Internet Speeds: ISPs Being Sneaky

So these days internet speeds are getting pretty big and people are willing to pay more and more to get better and faster speeds. ISPs (those guys that connect you to the internet) like Virgin Media or BT offer speeds these days that are more than enough for a full family to stream HD videos from the internet all at once, at least in theory. However unfortunately for us there are many ways that ISPs are misleading the majority of us into thinking that we are getting far more than than we actually are.

The first and probably the most recognisable of these ways that we can be mislead is the way that ISPs sell you bandwidth. They sell you bandwidth speed for your internet connection in megabits per second, otherwise known as Mbps or Mb/s. Nothing wrong with that right? Unless you consider that a very similar term is used is megabytes per second also known as MBps or MB/s (notice that the capital B is the only difference in the abbreviations). Those familiar with computers will know that there are eight bits in one byte, meaning that one Mb/s is only an eighth of the speed of one MB/s. So when you pay for an internet connection in Mb/s the ISPs make it easy to mistakenly think you are getting far more than you really are. It also doesn't help that some adverts show the connection as "50MB/s" when they really mean "50Mb/s", although this is mostly is due to the people who actually make the adverts not knowing the difference between them it is still unacceptable really.

Another thing about the speeds that they quote is that they use very careful wording when quoting speeds, like in the image above. They say "Up to 60Mb", meaning that they aren't legally obliged to actually provide 60Mb/s; in fact they don't even have to give you 30Mb/s even if you're on the 120Mb package! In reality most people get only about half of what is offered as the "Up to" speed on average, so if you're on the 30Mb/s package you can expect roughly 15Mb/s, if you're on the 60Mb/s package you can expect roughly 30Mb/s, etc.

Probably the least known about problem with internet speeds is that if you want to connect to a website or service, e.g. Netflix, and the website or video lags it may not actually be your connection or the website's connection that is actually the problem. You see your ISP connects all of the customers on its network to the internet via a much larger ISP which they purchase bandwidth from in bulk. The larger ISP then routes all of the traffic of the networks connected to it through connections to other larger ISP networks. The trouble is that the large ISPs have to pay each other to build better connections between them so that a customer whose traffic is routed through one ISP can get better bandwidth to a website whose traffic is routed through another ISP. This means that if your ISP doesn't pay the bigger ISPs to build a better connection then the traffic between the networks gets congested and you get a slow connection to websites and people on the other ISP's network but you still get a fast connection to those on your ISP's network.

Fortunately there is actually a work-around for this. You see if your ISP's ISP has a good connection to another bigger ISP that in turn has a good connection to the ISP of the website you want to get to then you can actually use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to get around your slow route and use the faster one of the other bigger ISP instead. If you connect to the VPN you can ask the VPN to fetch the data that you want from the website using the non-congested and fast route of the VPN's ISP. Then the VPN can send you the data through the fast and uncongested route between you and them. The end result is that you bypass the slow and congested route that you would normally have to take (even if it is actually shorter) and instead can get a faster connection.

Personally I would like it if ISPs would just cut the crap and just give me some realistic figures for the speeds I'm likely to get. But somehow I don't think that'll happen any time soon and yelling at the poor people in the call centres isn't likely to do any good. So I suppose for now I suppose I'll have to settle for a look of general disapproval in the ISPs' direction and hope that one day some new company will come into the mix with decent customer service to slap them in the face with the metaphorical hand of healthy competition.

Also, apologies on the late posts, my internet went down for roughly 5 days last week so I couldn't do any research or fact-checking until recently. I guess Virgin Media must have some angry psychics that didn't want this post to get written and posted.

If you would like more information on this week's subject watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWn_BEZYpfA
Around 22:40 in the video they begin talking fairly in-depth about the ISP to ISP problem and I found it a really interesting resource for writing this post.

References and related links:
http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broadband/50mb.html