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.
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.
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.
Agreed, very narrow focus and although the results are positive, the publication does little to spur on development in this industry. American ISPs, we need to talk.
I'm actually doing some research on this topic right now in grad school. I think there is definitely a lot more that can be done in this area; we're looking at things like time-of-day congestion, traffic management policy, actual application performance, and reliability. I think, as you said, there is a lot more to this than just bandwidth measurements. For example, last November a bunch of DNS servers went down in Comcast's networks that essentially meant no Internet for the majority of people that don't know how to configure public DNS.
We're working to eventually get a much finer grain survey of performance (e.g. a neighborhood), by piggy backing on network-intensive applications (currently BitTorrent). In addition to throughput, we're looking at things such as packet loss, latency (the last-mile in particular), time-of-day effects, as well as using traceroutes for underlying forward-path analysis.
My point is, if anyone has any ideas for other applications (something like Netflix would be great) to leverage, metrics to include, or advice, I'd be happy to hear them. :)
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.
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.
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.
For low latency, the IP/UDP/RTP headers are much bigger than the audio in many cases. So a "64 kbps" codec is actually ~96 kbps (IIRC) and the overhead gets worse at lower bitrates.
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.
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.
