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Your Internet Provider Likely Juiced Its Official Speed Scores
Companies wield tremendous influence over the [FCC's internet speeds] study and often employ tactics to boost their scores, according to interviews with more than two dozen industry executives, engineers and government officials. As a result, the FCC's report likely gives consumers an unreliable measure of internet providers' performances by overstating speeds.
[...] The FCC informs companies which customers are part of the speed tests, allowing some to prioritize giving those households better service, engineers who worked at some of the companies said. The FCC relies on companies to provide information about the speed plans for the customers being tested.
Major providers have persuaded the FCC to remove unfavorable data, including individual houses with poor scores, blaming faulty equipment. They have successfully argued to exclude test days when heavy traffic slowed scores, such as during NFL games or when pushed a new software update. Reasons for the deletions aren't always included in the FCC reports.
Many internet providers gain additional information about the users being tested by paying SamKnows, the U.K.-based company that administers and provides equipment for the tests, for real-time access to testers' scores year-round, and other analytics.
Representatives of major broadband providers denied tampering with the FCC study, pointing to a code of conduct they sign that forbids them from influencing the results unless it is "consistent with normal business practices." They said any network upgrades improved service for swaths of their subscribers, not just households in the FCC's tests.
AT&T said that in its case, the company asked the FCC to remove DSL data from the report because it no longer markets that older technology, which relies on copper phone lines, used by a small percentage of its customer base. The company said the commission's own policies should have excluded the "obsolete" internet plans. AT&T also said that it did validate the DSL accounts for the FCC.
An FCC spokesman said the program has a transparent process and that the agency will continue to enable it "to improve, evolve, and provide meaningful results as we move forward."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 15 2019, @07:15AM (9 children)
Sucks to be you guys. Mine delivers within a couple percent of its theoretical maximum all the time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Sunday December 15 2019, @09:54AM (7 children)
Barring outages and incidents, my ISP has consistently given me what I was promised.
The initial hassle was the WIFI on their router was just terrible, so we wired everything up except the game consoles.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 15 2019, @12:36PM (5 children)
Yeah, we took the opportunity of having the sheetrock all off to wire every room except the kitchens and bathrooms in the church (that we're making into a house) with Cat 6. Decided on having a router on each floor so we could just run a single riser going between them or we would have come pretty close to the 55M limit on 10GBASE-T for two of the runs.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Sunday December 15 2019, @01:10PM (4 children)
Nice. I would love to have 10GBASE-T here, but the cost per port is still a too far on the high side. I'd like to see $30/port for switches/routers before taking the plunge.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 15 2019, @01:41PM (3 children)
Well, we probably won't bother buying 10GBASE-T routers right off. Most of the things we'd be connecting to them don't have a NIC that can do above 1G and our net connection is only 1G as well. It's a lot easier to run cable that'll do 10GBASE-T now than to do it a couple years down the road when there's sheetrock covering everything though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday December 15 2019, @02:26PM (2 children)
When the price of copper skyrockets, you'll be ripping all that cable out :P. Or did you actually run fiber?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 15 2019, @02:59PM
Cat 6. I don't think we have a single device that's set up for fiber.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @12:36AM
Man, don't even joke about that. My buddy was doing renovations on his house and someone broke in and ripped all the pipes and wires out of the wall. I'm not just talking about the NM electrical and fresh-water copper. I mean all of it, including the cast iron, PVC, PEX, and vinyl, on top of the fiber optics, CAT-5e, 6P6C, conduit, coax, HVAC wiring, and buried cable.
At least the bastards got caught and had to pay up. IIRC, the electrician used something weird like buried 8-4-2 and 14-6-2 cable between the house, the garage, and the outbuilding that they tried to sell after ripping it out of the lawn. So it was easy for the scrap recycler and the police to figure out who the guys were that ripped it out because, apparently, most people don't use that sort of stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @01:24AM
Our house has 3 wifi routers, the one they provide for the downstairs and two for the upstairs. The one they provide isn't that great over long distances but the ones I bought separately work much better. The 4K T.V. downstairs is wired for things like Netflix though and most of the computers are wired but things like tablets, phones, laptops, and cameras connect through the wireless routers. For the most part their wifi router provides good enough coverage for what we need downstairs but for anything more serious I would recommend buying a decent separate wireless router.
I think the downstairs wireless router gets about ~100 Mb/s but the more expensive upstairs router can get ~130 Mb/s which is what our gigabit Ethernet gets. Our Internet is rated at 100 Mb/sec so we get more than the official speed. They offer a more expensive 300 Mb/sec plan but we don't need it, our plan is good enough for what we need.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @06:34AM
I don't understand SN or slashdot. These articles are read by a global audience. Everytime I see an article like this I have to assume that it was addressed to the US audience, because no state us specified in the headline. Moderators, pkease, make sure that you add a country/world region name in your headlines.