

FCC releases report on America's broadband providers - ecaron
http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america

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AdamTReineke
Nice report with numbers for my provider matching what I've seen. However,
there is no mention of bandwidth caps, internet downtime, or availability of
competing services. These three factors should be reported on as well.

~~~
joelhaus
Agreed. Downtime in NYC from TWC is painful. Youtube actually has a tool that
shows much of the information available in this report for your own
connection: <http://www.youtube.com/my_speed>

Strangely enough, in the FCC's wireless report, they could not come to a
conclusion about the state of competition in the wireless industry. I would
imagine that coming to a conclusion about wireline broadband would be equally
(if not more) difficult for them.

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arantius
> Downtime in NYC from TWC is painful

Really? I run nagios at home, and right now it says year-to-date I've had 28m
40s of downtime, for 99.988% uptime of my cable internet service (for the host
monitoring my first-hop router). This is in Chelsea, Manhattan, with their
"wideband" level of service.

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snikolic
To frame this another way: if we only use our connections for short periods of
time, we can almost get 100% of what we're paying for. Woo!

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adbge
Cablevision seems to be the largest offender, consistently delivering ~69% of
advertised speed. Qwest is another I noticed from skimming the data that
consistently underperforms by a significant margin.

If anything, this reads like an advertisement for FiOS. Verizon's FiOS
dominates every (positive) metric. I've heard that they've stopped deploying
FiOS to new districts. A shame, if true.

Guess I can always hope Google's fiber project goes well and someday sees
deployment in the Chicago-land area.

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warfangle
Page 25. It reflected perfectly my experiences with Cablevision: I can stream
movies anytime but prime-time.

And it's the only provider I can get other than DSL. Ugh.

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pbburns
I was hoping to see some measurement of dropped connections - something that I
used to see sometimes when I was still using DSL.

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Shenglong
I skimmed the report, but one point caught my attention:

 _VoIP services, which can be used with a data rate as low as 100 kilobits per
second (kbps)_

Isn't this quoted number a little high? If I remember correctly, Ventrilo on a
good codec was only 4kb/person/second.

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ww520
That's true. Modem was at 56kps max mostly on regular phone line. Voice
requires much less than 56kps. Voice on old line sounds crisp and clear.

Are they planning for mulit-VoIP sessions or video VoIP?

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adestefan
A POTS line is analog so even though you can run a 56kbps modem, the actual
data is transmitted via an analog signal. G.711 is the raw digital voice
benchmark and encodes at a constant 64kbps PCM a-law or u-law ecoding (8 kHz
sampling frequency x 8 bits per sample).

This is the reason why digital carrier lines are always multiples of 64. A
DS-0 is one 64kbps channel, a DS-1 is 1.54 Mbps (24 * 64), an E1 is 2.048 Mbps
(32 * 64), etc.

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Valien
I'm actually a part of this survey. I have a SamKnows device (basically a
Netgear router with custom firmware) that polls Charter's 'net service and I
get monthly details and can even login to the SamKnows site to see how Charter
is doing. Pretty slick.

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nomdeplume
I wonder if there is a legal requirement for an ISP to provide a certain % of
advertised performance. Also wonder if ISP circumvents by using "Up to" in
advertising. up to 3 MBPS usually comes out to 56kps 99% of the time in my
case.

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sudonim
The report matches my experience with Verizon FIOS. By far the best internet
service in America. I was coming from TWC and had positive experiences there,
but FIOS is even better. Low latency, high bandwidth.

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CrazedGeek
Same with Cox and me. Pretty fast speeds (for the South and cable, anyway),
great ping, and no caps.

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jeffool
Hate to ask, but is there a way to make a note of a thread for later, aside
from making a comment in it?

Yes, that is what I'm doing here. On my phone right now.

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CrazedGeek
Upvoting it will put it in the "saved stories" section in your profile, but
that's about it.

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pyre
Pimping my tool:

<http://github.com/bsandrow/hn-profile>

Written in response to an HN thread asking how to download the list of saved
articles.

~~~
jeffool
Ahhh, thanks to both of you!

