NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Free Press: FCC used 'flawed data' in broadband plan
Are you accusing your VoIP provider of sabotaging your VoIP service? If so, please present some data and I'll be happy to publish the results as will all the mainstream news sites. There are plenty of editors who would love to make something of it and plenty of public interest groups that would love to take this information to the FCC. If you don't have data, we can do without the insinuations. We can certainly do without the generalizations that Indian 64 Kbps DSL is better than American DSL because we can find extremely bad outliers of DSL service in any nation and any city. My mother had a 768/320 link (due to extreme distances and maybe some line quality issues) and she never had VoIP problems and we do video Skype all the time. Even using uncompressed G.711 CODEC, you only need a little more than 80 Kbps up/down (including packet overhead). What will absolutely cause problems is P2P traffic and to a much less frequent extent bursty video streaming (like YouTube which sometimes aggressively caches ahead). It might also be a case that you had such a poor quality link that you were suffering extreme packet loss. I've never come across a DSL line so bad that VoIP would have problems and your "evidence" sounds anecdotal at best. You don't even provide any continuous ping results or even a few speedtest.net samples. So barring some unusual problems that you haven't documented in any way shape or form, 3 Mbps broadband will comfortably run just about every application on the Internet. Even 768 Kbps broadband will support 480P mode Hulu (I measured around 500 Kbps). George Ou -----Original Message----- From: Rahul Tongia [mailto:tongia@cmu.edu] Sent: Monday, April 26, 2010 3:44 AM To: nnsquad@nnsquad.org Cc: Dan Gillmor; George Ou; Larry Press Subject: Re: [ NNSquad ] Re: Free Press: FCC used 'flawed data' in broadband plan A personal observation about DSL (and this links to the whole debate on definitions of broadband). While using DSL (no names ;) ) I was tempted to try the the lowest price DSL which advertised 768 kbps down, and 128 kbps uplink. I was also running VoIP at home. I found the service absolutely unusable for voice. I can't recall the exact numbers for the uplink but my recollection was not that it was horribly low speed but the numbers weren't always the same over the few days of testing, which I can understand, but there must be other issues such as jitter, varying oversubscription, maybe even "management" at play. In contrast, my in-laws in India used to have a 64 kbps (!) DSL link, on which we ran crystal clear VoIP (skype) to the US, 99.5% of the time. I thus fall back to my term of "meaningful broadband" - it's more than just the speed. Rahul On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Larry Press <lpress@csudh.edu> wrote: > > > On 4/25/2010 8:23 PM, Dan Gillmor wrote: >>> >>> spectrum in the US where they advertise 50 and actually deliver close to >>> 50? > > > "They" must be Verizon in this case, and perhaps they deliver a consistent > 50 mbps over FIOS (for $140/month). (What percent of US households can get > FIOS and how rapidly is Verizon adding new locations)? > > Verizon cannot deliver their advertised DSL speed in many areas where it is > advertised and sold. That does not stop them from signing people up then > wasting fruitless truck rolls when the customer complains. > > I recently signed up for Verizon 7 mbps DSL, and got around 1.4. It turns > out I am 9,000 feet from my central office -- no way to deliver 7 mbps, but > the marketing folks did not have access to that little detail. Verizon > happily signed me up and then sent truck out to investigate after having me > run stupid tests over the phone for an hour. The driver said he does about > 5 truck rolls per day and about three are fruitless. > > (See > http://cis471.blogspot.com/2010/04/government-and-private-industry-can-be.ht ml > for more). > > The bottom line -- even in a zip code where some folks can get an advertised > speed, others cannot, and Verizon is too disorganized (or dishonest) to tell > the difference. > > Larry Press > > [ As NNSquad readers will recall, Verizon has announced that > except in some areas already in negotiation or other process, > they have now ceased their expansion efforts for FiOS -- no doubt > to the vast relief of some existing ISPs in areas that FiOS > doesn't -- and apparently won't -- be serving anytime soon. > > -- Lauren Weinstein > NNSquad Moderator ] > > >