Roger Fingas
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.
Christine McKee
Charles Martin
Oliver Haslam
William Gallagher
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48 Comments
Not a surprise... 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.
Every survey and test has shown that Verizon FIOS does meet its promise. I can vouch for that in my own installation. I've got 150/150 FIOS. I always get between 145-165 down, and about the same up.
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.