Qwest Unveils 40Mbps/20Mbps Service → 85% Rule

Looks like they're still including verbiage about their connections only reaching 85% of advertised speeds...in 2009. Hey guys, ever heard of something called "overprovisioning" to get the connection up to the actual advertised speeds? Comcast does it and guess what, you're competing against them.

The overhead has nothing to do with "overprovisioning". The advertised speed is what the device trains at. Read here about DSL overhead.

»pflog.net/dsl_overhead/

I'm very aware of ATM (not necessarily DSL) overhead. If all internet had ATM overhead then okay, maybe advertising one speed and delivering another would be justified. However cable internet and non-ATM DSL techs (including GPON) don't have the majority of that overhead, and Comcast actually overprovisions their cable services to make perfectly sure everyone gets the speeds adversied, even when PowerBoost wears off.

So I maintain that Qwest should either overprovision the line or stop the false advertising of their, for example, 12 Mbit service as a comparable alternative to Comcast's service of the same speed.

Before you say anything else, I have had a Qwest DSL account, have used Qwest DSL recently and have used another provider's DSL that doesn't overprovision (Windstream in my area) but still uses ATM. I've also used providers that do overprovision (Comcast on cable, Embarq on DSL) and it doesn't take much to square speeds away with what people actually expect. I think it's not too far-fetched to actually be able to push 875 KB/s over a 7 Mbit connection, even if I have to use UDP to do that.

So does verizon DSL. but this is qworst. standard operating procedure for the bottomfeeder of telco's.
15% of 40mb and 20mb is 6mbps down and 3mbps up is what you're giving up because they still want to cheap out and use tired old PPPoE/PPPoA.
it'll be still distance sensitive so don't think just because you have 1.5mbps qwest DSL that you can pick up the phone and upgrade to 40/20!

It's not PPPoX that kills most of that 15% (though it does shave off a bit). The big problem is ATM...that's where the big performance losses are, because ATM cells are 53 bytes and nothing else is that length.