tier. You pay very little for it. That's fine, but it is for people who really don't do much. It doesn't surprise me that it is slow. Pony up more cash if speed is important.
Re:Sneaky, yes. Lies, not quite. (Score:3, Insightful)
If the weight of a packet of crisps diminished the further away you got from the shop, it would not only be perfectly legal, but prudent to advertise as "up to 200 grams". So the Analogy is terrible
With DSL your speed is entirely dependent on environmental conditions. With Cable it's entirely dependent on load. With Fibre, then you have a point as it should sync at whatever speed your paying for but with 2 Mbit Fibre coming in at A$500 a month, forget that. This is how Australian ISP's market their broadband offerings (ADSL2+). Some are quite unscrupulous but still legal whilst some actually publish information on expected speeds and at what rate they drop [iinet.net.au]. So there is nothing wrong or misleading about the "Up To" advertising because they cannot physically guarantee a certain speed at any one time (thus expecting them to is unreasonable).
Re:It's not a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, if it's speed limited, then it would be a lie.
With your broadband modem, if it's configured for 6.7MBit/s, then that is your speed limitation. Whether the network behind it can serve it is another matter.
The article itself, on the other hand, is doubly bogus - for one thing, they don't seem to get the wording 'up to', the other thing is that the compare the MEDIAN speed to the 'up to' speed.
Picture this: Your sports car can go UP TO 300km/h. There is no speed limit on the motorway (in Germany, at least) - yet traffic moves at a median speed of around 130km/h.
Does this mean the 'UP TO 300km/h' on your sports car brochure is wrong?
No... The median speed has nothing to do with what the car would be capable of.
Same thing here - if they were to say 'up to 6.7MBit/s' in the brochure, but their observed TOP speed over half a year would never go past 4MBit/s, they might have a case. Saying the median is lower than the top speed - only one word springs to mind: Duh!
Well, there is a solution of sorts: (Score:5, Insightful)
...what if I, in return, promise to pay the ISP "up to" $45/mo for their service?
Oh, that's right - they'd cut me off. :/
Re:Sneaky, yes. Lies, not quite. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people, even most hardcore nerds, don't download anywhere near that much.
Yet.
I launched my first BBS at 1200 bps and at the time it was a pretty good speed. A year later the big boards were installing 9600s. And a couple years later it was 56k. Early BBSs were text based message boards and didn't need a lot of speed. I had friends that were perfectly happy at 300 bps because that was as fast as they read. (no need for paging) As modems got faster BBSs added file downloads and graphics.
With ISPs we are working from the other side of equation. Speed has outpaced the providers ability to send content because we've gone to a shared medium. (modems provided a dedicated link from provider to consumer) But just like with BBSs, as speed increases so does content demand. Content demand will just continue to increase as new services are created. On a 1200 bps link you were happy with your 100k gifs of nekkid women. With broadband you want 100m mpgs. When you get into streaming video you're looking at 1-2g per hour for standard def TV. If you switched from broadcast TV to entirely online providers you would be looking at 75-150 hours of TV per month, assuming you don't degrade picture quality. That won't be acceptable in a year or two when everyone wants Netflix to send them 3 or 4 HD movies a week and HD content from the networks. So 150g per month is quickly going to limit your average couch potato consumer. Hardcore nerds sharing their Ubuntu DVDs are the lightweights in this environment.
Look at it another way. AT&T and Verizon have limited their data plans to 2g and 5g per month, respectively, saying that it is more than sufficient for their current definition of the service's intended use. The 2g is kind of tight if you're a regular internet user tethering your laptop, 5g isn't much of a problem if you also have occasional wifi access for large downloads and software updates. Neither limit is a problem for a regular user who is only consuming with their smart phone. My average session is about 10m reading all my news sites, unless I get into articles with linked photo essays and videos. And then it's pretty easy to hit 150m in a session. But I know people who frequent youtube that are going to have problems with 5g monthly limits.
Look at Sweden (Score:2, Insightful)
Here it is mandatory to advertise speed intervals that show what you can reasonably expect. One of the biggest DSL providers (Telia) currently sell three packages: 1.5-2 Mbit, 6-8 Mbit and 12-24 Mbit.
That being said, it is of course a problem to correctly advertise speeds that greatly depend on factors that are out of the ISPs control. If we are talking DSL the quality of the copper cable and also the length of the cable (the location of your house) are huge factors in determining the maximum speed you can get.
I also think a general increase in technology awareness has made most people aware that just because they advertise 12-24 Mbit, it does not mean you can actually buy that subscription. If your house is in a remote area maybe you can only get the 6-8 Mbit package.
Re:Well, there is a solution of sorts: (Score:4, Insightful)
did your contract with the ISP come with a SLA? no? right, so you agreed to pay $45 a month for what ever they give you... hmm oddly i'm not sure a contract like that would hold up in court though.
Re:Well, there is a solution of sorts: (Score:4, Insightful)
If everybody switched away from ISPs that pulled this crap they would stop doing it in short order. Just switch to another local provider and this will all go away. It's not like your local government cut a deal with them giving them monopoly status in exchange for bribes^Wfranchise fees or anything.......