[ NNSquad ] Re: Subject: Re: [IP] "Entry level pricing"

[Russell Smiley <im.russell.smiley@gmail.com>]

George Ou wrote:
> "I like to watch Congressional hearings live.  Over AT&T's allegedly 3Mbps
> DSL downlink they come in choppily, with frequent pauses and voice-video
> mismatch."
>
> I think you are grossly exaggerating here.  Even YouTube 2.25 Mbps 720P
> streams come in perfectly for me on my 3 Mbps sync rate connection which
> works out to about 2.5 Mbps raw data speeds.  Most of the government streams
> are well under 1 Mbps and they're usually buffered.  If you are experiencing
> choppy video, it's probably something else because I stream stuff from the
> FCC hearings all the time with no problems.

I think this is where we come back to the operators network management 
and advertising claims.

I am not exaggerating - I was sold a "3Mbps" DSL connection and YouTube 
video (or any other type of video for that matter) was consistently 
choppy, buffering and other such impairments. The question of whether it 
really was a 3Mbps connection comes down to expert knowledge that the 
vast majority of consumers (even businesses) wouldn't have the remotest 
idea of how to begin testing. I was also unable to use vnc (in low 
bandwidth connection mode, of course) for remote desktop work due to 
latencies of several seconds - and in this case the problem was 
identified as not my employers network.

I realised after some time that I had never once observed anything close 
to the rated maximum speed on my 3Mbps DSL connection that I was paying 
$50/month for (in Canada). In fact I was consistently getting 1/5 of 
that speed. I have since downgraded to a 256kbps link for $25/month and 
have largely observed almost no difference in performance.

Based on your testimony, George, apparently you have an ISP of the 
highest integrity who deliver close to what they said they would. This 
seems to be inconsistent with the experience of the  majority of people 
on this list. My suspicion is that this maps to general consumers as 
well, except that they have no means of characterising what they are 
delivered by their ISP - nor even consumer savvy to know that they 
_should_ test the performance.

Russell.
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