If any of you work for "Deathstar" or it's related Satellite TV company...

[mjr]

I have a question for you.

My internet speed is, consistently, far, far lower than it should be. I know that they say "speeds aren't guaranteed". But I'm talking about the fact that I'm getting speeds at 28.8K modem levels. for DSL where I'm supposed to have either 1.5 MBps or 3 MBps. I forget exactly which (I would have to check my bill).

So my questions are multi-tiered...

1. Should I contact "Deathstar" and ask for a reduced rate, since I'm getting a FAR slower speed consistently?

2. I am thinking of upgrading my speed, but my wife makes a valid point that even if I upgrade to the fastest speed in my area, yes, my speed would be faster, but it still may be proportionately slow.

So what should I do? Just deal with it? There's really not a lot available in my area as far as high-speed Internet goes. I know "Deathstar" is going to fiber, but I live in a smaller town, and it might take a bit before we get it.

I don't like the concept of "satellite internet"...because weather can disrupt the signal.

It's painfully slow, though. I have large files I need to download, and it literally takes hours to do so.

[Nunavut Pants]

Complain. My local telco has made efforts (mostly successful!) to fix overly-slow speeds. If they are advertising a speed, and drastically failing to meet that, call them out on it.

[mjr]

Complain. My local telco has made efforts (mostly successful!) to fix overly-slow speeds. If they are advertising a speed, and drastically failing to meet that, call them out on it.

I am considering calling and talking to Retention. That seems like all I can do. I mean, I've heard stories of people who have tried to email/contact the CEO of "Deathstar" and basically been threatened with Cease and Desist.

[sstabeler]

it really depends on exactly why you are getting such slow speeds.
1) it's possible- being in a smaller town- that it's bandwidth issues, not speed issues. (basically, there's only so much data that can be transmitted from your cabinet to wherever that goes to, and equally only so much data THAT place can send on. If that limit's being hit, increasing the nominal speed won't actually make a difference.
2) most connections are artificially throttled to produce the speed you pay for (the line is capable of much faster speeds) and it's theoretically possible, if it's a case of "never got the faster speed" that they forgot to change the speed of your connection at their end.

[csquared]

Odds are you have a bad wire between your house and the DSLAM. They might be able to swap you out for another pair in the cable. The trick is trying to get them to do that. Talk to support and try to get them out to check your signal quality.

What is your option if they don't/won't do anything? You only have the upper hand if you leave them or can afford to sue them. I had a fight with them a couple of weeks ago. My phone and internet were down for a week, and they no showed the first appointment. I got $20.00 for it. That doesn't even cover a week of my service.

[mjr]

What is your option if they don't/won't do anything? You only have the upper hand if you leave them or can afford to sue them. I had a fight with them a couple of weeks ago. My phone and internet were down for a week, and they no showed the first appointment. I got $20.00 for it. That doesn't even cover a week of my service.

Unfortunately, as far as actual DSL goes, most of the ISPs in my area are carried on DeathStar-owned phone lines, so they offer the same speeds as DeathStar. There's probably some kind of relationship there.

There is, I think, a cable company that offers Internet. And I think it's WAY faster than DeathStar. The website for said cable company would probably want to bundle, too, but all I want is Internet. Their website shows that they don't offer service in my area, but I don't think that's true, as I've seen their installation trucks on my street, and nearby streets. When the time comes, I'm going to call them and find out.

I basically have my Television service (TV that is Direct), land line, and Internet through Deathstar.

I could, in theory, get rid of two of them. I may talk to my wife about us getting rid of our land line completely. We rarely use it. She might want to keep it, though, and I think DeathStar is the only company in our area that offers land lines.

Do you know how long it takes to download Visual Studio 2017 when your download speed is 35 Kbps?? It was painful enough downloading smaller (i.e. a couple of hundred megs) installers for my new laptop. Visual Studio 2017 is gigabytes, as is Android Studio...

And I need these things installed, because I have a few "side" projects I want to work on.

[dalesys]

...Do you know how long it takes to download Visual Studio 2017 when your download speed is 35 Kbps??

Which is why when we were stuck on dullup (22K!) I'd hike my lappie & me 3 miles to the bus stop and go to the lube-rary.

[mjr]

Which is why when we were stuck on dullup (22K!) I'd hike my lappie & me 3 miles to the bus stop and go to the lube-rary.

I've actually been wanting to do that...

But the library where I live closes at 6 PM most days, which is basically 15 minutes after I get home. They stay open late on Thursdays, but I don't think 2 hours is enough time to DL Visual Studio 2017...even at the Library.

I've been wanting to go on a Saturday, but we've been busy the last couple of Saturdays, with us being busy this Saturday and next Saturday, too...

I even have a list of what I want/need to install to get started...

[csquared]

There is always Starbucks.

I was looking into going back to my cable provider. I dropped them three years ago, so they would have to check the cables. I was looking at over a week to get them out.

[mjr]

There is always Starbucks.

I was looking into going back to my cable provider. I dropped them three years ago, so they would have to check the cables. I was looking at over a week to get them out.

Is cable a lot faster than DSL? Based on what I've seen, it appears to be. Right now we have three computers connected to a wired network (two Windows machines and a Linux machine), and we have four more devices that we could use wireless for (we have wireless turned off, because of how slow our Internet is).

I was thinking about going with a cable company that rhymes with "plectrum". They offer something like 100 Mbps...way faster than what I have, and way faster than DeathStar offers in my area...at least until we get fiber (which may be never, I don't know).

Edit: I hadn't considered Starbucks.

[It's me]

Cable has a lot higher capacity that DSL. A good chunk of the phone network is unshielded twisted-pair cabling, even if the phone company has fiber running into your neighbourhood. Lots of opportunity to pick up noise. Cable is designed for high-bandwidth and is shielded, with a capacity a couple orders of magnitude higher than DSL.

At my place we've got 150Mbs down, 20Mbs up. Typically we only see about 30 Mbs down on the actual computers (using wifi) because 802.11n pretty much tops out at less than 40 Mbs even under ideal conditions. If I really want to move a lot of data I plug into the router.

(The reason for the 150Mbs is that was the lowest tier with unlimited data -- with six people in my house all playing on-line games, watching YouTube& NetFlix, uploading content etc. etc. we blow through 400GB-500GB of data every month)

[mjr]

Cable has a lot higher capacity that DSL. )

Honestly, 30Mbps down on WiFi wouldn't be bad...once I get everything set up. Once I get my IDEs and such installed, most of the uploads I'm going to be doing are probably to my code repository, and any downloads would be components/add-ons.

[EricKei]

To add on to what It's Me said:

Realistic upper speeds can vary -- Beyond the throttling they already do based on service tier:

- For cable, the number of connections to a given cable "hub" at any one time determine your maximum will change things. If the hub's capacity is well above the user/bandwidth maxmimum, everyone should be at or near the maximum their plan allows; distance is more or less irrelevant. If everyone logs in at once and it gets overloaded, everyone's speed will slow to a crawl.

- For DSL, which is commonly carried on phone lines, the number of users has only a small impact, but the distance (in terms of the length of the actual physical wires) to either the phone company's main local station, or to the nearest substation or "booster" (for lack of a better word) is what matters.

Unless there's something wrong, or misconfigured (as csquared suggests), those are the primary factors.

Note on satellite DSL: You could very well get nice download speeds, but keep in mind that your *upload* speed will literally be dialup, as they interface with the local phone system for whatever reason. Severely restricted upload speeds can effectively throttle your download speed, as your computer still needs to send an acknowledgement packet to the originating server that says, "OK, I got data packet XYXZ243, send XYXZ244" for each and every packet of data.

Could be worth checking out sites such as dslreports(.org) and the like for comparisons.

[Nunavut Pants]

BTW, when I said "complain", I meant talk to Tech Support. Be prepared to send them screenshots of Speedtest readouts (google it, I think they're on ookla.net?) and mention that this speed is unexpectedly low.

In my case, they did change me to a different pair of wires. They also told me that the wires in my house were hurting my speed, so I ran a new one in the crawl-space. (Thankfully in the tall one, not the claustrophobic one!) Finally, they put a speed cap on my line, which improved the speed believe it or not! Rather, it improved reliability, because they were no longer trying to drive the signal faster than the wiring could handle. But since the systems were no longer asking for stuff to be re-sent every handful of frames, the visible effect was better speeds...

And the maximum capability of cable TV-based networking is higher than that of telephone-based. How much you actually get in your specific house can vary a whole lot from that, of course.

FIOS would be rather faster, but not very many places have fiber-optic lines run so far.

[csquared]

Note on satellite DSL:

I was researching that recently. One of the big satellite ISPs offers 3Mbs uploads (their web site says it is ground to satellite. No phone line needed). Better than my DSL. Unfortunately, it is a metered service. They charge by Gigabyte blocks (10GB, 25GB, 50GB, 75GB). To get the GBs that I need, it would cost twice as much as DeathStar.