You're Being Ripped Off

[kidcanuck]

This is why I stick to dail up.

http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/

Are you getting the high-speed internet you're paying for?
When the telephone and cable companies are trying to sell you internet access, speed is everything. Some promise speeds of "up to 8Mbps." Some go as high as "up to 25Mbps." But how well do they explain what those numbers mean?

Pay attention to two small but important words: "up to." Sometimes they can be a shorthand way of saying "up to a theoretical maximum speed you may not actually experience, because your wires are old, or you have a lot of neighbours sharing the connection, or because we're still upgrading our equipment in your area."

For this segment, we did a series of speed tests on home internet service across the country. As Erica Johnson reports, there's some very crafty fine print behind all the marketing.

Tips
Smart shopping for internet access
You may be surprised to learn how many choices you have for your internet access. Beyond the big cable and phone companies, there are scores of smaller providers. Here are some guidelines:


DSL access uses your phone line. In general, it provides a more consistent speed than cable, although that rate of speed is determined by many factors, including how far your house is from the switching station, and on the condition of the wires.
Cable is usually faster than DSL for bursts of raw download speed, but it is also more variable. You will usually share a cable connection with your neighbours, so your speed may drop if everybody is online at the same time.
If you are the kind of person who uses a CD tray as a cup holder, you might benefit from hands-on attention from a smaller ISP. Canadian ISP.com has a large listing of alternative ISPs across the country, along with reviews.
Check your computer. Your speed could be slow because of viruses or spyware.
Check your wiring. If you have DSL, replacing the phone cord from your computer to your demarcation point (that's the spot dividing your own wires from the ones the local phone company is responsible for) can mean a big improvement in speeds. Make sure you have filters on all of your phones.
If you use an online speed test, remember that your ISP can manage traffic flow. You may get a quicker connection to the test site than to anything else, which could make you think your overall speed is faster than it is.
Remember that your speed could be fast to your provider and slow down at the next hop on the internet. Much of the internet is outside your provider's control.
Ask your provider what its "contention ratio" is. Some providers can oversubscribe lines in certain neighbourhoods, and this can slow you down.
If you have a bundle, ask if it's really saving you money. Can you buy a modem instead of renting one?


Please, try this at home

We want to hear from you about your connections. So how about this: You take the test at Speedtest.net, using the recommended test server. Then post your results here, including your city, province, neighbourhood, and internet provider. We'll make a big chart of the results and update it as new ones come in.

Remember, this is mostly for fun. For all we know, every ISP in the country is about to open a super-quick connection to this site, just for the sake of appearances. Still.


What the numbers mean

First, a bit. A bit is the smallest unit of digital information, either a one or a zero. So bits per second (bps) is a measure of how many ones or zeroes can move down a connection in a second.

A megabit is a million bits. So a connection that manages 5 Mbps can handle five million bits per second.

Next, a byte. A byte is a collection of eight bits, which is just enough information to hold a single letter or number. The documents you use on your computer are usually thousands or millions of bytes in size, so you tend to see them measured in kilobytes or megabytes.

A kilobyte (kB) is 1,024 bytes, and a megabyte (MB) is 1,048,576 bytes. To use some more meaningful references, a word processor document might be 200kB in size, and the standard pictures your digital camera takes are probably somewhere around 1MB each. Downloadable songs are usually between 3 and 4 MB each. A CD holds roughly 700MB.

So: a connection that manages 5Mbps can transmit about 625 kB per second, which means about six seconds to download a song.


Links to more information

As you probably guessed already, the internet is full of talk about internet connections and how fast they are. Here are some links.


"The White Lies ISPs Tell About Broadband Speeds," an article from PC magazine including the five questions you should ask your ISP.
The Bandwidth Calculator will help you turn meaningless numbers into ones that make sense.
Broadband Reports is full of news about internet connections. Their discussion forums have been eagerly awaiting this Marketplace broadcast.
There's another lively forum at Digital Home.
The Ottawa Business Journal has a useful background article on content-based traffic throttling by Canadian ISPs. If you've heard of the fight for "Net Neutrality" and wondered what it was about, this issue is a key part of it.

[Persephone]

Thanks for the tutorial kid.

[kidcanuck]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlMbxosLtaY