Of course, the first logical thing to do is test the connection speed and of course the best known way to do that is speedtest.net. When I use this I get pretty much the advertised result: 95 down and 11 up. But the user experience feels about the same as before. So it makes me wonder if I'm being Volkswagoned here. I wonder if Suddenlink is monitoring for connection to well known speed test sites and then if so they crank up my performance to that which they agreed to provide but then when not at these sites they just give me whatever happens to be available.
So I tried another less known site that was recommended as being accurate by DigitialTrends.com Best of the Internet. The new site is called SpeedOf.me. As you can see from below, not only was the measured performance far below expectation, it was also choppy and inconstant (which is in line with my user experience).
One test is not conclusive but now my suspicions are raised and I will be looking into this further. I smell a potential scandal here.
Not that an ISP wouldn't white list a speed testing site, but speedof.me is not very consistent. So far, the most accurate I've found was Netflix fast.com. Of course, due to its notoriety, it'd be a prime candidate for white listing. Again, average over several tests, like ipv6-test.com and dslreports.com. Given the common practice of obfuscating inflation by shrinking the amount while the price remains the same, it wouldn't be out of the question. Especially when a fee is charged to improve the experience of an artificially degraded service, like tolls, the stuff of robber barons
ReplyDelete