FCC Relying On Faulty ISP Performance Data 89
alphadogg writes "The FCC recently used speed test results from comScore as an absolute indicator of specific ISPs' performance. Consulting firm NetForecast analyzed comScore's testing methodology and data to assess whether it accurately reflects broadband ISP performance, and to assess the appropriateness of using the data to reach general conclusions about the actual performance ISPs deliver to their subscribers. NetForecast uncovered problems on both counts. They found that the effective service speeds comScore reports are low by a large margin (PDF) because its data calculations under-report performance and place many subscribers in a higher performance tier than they purchased."
Wait for ACK? (Score:2)
Re:Wait for ACK? (Score:4, Interesting)
TCP/IP doesn't wait for the ACK. It keeps sending until the Window is full, or the ACK is received. If the Window fills it will wait until the ACK is received (or timeout and retry, etc).
If the test is trying to automatically place the users in specific Tiers then there could be a problem, however the rest of the issues are mostly a red herring. I use Speedtest.net and can readily attest to it's general accuracy, and I seriously doubt any other services are all that different.
by the way, I'm not in the U.S., I actually get what I pay for.
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What do you pay or and what do you get? (just curious)
The speedtest.net you reference shows that the EU* is about 1 Mbit/s behind the US (which is 7.8 Mbit/s average). Now maybe your specific member state is faster overall, but the top US state is no slouch either (Delaware at 12.5). The only continent-sized federation faster than the US is the Russian Federation.
*
* Yes I'm making a big jump here that you live in the EU.
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I pay for 15 Mbit down and .5 Mbit up. .5 Mbit up.
I get 15-20 Mbit down and
I even tested it with the FCC test since I posted the first message. It rated my connection slightly faster than speedtest.net did. (Not significantly, and I'm sure it would vary).
Until recently I paid for 20 Mbit / 1.0 Mbit; but I wanted to save some money.
The general illusion in the U.S. is many markets are the numbers for a zip-code are good, or even fantastic, but only a tiny fraction of the zip-code may actually get any service
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Course my Zipcode has 10MB charter available in it. Of course, thats the homes right around the golf course. And the only ones that have cable. The rest of us get either Satellite, 3G, or Wisp coverage that is spotty, and drops alot. But according to the FCC, I have high speed available, since those houses on the golf course have it, and were all in the same zip code.
And I live a few miles from a very large town. So if the majority of the EU is at 7.8Mb/s and they have access to that, I think its aweso
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>>>So if the majority of the EU is at 7.8Mb/s
6.8 Mbit/s
>>>I have 600k\s. I pay $50/month for that, and feel lucky.
That's nuts. I have DSL through my phone company and it only costs $15/month. If I were in a position of power (nudges FCC), I would mandate DSL must be supplied to any customer that requests it. The wires are already there - all that's needed is to install the ~$1000 DSLAM at each central station.
Re:Wait for ACK? (Score:4, Informative)
by the way, I'm not in the U.S., I actually get what I pay for.
You might have worded that a little bit better. Canada and Australia have worse broadband networks than the US does. Most US users on DSL get what they pay for. Cable networks may or may not deliver the promised performance at all hours, but that's simply the nature of the beast. In my area Time Warner provides 10MBit/s service on a DOCSIS 1.1 network. That means that just four customers are enough to max out a node that serves dozens to hundreds of customers.
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No, I'm not a DSL "shrill". I receive my service through Time Warner -- 10 mbit/s (15mbit/s on RR Turbo) shared beats 1.5mbit/s dedicated any day of the week.
Your citation from DSLReports sounds great in theory but I've never seen Time Warner operate that way in my area. They have a single downstream channel for Roadrunner throughout this entire area. I've talked to engineers that admit that they often hook as many as four different nodes up to a single downstream card in the CMTS. Each node does have
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I prefer the speedtest that you can download and put on your own servers.
There are far too many unknown when testing from point A (your PC) to point B (the speedtest server). Because it's a public speedtest server, that hans people are beating on it all the time. Is the server capable of handling it? The uplink? Is there a congestion problem between you and them. mtr helps to give a better image of potential problems during the test.
I have access to servers
FCC is faulty? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:FCC is faulty? (Score:4, Insightful)
And we all know employees of private companies are infallible.
Re:FCC is faulty? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but in contrast to a government operation there are a dozen other companies colluding with each other and trying to screw their consumers as much as possible.
FTFY.
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Except when the ISP has a monopoly on broadband in the area. Which is one of the reasons we have the FCC.
That's funny, I could have sworn the FCC was created in 1934 to regulate the airwaves.
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US Code Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter I, Section 151:
For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications, and for the purpose of securing a more effective execution of this policy by centralizing authority heretofore granted by law to several agencies and by granting additional authority with respect to interstate and foreign commerce in wire and radio communication, there is created a commission to be known as the “Federal Communications Commission”, which shall be constituted as hereinafter provided, and which shall execute and enforce the provisions of this chapter.
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Then you haven't actually read the charter of the FCC:
For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio
But even disregarding that the scope and powers of the FCC has evolved over time as Congress has given it more authority. You seem to be the only one unaware that governmental agencies evolve over time.
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You seem to be the only one unaware that governmental agencies evolve over time.
That's true. They eventually fall victim to regulatory capture and wind up entrenching the very businesses that they were created to regulate, to the detriment of innovation and society as a whole.
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For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio
Wire and radio eh? I don't see the word "fiber" in there...
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Ya know.....
the only reason ISPs have monopolies is because local governments GAVE them the monopoly. If local governments stopped handing-out these exclusive licenses, and allowed the free market to operate, then we'd have a dozen different companies serving our homes. Just imagine if your choices were:
- Comcast .....and you simply chose whichever one you liked best, and "hooked" into their privately-owned fiber to get your int
- Cox
- Time-warner
- Cablevision
- Verizon
- Roadrunner
- Quest
- ATT
- AppleTV
- MSN
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Ya know.....
the only reason ISPs have monopolies is because local governments GAVE them the monopoly. If local governments stopped handing-out these exclusive licenses, and allowed the free market to operate, then we'd have a dozen different companies serving our homes. Just imagine if your choices were:
And the only reason those monopolies stay in place is because those same companies you list collude together to lobby that they stay around. If you think any of those companies actually want to compete against each other you're living in a fantasy world.
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>>>And the only reason those monopolies stay in place is because those same companies you list collude together to lobby that they stay around. If you think any of those companies actually want to compete against each other you're living in a fantasy world.
>>>
And if you had bothered to read my WHOLE message, you would not have repeated what I already said:
"Of course they won't because Comcast bribes the politicians to keep the monopoly."
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No. Natural monopoly due to high fixed cost of infrastructure would prevent that.
Get real. Running fiber and purchasing/leasing rights-of-way is expensive, and a dozen companies are not going to run out competing infrastructure without making sure th
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paying 40% more for the same service than our neighbors down the road whose condo board allowed satellite dishes.
.
Not strictly on topic, but I am endlessly amazed at the condo, apartment and rental unit operators who try to restrict satellite dishes. Except for some special cases (ex., you're in a historical district or putting up the dish would present a safety hazard), they CANNOT restrict satellite dishes that are less than 1 meter in size.
See the FCC's policy on receiving antennas (including satellite dishes) here. [fcc.gov]
Practically speaking, you'll typically have to get the FCC involved (which takes time) and you'll h
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>>>No. Natural monopoly due to high fixed cost of infrastructure would prevent that.
I don't consider running fiber optics to be a "natural" monopoly. Fiber is cheap - and the metal pipes are already under the street. If a new competitor like Google wants to start supplying hookups, all they have to do is run the fiber through the pipe to any customer who requests Google TV or Internet.
In fact there are some towns that DO have two competing cable companies, thereby giving customers a choice.
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Are you seriously suggesting that there is conduit under public streets that anyone can run fiber through free of charge?
And it's not just the fiber, there's all the other infrastructure required, as well a
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Private companies don't have access to my paycheck.
For example when Comcast yanked TCM off my cable without notice (and in violation of FCC rules), then sent me some paperwork that I could get TCM back by getting a "free" digital converter box at $5 per month rental (times 3 sets), I mailed them a photo of my middle digit attached to a formal complaint to the FCC, and asked them to cancel my cable effective the day they yanked TCM w/o telling me.
Now when Comcast mails me a letter asking me to "come back" I
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Private companies can use legal process the same way the Government can to obtain access to your paycheck. Ever heard of "garnishment"?
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>>>>>Private companies don't have access to my paycheck. For example when Comcast...I asked them to cancel my cable
>>
>>Private companies can use legal process..... Ever heard of "garnishment"?
Are you saying Comcast can drag me to court, convince the judge to FORCE me to be their customer, and suck/garnish a $70 subscription fee out of my paycheck each month??? - Dude. That has to be the most stupid idiotic thing I've ever heard anyone say. Of course they can't do that.
Now c
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No, but a judge can hold you liable if you violate a contract or damage a private party. I wasn't trying to imply that private parties can levy taxes.
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While you are correct, that a judge can hold you liable for contract violation, in this case Comcast unilaterally changed the terms of the contract. The GP was within his rights to insist that the contract be honored, or be terminated without damages. He chose "terminated".
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Bad data == good data for a politician.
Especially when it's in favor of whatever they desire to happen. Politicians wanted healthcare so they generated a faulty "42.5 million americans uninsured" statistic. How? Using a couple mail-in postcards from voluntary recipients. Hardly scientific. (Real numbers from scientists estimate the number as 5-15 million uninsured U.S. citizens. +9 million if you include illegal non-citizens/intruders.)
And of course if the FCC stats show that ~40 million Americans do
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Real numbers from scientists estimate the number as 5-15 million uninsured U.S. citizens. +9 million if you include illegal non-citizens/intruders.
Senator Orrin Hatch [wikipedia.org], a scientist???
Besides, here are his exact words. He doesn't even dispute the figures (because he does admit that they're uninsured). He just questions the assumption that those uninsured people even want insurance (which is a separate argument of its own, if you want to argue that, argue that, don't change the freaking numbers).
"By the way, of that 47 million people, when you deduct the ones who could have insurance through their employers but don't, you deduct the 11 million that basically qualify for CHIP or Medicaid but don't realize it (and) are not enrolled, you deduct those who are over $75,000 a year in income but just won't purchase their own health insurance, and then 6 million people who are illegal aliens, my gosh, when you put that all together, it leaves about 15 million people. So we're going to throw out a system that works for 15 million people."
And by the way, people without health insurance, whether they want that health insurance or not, do affect the rest of us. And unless Senator Hatch wants to re
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[citation needed]
My five minutes of googling has not come up with sources that agree with your figures. Typically, lowball figures like yours are due to the following errors:
1. They include only people without any insurance for the entire year, though at any given time during the year, a significantly higher number of people are uninsured.
2. They double-dip
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There's a simpler answer: The "45 million uninsured Americans" that politicians kept talking about actually ARE insured - by the government's existing programs. You're old, or you're a child, and when you enter the hospital you are instantly signed-up for Medicare or SCHIP. That drops the number to about 20 million instantly.
Also the stats come from about 5,000 mail-in surveys from voluntary respondents (the other persons threw-out the surveys). NOT an accurate scientific polling, therefore the
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Please provide a citation for that. No figures I have been able to find agree with that number.
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They have jobs.
Now compare with your lot. All of you.
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I have a better job?
I don't get it.
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Obviously you don't understand the methodology here.
The failure of government is meant to convince us that we need to spend more money on government so they can do better testing to convince us we need to spend more money on government.
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Exactly. While the commercial employees function perfectly... while working hard to rape the money out of your as hard as they can. ^^
How Much (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder which ISP owns comScore. Who got the worst rating?
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Sorry, I only thought about that later after submitting - there would be people who don't start their lists with zero. I was in the middle of a program and was thinking in terms of - figure out the owner by eliminating the non owners...
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Think about it; What other ISP's name starts with com?
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and a really bad one in my opinion, their website looks crazy from firefox
That's because it was created in FrontPage 5.0. It only barely renders properly in IE 7.
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Better question: who owns NetForcast?
Actually I'm inclined to chalk this one up as plain old sniping between competing performance testing companies, rather than either the FCC/pols or the ISPs trying to fudge numbers.
comScore got it more or less right (Score:5, Insightful)
comScore got the data more or less right. The OP's main complaint seems to be that the speed is under-reported because packet loss causes the TCP session they used to slow down. Guess what? Packet loss causes the TCP session to slow down. Customers on ISPs with noticeable loss rates experience slower performance than the line's rated speed. Hello!
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The OP's main complaint seems to be that the speed is under-reported because packet loss causes the TCP session they used to slow down.
Other things cause TCP sessions to slow down too though. Like Windows XP with its lack of window scaling.
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Like Windows XP with its lack of window scaling.
What are you talking about? There are all sorts of tweaking tools that let you enabled window scaling in Windows XP.
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It doesn't matter. He said it lacked window scaling. This is false because you can enable it through the registry or tweak tools.
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Technically false, but true in practice.
Better would have been to say Windows doesn't come with any such tools, and therefore the vast majority of people don't have access to such a feature because they lack the technical ability to get it.
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>>>>>Like Windows XP with its lack of window scaling.
>>>
>>tweaking tools that let you enabled window scaling in Windows XP
I see a lot of XP bashing but even if it didn't have "window scaling" I still consider it the best Microsoft OS. Still better than Windows 6.1's (7) ribbon interface. I liked this OS at first, due to it fixing the Vista Beta release, but now I'm sick of it. The menus keep randomly moving around instead of staying put. Well..... at least it's not as bad
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If you're not causing latency with QoS and you're not going through a satellite loop, lack of window scaling doesn't become a major factor until you're in the 100mbps range, well beyond any but the largest of today's consumer broadband links.
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XP was written in the day when most Internet connections were either dialup, or broadband that was slow by today's standards (128, 256, 512 or 768 kbps DSL, for instance). A small window size is preferable for that kind of situation, and as you say, provided the latency is low, it scales up well to the 100Mbps range. So in the US with your sub-100ms latency to the majority of hosts, it's not really an issue. But if you are more geographically distant, window scaling matters a lot.
Here in Australia, the XP T
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If I correctly recall the article, comScore tested against the nearest Akamai server. That would have all but eliminated latency due to geographical distance.
As for ADSL2, it's mainly a political thing with the phone companies. They're required by law to unbnudle and sell copper pairs but if they deliver fiber they have an unregulated monopoly. So anywhere they'd seriously consider ADSL2 is getting fiber instead.
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Ah true. I was speaking more generally about whether XP's lack of window sizing 'mattered'. In relation to the comScore tests though you are right ... doesn't matter at all.
Re:comScore got it more or less right (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sounds like error in the 'good' direction (Score:2)
And really the argument 'these scores are low because X slowed them down' is really not sound. If X really exists then the connection is slowed in real life. I would bet this is the results of what people expierence over the net. And should be plenty fine to help determine what needs to be done to get back in the same ballpark as the rest of the industrialized
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>>> This way the problem of 3rd world net speeds can be addressed.
What? The US has an average speed of 7.8 Mbit/s. Third world speeds are 3.6, 2.5, 1.8 in Chile, Brazil, or Argentina respectively. Or how about 1.9 for South Africa. Or 2.1 in China.
Compared to other continent-sized federations, the US is #2, behind Russia but ahead of the EU. The US is faaaaaar faster than a "third world speed"
Learn about statistics - both of you (Score:3, Interesting)
Both sides need to learn more about statistics.
The report fails to mention that across a large enough population, the results will be more-or-less correct within a certain percentage point because as he mentions, some people will test with a lot of bandwidth available at a certain point but others will test with their available bandwidth constricted. Overall, out of a large enough population the outliers are washed away.
comScore needs to realize that correlation != causation. It's not because your bandwidth correlates with other users' high-bandwidth plans, that it is caused by you actually buying the plan. But even then, even in the report the statistics show that it evens out pretty good with only a small percentage error.
Off course this brief report reeks more like paid research. Off course comScore measures the users' experience connecting to large-bandwidth centers like Akamai which has a lot of large sites on it and it doesn't accurately measures what the provider offers in the last mile. I don't care that I actually get my 10Mbps connecting to my neighborhood (unless a bunch of my neighbors actually host the Linux-ISO torrent I want) I care about getting on average getting maybe 50% of what I pay for which I usually don't get (I get closer to 1-10% depending on what I'm doing). comScore accurately reflects the poor status of broadband in this metropolitan area - dual-ISDN speeds (early 90's) on the best high-tier packages money can buy in this area. The only alternative is DSL which is horribly outdated.
Need new ISP (Score:2, Funny)
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Now, I do pay $60/Month for my connection which is 3x the cost of Residential Comcast, but the extra $40/Month as been well worth it to me.
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FYI, next town over from me has Comcast, and their residential lowest tier service (15/3) is $43 a month. You can get it for $20 for 6 months if you bundle with Comcast Cable or Voice.
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Complicated? (Score:2)
As if dslreports.com isn't useful?
Sheesh
a few somewhat valid points, but mostly garbage. (Score:2, Interesting)
So here is the outline of their claims, with responses.
Data gathering errors
Only one TCP connection is used
Basically valid, it's a pretty rare net activity nowadays that actually maxes out the connection by itself, no idea if the promises the ISPs make contractually include any wording about per-connection performance.
Client-server delay is variable
Tough, this is a reality of how the network operates, if an ISP promises
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Frankly I've lived in both the US and Australia and you are subject to the luck of the draw in both countries. There are plenty of places in Australia where you can get connections better than many places in the US. There are also awful Internet blackholes which are, I agree, hell on earth. E.g. places covered only by RIMs or with terrible backhaul congestion.
I lived in the US for a couple of years in a mid-sized city and the fastest home connection I could get was DSL from AT&T at 6000/768 (down/up in
The Finger (Score:1)
"The Secure features a fingerprint scanner and a thermal sensor 'so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick's contents."
I'm sure that if someone went through the trouble of removing the finger to access the Secure Pro, then they'd go through the trouble of warming the dead finger up so that they could have access. seems kinda gimmicky to me...