NY To Probe Broadband Providers Over Internet Speeds (reuters.com) 56
An anonymous reader writes with a report from The Stack that New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has begun a probe into the state's three dominant ISPs to assess whether they are actually delivering the service they advertise at the levels promised. From the article: According to leaked documents, sent to Verizon Communications, Cablevision Systems and Time Warner Cable, the New York attorney general asked each firm to hand over copies of the advertising and copy they have provided to consumers regarding internet speeds, along with any testing documents which studied the speed of their service. ... The probe plans to focus on the exchange of data through contractual partnerships between the ISPs and other networks. The AG office suspects that customers who are paying a premium fee for higher internet speeds could be experiencing a disruption to their service due to technical issues brought about by business disputes in these interconnection deals.
Re:government shakedown? (Score:5, Insightful)
More likely the AG's Netflix doesn't work smoothly.
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Government shakedown?
Whatever. And Good!
We have local monopolies and oligarchies, horrible service, and obscene prices. My only choice is to just not to subscribe to any internet service. WTF? Why is that every other industrialized country has service that is better AND cheaper than ours? Or when Google moves into a market, all of a sudden, the local ISPs start acting decently?
Please, the ISPs lobbied for their cushy markets and when they got them, decided to abuse their power and get even more money out
Don't forget New York created those monopolies (Score:5, Informative)
>We have local monopolies and oligarchies, horrible service, and obscene prices.
Yep. Why? Section 622 of the Cable Communications Act of 1984 allows local governments to collect 5% of cable company revenue to the city (plus campaign contributions) in exchange for granting an exclusive monopoly in an area, disallowing competition. This is known as a franchise.
In some cases, such as New York (where this investigation is occurring), the franchise is carved up neighborhood by neighborhood. Time Warner pays a bribe^H^H^H^H^H fee to local politicians for their monopoly north of 86th street, Cablevision owns the Bronx via political decree. Here's the map from NYC.gov:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/... [nyc.gov]
Given the fact that the New York government created the monopolies and enforces them, I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to fix it. I don't expect that will happen until the CCA is amended to prevent state and local governments from granting monopolies in exchange for kickbacks^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fees.
Re:government shakedown? (Score:5, Insightful)
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But don't you remember? Government bad, money-grubbing multinational monolithic sociopathic monopolistic corporations good!
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When you find me a free market that can possibly exist somewhere other than a libertarian's wet dream, you let me know.
Please live in the real world.
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Just to interject, very few Libertarians are laissez faire capitalists. Unfortunately, they're the vocal minority. Sorry about that and I can understand the confusion.
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No worries. The thing that I think really kills the whole concept of the free market in the world we live in is that it requires educated consumers to put enough pressure on businesses to act ethically and fairly. Consumers have proven over and over that they don't want to know the information that would be needed for that to work. People don't care if a business is using sweatshop labor or dumping toxic waste into the water supply; they want their cheap shit from Walmart.
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But don't you remember? Government bad, money-grubbing multinational monolithic sociopathic monopolistic corporations good!
All I remember is Napster Bad.
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How long ago did you move out?
Judge awards NY up to $100 million* in damages (Score:5, Funny)
* please note that the actual award may be less, depending on congestion and other factors
Will they ever address link speed fraud? (Score:3)
Like where you pay a premium for a higher speed tier and the net result is your local modem's speed is upgraded, but it's basically worthless because of congestion from your node all the way up to the interchange is congested and oversubscribed?
I see this all the time -- customer buys into some ridiculous Comcast business class speed tier of 100/50 or whatever and never sees the throughput. Sure, all the internet speed tests (which I am sure are gamed) show the speed but real-world tests from a local data
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I've had the same laptop for about 6 years. Back in 2009, with a fibre-optic cable TV network in the UK and a 70 Mbit data service (in a student area), I was lucky to get a 300K download speed. I've currently got a 20 Mbit phone line DSL service in a small town and get 1 Mbyte download speed. The price difference was around 5:1
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You appear to be judiciously confusing bytes and bits.
I have 75 Mbit symetric service from Verizon FiOS. My computer pushes 10MByte/sec without issue to select destinations. Usually, this has more to do with the peering connections, or where the other endpoint is and what kind of connection they have than an issue with my connection.
My connection is pretty much faster than many corporate connections, so I actually can download faster than most places can upload to me.
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Our university had a tier-1 terabit connection, but there were so many people downloading data, that they ended up with about 25K each.... It was frustrating that you could remotely log into your home PC, download the file in seconds, while have to wait hours at your own work desk.
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If a pure optical path works every time its not a larger issue.
Coaxial, copper has to connect back to something local and that can often have too many people and have to make some very simple sharing calculations so everyone on different networks can get the internet.
The solution is pure optical to every account or really add short distances of old networ
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My basic claim is that what Comcast is selling is nothing more than a DOCSIS speed setting on the modem, and not access to actual network throughput.
In any urban cable network there's some shared segment encompassing some range of dwellings that usually connects to a node where it gains access to some branch segment and that handles uplink for a larger geographic area and then to whatever the metro area data center is. I count 3 hops on my connection before it leaves my metro region.
My sense is that these
Wrong person to piss off (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like the New York Attorney General's Netflix keeps getting the loading notification and his HD videos don't play back. This, plus Verizon has reneged on its FiOS rollout to all neighborhoods as contractually required. They only installed in the neighborhoods they wanted and told the state to fuck off on the rest.
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I think this captures my feelings (Score:1)
What did their customers pay for? (Score:1, Interesting)
I have no clue, and without competition or regs, I'll likely never know.
Possibilities:
A: That the access speed was the advertised rate when nobody else was using it and the phase of the planets was just right. (Sure)
B: The ability to talk to anybody, anywhere on the Internet at their access speed. (No way is this even possible.)
C: That any content delivered to their ISP would be accepted gratis and delivered to their customer subject to the access speed limitation. (Should be this way.)
D: That the ISP would
I looked at my provider's TOS... (Score:2)
I couldn't find the word "promise" anywhere.
Here's reality: residential consumers are not paying for guaranteed bandwidth. Want guaranteed speeds? Get a dedicated circuit.
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Which is why he said "Want guaranteed speeds?" You don't, so of course you won't take the deal. I have a dedicated circuit because I want guaranteed speed. I also pay less than my local cable company charges (though I get slower than they "say I'll get"). It's certainly not orders of magnitude more than them, though.
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For Verizon FiOS, the difference between Commercial and Residential rates is $30. Not an order of magnitude on a $90 connection charge (residential).
It isn't a T(1, 3 ...) connection, but it is guaranteed.
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Re:I looked at my provider's TOS... (Score:5, Insightful)
The AG office suspects that customers who are paying a premium fee for higher internet speeds could be experiencing a disruption to their service due to technical issues brought about by business disputes in these interconnection deals.
It doesn't sound like he's talking about his average speeds. It sounds like he's talking about the targeted throttling of services. For example, I am a Comcast subscriber with an HBO subscription that I pay for through Comcast. As a part of my HBO subscription, I gain access to HBO Go. I have a PS4 HBO Go application. Every time I have tried it, it has failed to work, at all. This is a known issue, and in response to customer complaints Comcast has openly stated that it is a business decision, not a technical one. So, I pay Comcast for something, and they don't allow me to use it.
Sadly, I don't live in New York and Comcast doesn't appear to be a target of these letters. I can't actually speak to the practices of other ISPs as I'm not their customer, but both the article and summary make it pretty clear this isn't a matter of "guaranteed bandwidth." I haven't seen the words written in the article, but this is a net neutrality issue.
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"So, I pay Comcast for something, and they don't allow me to use it."
And you're not pressing your local DA/AG to get something done?
No wonder you're getting raped.
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FCC Prevue (Score:4, Interesting)
The FCC already requires broadband providers to do this. Most providers have or are implementing a product set called SamKnows [samknows.com] to comply. You can read the FCC's 2014 report here or have a look at the FCC's Measuring Broadband America [fcc.gov] for more info about the program. No, I don't work for the FCC.
Sounds like the NY Attorney General's office is just making more work for ISPs when they could just ask the FCC for the info. Probably just bullying.
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What's to stop them from coding in some type of recognition for requests made to FCC servers as part of this SamKnows testing to avoid throttling or giving them priority?
Re: FCC Prevue (Score:1)
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Perhaps this has more to do with Comcast and Verizon's games in relation to Netflix recently?
Comcast has intentionally maxed out peering connections, it could also have to do with this.
You seem to misunderstand (Score:1)
Chapter 3, section 2(A), paragraph 6, subparagraph 2, clearly states that the consumer is to be provided with "up to" the indicated bandwidth. I submit, your honor, that no evidence will be shown to prove we have delivered bandwidth in excess of our claims.
False advertising via employee incompetence (Score:1)
TWC Has Degraded Copper (Score:1)
From what I hear from someone who lives in New York City, Time Warner Cable's copper system was tarnishing/degrading so performance began to suck. People were jumping ship to FiOS for that reason alone.
He did say that TWC was finally starting to replace it.
Like Volkswagen (Score:4, Insightful)
The Volkswagen debacle reminds me of a question that's been bothering me for a while now.
I wonder if, when you go to one of those bandwidth test sites and perform a speed test, your ISP notices what you are doing and prioritizes your traffic, to make you think you have more bandwidth than you actually do.
If this is true, do you think people will get as upset with their ISPs as they are getting with Volkswagen, for engineering methods to lie on tests?