 tschmidtPremium,MVM
join:2000-11-12
Milford, NH
kudos:5
 ·Fairpoint Commun..
 ·Hollis Hosting
| Two sides to this story I'm always amused at these kinds of threads because they show a profound lack of understanding about how the Internet works - performance is an end-to-end measurement. Much of what determines transfer speed is beyond ISP control.
Having said that ISPs are able to hid behind this complexity to delay needed network upgrades resulting in congested networks and unhappy customers.
Seems to me if we really want to pursue the notion of an "ISP speedometer" a better metric is hop latency and dropped packets within the ISP network up to and including the IXC. However I have no idea how you would market this to make sense to the average consumer.
All I can say from my personal experience using several different dialup and DSL providers is overall they have done a good job delivering the service they advertise and invested capital when needed so network congestion has not been a serious issue.
/tom |
