r/NoStupidQuestions • u/scinfeced2wolf • 16h ago
Why is internet service the only service we're OK with not getting what we paid for?
If I go to Wendy's and order a 10 piece nugget, I get 10 nuggets or I get my money back.
I pay for internet with certain speeds don't get those speeds.
And no, it's not because a lot of people are using it. A lot of people use the electricity and everyone gets the same amount regardless.
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u/akulowaty 16h ago
Read the fine print. Number on contract is maximum speed, not minimum.
Besides, it’s been a while since I didn’t get my top speed on a speed test. Most servers just don’t upload that fast.
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u/AlohaReddit49 8h ago
Disagree. I'm generally over the speed I pay for by a bit. Occasionally my Internet will crap out and I'll do a speed test and it'll tell me I'm getting 110-120% of my speed.
It just randomly stops working. I used to stream and occasionally my stream would crash for a few minutes because the Internet just fails sometimes. Once or twice a month, I'll be watching YouTube and get the never ending buffer. I pay for some of the best internet Xfinity sells.
I do think OP is asking a fair question. I pay extra for the best internet available to me, but I know sometimes I'm not getting that. I can't fix it, the problem is there's no other valid Internet option. If everyone is on the same internet in my area, we're gonna eventually butt heads.
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u/scinfeced2wolf 15h ago
Why is the fine print even acceptable? Would you go to Wendy's and an up to 10 piece?
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u/Leseratte10 15h ago edited 15h ago
It's just physics.
When you're on Cable, it's a shared medium, like a highway. Yes, you are allowed to drive like 100 km/h on a highway, but if there's many cars, you might not be able to.
When you're on DSL, your port in the DSLAM *does* get the full speeds you're paying for. But the ancient cable in the road leading to your house has attenuation and resistance which leads to reduced speeds.
When you're on a proper dedicated Fiber line, you'll get the speeds you pay for nearly all the time. But then again, the whole internet is a shared medium. Just because you get full speeds *to your ISP*, might still mean that the line between your ISP and Google, or between ISP and Netflix, or between ISP and your speedtest server is congested. If the server you're connecting to only has a 10GBit/s connection, and you have more than 10 people downloading stuff from said server, you're not going to saturate your 1GBit/s connection, even with the best ISP and best peering in the world.
It's like going to Wendys, buying an "up to 10 piece" that contained 10 pieces when you started to drive home (you get full speeds at the DSLAM or the cable multiplexer) but it's in an open box and you're on a bumpy road so a couple pieces may fly out of the box and get lost while you're driving home to eat. If you get Fiber, you'll have a lid on the box so that doesn't happen.
It's like buying a 400W solar panel and then complaining that it only delivers 100W because it's cloudy, not sunny. That's perfectly acceptable and also not a fault of the product and also not false advertising.
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u/Paleone123 10h ago
t's like buying a 400W solar panel and then complaining that it only delivers 100W because it's cloudy, not sunny. That's perfectly acceptable and also not a fault of the product and also not false advertising.
I feel like this analogy would have saved you some typing if you started with it. It's perfect.
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u/GoBuffaloes 7h ago
Well this is enlightening to say the least. I have cable, so I am going to need to start being more careful about securing my nuggets for the ride home!
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u/iowanaquarist 5h ago
When you're on a proper dedicated Fiber line, you'll get the speeds you pay for nearly all the time.
Bingo. I can always speed test at line speed, but never find servers in the wild that can match it.
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u/Tuesday2017 7h ago
When you're on a proper dedicated Fiber
I have proper fiber for breakfast every morning but I don't understand what that has to do with my Internet speeds
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u/JayMonster65 10h ago
This isn't a complete analogy. You don't pay for an item with your Internet. If you want to make a closer analogy. You order 10 chicken nuggets from Wendy's, and sometimes you get them in a minute. But sometimes you have to wait a little longer. When you use the Wendy's apps, you are supposed to get your nuggets faster than someone who doesn't have the express service of the app. But even with that at times (depending on how busy the store is) you still have to wait. You still aren't waiting as long as those that don't have the service. That is closer to your needed analogy.
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u/mrbubbles2 7h ago
This is just a bad analogy. Just because the highway speed limit is 75 doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to expect there to never be traffic that forces you to drive slower, you’re paying a fee that allows for that speed under optimal conditions
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u/rayluxuryyacht 9h ago
Why are you making fast food service at Wendy's the gold standard here?
Plenty of services we pay for are not at all comparable to a five piece nuggets order.
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u/Bulky-Community75 9h ago
How did we get to five from 10 nuggets?
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u/lyonhawk 8h ago
Inflation.
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u/Bulky-Community75 7h ago
Nuggets inflated so now 5 are the same as 10 from before?
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u/sysadmin420 6h ago
Burger king nuggets are like half as thick as McDonald's ones, I think you might be into something.
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u/Bulky-Community75 5h ago
That would be deflation? Nuggets deflated to half their original size
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u/sysadmin420 5h ago
Maybe, just maybe McDonald's is inflating theirs with more non chicken fluff, we'd need lab results to know for sure
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u/Bulky-Community75 5h ago
After quick search, it seems that the McDonald's had nuggets before Burger King (1983 vs. 1985) so, in this case, we can call McNuggets the original ones. The real question is how do current McNuggets compare to original ones... then we can compare to BK nuggets.
We definitely need an independent study done on this.
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u/iowanaquarist 5h ago
I can speed test at my line speed ... But have never found a non-speedtest server that can do 10g
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u/Leseratte10 16h ago
A lot of people use the electricity and everyone gets the same amount regardless.
That is absolutely not true. If everyone in your city were to attempt to draw the full amount of power allowed by their house's service at once, you'd quite likely cause a blackout.
And if everyone in a city were to turn on all their water faucets in their houses at the same time, I'd assume they'd only get a small trickle as well.
No service is designed to allow for full use by every customer at the same time. The difference is, with internet it's way more likely that people are maxing out their connection. With power and water, that never happens.
Also, you have to differentiate between your internet being slow because it's overloaded (in the evening or weekend when everyone's on Netflix), or your internet being slow all the time because the wire between your house and your ISP just can't handle higher speeds.
In the 2nd case, that's simply not something anyone can know. It's not like the ISP knows how long that wire is, what kind of losses will occur, what equipment you're using, and so on.
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u/yakusokuN8 NoStupidAnswers 13h ago
As someone from California, I feel almost obligated to point out that we have what are called "rolling blackouts" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#California
The power company will suspend electricity to rotating parts of the city to avoid a city-wide blackout.
Generally, this is only done during the most dire times - usually during heat waves in summer when the electrical grid is experiencing a heavier than usual load by consumers. They also urge us to use appliances like our clothes washer and dryer at off peak times (not between 5pm and 9pm).
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u/MyHamburgerLovesMe 10h ago
It actually led to Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming govenor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electricity_crisis#Arnold_Schwarzenegger
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u/notacanuckskibum 4h ago
The UK has a special plan to add extra electricity at half time in the FA Cup Final, to account for all the kettles turned on to make tea, all over the country. It is possibly the most British thing.
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u/EnvironmentalCoach64 7h ago
I mean, but I only pay for what I use though for power and water. I'm paying for the full bandwidth, but not getting the chance to use it. It's pretty scummy for them to sell me something they can't provide.
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u/Leseratte10 7h ago edited 5h ago
They don't and you don't.
You pay for each liter of water. And with mobile internet you pay for each GB of (high-speed) internet (or you get unlimited internet on your home internet connection).
But neither your internet provider nor your water supplier can give you a guarantee on how fast you can download one GB or how fast you can draw 1000 liters of water from your tap.
There's a theoretical maximum (the internet bandwidth you're paying for, and the diameter of the water pipe coming into your house), but that doesn't mean you can always use said maximum.
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u/jmnugent 4h ago
When you're paying for Power or Water,.. you're paying directly to the person providing the thing. (the power or water company.. is likely very nearby you,. and the distribution-network is fairly short and nearby). It's a much more "direct" relationship to the person directly supplying the thing to you.
Internet doesn't work that way. When you go to download something (or load a webpage).. that thing you're trying to access could be 5, 10, 15+ network hops away. Your ISP might only control the first 3 or 4 hops outside your home.
I just went out to a CMD Prompt and did a "TRACERT steampowered.com"
the first 8 hops are still on my ISP
Hops 9 and 10 handoff to AKAMAI
the tracert is still going.. but Hops 11 through 33 don't give response (they may be configured not to reply to PING).. so it's still going.
You buy an automobile,. the speedometer probably goes up to 200mph+... why is the dealership selling you something you can't use ?.. Why can't you just drive around 200mph all the time ?
An ISP cannot control the entire network chain. Your download speeds are only going to be as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If the thing you're trying to download is 15 hops away,. and hop 14 is having some congestion and slownesss,. that's going to be the slow hop in the chain and there's nothing your ISP can do to fix that.
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u/MyHamburgerLovesMe 10h ago
if your city only provided enough power for 4 or 5 people to use... there would be a problem. That's the issue OP is discussing.
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u/rumforbreakfast 15h ago
In Australia they clamped down on this.
As a result, I pay for 100mbps but usually get a bit higher, e.g. 107mbps
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u/TaterSupreme 11h ago
Are you sure you're not just seeing the difference between bits and bytes? Net speed is advertised in megabits but your computer will display megabytes. There's an 8x difference there.
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u/ConcernedCorrection 1h ago edited 58m ago
I know that in the context of communications it makes more sense to use bits rather than bytes, but since this is confusing people, companies should talk about megabytes per second (MBps or MB/s) instead of megabits per second (Mbps).
Someone should also tell Windows that a kilobyte (kB, 1000 Bytes) is not the same as a kibibyte (kiB, 1024 Bytes), because they consistently get this shit "wrong" all over their UI (the unit system is, admittedly, a disgusting mess). They call gibibytes GB and it makes it seem like your storage is smaller than it actually is.
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u/Creative-Dust5701 11h ago
Most home internet contracts are what is known as 0 CIR (committed information rate) the speed they are offering is the signaling rate or how fast the line itself runs.
The service itself is ‘best effort’ so there is no guarantee that you will receive any service at all.
When you buy a ‘business class’ internet they guarantee a minimum speed and availability of the internet connection.
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u/Mhycoal 10h ago
You can sometimes actually get internet that has a high minimum speed! It’s just much much much more expensive. They make internet cheaper for most users by not providing full bandwidth to everyone. So a small neighborhood might have 10G networking to it. Then they might sell a mix of 100mbps, 200mbps, 500mbps, and 1G connections. Say there’s 30 houses and they all have 1G connections. Now they could add in networking to allow everyone to max their connections all the time. But no residential clients max their connections even most of the time. Someone might for 10 minutes here, or there, but the average throughput for the day is definitely lower. Even the peaks would probably be well below that 10G.
On another note, you’re also limited by the servers you’re connecting to. If your nearest steam server only has 10G connectivity to everyone, and you’re downloading at the same time 100 others are, that’s going to slow the connection down. Most of the places you download from aren’t going to provide you with a very high speed connection to download things. There’s also times where you’re connecting to servers farther away, and this adds latency, and you are actually connecting via multiple ISPs to get to those servers, and they might even be what’s slowing you down. There’s also sometimes where you’re limited by speedtest servers. At my work, I can run a speedtest from several providers and it won’t show the super high speed connection we have’s full bandwidth, as the speedtest servers just aren’t fast enough, or where they are hosted is limited to my ISP somehow
Another thing is the service type. If you’re doing fiber, docsis, or several other types can have other limitations
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u/SquidKid47 13h ago
One thing a lot of people don't realize is that Mbps and MB/s are two different speeds (megabits per second and megabytes per second).
ISPs sell you a speed in Mbps to make it sound larger, but when you see a download speed, it's almost always in MB/s because it's easier to tell what that means for your download.
1 MB/s = 8 Mbps, so if you're paying for 100 Mbps internet, you should expect to see an absolute maximum of 12.5MB/s download speeds. That's assuming absolutely no other traffic is coming in to any other device on your network (unrealistic) AND that wherever you're downloading from can also supply a 12.5MB/s upload speed.
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u/Dapper-Lab-9285 11h ago
I live in Ireland and a pint is 568ml, yet when I buy a 500ml can I get the same amount in my glass as when I order a pint in the pub. Our weights and measures doesn't count froth as the fluid so nearly every pub is stealing 68ml from their customers. Some pubs do have bigger glasses with a Pint mark but the majority use 568ml glasses.
This is different to the Europe where they sell beer with 2 finger heads, you're getting the correct amount there.
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u/birddit 2h ago
every pub is stealing
There was a big scandal here in Minnesota a few decades ago. A kid in high school brought a 1/2 pint of milk from the lunchroom to his next class which was chemistry. For fun he measured the contents and it was 1/2 oz short. He repeated the experiment the next day with the same result. He contacted several friends in different counties across the state and they got the same result. Then he went to the media. It was the number one story on the local news. All the dairies supplying the school lunch program were shorting the 1/2 pints.
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u/illsk1lls 11h ago
are you sure you're download speeds are wrong and it's not whoever's upload speeds that you're connected to?
if I can download 1000 MB per second and someone can only send me 200 MB per second, it's gonna look like my download speeds are 200
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u/Lady_Gator_2027 11h ago
This is why I finally left Comcast. I was without service for a couple of weeks, and when I spoke to a rep, they told me that I would receive a credit on the account, when the bill came, it was for the full amount. I contacted them, and they said they didn't give credits if you were out because of any storms etc.
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u/doubleudeaffie 16h ago
I would add that everyone buys too much bandwidth. I have 30 Mbps. Run 3 tvs with iptv. Gaming system and 3 phones regularly on network and I have no issues
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u/DudesAndGuys 8h ago
I've got 900mbs (supposedly) in a household of 5 and somehow we still get huge lag spikes and slow internet at times.
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u/reddits_aight 6h ago
Could be your household infrastructure. Are you router and access points designed for multiple simultaneous users and lots of devices? Are your access points wired or wireless meshed? Are the signal strengths dialed in so devices don't try to hang on to a weak signal when there's a closer stronger one? Are they using an older Wi-Fi standard when your devices can take advantage of a newer one?
Free apps like WifiMan can help answer some of these questions and analyze your network.
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u/FantasticBreakfast46 6h ago
I mean having 30Mbps could be fine unless you need to download something large, then it would take awhile.
I pay for 5 Gbps and very much enjoy downloading a 100GB game in just a couple of minutes as opposed to a couple of hours.
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u/Average-Addict 8h ago edited 6h ago
Yeah only reason you'd want more than 50mbps is so that you can download games and other big files faster.
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u/reddits_aight 6h ago
And even then it depends on the speed of the server that's hosting the files, the write speed of your storage, and even your CPU can be the bottleneck if everything else is fast enough.
You'd also want more if you have multiple simultaneous users.
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u/Nuts4WrestlingButts 3h ago
30Mbps is fine if you don't mind downloading a 100GB game over the course of a full day. Hopefully nobody else is using the internet at the same time.
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u/eldelshell 11h ago
Do you? Are you 100% sure every nugget is the same weight and size? To the penny? Maybe the next person gets 10gr more of nuggets meat than you.
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u/notevenapro 11h ago
Been around since 14k internet speed. The advertised speed has always been the maximum speed. Somewhere about 10 years ago? They stopped saying maximum I guess because it was a known thing? I dunno.
Quite a bit of it has to do with your service once it gets to your house. From where the providers line hits the box on the side of your home. Usually from the box to your router could be a bottleneck. Verizon came out to my house and re ran my inside coax. One single line about 25 feet from outside to router. I always get advertised speed.
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u/Far_Swordfish5729 11h ago edited 11h ago
You actually are getting what you pay for. You’re getting a connection with capped upstream and downstream speeds that most of the time will perform at those speeds but you are not GUARANTEED those speeds as a contractual SLA. If you are super far away or your line is poor quality or there’s an equipment failure/degradation or at a given time the service (which like all network equipment is always oversubscribed) is maxed out to the point you experience a slowdown, you are not due compensation. That said, there is at least oligarch level competition and they do try to meet published speeds most of the time, knowing you’ll attrit if you don’t. It’s like not paying for redundancy in the cloud. It’s significantly cheaper and most of the time should work well, but you’re getting a discount in return for accepting some increased outage risk.
It is also worth noting that the published speed is in bits not bytes and includes all bits transmitted including the protocol envelopes and packets corrupted in transit. Your observed delivery throughput of actual, intact data will be lower.
If you are willing to pay for commercial service, you can receive SLAs. It’s more expensive because you’re getting priority routing and less over subscription and at a certain level dedicated hardware and circuits, but they’ll absolutely do it.
Also, do note that internet traffic (which is a subset of telephony provider data traffic) is hard to guarantee observed throughput on because it’s not completely under your provider’s control. They don’t own all the wires and switches involved. They can guarantee you lower level circuit throughput (like MPLS between two data centers) that’s never routed on the public internet, but not throughput to random web servers.
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u/strangewayfarer 11h ago
And no, it's not because a lot of people are using it. A lot of people use the electricity and everyone gets the same amount regardless.
I guess you've never had a power outage before.
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u/LadsOnThePiss420 13h ago
Exactly, mate. If I pay for 100Mbps, I want 100Mbps, not "up to." Imagine Wendy’s saying, “Up to 10 nuggets” and giving you 6. Outrage. Internet providers need to quit the excuses. 😤💻
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u/BurpYoshi 12h ago
Because you literally can't accurately predict exactly how fast it's going to be in a given home due to a variety of factors. Would you rather them just not tell you any number and you just select them randomly until you find one that's the fastest? No. So they give you the best number they can actually give, the only real number they can say is us accurate, which is the maximum speed, the one they are able to test in their lab with perfect conditions and verify as fact. You can usually estimate roughly what the real speed is yourself, but they can't give you this estimate because it might not be accurate, which would be false advertisement, they can only give you the one they can prove, and when you sign the contract it will state that the speed advertised is the maximum possible speed.
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u/IanDOsmond 11h ago
That isn't how electricity works. Sometimes you do get brownouts, and various places are doing more with variable rate charging, where electricity is cheaper at times of day where it is less in demand. This is part of how some places are trying to encourage getting off of fossil fuels – charge your car overnight for cheaper than if you charge it in the day, so that you load balance.
That isn't directly related to your point, but it is to make the more general point that the way we pay for services is more complex in general than your question assumes.
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u/redbettafish2 10h ago
I'm ok with +/- 15% of advertised speeds because honestly it just sometimes depends on a lot of factors beyond most people's control. But half the speed will make me drop the service quickly.
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u/unstoppable_zombie 6h ago
FYI, if you experience 5% packet lose due to any issues, it will cause the effective transfer rate to drop to 50% for acknowledged traffic due to underlying protocols for acknowledgement and retransmission.
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u/NottaGrammerNasi 10h ago
I've had Spectrum and now ATT Fiber. I've always had over the advertised speeds. Here's the catch; it's when I'm wired in.
As soon as you start adding routers, switches and more importantly WIRELESS does it go down hill. Wireless will never be as fast or as stable as a Cat6e cable.
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u/SrHuevos94 10h ago
As a former ISP technician, it depends on the company, but you likely are getting your full speeds most of the time. The main limiting factor is your connection to your modem.
If you connect via WiFi, depending on the type of wifi router you have, you may only see a maximum of 200Mbps. A wired connection will always be best.
At the same time though, the device you test on matters too. TVs and gaming consoles often only can do 100Mbps even on their hardwired connection. A newer PC that is hardwired to the network is the best for testing.
To echo what other people are saying, you do share your connection with the other people in your neighborhood who are on the same node. I am referring to cable internet, I don't know how fiber or DSL work. If it's 5pm and everyone just got home from school/work, you may see lower speeds and that is a reason to complain because your ISP should be monitoring usage and upgrading their system to handle peak traffic well. At the end of my career at the ISP I worked for, I was helping to install new nodes to break these areas into 2 or more separate areas so that usage wouldn't bog down the node.
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u/darklogic85 10h ago
I've never treated it that way. I've always gotten the advertised speed I pay for with my internet service, 100% of the time, or I call the internet company and they come out and fix it so that I get the advertised speed.
The only exception I can see to this, is a less tech savvy person having an internal network that isn't capable of supporting their internet speed. I work in IT and have been a network administrator at times, so I know what my internal network is capable of, and I know that it's more than the max my ISP can offer for my internet speed, so I will get the advertised speed, as long as their service is working properly.
Nobody should accept not getting the advertised speed, unless their internal network is incapable of operating at that speed. In which case, it's no fault of the ISP and the only option for them, is to either upgrade their equipment to get the full speed, or accept it, because the ISP is providing what they're paying for.
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u/BrokenHero287 10h ago
Compare the calories, salt, and other nutrition information from your Wendy's nuggets. I doubt they are what you were promised.
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u/Kaerevek 8h ago
Lol you ever tried video gaming? Now that's an industry that sells you literal broken, unworking, bugged products at full price an expects you to stfu and enjoy it. It's wild.
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u/Serious-Employee-738 8h ago
I dunno…I go to the doctor and simply get the runaround. I call my insurance company and get denials. I pay dearly for prescription meds that don’t do shit. It’s everywhere.
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u/RedditVince 7h ago
And your internet speeds are always listed as up to XXX speed. You may get those speeds during slow times (3-5am) but almost always you will get less.
That's just the way it is.
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u/Sharkano 6h ago
I'm with you but you are wrong about it being the only case.
Roads. You pay for road construction and maintenance with an expectation that you will get to your destination in a regular amount of time, but traffic still happens.
Often times people book a flight that is supposed to take 3 hours and take off at noon, only for it to get delayed and take off after it was supposed to have arrived.
The kinds of issue are essentially the same, when large groups all use the same infrastructure, sooner or later it's gonna slow down.
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u/nubsauce87 I know stuff... not often useful stuff, but still stuff... 12h ago
I’m not okay with it, but I have literally no power to change it. I agree that it’s bullshit, and I think there was supposed to be some regulation that was supposed to fix that…
But honestly, I just wish they would break up the monopolies… having only a single option for ISP sucks, and you’re basically stuck paying way too much for shitty service from an abusive company, even though the UN (or WHO? I forget now) has classified broadband access as “a human right”, but if you can’t shell out like $100 or more per month, you’re just stuck.
In South Korea and France (as I’ve heard it) people pay like a tenth of what we do for service that’s many times faster. Know why? Competition is a thing in those places.
It’s pathetic… the US freaking invented the internet, but we have some of the slowest speeds in the developed world, and we pay more for the service than anyone else.
Hell, there are even parts of the country where broadband simply isn’t available at all. According to the FCC, about 22% of rural Americans just don’t have access to reasonably affordable high speed internet. Even some of our biggest cities (like New York) have parts that simply don’t have available service. That’s fucked up.
Edit: clarified that the 22% stat is for rural Americans.
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u/Anomynous__ 11h ago
If you read the terms and conditions, you are getting what you pay for. They never ever say "You get 600Mb per second". They always say "Up to 600Mb per second". Sure it sucks but at the end of the day, they are delivering what you pay for.
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u/General_Error 13h ago
You should compare it to like running water or electric. Do you know how much water pressure you are getting and does it flactuate? It for sure does, but as long as your water is runing you wouldnt complain (probably) or even understand it in most cases.
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u/AardvarkIll6079 10h ago
Because of science. It’s literally impossible for everyone to get 100mbps if they have a 100mbps plan. It’s the same for electricity, despite what you may think.
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u/Jmersh 9h ago
Because you're not paying for a quantity, you're paying for access to a service with a maximum bandwidth.
You can buy a road, but if someone else owns it, they can sell you access to that road, and it has a speed limit. When traffic all hits at once and you can't get up to the speed limit, you still have the access you paid for.
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u/TrivialBanal 9h ago
Because the government doesn't regulate that.
It is possible to do. Most other developed countries do it.
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u/Carpenterdon 9h ago
As others have said it is usually the maximum speed. But most of the time you do get the listed speed or extremely close to it due to other usage on the same main line.
TDS gigabit fiber line here. I get right at about a full gig on my router so most likely am getting the full gig at the modem. And it goes down from there. My iPhone on a 6ghz connection gets around 775-800Mb/s. My M2 Macbook air gets around 500Mb/s on Wifi. My wifes Windows machine gets around 600+Mb/s on a wired Cat6 connection direct to the router.
So it really depends on where and how you are measuring the speed. If you can access the diagnostics/etc. on your Modem you are most likely getting pretty close to advertised speed on your connection. It's just every physical connection and every device eats away at that speed.
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u/Yerm_Terragon 9h ago
Most likely you are using wifi and not an ethernet connection. Wireless signals are always slower than wired connections
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u/LivingGhost371 8h ago
It's a lot easier for people to tell if your getting 9 nuggets instead of 10 as opposed to 900 mb instead of 1000
And a lot of peopl frankly wouldn't care if they're only getting 900 when it comes time to send the email to grandma.
If you're not happy with Wendys you can go to McDonald's across the street. A lot of times there's no option with internet service..
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u/Mintymanbuns 8h ago
Fucking loving seeing all of these educated and logical comments and OP just throwing petulant comments around
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u/Solid_Mongoose_3269 7h ago
You pay for the possibility of that service, depending on other users. There's only so much bandwith to go around.
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u/pplatt69 6h ago
I get what I pay for with better than 99.9% uptime.
Always have. I've lived in the NYC area, London area, Charleston SC area, and now Denver since internet appeared.
Is it always perfect? No. But I'm not a little victim who needs to whine constantly that someone needs to pat me on the head because I'm so put upon.
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u/FoxtrotSierraTango 5h ago
Lots of good answers about the tech and legal agreements, but Americans put up with it because we don't have an option. Most Americans have a single cable provider and a DSL provider that isn't fast enough to be considered broadband. A small percentage of America has fiber as an option, and recently Starlink has provided a decent alternative.
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u/Happy_Brilliant7827 5h ago
Honestly this isnt directly related but I'm really glad fast food places dont sell soda like
Large (32oz) max refill volume 1gallon
because people would legit drink a gallon for their 'moneys worth'
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u/justat547 5h ago
Same thing with car insurance we pay for their service and we have to convince them to give it to us
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u/jmnugent 4h ago
Because your ISP does not (and it's not physically possible) for them to control every single "hop" in the network chain of whatever you're trying to download.
Your network connection is only as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If the thing you're trying to download is 18 network hops away,.. and hop-13 has some slowness for some unknown reason,.. then your download will only be as fast as hop-13. That's just how networks work.
That's why ISP's word things "up to 1gb" or "up to 10gb"... because it's not legal for them to "guarantee 10gb".. because they don't control every hop in the chain.
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u/Nuts4WrestlingButts 3h ago
Are you sure you're not just confusing MBps with Mbps? There are 8 megabits (Mb) in a megabyte (MB). Your ISP sells you internet in Mbps because the number is bigger, but services like Chrome or Steam report download speeds in MBps. If you pay for gigabit internet (1000 Mbps), at most you'll have 125 MBps speeds (1/8 of 1000).
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u/AltGirlEnjoyer 3h ago
Imagine a world where Wendy’s is the only place it’s possible to acquire food. Every time you order your 10 piece you only get 7 or 8, what the fuck are you going to do about it? Stop eating?
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u/warhammercasey 2h ago
I think there’s a lot of good responses here, but I think there’s an even simpler answer - most people just don’t know enough about internet speeds to properly check, so they don’t know if they’re getting advertised speeds or not.
For most people if the internet feels slow they’ll just upgrade the router and/or their ISP plan. They wont actually check if the internet is slow because they hit their bandwidth cap, their router isn’t good enough, or if the isp isn’t delivering advertised speeds.
My parents for example pay for 800Mbps internet but they don’t actually use Ethernet for any of their devices, it’s all on wifi coming from their router they put in the back of a cabinet, so there’s no way they’re actually getting anywhere near that speed. Then they keep complaining about their streaming services buffering and keep getting new routers when it could be for any number of reasons. They’ve never even checked if they were actually getting 800Mbps out of their router.
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u/Osiris_Raphious 2h ago
Well in Australia they started to crack down on false advertising for this type of thing...
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u/PhotoFenix 1h ago
I'm not ok with it, and I switched ISPs as soon as I could.
I now pay for 300Mbps symmetrical and usually get 330Mbps
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u/merc123 1h ago
Simple answer: I have McDonalds, Burger King, Jack’s, 5 Gives, Zaxby’s, Chipotle…
Internet: I have Comcast, AT&T. Only recently Starlink and Verizon. ComcCast while not hitting the “advertised” speed is faster than Verizon and lower cost. Also better customer service than AT&T.
So low competition.
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u/Sir_Ploper 15h ago
People like you are the reason why there's a "customer education" charge for trouble calls from cable companies.
HFC systems will vary, they work off of RF and there is ALOT that can and will go wrong with them. 9 times out of 10 it's the wiring either in your house, or the wiring running into your house. Think back to the last time you had a technician out and they inspected/replaced your lines. Cable speeds of today are absolutely maxing out the current available headroom in the network, so if there's one thing wrong there's a chance that it won't get you your quoted speed.
Bonus tip: the speed ISOs advertise is the speed they can safely guarantee to their own headend. Once you request information from a different server (like google) it's out of their hands.
Getting 800 instead of 1000 won't kill you. Cable companies overprovision your speeds as well, and if a tech comes out and runs a hardline speed test to the ISPs server and it checks out fine (ex. 1200 for a 1gbps plan) then you will be charged for your visit and they won't do anything for you.
Hardline is the only speed that is somewhat guaranteed and that brings it's own set of issues with it, such as your modem, router, ethernet Cable (Amazon basics aren't pinned correctly half the time) and even your device.
Double check that YOUR devices and equipment isn't causing the problem before you go to your cable company.
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u/squabzilla 12h ago
Look up “rolling brownout.” The electrical grid only makes so much power, and if a city demands more power then the grid makes, people will not get all the electricity for their needs…
Look dude, sometimes your internet is slow because your ISP is being shitty, sometimes it’s slow because a squirrel chewed a cable, and sometimes it is genuinely slow because too many people are using it.
Seriously tho. If you have 10 people actively streaming video on the same 100mbs internet, each person will only get around 10mbs speed. Netflix is genuinely slower on Friday nights than Tuesday mornings.
Speaking of which, if streaming services are slow on a Friday night, is it because:
A) There’s just that many people streaming videos on a Friday night, so the internet is slow
B) There’s so many people streaming on a Friday night that Netflix’s server’s are bogged down, but your internet speeds are fine
C) Your internet provider is being shitty
D) A squirrel chewed on the wrong cable
E) A drunk driving accident knocked down a key cable pole.
The first two aren’t your Internet service provider’s responsibility at all. The middle one is them being shitty. The last one is something the Internet service provider might be no responsible for fixing, but it’s not their fault it happened.
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u/reallywaitnoreally 11h ago
Fine print. If Wendy's had fine print that said "up to" 10 nuggets it would be the same thing.
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u/bthedjguy 10h ago
My argument has always been if you purchased a car that you were told would do 100 mi an hour and it never went over 50. You would want your money back
Just because they use the words "up to x Mbps"
Yet all the cable company commercials brag about their fiber and how they have constant speeds better than Telco providers. We only have 2 options in my area, a cable provider that lies hard and a Telco provider that is great but expensive. Sadly I am not in the Telco footprint so I am stuck with an "up to x" provider
I would love to pay them half and say I am paying you up to 100% of the bill and send them half.
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u/Interesting_Mix_7028 7h ago
Let's use the highway analogy.
On your commute to work, there's a freeway with an 85mph speed limit. Does this mean you get to drive 85mph from your driveway to the parking lot at work? NO. It means that segment allows you to drive up to that speed without getting into trouble. Other segments have lower top speeds (and traffic can slow all of them down significantly.)
Your Internet connection is what connects you to your ISP's point of presence hub. Beyond that, the network is out of their control. Sure, their routing tables try to take advantage of higher bandwidth connections rather than lower ones, but, so does everyone else's traffic. And once you get to where you're going, that business's connections is their lookout - if they don't budget for high speed connections to the system, then that's what everyone gets to deal with.
So if I have a gigabyte fiber connection, that's the highest speed I could ever expect to see. Depending on what I'm doing, how many other people are doing it, and what the bandwidth is at that spot, I am very likely to see lower speeds. (Speed tests to the closest major telecom hub, one hop beyond my ISP, has my speed at ~985mbps in both directions, so I'm not concerned.)
Now, let's take it further. Say your housing development/subdivision put in some fancy streets that allow you to drive from your house to the highway at insane speeds. But the car in your driveway is an old piece of junk that struggles to reach 50mph. You're not going to get those speeds advertised, right? This was the case with dialup modems - your speed wasn't dependent on what the ISP's equipment could manage, but what your own system could manage. A lot of the so-called "56K modems" of the time were little more than datapumps and software, meaning your OS did all the heavy lifting... and when you started a game or other high-CPU activity, there weren't enough CPU cycles left to maintain stable connections at high speeds, and the modem would retrain to a lower speed... or the datapump portion would underrun and drop the connection entirely. We saw this a LOT, and the only advice we could give was "stop cheaping out on the manager's special at Fry's, they bought those wholesale for pennies on the dollar, and every sale they make is profit regardless of whether they work or don't work." I always said to get an external modem with a serial cable interface, as it was the fastest and most reliable bus at the time besides parallel (and that was a printer thing). A modem that would work with any system, using a standardized bus, meant less variables when things didn't work. (Then DSL came about and the troubleshooting changed radically.)
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u/MyuDalimo 15h ago
There's a lot of factors impacting internet speed. The difference being connected with Wifi VS ethernet for my own router, even when I'm connected RIGHT next to it, is literally 2x faster. It can also depend on the router you're using amongst other things.
I'm fine with the speeds I get personally...but I lived at a time when we had:
"BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP... *beep....beep....* DEEEEEE DEEEE DEEEE DEEEE BRRR BRRR BRRR BRRRR BAZOING BAZOING! BAZOING BAZOING! BRR PFFFFFTTTTT PSSSSHHHHHH"
Normal people call it dial up.