Comment by brett-jackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brett-jackson | Hacker News Reader

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I wish the FCC would regulate how ISPs advertise their speeds and force reliability disclosures. It's impossible to compare two ISPs without actually subscribing. I know Comcast can offer me 10x the advertised bandwidth, but I know in practice that can vary widely.

I use Google Webpass (a microwave radio link). The speed is 100Mbps, and the service is phenomenal. I've had one outage in 3 years, only lasting about 6 hours. I had switched to RCN for about a month, as they had advertised 300Mbps for a cheaper price. The speed in tests was about that high (and actually even higher), but I was getting a lot of buffering when streaming videos, that made the service much worse.

Heck, many popular ISPs won't even tell you what you'll be paying until your first bill arrives.

For example "Fees & taxes" could be up to a third of your bill, and often they cannot quote the dollar amounts during initial contact.

This is particularly egregious when many fees are purely from the company itself, but worded to sound like taxes/government originating.

When I worked at att I was really only estimating what your bill would be, I never actually knew what we would charge you for phone service cable or internet even with our internal tools. Bills would also be different from month to month for seemingly no reason

Whats even worse is some of these "taxes" aren't even legit taxes, it's taxes they're creating. It's shady as all.

I love this idea because it would really help companies like my rural cable supplier. They advertise 300/30 for $80/month, but I regularly get 350/30, with as good as it gets ping and jitter. I'd love for their service to have some official recognition.

I've gone through some level of effort to try to document ISP reliability issues over the years and it's remarkably difficult to do anything comprehensive. SamKnows is the closest thing I've found but it's difficult to understand the distribution of their service and/or what all is done with the data they collect.

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