New York investigates claims that Verizon, TWC & Cablevision fail to deliver promised Internet speed
The New York attorney general's office is probing claims that three major Internet service providers -- Verizon, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable -- aren't living up to the speeds they advertise to subscribers.
Official letters were sent out to executives at the three companies on Friday, Reuters reported on Monday. Attorney general Eric Schneiderman confirmed the probe in a statement.
Verizon told Reuters it hadn't seen the letter, but the probe was acknowledged by spokesmen from TWC and Cablevision, who insisted their companies were meeting promises. Cablevision's Charlie Schueler in fact argued that his company's Optimum Online service "consistently surpasses" marketed speeds, beating them in internal tests and ones run by the Federal Communications Commission.
Schneiderman's office cited a 2014 M-Lab study, which found that connections tended to deteriorate at points where ISPs linked with so-called "long-haul" Internet carriers like Cogent. The probe is also based on public complaints and internal analysis, and will moreover scrutinize last-mile speeds at TWC and Cablevision.
American ISPs have regularly been accused of failing to match promised bandwidth, though connection quality can be limited by factors like location and existing infrastructure. The issue has become more serious in recent years, with growing dependence on the Internet for work, music, video, gaming, and government and financial services. Many productivity apps and games are now bought exclusively online, but can take hours or even days to download over a slow connection.
Official letters were sent out to executives at the three companies on Friday, Reuters reported on Monday. Attorney general Eric Schneiderman confirmed the probe in a statement.
Verizon told Reuters it hadn't seen the letter, but the probe was acknowledged by spokesmen from TWC and Cablevision, who insisted their companies were meeting promises. Cablevision's Charlie Schueler in fact argued that his company's Optimum Online service "consistently surpasses" marketed speeds, beating them in internal tests and ones run by the Federal Communications Commission.
Schneiderman's office cited a 2014 M-Lab study, which found that connections tended to deteriorate at points where ISPs linked with so-called "long-haul" Internet carriers like Cogent. The probe is also based on public complaints and internal analysis, and will moreover scrutinize last-mile speeds at TWC and Cablevision.
American ISPs have regularly been accused of failing to match promised bandwidth, though connection quality can be limited by factors like location and existing infrastructure. The issue has become more serious in recent years, with growing dependence on the Internet for work, music, video, gaming, and government and financial services. Many productivity apps and games are now bought exclusively online, but can take hours or even days to download over a slow connection.
Comments
Hope they all get fined big time!
Shocking.
Any fines will result in a consumer fee. "The regulatory access fee is increasing because of government mandated changes."
The problem is that companies never "promise" any speeds. They say that a certain plan has speeds of UP TO 50 Mbps. No provider will guarantee that that number will be what you see 24/7.
The problem is that companies never "promise" any speeds. They say that a certain plan has speeds of UP TO 50 Mbps. No provider will guarantee that that number will be what you see 24/7.
So true. When the technician comes to install your cable they often test it using Speed Test to demonstrate that you are getting close to the advertised speed. Problem is, the speed is being tested with one big chunk of data from your computer to the cable data center then to another nearby peering data center, therefore bypassing multiple hops and staying on fiber the entire time. In the real world when you visit some random web page, the code is referencing sometimes a few different servers and is composed of many elements such as stylesheets, Javascript, images, text, fonts, etc. Each of those elements has to be requested individually so there is a lot of back and forth packets required just to render a single page. Then of course there is the matter of the router hops and DNS resolution.
Speed Test is the equivalent of Volkswagen's diesel emissions testing.
Speed Test is the equivalent of Volkswagen's diesel emissions testing.
Yep. My vendor is worse. They use their own testing tool which goes right to their office. Speed looks great. Then in real-life use, it really sucks. And even though they claim not to throttle, when I watch streaming movies, they're fine for the first hour and then they start to gag. There's no way to tell for sure whether the problem is at the streaming service or my ISP, but it sure seems like it's the ISP.
Unfortunately, NY is not investigating my ISP.
One of the reasons I don't increase my speed with the ISP is because in real-world use, I'm not sure it's going to make any difference anyway.
And even though they claim not to throttle, when I watch streaming movies, they're fine for the first hour and then they start to gag. There's no way to tell for sure whether the problem is at the streaming service or my ISP, but it sure seems like it's the ISP.
I get the same thing. I'm convinced it is the cable company because they are pissed that you are getting your content form someone else instead of from them. That might become increasingly problematic as they transition into a dumb pipe with people getting their content from other streaming services and I'm not sure you as a consumer could ever prove they are throttling it because they can limit the throttling to only certain types of data such as movies..
Some people just like dissing things. ISPs are easy targets for people, rightly, or wrongly. If speedtest shows a good speed, it must be wrong, and the company is in cahoots with the ISPs.
Sounds like dile-up and not broadband to me ????
Problem is, the speed is being tested with one big chunk of data from your computer to the cable data center then to another nearby peering data center, therefore bypassing multiple hops and staying on fiber the entire time
Because they are testing your internet connection, not a connection with every single possible webpage on the Internet. That is why they are using those fast certified data centers, otherwise, your internet speed will not be a bottleneck and they will be measuring some other bottleneck connection speed.
Also, on the smaller vs larger chunks of data transfer speeds - smaller chunks always take longer to transfer because they can incur bigger overhead and hence - longer transfer times.
The problem is that companies never "promise" any speeds. They say that a certain plan has speeds of UP TO 50 Mbps. No provider will guarantee that that number will be what you see 24/7.
True, but when you only see that speed for 24 minutes every 7 years?
That might go a bit beyond "puffery".
Some people just like dissing things. ISPs are easy targets for people, rightly, or wrongly. If speedtest shows a good speed, it must be wrong, and the company is in cahoots with the ISPs.
No I'm just saying that testing in an ideal setting is not representative of the conditions in the real world which, in the case of network speed, numbers mean nothing if the consumer perceives that their internet is slow. The ISPs are deceiving the consumer in thinking that faster is going to be better when in most cases 10 mbps will deliver about the same real world experience as 300 mbps but they would rather up sell you to 300. Of course the final throughput speed is not the responsibility of the last mile provider if the upstream data is bottlenecked. The average consumer has no idea why they are not experiencing the blistering high speeds as advertised by the ISP.
If your speed is high enough, and you feel it's slow, then either you're just getting used to the speed, and it doesn't seem fast anymore, or the sites you go to are actually slow, and that often happens. But Speedtest is accurate. I often download at full speed, that is, my Apple updates download at 18.5MBs. That's the full speed of my 150/150 service. So you can use the full speed of the site you go to is equipped for it, and not all are.
I do think that the ISPs are setting themselves up for a fail with their pitches for buying ever faster internet connections. Between iPhones, routers, notebooks, media servers etc, I probably have over 30 network connected devices. Verizon, hearing that, would try to convince me I need way more than a 25 Mbps pipe.
Only about 20% of the people in Verizon's footprint have, or can get FiOS. The rest have to rely on DSL/HSI. I'm guessing the 80% is whom the NY AG is concerned about.
That's incorrect. If a simplistic evaluation is to just think about movie download streaming speed, them sure. But the internet is used for far more than that. Most people buy software over the Internet these days, and large apps can take time. OS X upgrades are often 5-7GB. My FIOS does 5GB in about 3.5 minutes. At 150/150. If your using a service at 15/15, then it will take 35 minutes. That's a pretty big difference. Even at 25 it will take 20 minutes for that 5GB. If several people are on at once, and we have three people here, then it will take longer, and streaming will be impossible.
I read that it was 40% around the country. But, right now, Verizon has stated that they aren't going to expand the range.
In NYC, Verizon has a deal stating that the entire city has to be wired. It's almost done, behind schedule. The storm, Sandy, delayed matters.
But FIOS isn't the issue, it's their DSL service that is.
This is from an article about this on Arstechnica today:
The FCC's Measuring Broadband America report last year found that Verizon DSL offers 83 percent of its advertised speed during peak usage periods, below the 91 percent average for DSL-based services. DSL speeds vary widely, with homes further away from ISP infrastructure getting lower speeds due to distance limitations.
Verizon's fiber customers, on the other hand, generally receive higher speeds than they pay for, as do Cablevision customers, the FCC said. TWC customers received between 94 percent and 101 percent of advertised download speeds during peak times, according to the FCC data.