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AT&T Government Network The Internet United States

AT&T Drops Out of FCC Speed-Test Program So It Can Hide Bad Results 53

Posted by BeauHD from the speed-tests dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T doesn't want its home Internet speeds to be measured by the Federal Communications Commission anymore, and it already convinced the FCC to exclude its worst speed-test results from an annual government report. "AT&T this year told the commission it will no longer cooperate with the FCC's SamKnows speed test," The Wall Street Journal wrote in an investigative report titled "Your Internet provider likely juiced its official speed scores." AT&T already convinced the FCC to exclude certain DSL test results from last year's Measuring Broadband America report. The reports are based on the SamKnows testing equipment installed in thousands of homes across the U.S.

"AT&T was dismayed at its report card from a government test measuring Internet speeds" and thus "pushed the Federal Communications Commission to omit unflattering data on its DSL Internet service from the report," the Journal wrote. "In the end, the DSL data was left out of the report released late last year, to the chagrin of some agency officials," the Journal wrote. "AT&T's remaining speed tiers notched high marks." "AT&T developed a best-in-class tool to measure its consumer broadband services," the company said in a statement provided to Ars. "This tool measures performance on all AT&T IP broadband technologies and is more accurate, versatile, and transparent. For these and other reasons, our tool provides better and more useful information to our customers."
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AT&T Drops Out of FCC Speed-Test Program So It Can Hide Bad Results More

AT&T Drops Out of FCC Speed-Test Program So It Can Hide Bad Results

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  • I trust them as far as I can throw them. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Friday December 13, 2019 @06:15PM (#59517416) Homepage Journal

    "Don't use any objective and unbiased tests of our performance! The test WE wrote with an obvious agenda is the only one you should trust!"

    Yeah, right.

    • AT&T's problem is still their widespread DSL. Where I am, thats still the best they offer.

      Its tiny little twisted pair vs bulky coax vs fiber and obviously coax and fiber are both much better. Their significant DSL market drags their numbers down and the only solution for them is running more last mile fiber, which is expensive anywhere outside of urban and dense suburban. Sparse suburban and rural are just not financially viable.
      • It's expensive? Let's fine executives and former executives until we come up with the money.
      • Yet they will still fight tooth and nail to keep any municipality from running their own line. In a lot of these small, rural communities, it's an investment in their viable future to invest in data infrastructure to attract companies and workers or even to keep the young people living in these communities. But the teleco industry has been fighting any effort to make this happen and not even making the investment themselves.

        We've been allowing these companies to collect surcharges for decades to support ru

      • Their significant DSL market drags their numbers down and the only solution for them is running more last mile fiber, which is expensive anywhere outside of urban and dense suburban

        Huh? You would think if that is the problem that the Federal government would have stepped in and help defray some of the cost? I wonder why they haven't done that? Oh wait, the Government already did [huffpost.com] something like that and the ISPs just put it in their pocket instead of doing the thing they said they would.

        AT&T's problem is still their widespread DSL

        No AT&T's problem is AT&T.

        • As a former customer of ATT DSL at multiple sites, and a current fiber subscriber, their DSL has always been dog dick. The only time I ever had quality DSL was when I lived 500 feet from a central office. Their fiber is legit. The equipment is shit, I have a Pace router that is super unreliable, but the speeds are legitimately 930-970 mbps up/down connected directly to the router. There are actually ways to fake the router and use your own equipment, it appears, so I'm going to be looking into that...
      • Twisted pair? Lucky. Everywhere I've had the displeasure of using AT&T DSL, it's been over conventional telephone lines that had been around for many decades.

        • Twisted pair? Lucky. Everywhere I've had the displeasure of using AT&T DSL, it's been over conventional telephone lines that had been around for many decades.

          Convention phone lines are twisted pair.

        • And it works best the closer you are to the phone box. That's why they'll never tell you how good your service will be until you give them an address (which means you get on their marketing spam list).

      • AT&T's problem is still their widespread DSL. Where I am, thats still the best they offer.

        Its tiny little twisted pair vs bulky coax vs fiber and obviously coax and fiber are both much better. Their significant DSL market drags their numbers down and the only solution for them is running more last mile fiber, which is expensive anywhere outside of urban and dense suburban. Sparse suburban and rural are just not financially viable.

        The last mile of coax just to be rid of the DSL is much cheaper than fiber. Fiber is delicate can only pull on it so hard, need to run out figure eights when the tension get too great. Needs to be lashed, needs to be spliced, etc etc. Coax is way better than DSL and much cheaper than fiber.

      • AT&T's problem is still their widespread DSL. Where I am, thats still the best they offer.

        Its tiny little twisted pair vs bulky coax vs fiber and obviously coax and fiber are both much better. Their significant DSL market drags their numbers down and the only solution for them is running more last mile fiber, which is expensive anywhere outside of urban and dense suburban. Sparse suburban and rural are just not financially viable.

        The thing is, where I live, right on the bleeding edge of the urban growth boundry, sparse urban got fiber *first*, some years ago, and urban areas, several miles to the east of us, still only have DSL over twisted pair. The reason, we are continually told, is that it's too expensive to wire up urban areas. Especially older buildings where they may not even know where the existing cable runs are. This is why, (again, we are told,) that for downtown they were trying to do broadband over wireless a couple

        • My house is located less than 1/2 mile from the existing cable backbone, yet Spectrum (or Time Warner or whatever they are calling themselves this year) will not even give me a price to bring the service to me. The only answer can get is âoewe do not currently service that address âoe. I know that you not service that address. How much would it cost me for you to get service to that address? âoeI am sorry sir, according to my computer, we do not currently service that address. âoe. Lathe

      • And it's often all you can get. It's what my mother users because there isn't an alternative. It's not great but its sooo much better than the dialup she had before and the borrowing off of a neighbors spotty wifi (with permission). She doesn't have cable, and not the income to pay for cable internet offerings. DSL exists because the infrastructure is pre-existing. Even cable companies make do with cable that was laid decades ago, very few companies are laying out fiber to the neighborhood. They know t

    • Owned by the same people who brought you the Volkswagen ...

    • when i lived in downtown dallas i lived close enough to the att national hq that if the wind was right i could piss off my balcony and hit their building. the best they would offer me was 17/0.75 dsl.
      • I used to have an office across the street from the Terremark NAP of the west. They peer like 20 different fiber carriers in the building. It is one of the most connected facilities in the US afaik. I could get 768k DSL there, but it would only do 384k on the days it would sync. It was pitiful.

    • Their best-in-class measuring. Software is the equivalent of changing the face of the spedometer in your car. Thats amazing! You went from 0 to 60 in just under 2 seconds!! And you managed to still be within legal limits driving through school zones at the same time!! Amazing! Just amazing!

  • They're speaking code (Score:3)

    by Guyle ( 79593 ) on Friday December 13, 2019 @06:43PM (#59517484)

    "This tool measures performance on all AT&T IP broadband technologies..."

    That's AT&T speak for "Everything that's U-verse." I guess these days that means their higher-speed internet offerings since the U-verse brand kinda went away. If it's old school frame based DSL, it doesn't count.
    (Source: I used to work for them.)

    • i'm happy with my 50Mb non-AT&T DSL they offered me 100Mb but i'm just a little too far when they came to set it up unfortunately

    • "This tool measures performance on all AT&T IP broadband technologies..."

      That's AT&T speak for "Everything that's U-verse." I guess these days that means their higher-speed internet offerings since the U-verse brand kinda went away. If it's old school frame based DSL, it doesn't count.
      (Source: I used to work for them.)

      Does AT&T even *have* what we would consider high speed internet offerings to homes? Everyone I know who is unlucky enough to have AT&T as their ISP is stuck with 1Mbps DSL. (And often measured at below 1Mbps in real throughput.)

      • They do have Fiber offerings but... yeah I'm not sure how much stock to put in that, given how limited a deployment it is.
      • No. Currently they do have broadband according to the FCC who under Pai wants to lower the definition of “broadband” so that it under his “leadership”, more Americans have access to “broadband”. And I am being sarcastic with all the terms in quotes.

      • Their uVerse used vDSL which can be much faster. It's often fiber to the neighborhood which is generally good enough for high speed internet. They don't call it uVerse anymore, it's all just internet now on their site (or maybe high speed internet). Even back when I had generic ADSL from AT&T it was 3Mbps for me, because I was relatively close to the phone box.

  • The thing is, (Score:5, Interesting)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Friday December 13, 2019 @07:06PM (#59517536) Journal

    I know people who are unlucky enough to live in areas that only have AT&T u-verse DSL available. I've done independent speed tests in homes in the Sacramento area and the Livermore area, and the results are horrible. Where other services start in the tens of Mbps and go up from there, AT&T scores hover around 1 Mbps, sometimes barely over, but often a little under. (As in 760 -- 790 Kbps.) This seems primarily due to using existing, often outrageously elderly phone lines as their internet infrastructure.

    As far as I have been able to measure, AT&T's internet service really is consistently horrible by today's standards. It's what you'd expect back in the 1990s, when early DSL, as poor as that might be, was still significantly faster than dialup, your only other choice at the time.

    I can see why AT&T would not want those scores publicized. It's much cheaper to try to convince users that their 25-year-old throughput is a modern internet service, than it would be to lay new infrastructure, and, you know, actually PROVIDE a modern internet service.

    I'm on record as saying I'd take any ISP over Comcast. There is, I'm pained to admit it, one exception -- I'd take Comcast over AT&T.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      For years, I was stuck with only AT&T as a internet service provider in the Atlanta Georgia area. I paid for 3 Mb service for 5 years or more as the only internet option other than dial up. I at most would get 500kb. Most times an average of 200kb. 2010 or 2011 I was informed by AT&T that they were going to upgrade my service to 6Mb for $30 more a month. I did and was getting about 1.5Mb to 2.0Mb as an average. It was 2016 when they wanted to upgrade me to U-Verse 18Mb and I think it was another $50

      • Wow. All I can say is, I'm really sorry you had to endure such crap service for so long. I really REALLY don't understand AT&T's business model. They still act like they are the only service in town. Admittedly, in some areas they still are. And that's absolutely inexcusable in a first world country.

        For a company to be substantially worse than Comcast is saying a lot.

        I was getting solid, measurable 3 Mbps DSL from Speakeasy over Verizon's twisted pair back in 2001. Shortly after, cable modem becam

    • I know people who are unlucky enough to live in areas that only have AT&T u-verse DSL available. I've done independent speed tests in homes in the Sacramento area and the Livermore area, and the results are horrible.

      Pac bell was well known to never bother to replace copper, they'd just patch it forever. SBC continued the tradition, and so has ATT. That copper was garbage two telcos ago.

    • We get Comcast and AT&T in my area. I've dealt with AT&T twice now and both times the experience was an order of magnitude worse than whatever I get from Comcast. Everything from horrible uptime to their box (which I believe they forced, can't remember) crapping out constantly to their customer "service." Ugh. Comcast has been pretty average by comparison. There was the whole throttling thing back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but I think they eventually stopped doing that. I haven't really had

  • ... more useful information to our customers ...

    How is knowing the speed over 'the last mile', less useful? It doesn't matter how beautiful your backbone is if the data 'pipe' connecting me, is the size of figurative spaghetti.

    This is the US government protecting corporate propaganda: evil government indeed, and it's not the first time. There's the obvious global-warming denial, energy-sector shills; Bush junior and Trump. Plus, the government hiding the truth whenever the rich and powerful are caught in anti-working-class activities.

    Something

  • Us or the telcos? Sorry, stupid question.

  • I've had at&t gigabit fiber for about 6 months now, and it is absolutely fantastic. Latency and jitter are just as good as the enterprise offerings, I haven't had any downtime in the past 6 months, and I get 500+ Mb/s speeds to most speedtest.com sites in California. But yes, the copper based U-verse really does suck, and customer support is terrible across the consumerland products. Though I did get lucky and got a really great installer.

  • They are both disgusting.
  • American Telephone and Telegraph, what speed to you expect??
  • I don't have too much of a problem with leaving their DSL speeds out of the broadband speed test as long as they leave the DSL areas out of the broadband coverage areas.
  • Personal anecdote: I've been crappy throughput on AT&T U-Verse. The Ookla speedtest was showing 3-7Mbps; the tool available on the AT&T U-Verse support site was showing 24Mbps. The funny thing is, the AT&T tool took zero time to run; I think the actual code is printf "%s\n", SpeedCustomerPaysFor;

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