‘Underperforming’ ISPs Questioned by FCC
The FCC is contacting ‘underperforming’ ISPs to find out why they've failed to deliver consistent speeds, the agency said Wednesday. Its fourth Measuring Broadband America report (http://fcc.us/1soP2Vx) has a new focus on “consistency” of speeds. Most broadband providers are delivering actual speeds at least as fast as what they advertised, but some providers have “significant room for improvement,” the report said.
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The report singled out Cablevision as a bright spot, delivering “100 percent or better of advertised speed to 80 percent of our panelists 80 percent of the time during peak periods.” But a third of the ISPs delivered only 60 percent or better of advertised speeds using that 80/80 benchmark, the report said. “This is a metric that we expect ISPs to improve upon over the course of the next year."
"Consumers deserve to get what they pay for,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “While it’s encouraging to see that in the past these reports have encouraged providers to improve their services, I'm concerned that some providers are failing to deliver consistent speeds to consumers that are commensurate to their advertised speeds. As a result, I've directed FCC staff to write to the underperforming companies to ask why this happened and what they will do to solve this.” Frontier Communications and Verizon’s DSL service, as well as Windstream and Insight, were among the lower performers in their consistency of performance.
"Windstream is committed to providing a quality broadband experience to our customers,” a spokesman said. “We are making significant capital investments in our network to address the growing demand for capacity and speeds. These investments are having a positive impact as evidenced by the improvement in our performance since the last survey.” A Verizon spokesman noted the report shows that FiOS customers are “getting more than they pay for when it comes to Internet services.” A Frontier spokeswoman said the company is “evaluating all the results of the report,” noting Frontier has spent “more than $1.5 billion on network improvements and broadband expansion efforts” in the last few years. Insight did not comment.
Consumers are migrating to faster speed tiers, but ISPs using DSL technology showed “little or no improvement in maximum speeds,” with the exception of Qwest/CenturyLink, the report said. Unlike cable and fiber, DSL “is strongly dependent upon the length of the copper wire” from the residence to the ISP’s terminating electronic equipment, it said. “Obtaining higher data speeds would require companies to make significant capital investments across a market area to shorten the copper loops. On the other hand, both fiber and cable technologies intrinsically support higher bandwidths, and can support even higher speeds with more incremental investments."
There are also “sharp differences in upload speeds,” the report said: Other than Verizon and Frontier, which use fiber-based services, “no other provider in the study offers rates that are higher than 10 Mbps.” The agency expects that as download speeds continue to increase, upload speeds will follow suit.
"We hope that this latest report again helps to refute the unsubstantiated allegations that cable operators routinely under-deliver and are solely responsible for any deficiencies in the performance experienced by consumers,” said a blog post by NCTA (http://bit.ly/SUNyBG). “Since the Commission started this effort back in 2010, the cable industry has voluntarily submitted to rigorous third-party testing and established a consistent track record of outstanding performance."
"We agree with the FCC that even more must be done,” said Telecommunications Industry Association President Grant Seifert in a statement. “This is not a time for providers and regulators to declare victory, but rather it’s a time to accelerate our efforts.” TIA will “continue to push providers and the industry to do even more to upgrade broadband infrastructure and expand deployment and deliver consistent service to consumers and businesses,” Seifert said.
Congestion at interconnection points, such as that experienced by transit provider Cogent (CD June 13 p4), “presented several challenges” for measurement, the report said: “Our test traffic is carried over these same interconnecting paths,” so “this congestion would also affect our tests.” FCC policy is to exclude measurements “known to have been collected from a degraded measurements infrastructure,” the report said. “As our Report focuses on average network performance and based on our analysis of this situation, we have chosen to rely upon data from unaffected servers for results in this Report.” The agency also collected test results from “impacted servers,” and will release the data “for use by academics and others in examination of this issue,” it said.
House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Vice Chairman Bob Latta, R-Ohio, said in a statement the report shows that “broadband Internet access is flourishing.” It’s also yet more evidence “that the administration’s call for ‘net neutrality’ regulations is grounded in finding solutions for problems that don’t exist,” they said. “The FCC does not need to take our word that unnecessary regulations are harmful; they just need to take a look at their own report.”