Customers getting burned by slow Internet speeds
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SEATTLE -- We live in a high-speed age, but a Problem Solvers investigation found Internet providers, on average, are failing to give customers the speed they're paying for.
But there is a way for customers to get faster speeds or get their money back, and sometimes both.
Steve Whitford and his family are CenturyLink customers and say their Internet is running at a snail's pace.
"It made me mad enough to want to do something about it. I'm old and I'm cranky and I've got all kinds of time," Whitford said.
In fact, Whitford's entire neighborhood on the Key Peninsula is having serious Internet problems.
"Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. And when it don't, that's it," said CenturyLink customer Pete Peterman.
CenturyLink officials say a recent upgrade should fix the problem, but connections are so bad right now that some customers can't even pay their CenturyLink bill online.
The Whitfords say their incoming Internet speed is just 288 kilobytes per second, despite the fact they're paying for a higher speed.
"768 high speed Internet right there," said Heather Whitford Abee. "That's not what we get."
Tim Grigar is CenturyLink's general manager in Western Washington. KOMO News asked him if the Whitfords should be getting 768 kilobytes per second.
"Uh, no," he said. "It wouldn't necessarily without making a change in the network to enable it."
He means customers have to call to get someone to throw a switch, and customers don't often call when there's a problem.
"But we certainly do not want any customers paying for something they're not getting. That's not our intent," Grigar said.
The problem of buying high speed Internet and getting slow speed Internet is a problem not just on the Key Peninsula, but a lot of places around the country from a lot of different Internet service providers.
A government report found Internet service providers delivered only 87 percent of advertised speeds in 2011.
This year that number jumped to 96 percent, while CenturyLink remained at about 90 percent of advertised speeds.
Experts say customers shouldn't always believe it when Internet providers blame computers for slower speeds. They advice customers to test their incoming speed themselves online and go to their provider armed with facts.
That's exactly what the Whitford family did.
When confronted with the facts,. Whitford said the company gave him a $149 credit.
Grigar also said CenturyLink will review customer bills and consider upgrading their services without increasing their bill.
Find out which Internet service providers failed to meet their advertised speeds here.
I checked my download speed last night at 1AM & again at 2PM today & both times my download speed was only .44 when it should have been 1.5. When I called CenturyLink and told then I was paying for 1.5 but only getting 1/3 of the speed I paid for, I was told since I signed up for a special internet price I could not get any credits for the 18 months of very slow speed. I think the companies that charge you for one speed but deliver all the time a much slower speed should be fined & customers given a credit of double the amount because the companies are taking our money & not giving us much of anything in return. I do not have a warm glow after being screwed by CenturyLink - would you?
768/128, amazing. DSL was at that speed in 2001 when I first got it.
Out here on the Key Peninsula (Lakebay) Centurylink offers DSL up to 10Mbps (Max) for residential customers.
I upgraded from 1.5Mbps to 10Mbps.... What a joke.
I constantly check my bandwidth, the most I ever get is 5.5Mbps and my upload is 0.76Mbps and that's late at night.
Come morning when businesses start useing the internet, my bandwidth drops to 2.0Mbps or less.
Centurylinks answer is: "Copper wire versus fiber optic cables, and internet traffic"
Seems that the most you can get with copper wire is 10Mbps, but with fiber optics the bandwidth is much higher.
Out here in the boonies (Key Pen) ISP is limited, no major competition, (Comcast).... Another joke.
If you want faster speed, then NO copper wires.
I don't see Centurylink ever giving me a fiber optic link, (To lay optic cable to my house)
But what I would like to see is Centurylink give a commitment, that if you pay for 10Mbps, you get 10Mbps, no matter where you live.
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Maybe I've just been lucky all these years, but I have never had any issue with Comcast. I pay for 15 mb down and usually get 30 when I'm downloading something. I never have to wait for anything to load....it's seamless. My cable modem has died 2 times and each time I got a new one without any hassle, and got a bill credit for the time I was down. Century Link? 1.5 was all I had when I was forced to go with them and I swear I was not getting any faster speeds than 56K dialup via NoCharge. They didn't care, didn't want to fix it, and told me it was my problem.
@dg54321 I guarantee you are not getting 30Mbps. The server on the other end that you are downloading from has to support an upload speed of at least that; and that connection is also supporting many other clients besides you. I'm not talking about the ISP, I am talking about the server you are downloading from. Speeds of 30Mbps UP (not down) are incredibly expensive. A typical DS3 connection many large companies use (symetrical 30/45Mbps) can cost from $2700 - $7000 per month.
You can do a speed test on any speed test website, but what happens is they send a file to your connection; usually an icmp or "ping" packet, and it is replied to, or sent back to them. They calculate the time it took and base your speed on this. Comcast may have your connection averaged at that speed but you are not downloading at that speed.
Dont be fooled by Comcast; I have two internet connections by them at home; residential and business class. I have to say, anyone with residential is better off. Business class is smoke and mirrors, but I need it because they will reset your connection if they detect you downloading large amounts of data on residential. The closest thing you that can guarantee your connection speed is metro-ethernet.
I have had to call Century Link, literally, fifty times (that's 50, and that's not an overestimate) in the last year and a half because our internet was running at several hundred kilobytes under the speed we pay for (sometimes down to dial-up speed). Each time they've said 'Oh, we had to reduce your connection speed to keep it stable, but let us reset it and it'll be fine' and then literally, seconds later, my speed is back up to the 1.3-1.5mbps that I pay for. A few weeks later, and they've reduced it again, as if I I wouldn't notice. Makes me SO MAD, gah! The problem is, we're 'grandfathered' in at a price substantially cheaper than what we could get through Comcast.Â
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 @Benjamin Mead, Comcast Business Class This is a forum not a Comcast advertising customer service board... besides consumers for home do not need a business line since Comcast dropped their 250gb limit monitoring pending 'review'
 @Freespeech  @Benjamin Mead, Comcast Business Class Yeah but Comcast is like a Hydra or Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. The residential side is still crap. They still have the 250gb limit, but now it's in the open. Plus they still throttle people and fake TCP/IP disconnect requests impersonating your computer when you're doing large file transfers and the community network in that area is busy. Don't like it? There's no contract and no QOS agreement.
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With business class you do pay a little more but everything is guaranteed. And the nice thing about a business connection in a residential area is that when the local network gets busy, all the residential people around you get throttled down to preserve your connection.
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Oh, and for tech support you actually get IT trained people instead of morons reading from a script.Â
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I wish comcast business would separate into its own company.Â
I have Clear. Â It's o.k. Â That's all I can say about it. Â
Centry Link never did do anything about the slow speeds when I had them. When I canceled they wanted to give me all these great deals to stay a customer and I refused. I had the same problems these folks do and it never did get any better. They told me I could get faster speeds if I paid more but since I wasn't even getting near the speeds I was already paying for I didn't see the point. Centry Link is out dated and a waste of money.
This is why comcast residential does not have contracts, because they can't guarantee decent speeds. Don't like it? Cancel and go somewhere else. Oh wait, you can't due to local monopolies, sorry about that, please send a note to comcast's local lobbyists.Â
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If you have to go with comcast, get their business class internet. It comes with a contract and even residential customers can buy it. Then if you wake up at 3 am and your net is down or slow, call them up and they have to have a truck rolling within 2 hours to fix it. It's a little bit more but it's worth it.
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No matter who you go with, get a CONTRACT that spells out specific Quality of Service Agreement standards.Â
 @NorthwestEconomist paying over $ 100 a month for the added boost on business class si a waste of money... mine always runs when I need it the one time I had an issue all I did was reset my modem... sheesh 20mb with boost to 30 is fine and your lucky if some sites let you download at a faster rate than that...paying for business class in a residence is for suckers unless your a business then you would be required to do so as that violates your TOS...
 @Freespeech Wow, you must have been ripped off big time. My business class is 50$ a month for 12 down 6 up, and my latency to Seattle from over 40 miles away is less than 10.Â
" 'It made me mad enough to want to do something about it. I'm old and I'm cranky and I've got all kinds of time,' Whitford said."
That just made my morning for some reason.
p.s. I hear people from other areas complain, but Comcast has been great in my area. There have been occasional slow downs, but they have all been short lived.
Color me thoroughly unsurprised that this is referencing CenturyDink.
 @Mikeftm DSL if you want fast go to cable and be ready to pay... you want cheap it performs cheap...
Yeah, I have problems with them, but I'd rather blame it on Internet Explorer since I don't seem to have these issues with Chrome.
Frontier Fios delivers. I ran speedtest and right now I'm getting 25.61 Mbps download and 25.88 Mbps upload. That speed is using a hard-wired connection. When I use wireless I only get 13.40 Mbps download and 9.67 Mbps upload.
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I used to have Comcast, but got tired of their slow speeds, poor customer service and frequent rate increases.
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The biggest negative of going with Frontier is that they do not offer cable TV, which is ok since I prefer Netflix movies online over cable, and a faster internet connection is important if you want to watch streaming vidoe over the Internet. Recently, I purchased a 30-dollar antennae at Costco which is able to pick up 35 free HD channels!
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Note: I do not work for Frontier, Comcast or Costco. I am just a happy Frontier customer.
 @Vinnie Try running your test from this site, it's the one I usually use. I am curious if you get different results. I get 23.78 download & 2.52 upload.
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http://www.speedtest.net/
@Gaikokujin That is the same site I use for speed tests.
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I've been having this problem for quite some time with Centurylink. They keep telling me there's always about a 20% fluctuation. I pay for 1.5 download speed. I have been getting anywhere from .05 to 1.46. Depending on the time of day. They also say that it's because I live too far out of town. And it's been slowing down more and more every month.
@kc1584 The longer you have them, the slower it will get. It's their bait and switch to get you to upgrade to a more expensive plan. How far out you live has nothing to do with it. If the service is there, it's there. It's them controling what they think you need.
As far as alternatives go for Internet access... I personally subscribe to Comcast's "Business Class" service. I know a lot of people don't have Comcast Residential service in their area and have to go with CLink, but if you do, and you have some extra money at the end of the month to spend for it, I recommend getting Comcast service.
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In my experience, I have always had a connection speed above what I was paying for. Currently with the 50/10Mbps service, I receive roughly 6.3MBps (63Mbps) of download bandwidth. The latency for my connection is also fairly low compared to other services, so connections to other systems are a decent bit quicker (referencing the time delay for pages to load in the video interview by KOMO).
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Don't be afraid to use Google, Facebook, etc., to research what services are best in your area. Find a technically inclined teenager and ask them. They should know what they have, what their friends have, and what their friend's friends have...
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*Disclamer: I do not, and have not worked for Comcast ;-)
Unfortunately, a lot of people are paying for DSL service, and receiving sub par bandwidth. With DSL, your telephone line quality will cause big shifts in the amount of bandwidth capable of traversing the lines. A lack of DSL filters on your phones and/or alarm panels can also cause you to lose connectivity, or have sub par bandwidth.
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Make sure that your modem's statistics show good SNR and Atten. You can find a good reference and explanation here: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/16220
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I used to work for a smaller ISP that had customers out on the West coast of Washington. Working with CLink customer service was one of the most time consuming and frustrating things we would do in a day. Part of the problem was the telephone lines and connections out on the coast. They deteriorate quickly with the high concentration of sea salt in the air.
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As far as Century Link service goes... I hope the Qwest employees have rubbed off on them, and their customer service has improved.
Very seldom between 8 and 11 in the evening do I get more than a third of the 1.5 mbs I pay CenturyLink for and often less than a quarter. I've never seen more than 1.31 mps.  After numerous calls over months of the problem, I was told it was a congestion problem and they weren't going to spent the money to correct the problem.  If I had another reasonable option, hills and trees in my neck of the foothills make satellite unworkable, I'd be telling CenturyLink what to do with it.
@My_Thoughts it's the same for us. I call them and they keep telling me faster speeds are going to be available by such and such date and then that date comes and I check back and they say well now it's another date and push it out further. I just called this week and they gave me a date in December...like I'm supposed to buy that being that all the other dates have come and gone and were bogus.
They told me the same thing and that was for several years! Comcast was finally available and I had no problem canceling CL
 @My_Thoughts Boy, I hear that, nothing but trouble with CenturyLink, I also would like another option, I pay for the highest speed possible and get like dial-up speed, I have told them numerous times, there is always an excuse, I have no idea where or who to turn to.