Firm That Tests ISP Meters: ISP Meters Aren't Accurate → Re: Funny

It might also have something to do with who at the ISP actually cares about the meters. I'm willing to bet that, while upper management and the investors may care, the technical people probably see the whole thing as one huge waste of time, and some of them may actually hate the idea, since they know what a big ripoff it is. In a situation like that, it isn't surprising that the meters under-report, and no one but the suits have any interest in fixing them.

It's also a money thing. One AT&T insider told me there's a lot of hemming and hawing over spending enough to get the meters to work properly. They want the revenue from metered billing, but they don't want to spend the case required to ensure they really work right. They know regulators won't do anything, so it continues.

Sooner or later, someone is going to get a big bill and, instead of going to the FCC, they're going to go to their state Attorney General and to the media, and this whole thing is going to blow up in the ISP's faces. The TV news will have a field day with a story like that, and some aspiring politician is going to want to make political hay by going after them with a vengeance.

I'm sure that's why some ISPs turned to this firm in the first place so they had data suggesting their meters were accurate. Amusing that only 2 out of 7 could pass the test, and that's among the ISPs who could even be bothered to go to an external source to confirm meter accuracy in the first place.

But yeah, I agree. The liability check will eventually come due on this.

Yup one day it's going to blow up and thir faces it's like holding a ticking time bomb until ....

DING. We have a winner.

As a former ISP engineer who did the accounting -- back in the days of dialup where your minutes on the modem was counted, I can tell you first hand there's little love for accuracy. I cared about overbilling people, but not so far as to add the rather complex logic to deal with the rare edge cases of login sessions spanning months. If the customer complained, I'd pull the logs and see it almost immediately -- translating my brain into perl was more work than "grep" and looking at the screen.

I could not give you numbers on the accuracy of the totals, but I can prove they're only ever possibly under reported -- syslog messages get lost, they don't end up duplicated. Other than the rare "over" billing due to a session being counted in the next month, there's no way any "extra time" can appear in the system.

Try not to forget "Vertical Integration" , most of these incumbents own Media as well as the ISP's

Yeah, but that can work both ways. A station owned by Comcast might love the opportunity to poke a stick in AT&T's eye, and the local reporter might not realize that Comcast is doing the same thing.

And so what else is new? Give an inch, take a yard is the motto!

This is really just an example of what is wrong with the very top of our government.

Honestly I think that political parties on the promise of dominant control of the most news media will push to make it illegal to compete with "any" deep pocket large monopoly incumbent. Incumbents will work under the table to set low caps for the majority of America for maximum profit and no regulation/competition. Controlled media will direct the rage of the unhappy directly back on the very people who would dare try and fix these issues as a unbreakable circle of corruption.

The democracy within our republic has been hijacked by a tidal wave of money that now feeds corruption passing laws to make it harder to ever try and stop corruption. My greatest fear is if they destroy access to independent media (they are working on it) to the majority public. There will be next to no way back to the Republic we once had.