because land-lines already advertise their speed in raw numbers. The problem with mobile is that everyone wants to call their network 4G even if the speeds are actually slower than 3G.
Really? Could you point me to a United States DSL/Cable provider that provides meaningful 'raw numbers' in their advertisements? Last I shopped for broadband the best you could get was a vague "up to x mbps" number, without any information as to reliability, not to mention minimum speeds.
(And with a wired connection you ought to be able to say pretty easily what the minimum speed is going to be 90% of the time.)
Hm, well usually when they advertise 10Mb down, a speed test usually confirms that number. Are you not getting advertised speeds on your land line? I don't remember a time when I didn't get a given advertised speed. Obviously reliability is a different story, but unless you're paying business class, you probably won't get a SLA anyway.
I reliably get 12Mbps reported from speedtest.net on my 12Mbps advertised AT&T UVerse service.
The problem is speedtest.net is useless since AT&T is clearly gaming me and them, prioritizing the traffic and bandwidth.
My normal surfing experience is clearly no where near 12Mbps, especially when Netflix routinely pauses/stutters. the iTunes experience is equally bad. The latency from AT&T's DNS is insane as well which just results in a garbage experience all around.
A few years ago 3Mbps DSL felt, if not blazing, reliably 3Mbps at least. These days my 12Mbps line feels, if anything, slower/less reliable. Sometimes I might be getting close to that, but it's much more routine to feel like I'm getting pretty pitiful service more on the order of 768Kbps, but with DNS service that can frequently take seconds to resolve.
Using alternative DNS seems to be hit and miss. Sometimes it helps, some times it actually appears to cause issues. It doesn't make any real sense to me from a networking perspective, but they're obviously doing something very weird when I can swap back to the AT&T DNS from Google's and suddenly my AppleTV video thumbnails browsing iTunes or Netflix start appearing snappily as they should.
I'd go FIOS or Cable in a heart-beat if I could. The AT&T/2Wire/UVerse combination is nothing but broken promises and frustration for what turns out to be a pretty pricey, underperforming service (the TV side is pretty good on quality, reliability and features, but I pay over $100/month so I expect that as a minimum considering I have no movie channels and am on a basic package).
How do you know it isn't netflix that is the slow one here? Sometimes I have to remind myself that it's Reddit that has the slow servers, not my connection. Try downloading a large file from a private Linode VPS and see what your speeds look like. At least for me, the speeds match very closely to the advertised speed.
Plus, one of the easier experiments is to swap in Google's DNS servers. Then the AppleTV is snappy for a few days. After awhile, slow-loading thumbs again. Swap back in the 2wire DNS, and snappy again.
I'm not sure the transfer speed to my Linode VPS really proves much either. It could be that video traffic like iTunes and Netflex are the big QoS targets, especially since they directly compete with the other half of the UVerse services.
