Kitz Forum

Broadband Related => ISPs => Topic started by: jabns on December 12, 2007, 12:35:54 AM

Title: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 12, 2007, 12:35:54 AM
I have been having a silly moment and thought of the following.

Is the phrase unlimited a bit silly when your connection can only download at 7150kbps.

So for example in a 31 day month you are limited to 19,150,560,000 kilobits  :lol: .

Therefore there is a limiting factor(BT / technology).


Told you i was having a silly moment!  :lol:

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: mr_chris on December 12, 2007, 09:51:29 AM
lol... these are the sorts of silly discussions that have taken place on ADSLGuide - when "unlimited" was talking point of the da mon year over at the PlusNet forum.

Don't get kitz (or me for that matter) started on false advertising of "unlimited"!

I know you were being silly with the connection speed being a limiting factor, but the simple fact of the matter is NO isp can afford to supply unlimited downloads at consumer prices for any length of time - the economics simply don't add up. And any ISP stlil doing so is now blatantly lying and should IMO be had up under trades description act or something.

I could go on, but I won't hehe  :-X
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: guest on December 12, 2007, 10:50:56 AM
Personally what I find TOTALLY outrageous is that an ISP can make whatever claims they wish on their own website and nobody can do ANYTHING as its apparently not classed as advertising.
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: kitz on December 12, 2007, 02:21:38 PM
>> Don't get kitz (or me for that matter) started on false advertising of "unlimited"!

Yep indeedy - a BIG bug bear of mine.  It is something that Ive had erm interesting discussions with a couple of ISPs about...  and a frequent rant of mine.

I also dislike the fact that theres certain ISPs who implied that there are no traffic shaping on their account and then have a system in place which throttles their users down to 2Mb at certain times of the day/eve.  Ive seen a few people being caught out by this and wondering wth is happening.

>> an ISP can make whatever claims they wish on their own website

mhmm..  like I say dont get me started - lol I do have to go out soon :D
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: Pwiggler on December 12, 2007, 05:54:35 PM
traffic shaping ..... i've heard of that somewhere  :hmm:

the gadget show is on the trail of 'unlimited' isp's and is asking viewers to visit their webby and post speed test results.  when they've got enough data they are gonna tackle the isp's for their comments.

Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 12, 2007, 07:37:07 PM
The server they are using for the speed test won't even go above 8.5Mb  :lol: .

I had to disable JS with noscript and fill the form in manually.

http://gadgetshow.five.tv/jsp/speed_test.htm (http://gadgetshow.five.tv/jsp/speed_test.htm)

EDIT: Having fun watching it go to 14xxxkbps and down to 1xxx and then back up all in one test LOL. Typical TV presenters  >:( .

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 12, 2007, 08:03:41 PM
Just sent them an email.

It makes me angry to think that some people will have just done the test and will currently be wasting there ISPs time because some TV Show wanted to do a test that had false results!

Its these sort of programs that say that BT are the best. Know one person/company can say who is the best when there opinon is just a worthy as the next person who has different needs.

The only way of reviewing ISPs is to post the facts and let people leave comments - wait a minute where have i seen that before, oh yes kitz.co.uk.

Rant over - I am getting a new punchbag tommorow  :lol:

PS: Sorry Pwiggler this is not aimed at you so please don't take offence.

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: guest on December 13, 2007, 07:17:08 AM
James I think the problem might lie with your bonding arrangements. The test works fine here and returns the expected results (17Mbps down and 700kbps up). It worked fine last night too.
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: kitz on December 13, 2007, 12:22:28 PM
There have been some complaints about the accuracy of that speedtester on other sites/places.

Particularly in the early days when their server couldnt cope with the demand
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: guest on December 13, 2007, 01:16:42 PM
True but I've seen James (IIRC) saying that other testers aren't accurate when I find they are - well as accurate as speedtesters can be anyway - so I wondered if it was the bonding arrangement to blame.

I remember Adrian (AAISP) saying something about scripted speedtesters and bonding not working very well but I can't remember the details - nor can I remember whether this was in the "MLPPP bonding days" or the "L2TP tunnel days". He recommended just using a decent ftp site for testing bonded line performance I think. Long time ago now right enough :)
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: mr_chris on December 13, 2007, 08:04:10 PM
I'm sure I could find the details somewhere on a search, but James, how does your bonding work, is it MLPPP or is it tunnelled? And if so, through different ISPs, or the same one?
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 14, 2007, 01:28:47 AM
Hi,

Sorry for the late reply i have been doing some reformatting and have only just got back up.

I am using MLPPP with both lines running through upstreaminter.net .


Every other speedtester is fine bar this one. The results have got very bad DL = 960kbps UL= 1430kbps.

I have actually had no problems using the sangoma PCI cards and any linux kernal. I would actually say its been more stable than my business plus net package ever was. People seem to have problems on MLPPP when there lines are going to 2 different makes of kit at the exchange.

EDIT: Its something to do with my ISP i think. He has just had to switch from SMP to a Singal CPU enviroment because of a software bug at his end. Basically my speed i now 960kbps from all sites. I must have just gone on the gadget shows tester as the problems were starting to hit me.

I don't know how i will cope at these speeds  :lol: .

PS: I will let you know how i get on tommorow after i have spoke to eddie(ISP Manager).

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 14, 2007, 01:26:25 PM
Spoke to them and it seems like a fault at the exchange.

My speed profile has gone from 7150 to 500 without ever loosing sync  ??? . It seems like they have been tinkering with something.

My other line is at full speed but was only running as fast a the slowest line(500kbps).


I rang BT to raise a voice fault because my ISP said there was a fault on the line and i am also experiancing intemitent phone connections. When i rang she did a line test and said there was nothing wrong with the line. I then said:

ME: Well my ISP...
BT: Sorry sir we can not help you.....
ME: Wait a minute(shouting). My ISP did a woosh test and it failed!
BT: ISPs can not run line tests so we can't help you(blatent lie).
ME: But the phones keep 'dying intemitently'(they actually do).
BT: we will send a  engineer out today but you could be charged £250.
ME: Ok, please do.

BT are coming in about 10mins.

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 14, 2007, 05:40:31 PM
Engineer did something in the exchange and also replaced a few bits down my line. Re synced 1 hour ago and just phoned my ISP up to reset my RAS mappings so the IP profile gets updated without having to wait three days  ;D .

I also got an extra 2db out of my SNR.

PS: I might actually get to do this speed test some time this week lol.

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: kitz on December 14, 2007, 06:03:30 PM
They have been doing something at the exchange.  As you know we've both had a couple of exchange outages recent.. and Ive also seen my routing and latency do weird things.

I was walking past there the other night on the way back home from partaking in some erm liquid refreshments and all the lights were glaring, me being nosey stood on the wall to see what was going on inside and there was a guy working in the adsl section.  Because it was illuminated I could also see there was a lot more dslams in there than the time I went round.  Would love to go back in there and see what its like now and take my camera with me.
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 14, 2007, 08:21:28 PM
Was that falling on the wall  :P.

Please do go in there again and find out what they are doing.

How the hell does an IP profile change without a resync? Its like the software lost the settings for my line so just set it at 500kbps.

My pings to my ISPs gateway have gone up by 3ms over the last week.


Do you have any ideas what it could be???

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: kitz on December 14, 2007, 11:01:47 PM
>> Was that falling on the wall 

heh - shhhhhh..  :D
Actually I had someone to hold me steady - although he did wonder WTH I was wanting to nose inside the exchange and why I climbed on the wall  :lol:

The racks of patch panels were way more than last time I was in there..  and I could see 3 dslams over in a place that was previously empty.   I couldnt see the BTw dslams properly.   But...  when I got home..  have you noticed whats appeared on the list for our exchange this week?  We have another LLU dslam.

>> Please do go in there again and find out what they are doing.

Funny enough I was talking about that only a couple of days ago, a few years ago as an adsl campaigner and all the stuff I'd done for the exchange when we had probs... I was easily able to get myself an "invite" and blag my way in.   I doubt I could do that now :(

>> My pings to my ISPs gateway have gone up by 3ms over the last week.

erm actually so have mine - 17ms previously 14ms :(
Must be whatever routing BTw in their wisdom decide to take us over the ATM cloud ...  I have had it much worse than that... sometimes it clears in a few weeks.

>> How the hell does an IP profile change without a resync?

Pass - Its "not supposed to happen" :/



Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: kitz on December 15, 2007, 12:00:58 AM
>> >> Please do go in there again

Update............

Oooooooooh wow... :thumbs:   I may be able to  ;)
/me does the happy dance.
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 15, 2007, 05:04:29 AM
Yey

Tell them how to run it as well please  :D .

Actually don't because then you won't get invited back!

PS: i should be starting my apprentiship there in feb/march (if i get it). I have gone for the data/networks technician (in non fancy terms, the exchange engineer). So you might have yourself a 00 agent inside there  :lol: .

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: kitz on December 15, 2007, 12:18:47 PM
Heh I just want to have a nose and would love to take my camera.. but I dunno if they would allow that.

>> i should be starting my apprentiship there in feb/march

That would be really cool.. I hope you do - good luck on that one James.

--
btw.. 
Did you ever dabble with TBP (Pascal/Delphi) by any chance?

Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 15, 2007, 04:04:28 PM
Cheers. I hopefully will get it.

Quote
btw.. 
Did you ever dabble with TBP (Pascal/Delphi) by any chance?

Nope just:

HTML, JS ect..
PHP (My fav. )
ASP.net (ooowww, I know!)
SQL
C, C++, C#
Basic, VB
Learning Perl

So to sum it up everything except delphi  :lol: ! Why ?

James
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: kitz on December 15, 2007, 05:02:03 PM
Several years ago I used to partake in a help chan, and remember encountering someone from fwd who at the time was just learning the language, who was about the same age as yourself ... and wondered if it was same person.
Title: Re: False advertising
Post by: jabns on December 16, 2007, 05:20:54 AM
Nope not me i am affraid.