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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: 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).