The Fastest ISPs In the US 199
adeelarshad82 writes "PCMag recently put Internet browsing speeds to the test to see which ISP was the fastest. The results were based on a quarter million tests run between May 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010, by more than 6,000 users. The tests were carried out using SurfSpeed, which takes into account the complete, real-world download time of a web page to a browser. According to the results, Verizon's FiOS took the top spot as the nation's fastest ISP, with a SurfSpeed score of 1.23 Mbps. Interestingly though, of all the regions where Verizon's FiOS is available, its dominance is only seen in the northeast and the west, whereas cable service from Cox and Comcast won out in the southern region. Moreover, cable through Cox and Optimum Online beat AT&T's fiber optic service in the nationwide results, with SurfSpeeds of 1.14Mbps, 1.12Mbps, and 1.06Mbps respectively. The worst results mostly consisted of DSL providers, bottoming out at 544 Kbps from Frontier and going up to 882Kbps by Earthlink. Other interesting facts noted in the test were that broadband penetration was highest in Rhode Island and lowest in Mississippi, while the average Internet bill was highest in Delaware and lowest in Arkansas."
Neat, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
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You mean Gigabytes per month? Ditto. It seems a more logical approach to separate the ISPs from one another.
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are ISPs still using gigs per month? Last month, I went above 3 TB....
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Comcast still imposes 250 GB limit. I don't know about other companies.
Mississippi (Score:5, Funny)
Is there any metric for which Mississippi is not the worst state?
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Yes, where Louisianna is last.
/ Louisianna native
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That's spelled "idjit"
(Yes a supernatural reference.)
Re:Mississippi (Score:5, Funny)
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1. Mississippi
2. All other 49 states.
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BBQ. Maybe not the best, but def. not last.
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Yea, definitely good BBQ to be found in the Delta...
Re:Mississippi (Score:5, Interesting)
I was kinda disappointed that the article doesn't address maximum speed, or average speed amongst all "5mbps" connections, instead it lumps in DSL, Cable, and Fiber and says "HEY LoOk! Fiber is usually faster!!"
What this is really testing is "How much speed do Americans purchase, by region,"... it's just.. almost.. completely useless... except for a few statistical data points that are not frequently mentioned (broadband penetration by state).. We're comparing ISP by what the end-users paid for, as opposed to what end users CAN pay for (i.e. the limit of the technology)... or, as an alternative test, they could have tested Like-speed connections average performance across carriers, but instead they are grouping DSL, Fiber, and Cable..... and ignoring that some people pay $20 for internet while others want to pay $50 (for semi-basic home internet service) and claiming an ISP is "The best" because they have more users that spend more money on internet. (or they have less users but much higher speed to result in the same data skewing of results).
So yeah, Metrics, IMO, are mostly crap. And Mississippi can pull ahead of every state in this 'survey' simply by spending an extra $5... hell for $10 extra you can probably get speeds 5 times faster then most of the United States!
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High Speed Metrics (Score:2)
We're way too far behind to catch up except with better technology (VDSL, Fios, etc).
In the short term though we need lower latency, the latency is high because of packet sniffing and low consumer demand.
We do need it though, clearly cell prices aren't dropping and VOIP is the only way out (unless we band together to buy a chunk of spectrum)... so we'll see I suppose!
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Is there any metric for which Mississippi is not the worst state?
Canned Possum consumption. Georgia takes it by a country mile.
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Out here in California, we like our possum curry.
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Cooking-Meat-750/Exotic-dish-question.htm [allexperts.com]
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Oklahoma is the worst in state government corruption.
Thou Louisiana will contest this, naturally...
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Yeah, it sucks when educated people move in.
Browsing speed? (Score:2)
This sounds more serious to me than anything else.
I said goodbye to speakeasy this year (Score:4, Interesting)
Even though Speakeasy was slashdot recommended, a lot of my geek friends used it, I had to cut them this year.
I never got the advertised speed out of them for what I was paying. My business was close to the CO, but when I'd complain their answer would always be "Replace the wire going from the pole into your building"
Why should I have to do that? I'm old, I hurt when I fall. NO thanks.
So after 6 years with SE, I called up Comcast. They sent an installer who made sure everything was working right. My speeds were out of sight, 20mbps down and 5mbps up. My bill is $20@mo less too.
DSL can compete, but they have to give up a little margin for better customer service.
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I'll keep my Speakeasy thanks. I've had it for several years, am always at least in the ballpark of my rated speeds, and have had a grand total of about 8 hours of downtime. A friend of mine has Comcast cable and his service goes down all the time. He's actually had to argue with Comcast to convince them his service is down, then wait days for the problem to be fixed. Pass. I work from home and need my connection to be reliable.
Comcast can't even get my TV cards to work consistently, I really don't want the
speakeasy are LIARS (Score:4, Informative)
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SpeakEasy sucks ass anyway - total liars (Score:2)
Fuck Comcast (Score:2, Offtopic)
I came just to say this.
"SurfSpeed" not a measure of bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite using bandwidth units (Mbps), their "SurfSpeed" "benchmark" actually depends heavily on latency, as it tries to simulate a web browser fetching resources sequentially from a site as it discovers them.
Found this report analyzing the article and the benchmark: http://blog.ookla.com/2010/06/23/the-fastest-isps-not-quite/ [ookla.com]
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Also, what are all the variables they are taking into account? If I have a screaming fast ISP, but the server I'm connecting to is hosted on some dog slow server, then the site is going to slow me down. It's not my ISP's fault, it's the site I'm visiting. Do they account for this and filter out the server's speed?
Re:"SurfSpeed" not a measure of bandwidth (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the article I linked to, they access a grand total of 10 sites: microsoft.com, aol.com, ebay.com, msn.com, google.com, yahoo.com, mapquest.com, go.com, apple.com, and myspace.com.
On the one hand, I'd expect none of those sites to have a slower connection than any consumer ISP. (Some sites with large files such as video sites will throttle for bandwidth reasons, but no sane site throttles HTML and similar; better to just serve the files quickly and close the connection.)
On the other hand, that doesn't look like a particularly representative sample of "top" sites. Who uses mapquest anymore? And how often does the average user visit microsoft.com or apple.com? (As opposed to msn.com or live.com, which seem somewhat more likely for regular visits. Windows Update doesn't count, since *hopefully* that gets much more non-interactive use than interactive use. Similarly for the various Apple services, which don't necessarily live on the same server as apple.com.)
But in any case, the bandwidth of the server will matter less to SurfSpeed than the latency of responding to each request quickly so it can start the next one.
The concept of a benchmark for real-world site load times seems perfectly reasonable, but it should not have a misleading unit of "Mbps". A better idea: measure the total number of milliseconds required for page loads during some representative real-world browsing paths (*not* just site front pages either).
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Actually, apple.com/downloads is a pretty decent portal for a few things that aren't search. They've got a web-based sort-of repository-like thing (ok, maybe it's more like tucows, but for stuff you'd actually want, and have to pay for.) with various applications that can be downloaded that run on macs, as well as some other things like movie trailers and automator actions, and whatnot.
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FIOS not all that? (Score:2)
This is interesting, considering the ad-hoc testing I did recently. I'm a Comcast customer in northern De, and DSL reports' speed test consistently gives me about 8Mbps down bs 1-2Mbps up.
My parents, I. Southeast PA, have FIOS. For giggles, I did the same DSL reports test, and got about the same results.
Do any other slashdotters have similar experiences?
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Regular speed tests are useless with comcast. Speedboost skews the results.
6,000 SurfSpeed Users (Score:3, Insightful)
I would like to know how much more spam they are getting now. Nice data harvester. I knew the article was a fraud when it said,"...cable and phone companies compete to provide fast connections..." What they possibly compete for are exclusive franchises.
I bet if you block the ad servers, your speed would double
Ad blocking (Score:2)
If you block APK spam, your speed would double. (Score:2)
Wow - Browsers don't parse HTML?
HOSTS files don't let me replace content with a tab to click on to view (eg: videos).
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Your hosts file crap has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere. Honestly, nobody gives a sh*t any more - the Internet has evolved since 1995. Your "solution" is more of a problem than it's worth. Really, the world has changed. Get over it. Learn something new for a change.
Besides, those of us who don't use Windows don't give a crap. We use our hosts file to configure our local networks if we're too lazy to do it via assignments at our router, and a few hard-coded external entries for when there's a dns fai
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You can't even figure out ONE way to remotely detect the use of a hosts file - you're just retarded. Go fling your monkey poo elsewhere. Or keep on - nobody else cares.
Or I'll tell you what - how much are you willing to PAY to learn how? Put your money where your mouth is. The price is $6k.
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Do like I did - work for the Russians for a few years. Impossible is just another word for "okay, your job is to find 3 different ways to do it," because when something is "impossible", there's an economic and technological advantage ripe for the plucking.
Problem is, you wouldn't get past the first interview.
TANSTAAFL (Score:2)
So pay up or shut up, because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. But now the price is $8k, not $6k - and it will only go up, not down.
My Frontier DSL is the worst provider in the US (Score:2)
Websites? Latency? (Score:2)
I'm having trouble believing that this test is useful for anything, if I'm understanding their methodology.
They should be giving TOTAL TIME to download a web page and all its assets, including DNS lookups. That's the only measurement that matters for web browsing.
Transfer rate is such a small importance to most people -- as an example, their slowest transfer rate (Frontier DSL) would download one of their ~21KB review pages in about 31ms. Their fastest (Verizon FIOS)? About 14ms. The difference is negli
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It's messed up anyway. Web browsing isn't a useful metric for measuring internet speed on broadband. We need HD quality real time video streams that are large enough to negate any benefit added by speedbooster.
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They weren't trying to measure all facets of internet speed on broadband. If I misunderstood and that actually was their intention, I agree there are even more holes in their methodology. From TFS:
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Their speeds appear to be based upon not the sustained transfer rate but a normalized rate that incorporates the DNS lookup(s), latency, etc. into the calculation
On a side note, for those stuck with Crapcast (TM), at least those in the Twin Cities area you can achieve substantially snappier web browsing if you replace their DNS server with something decent. Of which there are plenty of free DNS server providers such as OpenDNS [opendns.com] among others.
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Given the total time to measure a single web page is useless because the sample set would be very small (one web page? really?). Increasing the sample size, however, results in too much data: Suppose it tests 50 web sites. And suppose there are 20 ISPs tested. 50*20=1000, which is way too fucking many data points for layfolk to digest.
Besides, web sites change. They aren't static things. One day it might be big, the next it might be small. Ads rotate. If they were just measuring time, then the da
You have to be kidding! (Score:2)
A year and a half ago, 100 times that speed was considered good [slashdot.org] and in a year and a half from now Korea expects to have ONE THOUSAND times that fucking speed. I know people in US states who can still only connect with a fucking 33.6Kbaud modem.
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> People are proud of a 1Mb connection?
They aren't measuring the bandwidth of the connection. They are measuring the average download rate from a bunch of Web sites, including DNS lookups, server bandwidth, etc. Not particularly useful.
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That's the state of broadband in the US. If I was willing to pay $80-$100, I could add phone and TV, and double those speeds. But I'm not willing to do that.
We're a deca
What difference does speed matter.. (Score:2)
When you have a cap? ( or worse cap + overage charge ) It just means you get there faster.
OMG. (Score:2)
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> Houston, the north-americans have a problem!
Read the article. They did not measure bandwidth. They measured the average rate at which a bunch of Web pages could be dwonloaded, including DNS lookups, latency, waiting for slow ad servers, etc.
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We're a third-world country when it comes to bandwidth, almost.
Did we take into account all the BitTorrent.... (Score:2)
One way to see if you're getting what you should.. (Score:3, Interesting)
As everyone has pointed out, this test in this article really isn't measuring the bandwidth that your ISP is providing; it's like saying "let's see how fast you can run - oh, by the way, you'll be wearing this heavy backpack, dodging traffic." They say it's real world surf performance, but there are so many variables at work here that it really isn;t a very useful metric.
You can use the JAVA or Flash based speed tests at places like www.broadbandreports.com (which is a great site BTW if you aren't familiar for it) those tests are fairly accurate - but not always.
The best, most accurate way I have found to test whether I am getting the speeds I am supposed to, is to use newsleecher and download a bunch of binaries from my premium newsgroup provider. I use Giganews, and I have been really happy with them, but I assume the other top tier newsgroup providers are similar..... With most premium news providers, you get multiple connections and most of the good ones can max out your connection at anytime, provided you are using multiple connections.
I'm sure that most people here know this, but if not: - to figure out if you're getting what you're supposed to, once you're as certain as you can be that you are maxing out your connection, take youy average download speed in megabytes and multiply it by 8.
I live in Philly and have a 22 megabit at home, and 50 megabit at work.
When downloading at home I get about 2.8 megabytes/sec.....when downloading at work I get about 6.2 megabits per second.......so 2.8 x 8 = 22.4 and 6.2 x 8 = 49.6 So all is well...if I notice that something seems to be off, or slow - the first thing I do is queue up some binaries and check....
Meanwhile.... (Score:2)
I live in Japan. /wins
(On a serious note, I get ADSL 50Mbps for about $60 a month in a small Japanese city. I could also get a fiber connection if I wanted to for slightly more)
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I live in Japan. /wins
(On a serious note, I get ADSL 50Mbps for about $60 a month in a small Japanese city. I could also get a fiber connection if I wanted to for slightly more)
Wow, if I could afford it, the most I could get in DSL is 40mbps down and 20 up. This service is double what you pay in Japan. For 50.00 per month, I have 12 down/6 up.
I did a similar study... (Score:2)
...I had a couple of friends stop by for a taste test. I blindfolded them, laid out a pear, an apple, an orange, a kiwi, a mango, and a banana, and asked each of them which tasted closest to a pear.
Wouldn't you know it...the pear came out #1! Closely followed by the apple. For some reason, the lowly orange ended up last. I'm thinking about writing a blog article about this. Might even make Slashdot...
Underrated (Score:2)
America competative with broadband?? (Score:2)
Holland is not the only one, there are more co
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you bought the wrong service (Score:2)
You could try Business cable internet service instead. Anyone can buy it, it costs a little more than double, but instead of speedboost it is just twice as fast all the time. You can also add multiple IPs to your account.
People often complain about various things in the context of gaming, without every questioning if what they are doing is even appropriate for gaming.
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there is no contract because you have to pay an install fee.
It is perfectly natural to fear what you do not understand.
Re:Only 1.23 Mbps? (Score:5, Informative)
But we wouldn't expect you to read the article.
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Re:Only 1.23 Mbps? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not about downloading -- it's about browsing. The question is not about "how many bits can one shove through this pipe," but instead "what is a quantitative measurement of the actual speed one can expect when going clicky-clicky on links on web sites."
So instead of maximum aggregate speed (which is easy to determine with speedtest.net and the like) this "Surfspeed" figure includes latencies for things like DNS. Round-trip times. Route lookups. Geographic caching (Akamai). The time it takes for the geolocation service to figure out where you are. Hops to the host(s) in question. Congestion of those hops. How long it takes for the fucking ad servers to wake up and start spitting out ads.
Should any of that matter? Of course not. But over here in the really real world, things aren't perfect, and it all makes a difference.
Get it? It's not at all intended to be an idealized measurement of maximum throughput.
To use a car analogy: Given a selection of different vehicles of different performance characteristics, how long does it get a bushel full of DVD-R from point New Jersey to San Francisco, including refueling, maintenance, personal needs (more comfortable cars == less stopping), road conditions, weather, traffic, and dodging kids on bikes?
It's easy to come up with an idealized [yahoo.com] route and ETA. But it it's much harder to include some real data [google.com].
And all of that theory is meaningless compared to actually measuring how long it takes a given vehicle to do that job, which is what this Surfspeed measurement tool proclaims to do.
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I care, because I browse web pages. Anything slower than instantaneous is an indication that there is room for improvement.
Why is it a difficult concept to grasp?
Even on my reasonably-quick quad-core desktop, web browsing often consists of the following:
*click*
*wait*
*wait*
*wait*
*wait*
*wait*
*page appears*
*wait*
*page reformats*
*wait*
*can i start reading it yet?*
Removing any instance of *wait* is an improvement for me. Perhaps you like watching the throbber, but I've got better things do to.
Re:Only 1.23 Mbps? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have FioS @ 25/25, and I can EASILY get to that max on a normal basis:
STEAM download: ~3MB/s
ISO download from MSDN site (bizspark license): ~2.6MB/s
Clearly browsing an actual site is going to go slower, as you have to take into account a lot more things since it just isn't one large file.
However, did these results take into account video streaming? game playing, etc etc? All of those things would run well above that 2Mbps streaming HD content.
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Note: Just did a speedtest, and I ended up getting 25mbps down, 8mbps up... I am thinking some of those speedtest servers are getting hammered, as torrents will easily upload at 2.5MB/s+ when enough peers are connected.
(some of them were reporting me as only having 5mbps both ways)
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>>>"SurfSpeed takes into account the complete, real-world download time of a Web page to a browser."
If that's true then there's no reason for me to upgrade from dialup or DSL. My dialup uses image and text compression to achieve an equivalent web page load of 400-500 kbit/s. My DSL is 750 kbit/s. There's no reason for me to upgrade if, according to this PC World magazine, I'll only get ~1100 kbit/s in a browser
.
TRIVIA: How the US compares to other continent-sized countries/unions around the wo
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Uh, right. Your dialup is half as fast as broadband. And you used the same methodology (the program they wrote which takes into account all sorts of things) to determine that, of course.
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>>>And you used the same methodology (the program they wrote which takes into account all sorts of things) to determine that, of course.
No. I gauged the compressed dialup against my 750 kbit/s DSL. It loads webpages almost as fast, so I estimate it has an effective speed of 400-500 kbit/s. True the images look like crap (due to the 90% compression) but who cares? Most of those images are stupid ads anyway. What matters is I'm getting near-DSL web surfing from a phone line - very useful when th
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Whose number is 750kbit/s for your DSL? Is that effective speed as rendered in the browser (as tested by surfspeed), or is that what your ISP says it is? Because if you're using the advertised rate for your DSL, you're missing the point - your modem is not fast - your DSL is slow. In fact, this benchmark purports to test the same thing that gives your phone modem the apparent fastness relative to your DSL. Time to try a new broadband provider.
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sppeedtest.net and torrenting both confirm I'm getting 750 kbit/s on my DSL
Plus it makes logical sense that if you take Dialup and squeeze the images and text to 10% normal size, you're going to get about 56k times 10 == ~500 kbit/s effective speed. The only time I experience slowdown is on flash-heavy sites like imdb.com, so I simply block the flash.
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RTFA again. speedtest.net is not a comparable test. Sigh.
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>>>Assuming you don't want a 47%-175% speed increase
True but for me it's a matter of economics. According to the article FiOS would give me ~1200 kbit/s web surfing, which is about 1.5 times faster but the fee is around $50. That's 3 times more than what I currently pay, so I'll stick with what I've got.
time of day (Score:2)
What matters a lot is the time of day, especially on comcast. I had a comcast 12Mbs line and indeed I could get 8MB/sec in the middle of the day. but from 6pm to midnight it was normally 800kbs with bursts of twice that if you were lucky and sometimes droughts too.
Basically when I was home, so was everyone else.
What comcast does not advertise is that they will sell you an economy 1.5Mbs line for half the price of their cheapest "high speed internet". Since all you can actually get is 1Mbs if you are like
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Yes I concur...up in my apartment back at school, I get dial-up speeds from 4:00pm to 10:30pm. If I need to download a large file, I schedule it for 3:00am (to be kind to everyone else)...but the point is the ISP my landlord buys is clearly cheating him. I've seen the switchboard data!
Oddly enough I think the best way to "measure" an ISP would be with a poll: which ISP seems to piss off more of its users on a regular basis? If I can never find a good ISP, at least help me avoid the really bad ones!
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Fair point, but it still sucks that the figure is even that low. I honestly thought it would be much higher - here in the UK, iChoons tells me it pulls songs from the music store at about 16Mbps, and that's on what's advertised as 20Mbps.
Would you expect a measurement of the speed of car driving through downtown on a busy day while obeying all traffic laws to be anything close to the car's maximum speed? Why would you expect a the number to be higher?
In my opinion, there is a lot of ISP fraud. (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, QWest knows that most people won't understand that. QWest is saying that the advertised speeds are only the speed that the customer's modem synchronizes with QWest's equipment. The actual speed that QWest supplies data over the internet can be anything QWest likes, with those fixed synchronization speeds.
The same ads call the service "Fiber Optic Fast Internet". The fine print says, "Fiber optics exists only from the neighborhood terminal to the internet." That means NOT to your house or business.
The quotes are transcribed from an ad I have on my desk.
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They're doing the same thing here in Colorado, where I believe that they're based.
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Heh.. I have had people wonder why our web site stuff (work documents, sharepoint, webmail, etc) loads so slow for them when they are working at home, since they have a 5MB cable modem. They don't seem to understand that the systems they were connecting to back then just had a T1.
Yes, but sync speed is ENTIRELY misleading. (Score:2)
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It appears they are as much testing the speed of your computer and the internet connection of a few popular sites.
Your ISP could be selling you a 100 Mbps fiber, but only have a 50 Mbps uplink themselves and you would never know. Or more likely they have higher upstream but insufficient to provide for all customers.
So PCMag figured they would measure download from well known sites.
But it could also be that your ISP are honest guys that have plenty of upstream. Your download is limited by the well known site
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Go back and read the article again.
Truly, truly sad (Score:2)
More than 10 years ago, I had an ADSL Internet connection with a 1.5 Mb connection speed. (384 Kbps upload) Now, some 10 years later, we still find that the *average* is only just slightly faster than 1 Mbps?
The Internetz is right - the nerds HAVE won!
Re:Only 1.23 Mbps? (Score:4, Insightful)
Simply dividing the size of the page by the amount of time taken to fetch the page is misleading, because the size of the page is largely irrelevant to the total speed in this case. Loading a 1KB page takes almost the same amount of time as loading a 100KB page. If you want to measure the latency, give average latency figures. If you want to measure the throughput, give throughput figures.
As another example, if I go to iPlayer and click on one of their HD streams, it takes a couple of seconds to start playing, but then the network is constantly active for 1GB or more of data. I'm using far more than 1Mb/s (which is not quite enough for the SD streams) for an hour, but according to their tests my line would probably only have been rated at around 1-2Mb/s.
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There are probably more people on dialup in the US than consumer 100Mbps internet connections. Of the six thousand in the sample, what would be representative... one?
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The roll-out of proper internet speeds in the US seem to be in a quite laughable state. I've got an uncapped 100 Mbps internet connection in my apartment, which I pay $20 a month for (the connection, not the apartment). This is as a private citizen, not as an employee of some corporation, or some special university connection. But that's in Sweden.
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Unfortunately I know all too well. I have a vps server, in the US, with an unmetered 100Mbps connection that runs me $20 a month.
At home I have a 6Mbps connection comcast (they hype these up to sound like faster links by advertising their 16 or 20Mbps speedbooster feature).
Re:Latency more important than bandwidth (Score:4, Informative)
But other protocols, e.g., rsync, which was specifically designed to avoid RTT costs, perform quite well on high-latency network connections, by minimizing round-trip communication. In that case, bandwidth is the most important measure.
BTW, our survey showed Verizon coming out on top by a hefty margin. On average, FiOS users got about 15Mbit down, 7.5Mbit up, and under 10ms latency, with some being quite a bit higher. Of course, offices with Cogent fibre connections trashed everybody, but that's not really surprising-- our test site was running on Cogent, too.
Re:Latency more important than bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
> Thank you for saying this. I constantly tell people here that their speed
> doesn't mean crap if their latency, or real speed, is bad.
You are also oversimplifying. Both speed and latency (which is not "real speed") matter. Which matters most depends on the specific situation. When I'm downloading a Linux distribution I want throughput. I rarely care much about latency, but for gamers it's critical.
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When I'm downloading a Linux distribution I want throughput.
'Why people think "performace" means "throughput" is something I'll never understand. Throughput is _always_ secondary to latency, and really only becomes interesting when it becomes a latency number (ie "I need higher throughput in order to process these jobs in 4 hours instead of 8" - notice how the real issue was again about _latency_).'
-- Linus Torvalds
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Sigh. "Latency" is time from when I enter the command until the first byte arrives. "Throughput" is the average rate at which the data arrives once it starts arriving. If I am downloading a Linux distribution I don't mind if the first byte takes a few seconds to arrive (that would be extreme latency) as long as the throughput is as high as possible. If I was playing some sort of interactive multiplayer game, on the other hand, I might find latency of more than a few tens of milliseconds unacceptable.
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They purport to have measured "browsing speed".