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> Doesn't every ISP do this? Isn't that why we have the wording of "up to n Mbps"?

No. At least in NYC, every provider I've ever had (several) normally achieved the advertised speeds during the daytime mostly, and overnight (e.g. 3 am).

But it might go down 25% or even 50% in the evenings once everyone gets home and starts watching Netflix, at certain times on weekends, etc.

(Obviously COVID has changed these patterns a bit.)

That's always felt generally reasonable to me for residential contracts -- that the capacity is there except during peak residential usage or temporary maintenance.

"Up to" with regard to internet speeds generally means you will reach that capacity at non-peak times.

If you can't regularly achieve max capacity at 3 am, then the advertised speeds are fraudulent. After all, bringing this to its logical conclusion, companies can't advertise "up to infinite speed" even though that's "mathematically true".

There's also some aspect of how close they get to the "up to" speed during the peak times.

One friend that was on Frontier's DSL out in the boonies had a 5Mbps plan. At peak times, he'd be lucky to see 0.2Mbps. (And he'd be lucky to get it up to 1Mbps the rest of the time...)

It's really hard to justify providing 5% of the "up to" speed at peak times as reasonable in any circumstance.

In his case, Frontier's answer was to tell him to upgrade to their ~10Mbps plan if his speed wasn't enough. Never mind that they already weren't delivering what he paid for. After several complaints to the AG's office and other regulators, he eventually was in touch with an engineer that just told him flat out that the node he was on was already oversold by many hundreds of percent and there was just no way he'd ever see any promised speed.

So it wasn't even a case of Frontier thinking they had a realistic chance of ever delivering the speed they had sold and dealing with fluctuations in demand. They very clearly sold a product that they never expected to deliver.

It's perfectly reasonable to see "up to 100 Mbps" (for example) and expect speeds on average approaching that value, not 50 or 10 or even 60 or 70 most of the time.

At best it's misleading. Frontier should adjust the contract and marketing language to reflect its true capabilities. If it can deliver "up to 100 Mbps", but on average/typically can only deliver 50 Mbps, the marketing language and contract should reflect that, e.g., "50 Mbps on average/typically, with bursts up to 100 Mbps possible."

My understanding is that frontier serves mostly rural customers using the POTS infrastructure. They were advertising internet speeds that they were never capable of delivering.

This is indeed correct. While I understand the predicament of being far from the switch reduces speeds, it’s a bit absurd when you’re paying for 12, but can only get 3. (This is not an exaggeration.)

You’re are lucky to even get 3 if you pay for 12. In my (small) hometown most people have frontier so I definitely gathered a little more an anecdotal evidence when working on people’s networks/PCs and it was usually in the kilobytes 1-3 mbps on a good day (usually the lower end.)

At least in my area, most DSL providers derate their offerings based on distance from the DSLAM, so they're transparent about this... e.g. punch addresses in a small town into the CenturyLink website and you will see the offering decay from 15mbps to 3mbps as you get further from the phone exchange. I'm surprised that Frontier wasn't doing the same, or perhaps they were but being far too optimistic in their estimate.

Frontier also serves a bunch of reasonably large cities (for example territory they purchased from AT&T later in life). Where I live, I can get Frontier's "up to 24Mbit/s" service (probably closer to 10 if I'm lucky) or the competitor (cable company) which offers both traditional cable AND a new FiOS service with speeds up to 1 Gigabit. I haven't upgraded yet, and am still on 200 down/35 up but pay a fraction of what Frontier would charge (and I usually get closer to 215 down and 36 up). It's no wonder Frontier declared bankruptcy.

I live at about the maximum ADSL range from my central office and for years suffered with service that was slow and unreliable no matter what.

They put a fiber node just out of VDSL range but I have ADSL with two lines at 18 Mbps/s with an application-level load balancer. Each of those lines performs as rated almost all the time.

In the early 0's Frontier struggled with "middle mile" capacity even for customers who only got 1 Mbps DSL. People would have their service turned off with no explanation in my neighborhood, I had gone all the way up the CEO of the company to get help with one of my lines, the truck was followed by some lady in a car who was desperate to get hers fixed. Even when it worked the 1 Mbps DSL like would give more like 30k.

Eventually they fixed it, but around that time they announced they would implement a miniscule 10 GB monthly data cap which they were forced to suspend indefinitely once the public heard about it.

(I understand that upgrading DSL is a challenge, but there is no excuse for not upgrading the middle mile.)

> Doesn't every ISP do this?

No. Most ISPs overprovision. e.g. my Spectrum service is nominally 600Mbit but actually supports 680. This is done because a) users often measure payload throughput vs wire throughput and there's a ~10% packet overhead, and b) to avoid customer complaints at the margin.

This is accurate in my experience working for numerous ISPs. Especially with DSL service, lines were often overprovisioned up to 20%.

I also gained a lot of insight into the tools available to support staff and they varied quite a bit. I even worked on a contract with Frontier for a few months. The service they offered for former Verizon FIOS customers was decent, but DSL customers were treated like crap. Unless a customer went out of their way to make multiple contact attempts and demand to escalate multiple times, they would be largely ignored in any situation that required a truck roll. The company truly did not care and it's obvious nothing has changed (Except maybe for the worse) since I worked that contract.

Of the ISPs I worked with I actually found Centurylink to have the best tools and best service. Personally I've been stuck with comcast for most of the last decade so I've never been the customer but the support staff was generally pretty well trained at the time and they had a lot of information available about the line status, as well as direct interface with the CPE. They were in a transition to off-shore support at the time though, and it was clear that the quality of service provided by the off-shore agents was much lower. They were very clearly trained off a tight script and were woefully incapable of handling situations that didn't fit the script.

This isn’t entirely the whole story.

Every ISP oversubscribes. OP is correct.

Overprovision is a different thing. You are talking about getting 680 so that when you speedtest, you have NOTHING to complain about to them. This is basically part of their boost and oversub plan, where it isn’t hurting them so they toss you a bone to preempt speed complaints.

What you aren’t told is that Spectrum also does short term speed boosting. For 30S-1min you’ll get 680, but it will fall in PRIORITY after that. This also conveniently helps speed tests. At 3am, you’ll get a solid 680 real world. At 6pm, you’re more likely to get a sustained 680 for a bit, then fall to 400 or so. You need a transfer at max speed to show this. Newsgroups are good for maxing a connection and showing the fall-off decline of a boosted connection. Spectrum only started this in my area a year ago or so. After an initially great move to DOCSIS 3.1.

Oversubscribing means that if Spectrum has 2TB of bandwidth, they’ll sell 3TB knowing that all their customers won’t concurrently use it. It would be a statistically unlikelihood. TRUST ME, they do the math on this.

If you add all the 600Mbps users up, you’ll get to a number they can not possibly support. This is OK.

What the issue that Frontier seems to be in trouble with is they went way too far, and couldn’t hit the base numbers they were offering.

But YES, every ISP out there I ever felt with while in telecom does in fact oversubscribe.

> It would be a statistically unlikelihood. TRUST ME, they do the math on this.

Is that really how it works?

I was working for a small-town ISP and our approach was: Boss link A is at 50% and will fill up within a month. Shall upgrade the converters?

I mean, you could argue that we did math, i.e., linear prediction on statistical aggregate values, but this was not synced with sales or marketing, rather done out-of-band.

50% of actual usage or subscribed throughput?

50% of actual usage. We had no integration between NOC and sales, so we had no clue about subscribed throughput. Also, network topology -- e.g. redundant paths -- made the mapping between customers and network pretty tricky.

I'm talking here about access network and core network, not last mile.

The contractor I was with, yes, definitely.

It sounds from your other comment it was a smaller ISP you were at. We definitely had the data from NOC and Sales and watched them figure out what hardware they would need for the next few quarters based on their oversubscribe estimations.

Edit: lol; I worked in telecom. I’m sorry first hand experiences make some of you so mad.

Frontier is on another level. Even among their slow speeds, they had a 1.5, 3, or 7mbit plan. They would gladly charge you for the 7mbit plan if you could only get 1.5 and refuse to drop you to the lower plan. I have never in my life dealt with an ISP whose core culture seemed to revolve around lying. From sales to customer support, every time I had a reason to call them I would catch someone lying about something. The only remotely upstanding individuals were the field techs who seemed as disgusted with corporate as most customers were.

Just a data point but no, my ISPs have typically delivered within 5% of the 100- 200mbps plan speed the vast majority of the time, at least as a short burst.

> at least as a short burst

Ok, I worked in telecom and saw the roll out of priority bursting... to me, this makes your data a yes.

Every ISP does in fact over sub.

They put in boosting and over provisioning to stop complaints.

The service would be far more expensive if they had to guarantee sustained speeds, or rather that you had a guaranteed bandwidth potential.

It's impossible to not "over subscribe" in a strict sense unless you have dedicated bandwidth to and through every peering point of your ISP which most "DIA" service doesn't even have let alone consumer service.

It's not really a factor in this question though. The discussion with Frontier is they sold speeds that were impossible to reach, ever, not that the sold speeds you couldn't reach 100% of the time. Most ISPs do not do this, the vast majority will at least hit advertised speeds regularly even if they aren't guaranteed to at any instant.

Totally agree. The issue is Frontier seems to have lied their ass off about speeds that wouldn’t ever be possible over POTS.

And I’ll concede that oversub for DIA is totally different. Surely it’s still possible somewhere but ever less and less likely considering how much larger a 1Gbps fiber pipe is a 56k connection to 15k people at once.

But for actual broadband... I know ISPs over subscribe because I’ve seen it. I’ve been on the calls and in the room when it’s being calculated. Literally everyone does it. Speed boost and overprovisioning are tricks to please customers who are willing to accept “lots of people are online tonight so it’s slow”.

They do, but I have never experienced one as laughably terrible as Frontier. My parents have them and I used to when I lived back home. I’m not exaggerating when I say you would pay for “Up to 12 mbps” and have to endure a few hundred kilobytes most of the time. Not high end either like 2-300 kbps on average. Their customer support is also the worst I’ve ever experienced from anywhere, you call saying you are only getting 2-300 kbps down and they say “you’re in a high volume area” which they said to me even when I lived outside of town with no neighbors. You ask if you can move to a better plan to get faster speeds and they tell you no, you can’t. They also tend to hang up, etc on you but I’ve dealt with that from other companies.

I have a provider here in Switzerland that actually states on their website that 5g is the same as fiber. They offer 10gbits fiber. 10gbits maybe theoretically possible with 5g but fiber will never ever be the same as 5g when you have air/rain/snow/ etc in the line of sight.

I can't even pull 150mbit at full view of the 5g tower with best connection. That's less than 10% of the 2gbits they sold me and 1/5th of what the support told me I can expect.

Meanwhile my cable provider is providing me with 90% of what they sold me which I find acceptable.

I'm now running 15min automated speedtests and hopefully find someplace I can submit this data eventually.

I hate being lied too. If they told me I would get 150mbit I would have been happy.

Sounds like the ISP equivalent of "when everyone is breaking the speed limit all the time police have justification to pull over any individual car they want". I wonder if there's anything behind the scenes that Frontier refused to participate in à la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveilla...

Talk to Frontier's DSL customers. This is _not_ what other ISPs are doing.

With Frontier, you're not talking "I pay for 100Mbps and sometimes I only get 80Mbps.".

You're talking "I pay for 5Mbps and I've never seen 5Mbps. The best speed I've ever recorded was 1Mbps, and my connection regularly fluctuates between 0.1 and 0.3 Mbps even during off-peak."

This is a cop accepting that people will do 70mph on a 60mph road, but not 120mph.

It's right there in the contract that you have no expectation to those speeds. You pay for the chance to receive service, not a guarantee of service. One of my ISP options doesn't even attempt to specify bandwidth for upload.

What comparison does this possibly have to law enforcement.

Whatever’s in the contract does not matter for a false advertising claim.

You cannot advertise 12, then sign a contract that says 12 on the front, but has “go fuck yourself, you won’t ever see 12 in your life on this plan”. That’s false advertising.

If you do that, you run a real risk of finding yourself the subject of a lawsuit filed by the United States Federal Government, and potentially state Attorneys General

Where are the armies of Attorney Generals and federal prosecutors that are taking these cases? Every last residential ISP I have used works like this.

I once spoke to a customer service support individual who said I was "lucky" to be receiving 60 mbps of download speed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27211517

Their solution when you complain about your 5Mbps plan only providing a few hundred kilobits is to tell you to upgrade to a 12Mbps plan. Which, as confirmed by an engineer, was not going to be any faster as the node was already several hundred percent oversubscribed.

You can put whatever you want in a contract, but the law isn't a dumb computer mechanically executing instructions. It's pretty obvious when you are willing to charge people twice as much for "up to" twice the speed while providing an identical service that you are not presenting your products accurately.

> What comparison does this possibly have to law enforcement.

The comment I replied to literally said "Sounds like the ISP equivalent of 'when everyone is breaking the speed limit all the time police have justification to pull over any individual car they want'". It was the first line. If a comment seems confusing in context, it might help to _read_ the context.

>The comment I replied to literally said "Sounds like the ISP equivalent of 'when everyone is breaking the speed limit all the time police have justification to pull over any individual car they want'". It was the first line. If a comment seems confusing in context, it might help to _read_ the context.

Oh no, it isn't confusing at all. You encouraged a spurious comparison to a baseless allegation. There is no parallel to law enforcement, whatsoever.

No, you really aren’t understanding just how ridiculously terrible frontier as an ISP is. I’ve lived all over America and I would choose Comcast or Mediacom over frontier in a heart beat. It’s more like when everyone’s a thief they are arresting the dude who steals way more than anyone else and does so in such a brash way that he thinks the law doesn’t apply to him.

DSL is highly susceptible to issues with the physical connection. Somewhere in your neighborhood or apartment building is a stack of splitters and you can greatly improve your service if you can convince a technician to put your connection at the top. Customers at the bottom just have chronic signal noise and speed issues as their everyday experience and it isn't a solvable problem.

I'm sorry, what?! xDSL does not have splitters, except the only one in your household that splits the POTS frequencies for the phone and the rest is passed off to the modem. And of course your physical twisted pair wire goes from your modem to the port on the DSLAM in the central office. This is not like cable or xPON, the last mile twisted pair is yours alone.

Just wanted to comment that your bot for Twitter is awesome. Do you have the code on Github or anything? I would love to do this for Xfinity.

For cable, probably, since those are shared lines. For DSL or dedicated fiber lines, I’ve never had the paid-for speed not actually get hit on a regular basis (with the obvious exception that your ISP should be honest with you about your distance from the telco).

Tests (see my other comment) show that DSL ISPs routinely deliver worse service than cable in the US.

IMO "up to N Mbps" is fair if the ISP routinely delivers, but if they never deliver N Mbps (hey Frontier) then it's just plain fraud.

With DSL, it is trivial to see which speed is assigned to you and which speed is the maximum possible on your line. If your measured speed is lower than your "Actual bitrate" as shown by the modem, something must've gone terribly wrong. If however your plan speed ("on paper") is much higher than what is attainable by the modem, that is a fact of physics and you have to downgrade the plan. You cannot oversell DSL, if it says attainable rate is 10240/1024 Kbps, you cannot sell 15360/1536. The modem will literally be unable to connect at that speed.

The DSL line could be fine but there could be congestion elsewhere in the network. I wouldn't be surprised if Frontier was doing all of the above and they knew they were doing it.

If they managed to get the middle mile congested with 10 Mbps customers I will give them the "A$$hole of the millennium" award right here right now.

CenturyLink 6 Mbps DSL was normally ~6.2 Mbps. Sometimes it would go down to 5Mbps.

I have Frontier Fios (formally Verizon) and I always get over the advertised speeds on the downloads and uploads. I've never had DSL however.

I must be lucky, I'm currently getting ~100Mpbs higher than the advertised speeds for Fios.

While not a certification i think some speed testing apps do show by network.