from the you-only-ever-get-promised-'upto' dept.
Russell Petrick, disgruntled former Peak Internet customer, posted bad reviews online about his former ISP (on: Yelp, SuperPages, Better Business Bureau, and Yahoo) and is now being sued for an undetermined amount of money.
According to Techdirt:
Russell Petrick is disabled and spends a lot of time on his computer at home. He signed on with Peak Internet for web access to watch movies and surf the net. "It was just too terrible to consider keeping," Petrick said when asked about the service. He said he was paying $50 a month for Internet download speeds of 20 mbps... Petrick claims the speeds were nowhere near that, and averaged 6.5 mbps. "The fastest speed I got was 13.6 mbps download and 3.1 mbps upload," Petrick said. "I didn't get anywhere near the 20 mbps mark."
It seems that Peak Internet's view is "ISP to customer: thanks for paying for a 20 Mbps connection speed. Anything above 4 Mbps is bonus speed. Stop complaining."
A customer who can only approach the speeds of a connection priced at half what he's paying obviously isn't going to be happy, but rather than work towards improving connection speeds, the company apparently decided to defer to its fine print. This isn't a great way to provide customer service and suing someone over bad reviews is an even worse decision.
Here are The Suit for Your Viewing Pleasure [pdf], Complaint Teller County [pdf], and the KOAA5 News Report.
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Monday August 04 2014, @01:15AM
Stop telling the truth about us! Waaah!
I'd like to say that this type of move is a PR disaster in the making, but with the local monopolies that exist in this industry Peak can sue this guy into oblivion and then run commercials about "see how fast your searches for things not to say about us are now!" without any repercussions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @03:27AM
I live in the market. It's not a monopoly. There are three Internet providers: Centurylink (slow DSL), the local cable company Baja Broadband, and Peak Internet. I've thought about switching to Peak, but I've stayed with Centurylink so far, mainly because I didn't want the hassle of professional setup.
This probably refers to Peak's wireless Internet - some kind of WiMax setup. I've seen their advertising and it can be deceptive (though not in the legal sense.) They advertise "Up to 15Mbps" or so, but then in the fine print it says "guaranteed speed 1.5Mbps". I don't have an ad in front of me so I don't have the exact numbers, but you get the idea.
(Score: 1) by CirclesInSand on Monday August 04 2014, @03:54AM
3 providers is a monopoly. Try to start your own company. You can't. It's a government monopoly.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Monday August 04 2014, @11:24AM
No, 3 providers is an oligopoly. One providers is a monopoly. Hence the use of the root "mono", which means one.
(Score: 1) by CirclesInSand on Monday August 04 2014, @12:43PM
Don't be fooled by an arbitrary construct of identity. What's important isn't that they are legally considered separate corporations, what is important is that they are together the only providers and are working together to keep it that way. And they will not make greedy choices at the expense of each other (at your expense yes, but not at each other's expense). They may as well be 1 organism.
(Score: 1) by khedoros on Monday August 04 2014, @07:31PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @01:26AM
This suit has since been dropped.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140731/21540728081/peak-internet-dismisses-defamation-suit-against-former-customer-who-complained-about-its-lousy-connection-speeds.shtml [techdirt.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 04 2014, @02:00AM
I don't think the same can be said about the bashing that is headed in their direction.
Kind of a ComCast practice run.. :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @02:09AM
So what did they actually sue him for? With as lengthy as the description was, just one little sentence saying what they sued him for is too much to ask?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Geotti on Monday August 04 2014, @03:15AM
ACs... Never happy (for some values of "never").
From the first link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @02:07AM
Way back when, people could say just about anything they wanted as long as:
1) It wasn't yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theater (safety issue).
2) It wasn't libel or slander -- deliberate lies printed or told
to hurt someone in a non-physical way.
Those days appear to be gone.
Money as free speech TRUMPS fact-based opinions however
unfavorable they may be to the affected party.... :(
Had the case gone to court, the ISP's lawyer team would
be sure to have any evidence the guy submitted to
the court called into question and/or thrown out.
You can't personally win battles like these--you have
to 'martyr' yourself in the court of 'popular opinion'
with the public at large in order to convince enough of
them to take action to support your cause. The guy did
his part by complaining online out in the open. Had
he used another ISP via a public access point to lodge
the complaints in an anonymous fashion, got feedback
in a public setting, then lined up another ISP for
himself for home use then canceled his current service
if contracturally possible and switched then things
might have gone differently for him.
In the end it is just another case of "Profits Over People".... :P
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @10:51AM
Almost all of these suits are libel suits. They almost all claim that the Reviewer was intentionally and falsely reporting bad service in order to damage the Company's business prospects. In this case, that is certainly based on the linguistic distinction between "we provide up to 20 Mbps" and "my connection speed averaged 6.5 Mbps."
It works like this: the company gets to use the phrase "up to" to legally shield themselves from claims of poor bandwidth, but any subscriber bandwidth claims are measured against that theoretical maximum with all modifiers stripped out. It seems to be pretty standard legal tactic to leverage the exact wording of your own claims while simultaneously pretending to misunderstand your counterparty's claims. It's almost always funny when it comes out in public.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @10:11PM
If free speech is dead, why did it win in this case? LOLOL derrrrrrrrrr
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @07:33AM
m == milli == 0.001
M == Mega == 1,000,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Prefixes [wikipedia.org]
Further note: You can't subdivide a bit; there is no such thing as a millibit.
...but what's 9 orders of magnitude between friends.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @08:50AM
I do agree with you that it would be nice if people could actually get it right. The current situation where it is common for m to be used instead of M is better than what used to happen, you often saw MBPS. Obviously an 8x oversell is not right, and the unit makes sense (even if it is unusual in telecoms). At least with with mbps the numbers are so mad any one who actually understands will laugh/get frustrated but understand the intent.
It is also possible to have fractional bits when you talk in terms of network speed. For example if it took 2 seconds to send 1 bit, it would be correct to call the link 500 mbps. I cannot think of a medium that runs this slow, but sending a short text can often give effective speeds around the 1bps point (100*7 bit ASCII chars + small overhead / 5 mins it takes to receive if the receivers phone on and connected to a tower).
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday August 04 2014, @10:51AM
Yes, fractional bits always crop up. I'm currently looking at a packet capture of a video stream I'm debugging. Wireshark tells me it's 4691908.440 bits per second, which is fine, as it was over 28949 ms. Specifically it was 12375 packets of 10976 bits in that time, so 1 packet every 2.34ms, or 4.69 bits per microsecond.
In a given nanosecond though, I was either receiving the packet from a buffer in a switch somewhere, or I wasn't. I'd rather have 1000 bits per ms than 1 million bits per second any day of the week.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 04 2014, @02:56PM
By this sort of logic chopping, probably coming soon to all monopoly ISP providers, all internet services provided by a 100 meg fast ethernet connection always peak at 100 megs for every single packet, no matter how slow the average rate may be.
And you can upgrade to a 1 gig internet connection, provided by a gig-e connector, for only a large additional fee.
I had a 608K DSL maybe 15 years ago that really did only use regular 10 meg ethernet. Seeing as that was 20 times faster than I needed, I didn't care that it wasn't that newfangled fast ethernet.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday August 04 2014, @05:57PM
Perhaps, it depends on your need. An average rate per day is no good either - they could give you 100mbit for 12 hours a day, and 1mbit for 12 hours a day, and still claim it's 50mbit.
You can buy a 1:1 contended internet connection in most global cities. It costs a relative fortune vs normal uncontended, but it's a far more realistic cost. In our HK office, we have a normal £70 a month 100mbit business grade fibre. We also have a £600 a month 10mbit "uncontended" fibre. Once you leave the provider's AS though you're screwed, as we found on the "uncontended" fibre which routed via a level 3 backbone that seemed to do something very strange to the packets, giving us a maximum of 1mbit from the UK. Changing our BGP local preference to route via another peer and this problem went away. At no point did we have course to complain to our ISP in HK though, because it's the internet, and it's out of their hands. The problem was an ISP that peers with an ISP that we peer with.
Typical transit tends to cost in the region of $1/mbit/month at bulk costs, this has dropped a lot in the last few years though -- in 2009 it was $10/mbit/month. You'd think your ISP's cost would also have dropped in the same time frame (hah). It's cheaper than ever to become an ISP, but if you were an ISP offering 100mbit a second uncontended, you'd still need to charge the customer $100 a month for that bandwidth, plus your own costs (including maintenance and return on investment on the circuit from their house to a typical transit point, which in the case of Hicksville ND could be 1000 miles).
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday August 05 2014, @07:36PM
We aim not to edit the quoted part of the story - but I should have used [sic] in this instance, despite the comments in a different thread over the weekend.
(Score: 1) by black_trout on Monday August 04 2014, @09:43PM
I've lived in Colorado my whole life and have never heard of this busch league ISP. They might have greater success if they spent less money on frivolous suits, and more on marketing themselves as an alternative to the Comcast / Century Link duopoly in the area.
Regarding advertised speeds- its all bullshit and everybody knows it. It says "up to" right in your contract. If you cant handle that, put your money where your mouth is and get a business class contract with guaranteed speeds.