That's illegal where I live, the primary connection speed figure used in advertisements must be the average speed users in the real world experience.

Turns out that consumer protection laws are pretty useful.

There's a solid technical reason for that though, as ISPs have no control over the performance of your connection's remote part. Sure, it leaves plenty of room for abuse, but this is a necessary disclaimer, not some slippery marketing.

The ISP is also in the best position to publish the p50, p90 and p99 speeds their customers reach. But why bother, when they can feign ignorance and just talk about what the boffins in the Science Lab say it should be.

Perhaps, with tongue in cheek, we could call this the p0 speed — as in it doesn’t make sense and it’s guaranteed that 0% of customers achieve it.

Percentiles are not helpful, because at least in my home country what degrades the maximum potential speed is the influence that parallel copper cables have on each other. So my internet speed depends on how much my neighbours are using the internet.

It's really really difficult to predict this statistically.

OTOH, there's a guaranteed minimum speed the ISP has to deliver.

This is really interesting, thank you. Do you have a link to some good info on the phenomenon?

It also includes the fact that their network may be oversubscribed.

There's no "may" about it: they are oversubscribed for consumers so as to get the price points down.

If anyone wants to have an unfettered pipe then call up a Tier 1/2/3 ISP and ask for a commercial connection via a single-mode fibre, and be ready to pay quite a bit for it.

This varies wildly by location and company. Approximately half my family is subscribed to Cox, and the other half mostly to Spectrum. The Cox connections never drop below 80% of their advertised speeds and the Spectrum ones rarely rise above 50%. Huge swaths of Spectrum's service area are so resource-starved they don't rise above 10% of their advertised speeds during daylight hours.

IMO, there should be some regulation where they should be forced to mention the current and maximum allocation that they are willing to make as well as the average/median bandwidth that the active users enjoy per hour.

The UK has a rule which requires ISPs to only advertise speeds achievable by 50% of users during peak periods. Customers are also allowed to leave contracts without penalty if ISPs are unable or unwilling to provide advertised speeds to the end user[0].

Such rules are not within the American Overton window for the usual reasons.

[0] https://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/ask-our-expert/broadband-...

Germany has a website that lets you automatically file a complaint if your provider doesn't reach 90% of the advertised speed in measurements over two days

> If anyone wants to have an unfettered pipe then call up a Tier 1/2/3 ISP and ask for a commercial connection via a single-mode fibre, and be ready to pay quite a bit for it.

You might be surprised to find it surprisingly affordable. Cheaper than colocation, even.

> You might be surprised to find it surprisingly affordable.

Assuming you can easily get hooked up at a residential address. Perhaps if you live in an apartment/condo tower, then fibre may have already been run:

* https://www.fibrestream.ca/locations

Some random house, on some random street? Unlikely.

If you get in touch with the right department, you would typically have to sign a multi year contract with the net value due upfront in case of termination to get them to run the fiber to you. Or else cover the cost of the run as an installation fee.

> Or else cover the cost of the run as an installation fee.

The community of Ammon, ID, built their own municipal fibre network because of this:

> It all began about seven years ago when the city government, suffering from horrible upload speeds, wanted a dedicated 100Mbps circuit between City Hall and the Public Works building, less than a mile apart. Qwest (now CenturyLink) didn't want the project, while Cable One offered to do it for a start-up fee of $80,000 plus $1,000 a month, Patterson said.

* https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...

* https://www.ammonfiber.com

At this year's (virtual) NLNOG there was presentation from a fellow who was fed up with slow Internet options in his rural Michigan county and so setup his own ISP by having fibre optic pulled to his house and then redistributing service to his neighbours:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg

Only if you want a complete rack or more at a colo facility.

If you get half a rack or less, that tends to be (quite a bit) cheaper.

I have both, and I think the break even point is probably paying for around 7 or 8U.

They have total control over your connection's speed, particularly when they mandate you use their equipment.

Only as far as the first bottleneck though - if 1000 customers in a neighborhood pay for 1Gbps connections, that doesnt mean the neighborhood actually has 1Tbps of capacity to the wider internet. Its probably a tenth of that at best, even in well connected areas.

Does anyone in the US actually get the “up to” even plugging directly into the ISP provided modem at off peak times?

Yes, absolutely. On all 5 different sites I manage in fact, two on a local ISP ADSL, third on local ISP fiber, fourth on Comcast Business cable modem, and even the fifth on a small regional WISP. All of them are reliably within a few percent of their expected speed with about the frequency that one would reasonably expect from that connection class. "Up-to" is fuzzy but quite justified with many technologies. Proper fiber of course is rock solid and essentially never has issues short of a backhoe. But ADSL falls off hard with distance, and a lot of the in-house wiring it's forced through is ancient garbage phone line. Sometimes one can get a huge practical boost just from shortening/replacing line with cat 5. And WISPs obviously have to deal with inclement weather fade as well as any additional obstacles for subpar sites that customers can't/won't rectify. Cable is more of a shared resource though you get much better support and less bullshit with business class even though Comcast are bastards.

Now, I absolutely would love to see it mandated by law that somewhere upfront in ISP info to consumers it's required to have a standardized SLA. A consumer-level SLA for sure, but still have it formalized and cover all of the basics. So not just absolute max bandwidth, but 90%/50%/whatever bandwidth, any guaranteed floor, 90% latency, any data caps, any throttling criteria, etc. All categories the same and measured in a mandated standardized way so universally comparable. I don't expect data center level SLAs at all, but there isn't any reason there can't be that level of clarity.

But residential/SOHO and such service inherently has more uncertainty and more compromises and capacity multipliers to meet lower prices. I think that's ok, just that it should be laid out and not buried in some fine print or support page in the disused lavatory defended by a leopard either.

Yes, I do. I have lived in several different areas where I had no problems getting the full advertised speed at any given time (on peak, off peak, etc.).

I think the biggest reason they say "up to" is because a lot of poeple get a cheap $40 router that can't support that the advertised speed. Heck, I just moved into a new place that gives symmetric gigabit speeds. I had to replace my router to actually get one that can handle the advertised speeds (I had an APU1d4 with realtek ethernet ports that saturated at 300 Mb/s). My older laptop does not even have wired nor wireless speeds that can handle the connection.

So while I am no fan of a lot of ISPs, I completely understand why they say "up to", they don't want to deal with folks who say they don't get their advertised speeds while using a $200 laptop and a $40 router.

I've had pretty good luck with DSL providers in three locations in the bay area and one in washington state. Sync speeds have always been at the top of the range, and usually upload/download speed to real destinations is consistent with the sync speed. Depends on the destination of course. And a lot of people on DSL have poor outside wiring (or it's just a long distance) and don't get great sync speeds or the lose sync when it rains and the lines get wet, etc. Mostly though, outside of exceptional circumstances the DSL data rates are slow enough that the bottleneck is either the individual subscriber's line (outdoor and indoor), their equipment, or wifi problems.

When I was on ATT gigabit fiber in San Jose, it was hard to confirm the speeds, but they would vary a lot more. I think most of the time at peak I would only see 400 Mbps down, but closer to the line speed off-peak. Upstream was more consistent.

Cox Communications doesn't have the best availability record with me (1-2 hour complete connection failures in the middle of the night every month or two) but as far as speeds go they're almost always exactly as advertised.

Many ISPs provide that level (or more) of performance, even during peak hours.

https://transition.fcc.gov/oet/mba/images/2018/chart1.png https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...

I do. (Frontier FIOS, Southern California) I pay for 150Mb/s up/down and always get those speeds, even at peak times. (I don't get the full speed on my wireless devices, 100BaseT ethernet devices, or network over USB 2.0 devices) I pay $90-$95 per month. (this is a residential ISP, not a commercial one. Commercial ISPs typically have a SLA and "up to" is well defined in the contract if it's applicable at all.)

Every time I've tested it my AT&T Fiber 300Mbit symmetrical connection gave me pretty close (if not more) than 300mb upload and download. Speed is also high enough that I have to test on LAN for it to be reliable, as just one wall can cause my WiFi to drop below the maximum speed of the service (of course, I'm using my own AP not the terrible one built into the provided modem).

I'm on spectrum in a high-tier US city and can regularly achieve a number very close to my cap (400mbs) throughout the day.

Granted, before my current router I was only hitting just over 50% of the rated speed. But that turned out to be the router I was using, its CPU was not fast enough or something. With a new router and all wired connections between me and the 'net, I get the speeds I pay for.

Just did a Speedtest, 880mbps down and 780Mbps up at 19:30, so peak.

Sonic gigabit in SF. I’d say that’s within margin of error. I see 900s on the early AM. Plus my WiFi can’t go that fast so I’m ok with it.

Would be nice if the pricing then corresponded to performance statistics.

Yes, even during peak hours.

The worst case ever:

Long ago an ISP sold me on VDSL for the office as "up to 55/3 Mbit/s". After install I notice they had deployed ADSL equipment with a theoretical maximum throughput of 12/1.3 Mbit/s. They claimed that this was ok and tried to hide behind the "up to" clause.