Nationwide Study of US ISPs Finds Slower-than-Advertised Downloads and Inconsistent Pricing (msn.com) 42
"Dear internet service providers of America: We're onto your tricks," writes Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler:
Last year, I encouraged Washington Post readers to participate in a major nationwide study of ISPs by uploading a copy of their monthly bills to Fight for Fair Internet, a project of Consumer Reports and other partners. Some 22,000 Americans did, and the results released Thursday reveal the many ways internet and cable companies get away with jacking up our bills.
For you and me, the study of big and small ISPs alike offers a clearer view of their worst behaviors — and how to fight back. The most important cost-saving lesson: Calling up and threatening to quit your internet service works. It's super annoying, I know, but Verizon (for example) applied discounts to 58 percent of the bills people submitted, with an astounding monthly median discount of $40.
The study's spotlight on ISP tricks, including bogus fees, data caps and wildly inconsistent pricing, also is fresh evidence that in many parts of the United States, there just isn't a competitive market for internet service. Who would put up with it if there were? About 200 million people live in parts of the country with only one or two choices for reliable, fast internet, according to a 2021 report from the White House.
The report identified the U.S. internet providers charging the highest equipment rental fees (Wave Broadband) and the highest data-cap fees (Cox Communications), as well as the ones with the lowest and highest monthly service fees. But in addition, Consumer Reports notes that "Download speeds routinely fail to match the advertised 'up to' speeds of several ISPs. This was especially true of consumers paying for 'premium' plans purporting to offer download speeds of between 940 and 1,200 Mbps, who in fact experienced median speeds of between 360 and 373 Mbps."
The Washington Post highlights one case "Where you might pay more for less: AT&T" On volunteer bills, AT&T's median pricing across different speed plans was all over the map. People getting:
12 mbps paid $63.
45 mbps paid $80.
100 mbps paid $60.
1000 mbps paid $80.
Why should people who aren't even getting minimum broadband speeds (25 mbps) be paying more than people getting zippy service? ISPs can and will charge whatever they can get away with in your neighborhood.
"The charges on those bills may reflect older plans that we no longer sell," said AT&T spokesman Jim Kimberly. "Customers with older plans can check on our website or call in to see if a lower cost offer is available to them for faster speeds and switch service."
That's another lesson for all of us: It's always worth checking to see if there's a new deal available. Unlike the cellphone carriers, ISPs rarely proactively switch consumers into cheaper or better plans.
For you and me, the study of big and small ISPs alike offers a clearer view of their worst behaviors — and how to fight back. The most important cost-saving lesson: Calling up and threatening to quit your internet service works. It's super annoying, I know, but Verizon (for example) applied discounts to 58 percent of the bills people submitted, with an astounding monthly median discount of $40.
The study's spotlight on ISP tricks, including bogus fees, data caps and wildly inconsistent pricing, also is fresh evidence that in many parts of the United States, there just isn't a competitive market for internet service. Who would put up with it if there were? About 200 million people live in parts of the country with only one or two choices for reliable, fast internet, according to a 2021 report from the White House.
The report identified the U.S. internet providers charging the highest equipment rental fees (Wave Broadband) and the highest data-cap fees (Cox Communications), as well as the ones with the lowest and highest monthly service fees. But in addition, Consumer Reports notes that "Download speeds routinely fail to match the advertised 'up to' speeds of several ISPs. This was especially true of consumers paying for 'premium' plans purporting to offer download speeds of between 940 and 1,200 Mbps, who in fact experienced median speeds of between 360 and 373 Mbps."
The Washington Post highlights one case "Where you might pay more for less: AT&T" On volunteer bills, AT&T's median pricing across different speed plans was all over the map. People getting:
12 mbps paid $63.
45 mbps paid $80.
100 mbps paid $60.
1000 mbps paid $80.
Why should people who aren't even getting minimum broadband speeds (25 mbps) be paying more than people getting zippy service? ISPs can and will charge whatever they can get away with in your neighborhood.
"The charges on those bills may reflect older plans that we no longer sell," said AT&T spokesman Jim Kimberly. "Customers with older plans can check on our website or call in to see if a lower cost offer is available to them for faster speeds and switch service."
That's another lesson for all of us: It's always worth checking to see if there's a new deal available. Unlike the cellphone carriers, ISPs rarely proactively switch consumers into cheaper or better plans.
No accountability (Score:2)
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If you read the fine print.... speeds are not guaranteed and are only "best effort". You would have to prove in court that the ISP did not make the best effort to provide those speeds.
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It actually is. Proving intent is difficult. It becomes word against word. They can put up various arguments to counter a simple "this is technically possible". There's not really anything requiring them to upgrade equipment simply to meet customer demands; at least not in the US.
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Sadly...no. There is absolutely no regulation that requires them to meet requirements on a per-customer basis; and they've got tons of loopholes to exploit. If your piece of coax can deliver a maximum of 1gbps; then the fact it's shared with 1000 other people doesn't matter. Best effort is not codified as a hard definition. Their best effort is they make a gig possible in theory. Beyond that...they start pointing the fingers at customers. For example...franchise agreements often include the term "roll past"
Re: No accountability (Score:2)
Re: No accountability (Score:2)
Re: No accountability (Score:2)
Honest question, have you ever checked to see sliding window actually works over the internet? My computer is hooked up to my router via ethernet, so the frame sizes are probably 1500 bytes. Are large packets a real thing outside of test environment? Honestly, I've never bothered to look.
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There is no penalty for over promising and under delivering. Plus, lawmakers won't do anything constructive to help.
I doubt your average bear even knows to do a speed test, let alone how to do it. If speeds are that invisible, no kidding there's no accountability.
I also wonder how many areas still have exclusive deals to provide internet services. As long as there are at least two providers competing to provide service (and maybe a third: traditional landline, cable, 5G), you'd think this problem would solve itself.
You know what might be a good starting point? A PSA campaign asking people to run a speed test and complain
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It takes a lot more than two alternatives to really break things open. Two sufficiently lazy competitors will realize it's in their mutual best interest to not compete too hard so they can get half the pie for almost no effort. They will manage that without any clandestine meetings, smoke filled rooms, or anything else that might lead to criminal charges.
Price differences are normal (Score:3)
Why should people who aren't even getting minimum broadband speeds (25 mbps) be paying more than people getting zippy service?
I know that the user doesn't care about the reason but the result. But, they're comparing (assuming) some form of DSL to fiber in this case. DSL just cannot provide the same speeds, and it doesn't magically cost less to maintain. If anything, fiber is easier to maintain. So, they cannot just charge a proportionally less amount for slower speeds. The large ISPs have much less of an excuse, but it does take time and money to convert to fiber.
"normal to an extent" (Score:1)
In the US the big ISPs (usually telcos) have managed to carve up the market among themselves so they're regional commercial monopolies. They've even managed to shut out (community) competition by law.
Especially commercial monopolies have a tendency to cause shortages and high prices, IOW, the whole "market economy" that justifies raking in profits is subverted.
Change that situation and at least you might have multiple prices in any one location so you have something to compare.
Absent that and present mon
Re: "normal to an extent" (Score:2)
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"Nationwide Study of US ISPs Finds Slower-than-Adv (Score:2)
monopoly power (Score:2)
This is what you get with de facto monopolies all over the place. When there is no real competition this is what you get.
Getting more than I pay for (Score:2)
FWIW, I decided to do a speed test. I'm paying for 300/300 and getting 360/330. That's somewhere between 10 and 20% more than I'm paying for. Yay me. I wonder if the report documented who else is getting better service than they're paying for.
TBH, I'm surprised my in-home wifi runs that fast. I thought that was going to be the bottleneck.
For what it's also worth, I recently downgraded from 1000/1000 to 300/300 because it was $20 a month cheaper and I don't need the extra bandwidth. I can't even tell I downg
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I'm on the Cox "preferred" tier, which used to be 150/10, a few months ago they raised the download to 250mbps, and I found my current router, an Asus RT-N66U couldn't keep up with anything over about 150mbps. Since I really didn't NEED the additional speed, and that router worked perfectly otherwise and had all the features I needed (It ran the 3rd party FreshTomato firmware), I wasn't about to change it out. I made an interesting discovery. Since ALL of my tv is streamed by either a Roku TV or a Roku box,
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And way over on the other side of that argument, I have a 10gbps connection (not a typo) and I'm trying to see how much I can actually get out of it. Granted, most of the time I'm barely using it, but it's nice to know the headroom's there in case anything changes.
Effective Cloud use requires faster UPLOAD speed (Score:2)
Just like the ISPs, everyone seems more interested in download speed than UPLOAD speed. But if you're going to be doing system backups to the cloud, faster UPLOAD speeds is key!
I've got Comcast (Xfinity) and over the years they've been gradually increasing my download speed to the point where today I enjoy speeds of 400Mbps. Great! But their UPLOAD speed is still only a extremely pitiful 10Mbps!
At only 10Mbps upload, it would take me over 1.5 days to perform a typical differential system backup to the
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I've got AT&T gigabit fiber. According to both DSLReports and Ookla, I'm getting around 800Mbps symmetric.
I suspect that most of any download slowness I may be seeing is at the other end.
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naive perspective (Score:2)
It's a super naive perspective. While there is no shortage of gouging in this or any business, the speeds are not an inconsequencial component nor the delivery.
There are areas where the infrustracture supports a 12Mbps rate but still costs enough that it has to be sold at similar prices to 100+Mbps plans in other areas.
Fiber is both everywhere and nowhere. So much of the US has fiber running across farmers fields that can't be access by any willing providers and so that farmer get's the 12Mbps for $80 pla
Re: naive perspective (Score:2)
Agree. TFA rattles off a bunch of numbers but doesn't engage show much understanding of the impact of technology or density issues.
Even the competition point falls flat:
"In Zip codes where customers received bills from only one provider, the median monthly price was $75. In Zip codes where they received bills from four or more providers, the median bill was $65. "
That's a 15% difference. It's a difference, sure, but it's minor.
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I wish it were that minor around here. If you want more than 7.5Mb/sec DSL, your only option is Comcast. About 30 miles west of here there is a moderate sized city of about 100K people which also happens to sit on a major internet backbone with lots of access to cheap bandwidth. There, Comcast has to compete with ATT, several regional fiber optic providers, Century Link, and a few others. There, $75 gets you gigabit down from Comcast and $80 gets you symmetric gigabit from ATT. In our town where Comcas
Windstream/Kinietic sucks balls (Score:3)
But remember we can't have regulation (Score:2)
FTC (Score:2)
The FTC is busy investigating political opponents. No time to look at ISPs.
Rates on ISP websites are often lies (Score:1)
The problem with "Customers with older plans can check on our website or call in to see if a lower cost offer is available to them" is that the prices given on websites are almost always 'limited time promotional rates' and it is nearly impossible, including by phone, to find out what the actual rate is going to be after the promotional period is over. You could change plans to a lower rate and find in a years time you're paying more. As much as I loathe regulation, ISPs need to be forced to show what their
Misleading advertising (Score:2)
Typically, around here, speeds are advertised as being "up to ____ MB/sec."
Which means it's pretty much certain that you won't get more than that speed, although you might well get less, and if you upgrade to a more expensive plan, you won't get more than that plan's speed either, but *might* get more than the speed you would have with the cheaper plan.
Some of this represents the limitations of technology; a pipe shared by lots of subscribers will be fastest when fewer of them are using it, and slower when