Hacker News Reader

Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

Seems quite useless.

For starters, the Internet is best effort, and thus download and upload speeds will depend on the whole path at a given moment, irrespective of how good the connection is. Also applies to latency.

Information about what the link speed is, and how much bandwidth is guaranteed to be allocated to your link would be much more useful.

There's also information on IP address allocation in IPv4 (fixed? dynamic? only a CGNAT?) or IPv6 (dynamic? CIDR size?), or whether you get an appropriate endpoint you can attach your router to, vs being locked into an ISP provided box (the FCC should probably do something about this).

No information about SLAs either.

View on HN

According to the FCC doc [1], the measurements may be conducted "between two defined points on a network, such as between a user’s interface device and the ISP’s network core or between the user interface device and the nearest internet exchange point where the ISP exchanges traffic with other networks". They require these measurements to be an average. I think this makes sense - it at least guarantees your speeds within the service provider's network.

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-22-86A1.pdf

>They require these measurements to be an average. I think this makes sense - it at least guarantees your speeds within the service provider's network.

It is useful that the remote end is the ISP exchange with the other ISPs.

It is way less useful to talk about averages. The averages could be great and it won't mean much when all of a sudden it can be slow, or not work at all.

The important information (and missing there) is what the guaranteed speed is, and what the guaranteed response times are for incidents.

e.g.: Outside the US, many countries have mandated minimums for guaranteed bandwidth, set as a percent of the advertised speeds. Similarly, they enforce certain maximum response times for incidents. There's of course different minimums for residential vs business, and ISPs will offer better tiers with better guaranteed bandwidth.

The FCC has the power to fix the insanity that is US broadband, but appears to be not motivated to.

There are servers that are provisioned to do this for isp systems. Sure you are testing to some known set of servers but you cant expect max rate speed to the internet. It doesnt make any sense and an ISP shouldn't even be expected to.

Link speed is what it is. On GPON your ONT links at 1.2gbps. No one cares about this information. We don't provision based on link speed. Unless you are paying for guaranteed bandwidth, you arent going to get guaranteed bandwidth. I monitor all of our pons and if they go over a certain percent utilization for a period of time we split them or move customers around. There are systems and reports to do all of this.

The amount of customers that even know what IPv4 is is minuscule.

You are using our ONT, there is no madness that would allow otherwise. I will give you a passthrough port if you need one.

SLA on a residential connection for $90 a month? The SLA is as fast as we can get you back on during business hours.

Your comment fully illustrates why this information is necessary.

Residential customers are being played for fools and taken advantage of.

ISPs get paid, yet act without accountability. This has to change.

Residential customers have no idea what you are even talking about. To an approximation of nearly zero. They don't know what 2.4ghz or 5ghz is or even what the different speeds mean.

Have you ever worked in this space? I do this every day and I try to educate anyone that needs a little help, but at the end of the day they just want their TV to not buffer all the time for the most part. Most of our outages are caused by the end customer.

We aren't playing them for fools and despite you thinking we are, we are providing a desperately needed service in an area that is unprofitable for most companies to serve.

The point being that residential customers' Internet access should not depend on an ISPs good will.

The FCC should help establish a framework and enforce some minimums.

This should not cause much overhead if at all, to an ISP that isn't being abusive in the first place.

This is already in place. We file reports quarterly and have to provide specific levels of service to apply for any grants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com