FCC Adds Check for Broadband Speed
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is getting plenty serious about the Internet. Besides striking a stance in favor of net neutrality, the FCC feels that the quasi-monopolies that dominate the industry should be more responsive to their customers. And to help you keep an eye on your ISP, the FCC has rolled out www.broadband.gov, which will let you check your broadband speeds.
Yeah, yeah, yeah--this is nothing new. Many of the major ISPs offer something like this, as do a number of independents, like SpeedTest.net But the FCC’s effort is a bit different. The FCC would like you to anonymously provide your address (How can that be anonymous?), which the FCC will use to compile a “Broadband Dead Zone” report. If you feel uncomfortable about ratting out your ISP to the government, just keep in mind your ISP doesn’t share your guilt when it comes to ratting you out.
What’s fun, though, is Marguerite Reardon’s testing of her broadband connection, and her resulting conversation with her ISP, Time Warner Cable. Using both a Dell laptop and an Apple MacBook, she never got close to the 10Mbps download speed Time Warner promises. When asked about this, a Time Warner service rep said 10Mbps wasn’t guaranteed, that speeds “can go up to 10Mbps.” And you know what, he’s right, that’s exactly what Time Warner says on its web site.
Which of course means that Time Warner can just as easily promise speeds up to 100Mbps, while still delivering the sub-7Mbps Reardon was registering. Perhaps it might be a good idea to rat out our ISPs.
Image Credit: Time Warner Cable
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nadako
March 15, 2010 at 7:31pm
People that are paying for comcast has a way to logically report them. Well this is will be good untill companies send out something to give the user really fast internet to that server. If I was an internet provider that wanted to rip people off i would do that.
COMMANDER_COOK
March 16, 2010 at 2:09am
"Well this is will be good untill"
What grade are you in?
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icebird
March 13, 2010 at 6:18pm
Hey Bart, I don't think you read over the site closely enough. This has nothing to do with "ratting out" your ISP and everything to do with starting up a government-controlled public broadband service.
Would you feel comfortable with the government having absolute control over all the information you access over the internet (see: China)? This is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Sure it may be all good and happy at first, but do you trust those in this or future governments to never abuse this power they hold?
510Gamer
March 13, 2010 at 4:05pm
Ha, 21,000 kbs download speeds.....i wish.....I rarely hit 3-5mbs.....
Cy-Kill
March 13, 2010 at 8:06am
Now only if the CRTC would do that here in Canada, but we all know the CRTC caves to companies like Bell, etc., so of course it'll never happen.
Cy-Kill
133794m3r
March 13, 2010 at 4:01am
I wish i could have that. Here's mine about what i normally get day in and day out on speedtest.net and also teh same here. 1387Kb/s down, 418Kb/s up, 56-57ms ping, with 1-10ms jitter.
Oh how all of you complain about having faster speeds. Atleast as you said you're one mile away, so it's likely to come to you. Where i live it's this net from teh cable/local phone company or dial up from others. OH yeah, and there's also the worlds biggest running scammer Hughesnet. I had it at one time and said screw it. They make outrageous claims and dont' have the proof to back it up.
Once i tried it, i had 10GB of bandwith to use a day on a 10Mb/s line compared to my dialup i was on that was like heaven. Well one day i get online and it's going at 7KB/s down i call them up and they say to me "Sir, you've used 500GB of data in the past 24 hours." This would mean that i had been doing some serious heavy lifting on my downloads considering that when i asked them when the majority of it came from? Well that morning at 7AM they told me i had used 300GB in the past 8 hours. This was when i was asleep, and the computer was unplugged since i didn't want some random thing accidently making it turn on. Also if anyone's doing the math here i somehow defied all logic and math. Well i said, fine i'll deal with it this time. And then it happened again, they once more couldn't find the problem and told me that they couldn't change it. So i went to that and had all of that fun with them.
Be glad that faster speeds are near you, b/c they'll get there eventually. And eventually is always a good thign to know. Here 512k just came here 3 years ago. Why am i supposedly at 1.5Mb/s? Well that's b/c that's about what it takes to stream sd tv and the telephone/cable/net company does it digitally so i can thank the goverement for giving me more bandwith. Now only if they increased that mandate... i'd be a really happy person.
I hope to make it to 10Mb/s in the next 5 years. I can dream can't i?
Materialize
March 12, 2010 at 10:31pm
My connection is only 3Mbps and I am paying about $85 a month for it! I live a mile out of the zone that has 30Mbps for the same price. I live in Merrifield MN.
Athlonite
March 12, 2010 at 7:23pm
you all do know that ADSL or fiber are best effort right , that more people who connect and download slows it down for all for fiber rather like a multi lane freeway in rush hour traffic and the further from and exchange/cabinet you are if you've only got DSL plays a big part in what sort of speeds you get...
Play till it breaks then learn how to fix it!
Digital-Storm
March 13, 2010 at 6:56am
You do know that the more people using DSL or fiber will not effect your connection. Only how far you are from the drop. More people that use cable in your area, the slower your connection is.
Blaze589
March 13, 2010 at 11:58am
The upload tests are not conclusive. I know for a fact that I can upload at 1.1MB/s and download at 3.15MB/s (yes megabytes not megabits) sustained. Although they got my DL test correctly benched they only benched me at 300-500KB/s upload on the two servers provided at broadband.gov. I'm using FiOS as well.
Mike Hawk
March 12, 2010 at 5:03pm
Hmm I wish I could get these results in real situations! I am in So-Cal with Verizon FIOS
Download~~18.890MB/s
Upload/1.575MB/s
Latency 105ms
Jitter 72ms
Your guys' results?
TheZomb
March 12, 2010 at 7:04pm
18.890 MB/s = 151.12 mbps, which I sincerely doubt you have.
18.890 Mb/s (little 'b') is more likely and probably explains why you think you never get that performance in the real world since that is 2.36 MB/s
anthroplop
March 12, 2010 at 6:24pm
Down - 18.881 Mbps / ~2.36MBps
Up - 15.446 Mbps / ~ 1.93MBps
Latency - 46ms
Jitter - 0ms
Location: Northwest Florida
Connection: Fiber
I'd say these results reflect standard use, but seeing as it's fiber I'd be eternally pissed if they didn't.
Edit: added approximate MBps speeds.
Havok
March 12, 2010 at 4:52pm
Personally, I could care less about download and upload rates, asI was a person who was accostomed to DIAL-UP servicefor the better part of my internet life. I have more of a beef with ISPs and bandwidth caps. Scoff as you may, but for a while my ISP (Bell Canada) claimed to offer 60 Gigs of bandwidth a month before they started to ding me for extra usage. About 3 months ago, they changed all of those plans in Canada to 25 Gigs of usage before they charged extra, up to a GRAND LIMIT of 60 gigs.
I Got freaking burned when I re-installed my copy of Windows 7! Just think, Gigabytes of files downloading from my Dropbox, Steam games re-installing and updating plus all of the extra goodies I had been streaming that month! It was a disaster.
CLICK.
Caboose
March 12, 2010 at 6:43pm
I never had an issue when I was on Bell, but then again, I've heard the exact same thing from others that you experienced with Bell. And the same thing w/Rogers as well. I'm on Shaw right now (Edmonton) and I think their cap is 120GB or something... I don't know if I've ever hit it or not, they've never said anything. I found that most of the time, when people were getting notices, it was due to a lot of bit torrenting.
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
I Jedi
March 12, 2010 at 3:46pm
I went on the FCC's new website, and submitted my info to them. At either rate, I have Time Warner (Road Runner), and I can't really complain about my connection, except the upload speed. I get, on average, around 13MBPS download and 480Kbps upload. Latency is low, too. I feel that I am very gifted to have what I have because I know a lot of people in America are still stuck with 7MBPS or lower.
Honestly, one thing people need to keep in mind is that just because you have a 10MBPS download rate, that does not mean you're downloading files off of the Internet at 10MBPS... Most web-servers cap download speeds at around 200KBPS-1MB. I've only recently noticed that I've kept a good download rate of around 2MBPS from sources like Steam, iTunes, and even our beloved MxPC for the No BS podcast.
At either rate, I would rather sacrifice 3MBPS of my download rate to get 3MBPS added to my upload rate, and definitely improve latency as much as possible, even though mine is good.
**EDIT**
Also, has anyone noticed how fast Amazon MP3 songs download? Jeez, it's litterally zoom, zoom. I can't even open the download tab in Firefox to watch how fast one 5MB file takes to download from Amazon.
anthroplop
March 12, 2010 at 4:18pm
More important to keep in mind is that they probably have a 10 megabit (10Mb) per second connection rather than a 10 megabyte (10MB) per second connection. 10Mbps download speed translates to a 1.25MBps download rate
Quite truthfully, your 104Mbps (13MB = 104Mb) download speed astonishes me, especially since it's paired with such a low upload speed of 480kbps.
I don't want to sound condescending or anything, but thousands of people get confused when they sign up for a 10Mbps connection and they're only downloading at ~1.25MBps, and your comment isn't helping the confusion. I chimed in (with a jerk tone, I know) only to help.
gendoikari1
March 12, 2010 at 3:20pm
I wish there was one of these in Canada. Then, I can help bring the banhammer to Rogers' "Hi-Speed" internet.
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Caboose
March 12, 2010 at 4:26pm
Rogers blows! Back when I had them, we had their 3Mb service (this was back when 5Mb was the super expensive one). We would get 1-1.5 Mbps. Rogers could never find an issue, and it was always my fault!
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
anthroplop
March 12, 2010 at 4:44pm
Typical ISP behavior. Send out a tech to do EXACTLY what you've been doing (monitoring your speeds with X speed testing utility) and then tell you they see no problem, so it must be you. Then they charge you for having the tech out.
On some occasions the tech may say you need a new cable or you need a new splitter and the installation has to be done in a professional manner (because you, the customer, are Mr./Mrs. Simpleton) else something may go wrong. Then they charge you for the cable/splitter/etc., with a fee for the "professional installation," and maybe even that coffee the tech spilled in his lap on his way to your house.
Everything's in working order here, people.
Edit: gender neutrality.
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