Expert: Actual Internet speed is 'almost guaranteed' to be less than advertised

We have found unbelievable local situational factors that affect actual speeds at the home or in the organization.

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Expert: Actual Internet speed is 'almost guaranteed' to be less than advertised

July 8, 2010

   I received this letter recently.


   Someone forwarded to me your column from June 6 about "Grading Super-fast Road Runner."
   I am the director of a research center at Florida State University (but used to be at Syracuse University and am in the upstate area for the summer). Our research center does a lot of work on telecommunications policy and broadband planning, applications, and evaluation.
   The short story is that the actual connection speed at the workstation is complicated to get even if you ping yourself at sites like www.speakeasy.com or the one at Connected Nation.
   Its almost guaranteed that whatever the ISP says they get you at the front door is anywhere between 15-45% less then they advertise. And, between the front door and the workstation dozens of "bad" things happen to the speed reducing it more before it gets to the workstation.
   A lot of our research has been with diagnostics for broadband with public libraries, K-12, and other community anchor organizations. We have seen local public libraries with an advertised ISP connectivity speed of say 10 mbs at the front door and actually have 33.3 kps at the workstation (poor dial-up speed).
   There are numerous reasons for why this happens (like have 5 wireless routers on the network, poorly designed network, bad firewall, etc. etc.). But at the end of the day, if there is not a knowledgeable technical person either in the home or in the organization they probably will end up either not knowing what their true connection speed is and/or not understanding with a TI line is versus a 10 gig line!
   AND, we have found unbelievable local situational factors that affect actual speeds at the home or in the organization. In one case a firewall had been incorrectly hooked to the network and sucked 50% of the available connection speed. In other situations at home, if all the teenage kids get on at 4:00 after school to play interactive video games everyone on that loop will suffer. So it also is not predictable what speeds are present except to know _generally_ what you have at a specific moment.
   Anywho, you did not detail how exactly you did the speed tests so I would be interested to know that -- but many of the commercial speed tests available are inaccurate and can vary for literally 100s of reasons and situation factors.
   But I did enjoy the read!

   Chuck

   Dr. Charles R. McClure, Francis Eppes Professor and Director, Information Use Management and Policy Institute at the College of Communication and Information.
   Florida State University
   Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2100