Bandwidth. The data world’s equivalent to Black Gold. With life migrating to the digital world more and more everyday, everyone is fighting to get their worth of this prized resource. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) promise faster and faster speeds to residential and business users and faster dedicated speeds to enterprise-class users. But are they actually providing these speeds or are they fudging the numbers to build a customer base?
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filed a report in 2014 [1] that audited major and minor ISPs throughout the country. Their findings were rather surprising. They reported that most ISPs actually provided faster than advertised speeds to their customers during non-peak hours (usually between 12am and 5pm) and between 90% and 97% of advertised speeds during peak hours (7pm – 11pm) [2]. This is an improvement from earlier reports.
How is it that the FCC report found that Internet speeds provided to customers are so fast, but I experience downtime and slow speeds?
That answer is simpler than you may think. Most ISPs advertise speeds “up to Xmbps” but you, as the customer, seem to receive less than you were promised. The truth is, most advertised speeds aren’t promises.
From the business standpoint of these ISPs, anything within 80% of the advertised speed is considered “within tolerance,” and, as the FCC report shows, most are doing even better than that. But they don’t always hit the speeds you’re expecting. Why not?
The reason these ISPs do not promise the advertised speeds at all times is because of limitations of the infrastructure. You see, the connection from your local ISP is not a direct connection to the Internet. It has to go through a series of “hops” in order to reach the world.
Think of it like a highway system. You activate the Internet and send your request to go to Google.com. The signal leaves your house and joins the nearest bypass alongside your neighbor’s request. Traveling through the pipeline it joins his neighbor’s query, then his neighbor’s, so on and so forth until it reaches its destination and the webpage is displayed on your computer. If there are a lot of requests going through, you may experience slower speeds, just as highway congestion causes driving speeds to drop.
Without a dedicated line to your house, there is no way to regulate this so that everyone gets the same speed. So if your neighbors are downloading or streaming large files, your connection may seem slower. That is why most advertised speeds are amended with “speeds up to.”
FRII works with many different ISPs, so some of the solutions we offer are these “up to” speeds, but on our own network we can offer guaranteed bandwidth speeds. If your business needs that guarantee, let us know. Unfortunately, these dedicated connections aren’t usually available for private homes.
1. FCC ISP Speed Audit
2. CenturyLink Internet Service Management