Google Fiber cannot come soon enough.
Posted Jun 5, 2013, 5:04 AM UTC
2649
I work for a contractor for about ten ISPs, including one in Austin. Road Runner is not the worst. Be glad you don't live in New England.
7
And let me guess... How much are you paying for your wifi and where do you live AND how many computers are actively connected to your Internet?
6
I pay around $50 a month for my wifi, and there are between 1-4 computers that use the wifi. Right now there is only one and my Mbps is at 1.5.
2
You didn't guess!
It's "free" internet in my small apartment complex near the UT campus. On a good day I get almost 1 up and around 1 down (which I'm totally okay with). Regardless of the scenario, this (speedtest) is unacceptable IMO.
-5
I'm confused, why do you have expectations for free internet? If you wanted to be able to have reasonable expectations, wouldn't you order your own internet line?
22
[deleted]
3
Oh shit, did you leak out from r/investing? Is this a "it's built into the price comment?" I don't buy internet from landlords, just like I don't buy my pizza from subway.
If you think the pizza is crappy at subway, why would you go in and buy it? Don't lease an apartment with "free" internet thinking that it will be in any way comparable to a dedicated line to your residence.
-2
Well it's TWC/Roadrunner and it's provided but not exactly free since I pay rent. I guess you and I differ on what we consider reasonable expectations and I don't believe the landlord intends to provide service as bad as it has been at times.
2
Dude, rent is for your living quarters, "free" internet is just that... you are not paying an ISP for living space. Let me guess, you get pissed at Olive Garden when it turns out the free salad is actually shit?
-3
Yeah, I'm going to go with the problem being with the apartment complex, not Time Warner. Shitty router, landlord possibly capping connection speeds, and/or too many connections. A basic home wifi router gets bogged down very easily when multiple connections are trying to pull data at once.
2
I'm gonna take a few safe leaps of assumption here based on what you've already said:
Your apartment complex provides free internet which is basically a shared line. Time Warner provides that line... your apartment complex then just stacks everyone onto it.
Here's a few reasons things go to shit:
Bad routers/QoS policies/lack of uplink throttling. People don't ever seem to understand that when you have say a 20mb connection down and a 1.5mb connection up... the second you flood the upstream, your downstream grinds to a halt.
Throw a fuck ton of computers with malware, torrents, etc onto a network with cheap routers, no filtering, QoS rules, or bandwidth throttling... it's always going to suck. Ever notice how virtually any coffee shop you go into has the worst internet ever. It's not the connection, it's the local network infrastructure.
Even in my home network...I was getting shotty service, intermittent connections, lag, inconsistent streaming. Switched out my few year old cheapo belkin router I had been too lazy to upgrade to a cisco dual band router and I haven't had a problem since.
So, moral of the story... it's not so much Time Warner's fault as your apartment complex probably isn't shelling out money for enough bandwidth to service your community and if it is... it's not managing the data properly.
5
I think you summed it up pretty well, thanks. I've been living here for a while and a majority of the time the internet is perfectly fine. Not great and maybe not even good, but I'm content with it. However, it's a bit inconsistent and when things are bad (as they were yesterday), they're awful.
1
This is what you get when you pay for internet:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2753860651.png
I pay for a 50 down 8 up connection from timewarner they provide with with the connection speed after 2:00 AM but prior to that they throttle me. I have asked them to stop on multiple occasions. I do lots of 1080p streaming and upload videos to youtube that are rather large in size. I pay for the speed why get throttled?
Youtube sucks no matter what ISP you are with, so that isn't a good benchmark. I can stream HD from Netflix & Vudu, but Youtube can't buffer even a low res video. More likely, you are on a high traffic node and are experiencing slow-down during peak use times. I have personally run tests to see if they are bandwidth shaping, and haven't found any evidence of it.
Well I mean that I broadcast my streams not exactly that its youtube specific. I also host content on my home servers for friends and family and even then i have a constant data tracking regarding my network. I do sys admin and networking stuff for a living so I have a small Idea of how the service company treats me. The thing is when you offer a connection speed that is the max speed that it should be throttled at not anything below that. I have been throttled at some point 90k upload forcing me to turn off the streams due to terrible quality and having to record and upload at a later time. I have contacted Time warner about it and every time i complain i end up with one of their network guys that just says you have lots of bandwidth and we fear that your connection is being abused by others. Honestly this is not really the case and after lots of data tracking and trace routes they stop doing so for about a month until i get enough energy to wait on a phone for 1.5 hours before getting the results I want. You bet your ass I am dropping time warner no matter how good their retention plan may be. Since i started my service with them 3 years ago i have called roughly 28 times about the same things and other various times due to unscheduled maintenance they were performing.
I checked I am the only one in my block and there are few others on the docsis 3.0 network they have its a higher price and most people are still sitting below me in a crappier internet situation that is still being throttled.
I'm suffering horribly over here.
Congrats your job has a fast internet connection. I bet it wasn't free! :P
Nothing really is.
I woulda thought you'd link to this
Although that link also applies to this entire thread
Zero millisecond ping... :(
Who are you with? I'm thinking of moving to Austin from Phoenix but from my last trip I suffered greatly in the two crappy hotels I stayed at because they were with Time Warner.
That was from my business that has a dedicated line from Time Warner. At home I'm also Time Warner but cap out around 50MB/s down and 6MB/s up. FYI, most hotels here have the crappiest business internet plan for like $80/month (less than I pay at home), with hundreds of people using it over shoddy wireless setup. Also, we're getting Google Fiber next so that will be nice as well.
Oh believe me. I know hotels are cheap, but even the most congested ones get ok speeds around midnight, but nope. These two were along the i35 and weren't low class. I've heard so many bad things from the company I thought their service was generally horrible. Im thinking about waiting for google to announce the neighborhoods in which google fiber will be released so I can move there. I don't want to risk it.