Incorrect, and that was exactly my point

This is like saying that if the fruit at a store is rotten sometimes, it’s not the grocer’s fault, because the fruit had to come a long way and went bad in transit. The exact job you are paying the ISP for, is to deal with the hops and give you good internet. It’s actually a lot easier at the trunk level (because the pipes are bigger and more reliable and there are more of them / more redundancy and predictability and they get more attention.)

I won’t say there isn’t some isolated exception, but in reality it’s a small small small minority of the time. Take an internet connection that’s having difficulty getting the advertised speed and run mtr or something, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll find that the problem is near one or the other of the ends where there’s only one pipe and maybe it’s having hardware trouble or individually underprovisioned or something.

Actually Verizon deliberately underprovisioning Netflix is the exception that proves the rule – that was a case where it actually was an upstream pipe that wasn’t big enough to carry all the needed traffic, but it was perfectly visible to them and they could easily have solved it if they wanted to, and chose not to, and the result was visibly different from normal internet performance in almost any other case.

Ehhh, I get what you are saying but I would rephrase the above poster’s comment a little then. If a person is paying for 100Mbps and they are able to get/find a source or some combination of sources that are able to supply them 100mbps of data then that’s what they should be getting. The easiest example being a torrent for popular Linux distros.

I personally think the solution to that should be some kind of regulatory minimum around the advertisement of speed or contractual service obligation. For example if a person pays for a 100Mbps connection then the ISP should be required to supply that speed at +/- 5% instantaneous and -.5% on average (because if you give them a range you know they will maintain the lowest possible speed to be in compliance).

Don’t look too hard at my numbers, I pulled them out of my ass, but hopefully it gets across the idea.

Distance would add latency but shouldn’t reduce speed on well maintained infrastructure.

There’s always going to be some level of loss and retransmission. It would take a perfect stream of UDP, since TCP needs acknowledgements in order to continue sending data. That can be reduced by window scaling and multiplexing, but it’s still going to happen.

It’s so weird that that phrasing is even accepted as the norm. It would be unacceptable if a grocery store charges you for ‘up to’ 2 liters of soda, and then tells you to go fuck yourself when they give you only 0.5 liter.

I just checked my agreement, and it says something like this:

Stated Speeds not guaranteed and are affected by many factors. In all cases, actual speed will likely be lower than speed indicated during peak hours.

But the marketing says nothing about “up to” like it does with typical cable and DSL services (we use a small, local ISP), and I’ve honestly never seen my speed go below the advertised limit. Every time I test it (and I’ve tested during peak hours as well), I get pretty much exactly what’s advertised.

That said, the agreement I’m reading is kind of funny:

Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn’t seem to care what I do with it.

This is BS by the ISP. My ISP advertises they give 140 Mbps, I get 140 and sometimes 150 Mbps. Maybe during peak hours I may get slightly less, like 130. But it’s not supposed to be drastically low, like 80-90.

However, the user must also consider that some issues are beyond the ISP’s control, like how loaded the destination server is.

Yeah because we know how it works behind the curtain.

I didn’t go in engineering to fuck people over. I want to be proud of my work, and the salespeople put their dirty shit all over it.

Shit, TIL I’m an engineer lol.

Quality of service, networking term for rate limiting. Essentially whatever the QOS is set to is the maximum speed you will see.

Quality of Service. On the user side, it can be used to ensure high-priority traffic actually gets through first.

In networking, all of the data is bundled into packets. These packets are sort of like a shipping package; They contain a shipping label about where the data packet is going, and how soon it should be delivered. That latter part is QoS. If you have a compatible network, enabling and properly configuring QoS will allow the network to prioritize certain “urgent” data packets over other less urgent packets.

Maybe your large download is a low priority compared to your VoIP traffic. Because the download will still get done eventually if the packets get delayed by a few milliseconds, but if the VoIP packets end up waiting in line then you’ll get stuttering, bad call quality, dropped calls, etc… So QoS ensures those VoIP packets get delivered before the download packets do.

But on the ISP’s side, QoS basically means “we’re throttling the fuck out of you so we don’t have to actually build decent infrastructure.” Because if your neighborhood’s line can only handle 2000Mbps of total traffic, but the ISP has sold 3000Mbps worth of service, the ISP can use QoS to throttle everyone in your neighborhood and ensure that every user on that line still gets connectivity. It’s not the connectivity they were promised, but it’s enough for most people to not notice.

For instance, maybe you have three users with 1000Mbps connections. So when only two of them are using that 2000Mbps line, everything is fine. But when the third user connects, they find that they’re basically locked out. The line is already totally full, so all three users begin experiencing connectivity problems. To avoid this, the ISP uses QoS to throttle everyone; everyone gets throttled down to 666.66Mbps to account for that third user. No single user is getting the promised 1000Mbps, because the ISP has over-sold their infrastructure and is using QoS as a stop-gap to avoid actually upgrading. But since all three users can connect, and most won’t bother actually checking their speeds, the ISP is able to get away with it.

Nah it was very frustrating at the time. However its better since we started the transition to a new provider.

Its not complete yet but it did indeed feel good when my latest in long line of sales reps called me about a new 36 month contract. Windstream is mismanagements prototype. They have achieved greatness in sucking. They have good technical people who are prevented from fixing problems by their clueless management personnel. These people also change all the time. That revolving door there must be spinning at thousands of RPM’s.

The concept of net neutrality definitely existed long before Obama so it’s a bit questionable to say it was created under him. Did anything specific happen under him to enforce net neutrality more than it already was?

You’re definitely right about Trump though. It seems like he took every opportunity to screw over the US public in favour of corporate interests.

The FCC really started pushing for net neutrality in the Bush administration.

In 2005, the Madison River Telephone company (now Lumen/CenturyLink) blocked Vonage from using its networks and the FCC stepped in to stop them. They then established 4 principles of an Open Internet:

Consumers deserve access to the lawful Internet content of their choice.

Consumers should be allowed to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement

Consumers should be able to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

Consumers deserve to choose their network providers, application and service providers, and content providers of choice.

In 2009, they overtly added the principle of non-discrimination, and in 2010 they made the principles official with the Open Internet Order.

Comcast sued and got the order thrown out, so they started the prices of reclassifying broadband, and the fight reached fever pitch in 2014 when it looked like the FCC was finally going to win for us.

But between 2012 and 2016, the ISPs changed their tactics. They stated colluding with the major tech and streaming services pitching net neutrality as a good thing for the established businesses that could pay the ransom or engage in partnerships. A good example was T-Mobile exempting Netflix from their 2gig data limit on cellular plans. T-Mobile was able to advertise the partnership as a good thing instead of an assault on users and the open internet.

Then the Trump administration took over and took a huge steaming dump on the FCC along with everything else, and the Biden administration just spent the better part of 4 years just trying to seat a commissioner to reinstate open internet.

I’m not optimistic we’ll have it for long.

fast.com is pretty good, too. No nonsense, and run by a company renowned for server throughput optimization, so it should rarely be on their end if it’s a slow result

Try librespeed

Its good for at least confirming the physical links between your system and your home network and the ISP are good.

Can I have a link to your speed test?

I literally had this happen to me; it’s why I don’t use Verizon anymore. Youtube, too. There’s a technical breakdown somewhere of precisely how they did it (roughly speaking, “accidentally” underprovisioning the exact exits from their network that would lead to Netflix’s servers for no possible reason except to fuck with Netflix and degrade that service and only that service, which it accomplished very effectively.)

That’s a real problem for sure, but I’m not a fan of the solution.

They should have been found guilty of anticompetitive behaviour and split up into multiple companies.

Here in Australia we’ve gone down that path though there was no actual lawsuit. We just saw problems starting to creep in and dealt with it proactively. The vast majority of network infrastructure is now owned by a company called “NBN Co” (National Broadband Network) which is required to provide the best available network technology to every single household/business in the country. All pre-existing network operators were forced to sell their infrastructure to NBN Co and any business can provide services to anyone for a reasonable fee paid to NBN Co. Mostly it’s broadband internet, but literally anything can go over the pipes. The fee varies depending on the bandwidth and QoS level.

They are also investing in network upgrades, including state of the art DSL routers that can run at decent speeds for most people (I get about 80Mbps) and all new connections are Fibre as well as existing connections are gradually moving to Fibre (on those, you can usually get 10Gbps). Each building can have multiple connections, at least four but large buildings obviously get more. If you live in the middle of the desert with no wired networking at all, then you get a wireless one. Satellite if necessary, though usually it will be “fixed wireless” which is basically cellular with large/high quality a rooftop antenna.

NBN Co is tax payer funded, but mostly only to accelerate fibre installations. Aside from that upfront capital expenditure it is profitable and some of those profits are paying off the tax payer’s uprfront investment.

The things NN is trying to “solve” was never an issue either

I know Lemmy is the wrong place for this, it’s just another hive mind like reddit. Actual reading is what got me to this point. So maybe it’s you that should do some unbiased reading.

Bless your heart