
Internet speed guarantees must be realistic, says Ofcom - ohjeez
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41524650
======
Drakim
It always puzzled me that internet companies can simply say that the speed is
"up to" a certain number. Especially since, they will often sell various tiers
of speed, proving that they ARE capable of delivering a faster speed.

Imagine paying for 50mb/s internet and only getting 23mb/s. So you upgrade to
the 75mb/s plan and now your real speed is 46mb/s. Why couldn't you get that
higher speed for the original plan? It seems bizarre that this setup would be
legal anywhere in any country.

If you can simply provide "up to" on something, then I wanna sell you a box
for ten bucks that contains up to a million dollars!

 _Edit:_ Obviously speed depends on a million factors, but I don't know if
I've ever experienced even half the speed I was paying for, even when I
control both end points.

~~~
smudgymcscmudge
Our cable internet is sold as "up to 100mbps", so the joke at our house is
that if we ever get 101mbps we will sue them for breach of contract.

Edit: I realize it isn't a good joke.

~~~
hrrsn
The New Zealand Commerce Commission got grumpy when ISPs started selling
gigabit plans as 1000mbit, as it's not realistically possible for consumers to
reach those speeds. So, instead of gigabit, we get "up to 900/400Mbps" or more
realistically about 800/400, which, you know what, I can live with.

[http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/87071149/spark-
wa...](http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/87071149/spark-warned-off-
marketing-new-fibre-plans-as-gigabit-plans-says-spokesman)

[http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6671498802.png](http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6671498802.png)

~~~
Cyph0n
Are internet packages better in NZ than in Australia? I'm assuming the
connection is heavily metered?

~~~
UberMouse
I have an unlimited gigabit connection that I pay $120NZD per month for. And
for content on good CDNs or hosted in the country I do get near the advertised
speed. It took me just under 4 minutes to download the Star Wars Battlefront 2
beta from Origin which had a size of 23.78GB, averaging 90+ MB/s.

I probably use around 5TB of data per month as well.

~~~
krzyk
Nice, do you have also uplink with gigabit?

In Poland I ave 300/30 Mbit (they connected fiber to my house recently) for 50
PLN (it is about 19 NZD, or 13 USD) per month. They offer 600/60 in some
cities (where there is more competition), but I don't know the price, I think
is is more in 80PLN range. And plan to start also 1 gbit plan (probably with
100 Mbit uplink).

~~~
hrrsn
Not the guy you asked, but here the speeds are set by the fibre infrastructure
holders, not the ISP. So on residential connections the fastest you'll get is
900/500\. I pay $129 NZD (~335 PLN). Not symmetrical, but damn impressive
nonetheless.

------
AliAdams
As someone with a company in the ISP space, this is awesome news.

One of the biggest problems in marketing that our team has come across,
particularly in consumer broadband, is that as a company attempting to be open
and honest about speeds and pricing, it can be hard to compete with the older
players using bamboozling pricing and inflated speed claims to trick consumers
thinking that they are giving a better deal.

These restrictions will level the playing field in the right direction for a
more informed and better served consumer.

At a time of some very bad calls around internet legislation in the UK, this
is finally a decision I think we can all applaud.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Yes, that sounds like a very good idea for both sides. It's annoying as hell
when as an informed consumer, you have essentially no chance to figure out
what the products even are that are competing for your money. How the hell am
I supposed to decide between products that only guarantee that they won't
provide more than a certain level of service with no lower limit? Just imagine
supermarkets filled with "up to" products ... WTF?

~~~
mrguyorama
It's a disgustingly unhealthy market when the only possible way to find the
best product for you is to buy service from each available option for over a
year (in order to get the true, not stupid introductory price)

------
smallnamespace
In a weird way, this is the same problem that banks face.

Fractional reserve banking is actually in society's best interests: it's fine
if the bank takes $100 in deposits, then loans out $80 or $90, rather than
just having the money sitting in a vault doing nothing.

In the same way, it's probably better for the _overall efficiency of
communications_ for ISPs to oversell capacity and then allow bursting on top,
rather than not overselling and wasting bandwidth when there's no congestion.

They face the same problem though: banks have an incentive to lower reserves
until the smallest shock will bankrupt them, and ISPs make more money by
overselling past what is wise or reasonable.

Same solution: for banks we regulate margin requirements, and for ISPs we
should regulate how much they can oversell.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Well, first of all, banks cannot simply claim that they don't have all your
money available and give you back only half instead. Once they reach a stage
where that is their problem, they are bankrupt, and you get to sell their
assets to recover your money.

I think it's much simpler in the case of ISPs, because there is no risk
involved for the customer: You don't need to regulate how much they can
oversell, but rather simply that the customer must not ever notice that the
network is oversold.

~~~
Tyr42
I mean, they can during a run on the bank without declaring bankruptcy.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
No, they can't.

First of all, only paying out part of the balance at once is very different
from paying out part of the balance instead of the full balance. A bank can
not unilaterally declare that their 100 dollar debt to you is paid by giving
you 50 dollars. If they pay out 50 dollars, they still owe you 50 dollars.

But more importantly: No, they can not even unilaterally delay the payout. If
you have demand deposits of a million bucks with a bank, that means that you
can at any point demand they pay out a million bucks, and when you demand
that, they are legally required to do so, and if they can't fulfill a legal
obligation to pay, that is exactly the definition of bankruptcy. If they fail
to immediately declare bankcruptcy, the management is on the hook for any
losses due to that failure of theirs.

Banks might limit what their ATMs pay out per person per day or something,
say, but that does not change anything about their obligation to fulfill any
requests to pay out your balance immediately. Just because the ATM doesn't
allow you to demand a payout of a million dollars, doesn't mean they have any
legal option to refuse if you go to the cashier and express your demand that
they pay out a million dollars right now. At best they might not have a
million dollars on site, in which case they possibly might be allowed to have
you wait for however long it takes to move the cash from the central bank to
the branch that you are at, but that is certainly not more than a day.

~~~
smallnamespace
You're right that the bank cannot unilaterally prevent a payout.

Practically speaking though, what usually happens during a potential bank run
is that governments declare a bank holiday, preventing customers from
withdrawing funds.

That buys the government (and the bank) time to get their ducks in a row, line
up bailouts, etc.

Things get a LOT worse if the bank is actually allowed to go under. Letting
Bear Stearns and Lehman collapse was, in retrospect, probably a mistake that
made the eventual bailout need to be larger.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Well, that really depends on the bank, though. In the case of smaller/local
banks, chances are that it will simply go bankrupt to be wound down and
deposit insurance will pay out the balance (or as much of it as is insured)
within a couple days.

But also, bankruptcy does not necessarily imply that the bank collapses: One
way to resolve a bankruptcy is to obtain funds, possibly in the form of a
bailout, that allow any demands to be fulfilled. Rather, bankruptcy is exactly
the thing that allows the bank to refuse payouts even when it's not a bank
holiday. The point is that once a bank has declared bankruptcy, it is not
allowed to pay out to anyone anymore without oversight, because the bankruptcy
proceedings are supposed to make sure that everyone that the bank is indebted
to gets a fair share of the remaining assets--or possibly to find a solution
that allows the bank to resume operations by accepting a later payout for some
of its debts. The important point in all of this is that in any case, none of
this can be used directly to increase the equity of the existing owners. If
the bank has to obtain loans in order to fulfill its obligations, the interest
on that is paid from equity. If there is no equity, the bank changes ownership
(like, if the state bails out the bank, the state gets to own the bank). So,
even if the bank might refuse to pay out under certain circumstances, the
processes that get triggered by that have as their primary goal to make those
payouts happen as soon as possible, not to allow the bank's owners to keep
anything.

------
userbinator
_Many factors can influence browsing speeds, he said. These include_

...and not one mention of _the server at the other end_. Whenever discussion
of Internet connection speeds comes up, I always ask myself, "speed _between
what_?" Even if you have a 1Gbps connection to your ISP, you're not going to
get anywhere near that if the other end is on a different continent, a small
site behind the Great Firewall of China, or a heavily overloaded server.

Thus, in some sense, ISPs have always been advertising _maximum_ speeds, and
even those expensive services with SLAs etc. very carefully define to what
part of the connection such guarantees apply.

~~~
olympus
But when I can't even get that speed under favorable conditions then it is
dishonest to advertise that speed. If you can't even get that speed when
connecting to the ISP's own server a few miles away then you aren't getting
what you pay for.

When car companies advertise the fuel efficiency of their cars those are
realistic numbers for regular driving because there is a standardized testing
protocol. You can trust the number because it is regulated, so why can't we
hold ISPs to the same standard?

~~~
userbinator
_If you can 't even get that speed when connecting to the ISP's own server a
few miles away then you aren't getting what you pay for._

That I agree with --- the connection from your house to your ISP should always
be at advertised speed, but beyond that it's basically impossible to guarantee
anything.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
How is it impossible for an ISP to guarantee bandwidth within their own
network, including to/from interconnection points/exchanges?!

Maybe not at every point in time (if you accept some overbooking), but that
doesn't mean that you can't at least guarantee bandwidth for > 99% of the
time.

The ISP's advertised bandwidth should be available essentially always, with
rare exceptions for unusually high levels of traffic, between your connection
point and some exchange location where other ISPs can interconnect with your
ISP without paying your ISP any money. The ISP doesn't have to guarantee that
every server is reachable at advertised speeds, but they should guarantee that
if ever anyone wants to send packets in your direction at the speed of your
link, they should be able to either bury their own lines or buy transit from a
market of transit providers to deliver the packets to some point in their
network, and that those will be delivered without major packet loss at full
rate.

~~~
closeparen
Overselling of the last mile infrastructure. If you want to see what a not-
oversold last mile connection (with a real minimum speed SLA) would cost, take
a look at the “for business” pricing and weep.

Most people’s usage is bursty, so the present oversold state is probably the
least bad option compared to having a fixed <1Mbps line speed or paying
thousands per month for a truly dedicated 50-100Mbps.

~~~
gaius
It WAS bursty when most people were browsing but it's continuous if they've
streaming these days.

~~~
throw_away_4567
Yeah but not much - stream Amazon Prime UHD pretend 4k and consume.. 18mbps.
You can support 1k homes doing that on a 10G pon or VDSL build

------
tialaramex
Lot of people in here moaning about cable speed problems caused mostly by
congestion.

This article is about the UK, where most people with broadband Internet get it
via their telephone line, ie VDSL, and so aren't subject to congestion in the
last mile.

In most cases this means their "speed" is a property of the VDSL standard, the
length and quality of copper cable in the ground between them and the VDSL
node (a relatively new bigger green street cabinet for most of them, vaguely
near their older smaller "BT" cabinet).

VDSL works basically the same way as your ancient "analogue" telephone modem,
except with way, way higher frequencies and more sophisticated encoding
because it wasn't designed to cost $10 and work over actual telephone calls,
just make it for about a mile down a copper cable to a $$$$ specialist box.

Short, high quality telephone cables can easily support the same sort of
bandwidth you regularly see from say, 100baseT, ie 100Mbps. But very long,
poor quality ones will do much worse, VDSL needs to tweak things to give those
poor souls some sort of service, while also delivering a really good service
to people who are closer, as automatically as possible. Higher frequencies get
smushed worse over distance, so the closer people get a wider _band_ of
frequencies, more literal _bandwidth_. The consumer equipment and the big
green box in the street negotiate how best to get a signal between them, then
if necessary the big green box throttles this down to an agreed speed, the
actual "maximum" which may be higher than the advertised "Up to..." speed in
countries where a regulator demanded such a pointless change to advertising.

The end result is usually if you live 100 metres from the cabinet, you get
nice fast broadband and it doesn't matter which ISP you pick. And if you live
two miles from the cabinet you get shitty ADSL at 1Mbps and can't watch
Netflix and again, it still doesn't matter which ISP you pick.

So in a way the irony is that ISPs advertise speed at all. Speed has almost
nothing to do with your ISP if you're using VDSL, which most UK households
are. Imagine if car manufacturers started advertising the quality of roads you
can drive on. It's the same roads for all manufacturers - who cares?

~~~
zimpenfish
> if you're using VDSL, which most UK households are

It's been a while since I was in the UK internet industry but I think most of
them are using ADSL with VDSL generally only used for fibre or "business
class" connections.

~~~
maaark
Any broadband package over "up to 20Mbit" will be VDSL. I'd say that's a
majority, nowdays.

~~~
zimpenfish
[https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/04/ofcom-2017-stu...](https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/04/ofcom-2017-study-
average-uk-home-broadband-speeds-rise-36-2mbps.html)

> a little over half of the country still subscribe to the much slower and
> less reliable ADSL (up to 8-20Mbps) based pure copper line services.

------
bronzeage
The big lie is that connection speed within the ISP means nothing. Most of the
time when I experience packet loss / congestion you can clearly see it's in
the connection from the ISP to other providers, and some providers are cheap
you will suffer high packet loss and congestion exiting their network. The
advertised speed is meaningless when 1 in every 30 packets is dropped. Just
small packet loss is enough to slow TCP

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Well, packet loss here really is a bandwidth problem, though. The packet loss
happens because some link is saturated and packets are arriving faster than
they can be transmitted, and TCP simply reacts by adjusting the sending rate
so as to not exceed the available bandwidth at the bottleneck.

Still true that the problem often is more the peering than internal
infrastructure, yeah.

------
jumpkickhit
I used to love speedtest.net, but since finding testmy.net which keeps a log
of your previous tests, I haven't gone back.

I typically receive the correct up/down ratio, though intermittent issues may
lower it for a day or less. Though various ISPs over the years. It would be
nice to have a consistent as-advertised speed though if you happen to live in
an area where that isn't happening.

~~~
koyote
Eh, I guess this is US only?

I am getting 40/30 here in London whereas speedtest.net gives me 900/900.

That is a massive difference.

~~~
plopz
At some point certain ISPs were disabling throttling specifically for
speedtest.net which is why netflix made fast.com. Perhaps thats whats
happening with testmy.net?

------
andrewingram
My favourite questionable practice is from Hyperoptic. They advertise gigabit
broadband, and this is accurate.

But the wifi hotspot they provide is only capable of a small fraction of that
(theoretically 130mbit, practically 70mbit), but you can get the full gigabit
if you use ethernet. This discrepancy isn't mentioned at any point until you
start digging around in the FAQs or in some forums around the internet:

[https://support.hyperoptic.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/205590822-W...](https://support.hyperoptic.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/205590822-What-download-speeds-should-I-see-using-a-wireless-
connection-)

But I plugged in a proper wifi hotspot (one capable of at least gigabit) and I
got the full advertised speed.

I believe this is an intentional trick to avoid saturation of their network.

------
SeanDav
A few years ago I subscribed to a 8 MB service with a major ISP (Virgin). I
was getting around 500k. Virgin insisted it was an issue with my router/my
line/my computer/everything under the sun and nothing to do with them. When I
pointed out that I had signed up for a 8 MB deal, they said that legally they
did not have to do anything unless my performance went below 300k! I cancelled
the contract and was forced to pay an early termination penalty.

I went with a smaller ISP (Fast.co.uk - those guys are brilliant!) and
immediately started getting around 6 MB. Same computer, same router and same
lines as before.

It boggled my mind that a big ISP could get away with this borderline
fraudulent behaviour.

------
rikkus
I’m not really bothered about speed. Just reliability. If my home broadband
could actually stay up then I’d be able to work from home without tethering to
a phone in order to get a reliable connection.

------
gnicholas
Whenever my internet is sluggish enough for me to call Comcast, they always
blame the fact that I'm using wifi — and suggest I switch to ethernet to get
higher speeds.

I tell them that all of my devices are newer and therefore do not have
ethernet. And I point out that all of the service techs they send out do not
have ethernet-equipped devices either.

This generally does not convince them. Sometimes they are convinced if I can
do a transfer over my network (Time Machine backups, etc.) to show that the
wifi is blazing fast, and that the bottleneck is their connection.

~~~
Nullabillity
Do you also complain that your SSD is slow when you connect it over USB 1.1?

~~~
gnicholas
Not sure how you think this is at all analogous. My internet connection is 12
Mb/s, which could be handled by any recent wifi protocol. Maybe get the facts
first next time before jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

~~~
Nullabillity
It's not just about what protocol you use, physical factors also come into
play. If you're in an apartment, how noisy are your neighbors? If you're in a
villa, how far away are you, and how many walls are there in between?

Yes, Wi-Fi can have pretty decent bandwidth in the optimal case, but there are
far too many uncontrollable variables for it to be possible to guarantee
anything with it. It also makes perfect sense to want to exclude it as a
variable before making a more thorough investigation.

If you bought a computer without Ethernet then that's on you, not your ISP.
Fashion is not an excuse.

~~~
gnicholas
Did you miss the part where I said it can move files internally perfectly
fine? There is nothing wrong with the wifi, and it's bizarre to see someone on
HN make such unjustified assumptions.

Does it make sense to "exclude it as a variable before making a more thorough
investigation"? Yes. But if Comcast sends out techs who do not have ethernet-
equipped hardware (as I pointed out in my original post), then it's silly of
them to expect customers to all have ethernet-equipped hardware.

> _Fashion is not an excuse_

Oversimplification is not an excuse either.

------
m3kw9
Any guarantee is unrealistic, depending on who you ask. There are so many
points of potential slow downs that it is. Not realistic. To say a minimum.

~~~
ncallaway
The problem isn't a lack of a guarantee. The problem is _never_ getting the
service as advertised.

If I buy a 50 Mbps plan, and I get 50 Mbps 60% of the time and between 20-30
Mbps 40% of the time, I could live with that.

My problem is that has _never_ been my experience with major cable providers.

I pay for a 50 Mbps plan and get 20-30 Mbps 50% of the time and 10-20 Mbps 50%
of the time. That's not simply a lack of a guarantee. That's a complete
failure to provide the service that was advertised.

~~~
dboreham
Again (as above) I feel I need to speak up that we have a bigCableCo
connection (Charter) that delivers 1.2x the sold throughput. From talking to
the local guys there, they have a policy to over-provision connections by
about 10% so they can be sure a speed test will deliver what the customer paid
for.

When I ran an ISP it was common for customers to run a speed test, see a speed
less than they had paid for, and immediately call us. Often the reason was
their router or their WiFi, or some flakyness in the speed test site, but
sometimes it was our network. We always investigated and resolved the problem
to restore their expected speed.

This being the case, I find it quite hard to believe that there are ISPs who
as a matter of course just don't ever deliver the advertised speed. They would
be receiving constant calls from disgruntled customers, which surely would
cost them more to answer than it would cost to fix the network??

~~~
CamTin
You can easily (through shoddy, cheap outsourcing body shops in India,
Phillipines, etc.) get support costs low enough that just taking the calls is
cheaper than fixing things, at least until the end of the financial quarter,
and that's what really matters to management. I say this from experience in
the web hosting industry, but I don't see any reason it wouldn't apply to
ISPs.

------
chopete2
W{{\78[8

------
shmerl
Good luck imposing anything in US now, with the current corrupted head of FCC.

~~~
olympus
Ofcom is a regulatory agency in the UK, this article has nothing to do with
the FCC and the US.

------
tryingagainbro
As the article points out the real speed depends on a lot of factors. Also,
not all servers can serve you at your max speed. Currently what would be a
decent speed, meaning you experience no lag...20 mb, 50mb ? Has anyone gone
from 50mb to a lot more and felt a huge difference ?

~~~
olympus
You will notice a difference if you live in a house with multiple people
streaming at once. The most typical use case is a big family that wants full
HD on their tablets plus a 4k stream in the living room. That requires a 100
mbps connection due to speeds slowing down in the evening (part of what the
article is about), and needing a bit of extra speed to prevent buffering.

~~~
dawnerd
I noticed a huge difference and it’s just me and my server (and two cats but I
don’t think they’re using Netflix...).

Normal day to day sites, no real difference. Loading up a steam game or the
like, huuuuuge improvement. Also no talk about upload speeds which are an even
bigger part of making the web faster.

~~~
throw_away_4567
Big issue is wifi; if you live 50m from your neighbours, no problem, but most
people are sharing the wifi bearer with 10's of others.

~~~
dawnerd
Equipment too. Using whatever junk your isp gives you isn’t going to do too
well. Better to spend a few hundred bucks on something like a UniFi setup.

