My ISP in Germany was lending cables from another ISP. They failed to fulfill the "up to 100 MBit/s" claim all the time.
So I set up a Raspberry Pi (which is a bit flawed, as the network interface on the older models was too slow, to begin with) and let it run speedtests every 5 minutes for four weeks.
The graph looked terribly enough that I was allowed to change ISPs without any cancellation period or something else.
Sometimes they care, probably because I blogged and tweeted about it, too.
I gets very confused by marketing terms. But doesn't giving you only 1MBit/s during the whole day counts in "up to 100Mbit/s"? I'm trying to understand the legal merits in a case like this.
Marketing-wise that's true (and probably also from a legal point of view). But they were constantly delivering 25 MBit/s or less, even through the night. That's pretty bad for a large german city.
Not sure if you couldn't "sue" them or whatnot for not fulfilling their part of the contract. I was fine with being able to change, that's where my journey ended.
Point for me was: It's a good idea to collect "evidence" and it sometimes helps to have numbers at hand.
Yes, netzpolitik.org has some info [0], I'll give you a deepl translation of the section:
In the future, performance not in compliance with the contract will be deemed to have occurred if
- 90 percent of the contractually agreed maximum speed is not achieved at least once on each of at least two measurement days, or
- the normally available speed is not achieved in 90 percent of the measurements, or
- the contractually agreed minimum speed is not reached on at least two measurement days respectively.
To be recognized as valid, users must also perform at least 20 measurements on two different days and have their computer connected to the Internet via LAN.
In my case as well this is true. ISPs ( especially when they have monopolies) don't care about this. I live in a town with 8K people and the whole town is sharing an uplink of 300Mbit/s. And we complained a lot but due to how only one single ( governmental) provider have the rights to install cable internet, we're stuck with what we have.
All major UK ISPs abide to Ofcom's Code of Practice which means you have the right to get out of the contract with no consequences if they fail to reach their minimum advertised speed. This feels like a bit of a raw deal, since they get to keep the months payment for a service they failed to provide, but it's better than nothing.
I've actually had pretty good luck with pingplotter's sidekick + mediacom twitter support. The phone people would not give me the time of day, however.
My ISP in Germany was lending cables from another ISP. They failed to fulfill the "up to 100 MBit/s" claim all the time.
So I set up a Raspberry Pi (which is a bit flawed, as the network interface on the older models was too slow, to begin with) and let it run speedtests every 5 minutes for four weeks.
The graph looked terribly enough that I was allowed to change ISPs without any cancellation period or something else.
Sometimes they care, probably because I blogged and tweeted about it, too.