The FCC Says ISPs Aren't Hitting Advertised Speeds

MojoKid writes "The Federal Communications Commission has released the results of a year-long scientific study it conducted with regard to the upload and download speeds of thirteen American Internet service providers. Most of the ISPs hit 90 percent of their advertised upload speeds. Of the 13 providers tested, only four (or less than a third) averaged at or even above their advertised download speeds (Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Verizon Fiber). The tests were performed by a private firm that has run similar tests in the U.K. It measured performance at 6,800 'representative homes' nationally in March."

Comcast

[guttentag]

When I had issues with my Comcast cable internet connection, it was taking me about 5 minutes to load Google's home page, 10 minutes for the nytimes.com home page. Slashdot took about 7 minutes. I went to three different independent speed test sites, which each confirmed I was getting less than 5% of the bandwidth Comcast advertised. I called them up and they directed me to a flash animation that looked like an analog gauge of a car speeding up onto the freeway, overshooting the advertised bandwidth, wavering a bit to make it look like it was actually measuring something and leveling off at exactly the advertised bandwidth. I reloaded it a couple times, and each time it was the exact same animation. The rep then said, "can you read me what it says on the dial? Looks like your connection is working just fine. The sites you are trying to visit must not have enough bandwidth to handle the connection." I asked if she'd ever heard of a little company named Google, and she said they must be having network trouble on their end.

I'm in that FCC study, and here's what happened.

[quixote9]

Before participation: Time Warner/Roadrunner here in Southern California gave me less than a tenth of advertised speeds. Officially 7mbits down, 1mb up, the actual service was more like 400kbits. Up to 800kb, sometimes even over a whole megabite early in the morning. (Exciting!) After the initial burst, which hit over a megabit down fairly often, there were times when it slowed all the way to single digits in KB.

Under the Sam Knows program, the FCC lets the ISPs know which subscribers are part of the test. (Bit of a problem right there, I'd say.) A few days before we had the government router hooked up, no doubt when Time Warner got word of our new "status," our speeds suddenly shot up into the advertised range. I nearly swooned the first time I saw a download go by at over a megabyte. And, interestingly enough, they've stayed there. It wasn't just some random thing. We don't usually get 7mb, but 5-6mb is the norm now.

So the info that ISPs aren't delivering stated speeds even in the FCC study is interesting, given that they seem to be jimmying the results for all they're worth.

(Speed tests before the FCC program would show us getting multi-megabits that we never saw in real life. Two things there: burst-shaping, no doubt, and I've heard that ISPs have ways of recognizing speed test traffic and giving it bandwidth.)