*sigh* [insert mini-rant here]

[drfish]

Was going to title this thread, "What are you ranting about RIGHT NOW?" but I was worried about trademark infringement... This doesn't really merit its own topic but if people want to add their own mini-rant maybe it would be good for our collective mental health (or the opposite, whatever)...

The mini-rant:
Charter wants me to upgrade me Internet speed, tells me I'm on the 15Mbps plan and I could be on the 30Mbps plan for $1 a month more. Various popular speed test sites tell me my connection is already ~40Mbps but Steam confirms my ~1.8MB/s downloads are equal to a 15Mbps plan. Way to go Charter, hard to sell speed upgrades when you're cheating on bandwidth tests. Of course I'm upgrading to 30Mbps...

[ClickClick5]

My dad's home connection was 7 Mbps/768 Kbps and he got a piece of mail saying he could get the 12 Mbps/5 Mbps connection for the same price he was paying then. So he said sure. Two months go by and they send him a new modem to use with faster speeds and they charged him $5 more per month to lease the modem for the new speeds. I checked his connection and found he was still on the old speed. After a few calls, they "fixed the error" and he had his faster speed.

Lovely internet providers.

*rolls eyes*

[derFunkenstein]

I live on the outskirts of a city of 35,000 people. Like, I'm not in the country - I'm within the city limits - but kind of on the edge of it. Yet the only ISP who can get reliable internet service to me is Comcast. If I were 300 feet north I'd be across the highway in (officially) a different town serviced by different equipment that is much closer to me - even where I am - than the equipment that services my home right now.

I'm glad I learned this lesson, though. If I hadn't figured it out the hard way I'd be oblivious this spring when we start house searches. Now I know to call different ISPs with the addresses of houses we consider to make sure I can get away from Comcast. I also know now (more of what I didn't know then) to check for good cell coverage inside the houses we consider, too. I didn't realize how badly house-to-house cell service can vary. If we intend to remain land-line-free, we'd best make sure we can get good cell service in our home.

[nanoflower]

I don't know if Charter uses Powerboost or not but that could explain the speed you measured. Most of the speed testing sites don't take into account the temporary boost in speeds that Powerboost provides so you see a higher speed than what you would get if downloading larger files. Best way to test is to find a site that can deliver at high speeds and download something that is at least greater than 20MB in size (since that tends to be the amount boosted before the download speed drops to the normal speed.)

[drfish]

Fair point but most testing sites seem to spike to around 60Mbps and then settle into the 40. Steam spikes around the same percentage before settling down as well.

[paulWTAMU]

Social service style work steals your soul and makes a cynical SOB. If anyone here is thinking of pursuing it, DON'T. I've got applications out in oil and gas companies now. Time to see if I can join the family business (nearly all of us work in oil or pipelines in some way, shape or form).

[druidcent]

Great.. so when the speed test sites show me at .60 Mbps, and I'm supposed to be getting 25/6 Mbps, I should probably be concerned, if I weren't moving in a couple weeks..

[paulWTAMU]

point six megs? Yuck!

[nanoflower]

druidcent, I would say so. Sheesh. That sounds like you've got some bad wiring/connectors somewhere to create that much of a drop. Call your ISP and complain.

drfish, if you are seeing 40Mb/sec with Steam on a game download then I think they are just trying to upsell you. Or maybe trying to sell you something that they are already giving you for free even if it isn't what you are paying for. I've seen that before where they provision a customer for one speed while charging them for another due to some glitch or human error along the way. Though normally it's not in the customer's favor.

[drfish]

The 40Mbps would translate to 5MB/s as Steam displays it (bits vs bytes). So I know I'm really on the 15Mbps plan because my 1.8MB/s ends up being 14.4Mbps if you multiply it by 8. Being on the 30Mbps plan should give me ~3.5MB/s Steam downloads. The rant was about how stupid it is for Charter to cheat on bandwidth tests if they are trying to sell higher speed grades to their customers (burst or no).

Social service style work steals your soul and makes a cynical SOB. If anyone here is thinking of pursuing it, DON'T. I've got applications out in oil and gas companies now. Time to see if I can join the family business (nearly all of us work in oil or pipelines in some way, shape or form).

I've heard this from a number of friends. I've also know a number of people very happy to be in the gas and oil game.

[paulWTAMU]

Honestly, it isn't my clients that try my patience the most....

[Ryu Connor]

Way too much R&P there.

[vargis14]

I dropped RCN that was good to me for years. I had 20 dwn and 2 up for over 5 years but the price kept going up until it was unacceptable. I liked that they did not have a download cap like comcast.
So after waiting for 2 years seeing fios trucks a block away or around the corner they became available so i started 7 months ago or so with 35 down and 15 up........Fios gave me 40+ down...it seems like they always give you 5-7 mbps extra speed, thats fine with me.
So i looked on the website and they had 75 down and 35 up for 5$ more, so faster is better so i went for it. Well i ended up with 85 down and 35 up and my steam downloads hang around 10.5mbps, so i am very happy with the performance. Plus TV picture is a good bit better then rcn since they do not compress as much.

All in all Fios is a great provider in my eyes...but i heard stories of bad bad service. Luckily i have not needed any

[SuperSpy]

Took a look at my frontier dsl bill, and noticed a $7 'modem rental fee'.

Not knowing anything about dsl modems, I thought 'how expensive can they be?' Sure enough, they cost like 30 bucks on newegg, so I got one and got it installed. I call up frontier to ask them who the send their modem back to and they tell me the modem rental fee can't be taken out, even if you return the equipment.

[MadManOriginal]

The 40Mbps would translate to 5MB/s as Steam displays it (bits vs bytes). So I know I'm really on the 15Mbps plan because my 1.8MB/s ends up being 14.4Mbps if you multiply it by 8. Being on the 30Mbps plan should give me ~3.5MB/s Steam downloads. The rant was about how stupid it is for Charter to cheat on bandwidth tests if they are trying to sell higher speed grades to their customers (burst or no).

Social service style work steals your soul and makes a cynical SOB. If anyone here is thinking of pursuing it, DON'T. I've got applications out in oil and gas companies now. Time to see if I can join the family business (nearly all of us work in oil or pipelines in some way, shape or form).

I've heard this from a number of friends. I've also know a number of people very happy to be in the gas and oil game.

You're right you have 15Mbps judging by large downloads. I wouldn't say Charter is 'cheating' on bandwidth tests though, as noted by nanoflower it's just a 'powerboost' (Comcast's name) style burst speed. It's not Charter's fault that the burst speed is what the bandwidth test sites like speedtest show, unless you're talking about a test provided by Charter itself. You could also look at it as Charter providing more than your plan speed, even if only for short bursts, while your sustained speeds match the plan you've got.

[drfish]

It's not Charter's fault that the burst speed is what the bandwidth test sites like speedtest show...

What other legitimate reason could there possibly be for "boosting" the speed of the first 20MB of a download?

[SuperSpy]

It's not Charter's fault that the burst speed is what the bandwidth test sites like speedtest show...

What other legitimate reason could there possibly be for "boosting" the speed of the first 20MB of a download?

It has the effect of appearing faster for 'normal' use, like web page viewing (most web page impressions are under 20MB).

[ludi]

It's not Charter's fault that the burst speed is what the bandwidth test sites like speedtest show...

What other legitimate reason could there possibly be for "boosting" the speed of the first 20MB of a download?

Could be part of a broader QoS management scheme. Most of the things people download these days, other than streaming media, are going to be things like smartphone app updates, photos from Tumblr and Facebook, email attachments, etc. These are usually under 20MB and it makes sense to quickly clear them out of the system even if there might be some adverse effects on the connection while that's happening, such as increased packet loss or latency spikes. On the other hand, a fat wad of Windows Updates or a 2GB media download should not be permitted to degrade the connection quality for 30+ minutes, so those get throttled after a while.

[Rakhmaninov3]

It's not Charter's fault that the burst speed is what the bandwidth test sites like speedtest show...

What other legitimate reason could there possibly be for "boosting" the speed of the first 20MB of a download?

Helps you get those song-size files and websites in the blink of an eye, too

[drfish]

Ok, better reasons than I expected. HOWEVER, I would argue that webpage loading is more a factor of latency than bandwidth in most cases and I would also submit that for downloading things like MP3s or apps the difference between 3 seconds and 5 seconds is pretty meaningless (and a lot of apps are a lot bigger than 20MB anyway).

I think you guys are missing the point of this being a rant thread. Feel free to rant about my irrational ranting though.

[ludi]

I think you guys are missing the point of this being a rant thread. Feel free to rant about my irrational ranting though.

Oh, I'm stuck on a 1.5 mbps DSL connection, because it's either that or deliver the Ring of Power to Comcast, while my office tower 3 miles away is parked on a fiber backbone and I can get in excess of 450 kB/s downloads at my workstation. My sympathy for people with throttled 40mb connections is, shall we say, limited

[druidcent]

I'd rant about crappy officiating in the NFL, but I'm still to drained from watching the Denver/Baltimore game on Saturday..

[MadManOriginal]

This isn't as intense as a rant but something that bothers me...Google getting off relatively scot-free with no slap on the wrist and a wink-wink 'be nice!' in the recent FTC investigation when they are doing things completely analogous to what Microsoft got smashed for in the 90s. We'll see if the DoJ, which did the MS prosecution in the 90s, is any different but I haven't heard anything about a DoJ investigation.

[tanker27]

This isn't as intense as a rant but something that bothers me...Google getting off relatively scot-free with no slap on the wrist and a wink-wink 'be nice!' in the recent FTC investigation when they are doing things completely analogous to what Microsoft got smashed for in the 90s. We'll see if the DoJ, which did the MS prosecution in the 90s, is any different but I haven't heard anything about a DoJ investigation.

I doubt, the government needs Google to spy on us by proxy.

[tanker27]

So my rant is managers who fail to understand how to manage. I am always amazed to see incompetence, ignorance, and inability to lead in managers. The biggest thing of this all is those managers who fail to understand "punish in private and praise in public". I cannot tell you how many times on a daily basis I see this broken.

The second biggest thing is I am constantly amazed at how these Piss-poor managers survive and yet they still seem to get the best projects, the promotions, and all the kudos for what their team has done for them.

[just brew it!]

So my rant is managers who fail to understand how to manage. I am always amazed to see incompetence, ignorance, and inability to lead in managers. The biggest thing of this all is those managers who fail to understand "punish in private and praise in public". I cannot tell you how many times on a daily basis I see this broken.

This is near-universal. You've heard of the Peter Principle, yes? "Employees tend to rise to the level of their incompetence."

Managers should also act as BS filters -- a buffer between those above them and those below. All to often, the reverse is true; they are BS amplifiers and/or generators instead.

The second biggest thing is I am constantly amazed at how these Piss-poor managers survive and yet they still seem to get the best projects, the promotions, and all the kudos for what their team has done for them.

Most managers are good at making themselves look good to their superiors, whether they're any good at managing or not.

[Glorious]

We'll see if the DoJ, which did the MS prosecution in the 90s, is any different but I haven't heard anything about a DoJ investigation.

This is verging into R&P, but I wouldn't hold my breath. The US government and Google are very, very good friends.

[drfish]

WTH Netflix? A content provider imposing restrictions on ISPs? Have you learned nothing???

Edit: ...and another one, WTH won't Charter let me use my existing modem when I upgrade to their 30Mbps plan? Its a perfectly good DOCSIS 3.0 model that I'm sure would work fine. Just turn up the freaking dial and give me more bandwidth!

Edit 2: ...and another one! Those freaking "I love my job, blah, blah, blah" comment SPAM. Why is is nearly everywhere? All of Gawker's sites, Anandtech, RPS, why can't they shut it down?

[derFunkenstein]

Based on Ars Technica's write-up on Netflix HD it seems they're trying to get ISP's to be "compatible" by signing on to Netflix's own CDN.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01 ... -super-hd/

doesn't make it any less annoying - I'm on Comcast and can't get the highest-quality streaming, either. Not that it matters; if it's 7mbit then we're talking 3.1GB/hour. With my now 300GB limit (which to Comcast's credit they say they're not enforcing right now) and other stuff going on with my internet connection, that won't take too many episodes of Dora the Explorer and Arrested Development to hit.

edit: Actually it would be all the episodes of Arrested Development a total of 4 times each. I guess that's not as bad as I thought.

[jss21382]

WTH Netflix? A content provider imposing restrictions on ISPs? Have you learned nothing???

Edit: ...and another one, WTH won't Charter let me use my existing modem when I upgrade to their 30Mbps plan? Its a perfectly good DOCSIS 3.0 model that I'm sure would work fine. Just turn up the freaking dial and give me more bandwidth!

Edit 2: ...and another one! Those freaking "I love my job, blah, blah, blah" comment SPAM. Why is is nearly everywhere? All of Gawker's sites, Anandtech, RPS, why can't they shut it down?

They don't have a provisioning for your modem, that's all. I have a motorola sb 6200 I'm not using that should be supported.