Lawmaker wants 4G carriers to disclose throttling and speed | Hacker News Reader

Lawmaker wants 4G carriers to disclose throttling and speed

arstechnica.com

82 pointsshawndumas19 comments

Fantastic idea. To require carriers to define 4G like "at least X megabits per second transmission speed will be available Y percent of the time, costing Z dollars, with exactly these limits on data volume and this kind of traffic priority scheme."

Yes, there is always uncertainty in wireless communication and ISP service, but that's what the "percent of the time" part is for, and the carriers are free to under-promise and over-deliver.

What I'm sick of is ISPs and carriers promising "up to" some speed. "Up to" means "guaranteed not more than." How does that make sense? "We guarantee you won't get better speed than X!" That would only make sense if I hated speed. Or if I could pay them "up to $50" a month for service.

Defining 4G service like that is still a scam, as true 4G would be one of the fourth generation network standards. However, laissez-faire non-regulation from the FCC led to a marketing arms race where US carriers had to advertise 4G service even if they had nothing like it. What they have is LTE = 3GPP Long Term Evolution, which is better 3G, and it's barely getting deployed, and which they just agreed among themselves to call 4G.

Not that I'm against better defining consumer TOS, but don't call it 4G. When true 4G gets deployed, prepare for the confusion. This fraudulent 4G marketing could very well have killed investment in true 4G networks from US carriers: "Oh they're deploying 4G ? Big deal I thought all carriers already had that thingamajig." Try to explain this one to Joe Public.

I don't think bureaucratic pedantry helps the situation; it's silly to call everything between 384 kbps and 100 Mbps "3G".

BTW, "true 4G" will simply be renamed to "5G" and there will be no confusion.

Who cares what they call it? As a consumer it doesn't matter whether the service is 2G, 4G, or 99G. What does matter is the user experience (coverage, reliability, performance) and price. Joe Public doesn't know what 4G was originally supposed to mean anyway.

Drop the acronym BS & call it what it is: another QoS/price option. Start with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service#Key_qualitie... (but swap out-of-order delivery for bitrate) and let the providers get measured. Publish the results.

You can actually sell quite a few network services to people, once you start talking about them in real terms. Gaming network links, with better latency guarantees, make a lot of sense. So do high-bandwidth, high-jitter links for downloaders.

IMHO it's another case of the marketers completely fucking up the market, because they're too dumb to understand their own product.

I'd like to see a minimum latency guarantee, too -- it's at least as important as throughput.

Yes, in my experience that's been a much bigger problem than bandwidth. I tried Clearwire, which advertises itself as 4G. The bandwidth was between fine and superb, but the latency was unbearably bad--many webpages would have various resources timeout, and load without CSS or not at all.

Why just mobile? These requirements sound equally important for land-lines.

because land-lines already advertise their speed in raw numbers. The problem with mobile is that everyone wants to call their network 4G even if the speeds are actually slower than 3G.

Really? Could you point me to a United States DSL/Cable provider that provides meaningful 'raw numbers' in their advertisements? Last I shopped for broadband the best you could get was a vague "up to x mbps" number, without any information as to reliability, not to mention minimum speeds.

(And with a wired connection you ought to be able to say pretty easily what the minimum speed is going to be 90% of the time.)

Hm, well usually when they advertise 10Mb down, a speed test usually confirms that number. Are you not getting advertised speeds on your land line? I don't remember a time when I didn't get a given advertised speed. Obviously reliability is a different story, but unless you're paying business class, you probably won't get a SLA anyway.

I reliably get 12Mbps reported from speedtest.net on my 12Mbps advertised AT&T UVerse service.

The problem is speedtest.net is useless since AT&T is clearly gaming me and them, prioritizing the traffic and bandwidth.

My normal surfing experience is clearly no where near 12Mbps, especially when Netflix routinely pauses/stutters. the iTunes experience is equally bad. The latency from AT&T's DNS is insane as well which just results in a garbage experience all around.

A few years ago 3Mbps DSL felt, if not blazing, reliably 3Mbps at least. These days my 12Mbps line feels, if anything, slower/less reliable. Sometimes I might be getting close to that, but it's much more routine to feel like I'm getting pretty pitiful service more on the order of 768Kbps, but with DNS service that can frequently take seconds to resolve.

Using alternative DNS seems to be hit and miss. Sometimes it helps, some times it actually appears to cause issues. It doesn't make any real sense to me from a networking perspective, but they're obviously doing something very weird when I can swap back to the AT&T DNS from Google's and suddenly my AppleTV video thumbnails browsing iTunes or Netflix start appearing snappily as they should.

I'd go FIOS or Cable in a heart-beat if I could. The AT&T/2Wire/UVerse combination is nothing but broken promises and frustration for what turns out to be a pretty pricey, underperforming service (the TV side is pretty good on quality, reliability and features, but I pay over $100/month so I expect that as a minimum considering I have no movie channels and am on a basic package).

How do you know it isn't netflix that is the slow one here? Sometimes I have to remind myself that it's Reddit that has the slow servers, not my connection. Try downloading a large file from a private Linode VPS and see what your speeds look like. At least for me, the speeds match very closely to the advertised speed.

The same sluggishness applies to iTunes as well.

Plus, one of the easier experiments is to swap in Google's DNS servers. Then the AppleTV is snappy for a few days. After awhile, slow-loading thumbs again. Swap back in the 2wire DNS, and snappy again.

I'm not sure the transfer speed to my Linode VPS really proves much either. It could be that video traffic like iTunes and Netflex are the big QoS targets, especially since they directly compete with the other half of the UVerse services.

First thought — good idea, and it should apply to all ISPs (not only 4G wireless), at least voluntarily as a good tone.

Second thought — minimum rates to what? ISPs can guarrantee certain quality of service only up to their uplinks, they cannot really help with anything out of their network. And most customers do not directly care about this, they need to transfer the data all over the globe (and complain on this).

While they are at it they should also make them state the actual price of the service instead of adding them on your bill. I am tired of having random charges on my phone bill.

I really think it should be the user's responsibility to figure out the details, as long as no effort is made to cheat on the provider's part. Market efficiency will end up dictating the progress in the end anyway. Having laws like this just makes the services more expensive overall, and does no good to the majority of people.

How many people who don't at least have a basic understanding of 4G transmission speeds will know what a megabit or megabyte is anyway? Even in an university setting (which should represent a highly biased group of overall educated people), the majority of students just know basic facts like "my song is 6mb".

But hey! On the bright side, creating useless jobs will add to our GDP. Props to modern economics.

Why should people be responsible for knowing the difference between Sprint's 4G network and AT&T's 4G network? The speeds are actually vastly different.

This problem existed back in the days when monitor manufacturers liked to "round up" the diagonal length of the monitors and put the actual viewing size in fine print. Some manufacturers would add 3 inches to the actual size of the monitor, just so that they'd "beat out" the competition.

> as long as no effort is made to cheat on the provider's part.

Isn't this precisely what this law is trying to guarantee? How is false advertisement not cheating?

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