Voip > blog
Voip Blog
My broadband: glacially slow (from those guys that rhyme with Farter)
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Ummm...yeah. So today? I got into a knock-down drag-out fight with my internet provider about the lousy Quality of Service (QoS) they've been shoving down the pipe out here. And let me be entirely clear...I know we are living in InstaWorld, when waiting for a bag of microwave popcorn to do its thing is legally defined as an eternity, but honestly, we're shelling out the big bucks for high-speed cable internet access. I don't expect to be connecting at top speeds or anything, but is it too much to ask that performance doesn't drop below prehistoric dialup benchmarks?
Things started out so well when we switched at the beginning of summer. Then my ISP decided to branch out by offering voip internet phone service. The moment their voip plan went live in our area, it's been nothing but a steady downward spiral--at least as far as quality is concerned.
Xbox 360 Live? Forget about it. You'll never make it out alive. Trust me; virtual guns don't kill virtual people--lag does. Want to upload a couple of text files? Hah! Only 30 kb, but it may as well be 30 Mb. No matter how many different ways I tried to upload, the !@#%*&! thing hung up or lost its connection or managed to self-destruct in some strange, unfathomable way that nonetheless completely sideswiped the whole process. And my voip phone? The dial tone just won't stay put. One minute it's there and the next...nothing but dead airspace. Maybe my broadband is being abducted by invisible, time-traveling alien bandwidth vampires. Yeah...that must be it.
Before I got on the phone to complain, I did a quick little broadband speedtest and discovered (among other things) that my connection had a QoS topping out at a whopping 2%. Yes, that's out of 100%. As in, 98% of other connections run circles around this cruddy performance. Miraculously, that figure increased to 69%. It only took an entire day, spent bitching and moaning to tech support. Perhaps we don't have to worry about ISPs blocking sites; we'll just wait for them to expand into voip. Why should they go to all the trouble of blocking specific websites when they can just block them all?
