bout time some did some thing to these vultures . Multi million dollar fines is the only thing that will fix this. But I would love to see fraud charges brought against management as they sought to use fraud to make money .
US cable giant tries to wriggle out of 'crap ISP' legal battle now that net neutrality is dead
Charter still has to answer for selling New Yorkers short on their internet packages, a judge has decided, rejecting the cable giant's argument that the repeal of net neutrality rules in the US means the case is moot. Judge O. Peter Sherwood issued 26 pages of No [PDF] in a lawsuit that has been running for over a year. …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 07:28 GMT John Smith 19
"Charter knew that it wasn't able to offer the speeds it advertised,"
Note that word.
Knew.
Not (for example) "may have difficulty meeting" or " will be challenging without investment" but knew they could not meet their claims and instead of investing to better meet them actively hid the fact and engaged in deceptive behavior (and investment) to do so.
That's what makes it fraud.
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Tuesday 20th February 2018 21:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?
Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?
It looks like the NY state attorney is trying to clock as many pro-consumer points as he possibly can. While I would love to give him the benefit of the doubt, I suspect he is simply gunning for a higher office.
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Tuesday 20th February 2018 21:42 GMT Nate Amsden
When is the bandwidth good enough?
Pretty much all consumer broadband ISPs in the U.S. anyway advertise speeds "up to". These aren't committed rate lines(even if they were, there are still caveats). So I am curious if there is any guidelines as to what the speed must actually be, or what the over commit rate is allowed on a given pipe ? (as far as I know there is no such rules or guidelines).
Certainly it's reasonable to expect during peak times at a minimum you probably won't reach your peak speeds if there are a lot of other active users on the same network segment. But dragging everyone's average speed to below say 30-40% of their peak speed isn't acceptable either.
So what is a reasonable level of over subscription for consumer broadband?
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Tuesday 20th February 2018 22:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: When is the bandwidth good enough?
Of course, but there's other tomfoolery going on here as well.
For one, they were aware of customers being oversold plans that they didn't have the kit to support. I'm guessing the 200-300 plans mentioned, but routers that only ran at 100. Looking at my current router, there's nothing on it that indicates its speed, but it's blindingly obvious to a techie it isn't going to hit 200mbps.. there are only 4 pins in the ethernet port!
Would Joe Public realise this? Unlikely. Doesn't bother me - my VDSL would max out at 80mbps - but if I'd been encouraged to take up 200mbps service, and had been paying for it, I'd be pretty miffed to say the least!
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 14:40 GMT Just Enough
Re: When is the bandwidth good enough?
If I know you are paying so much for "up to" speed X, and then sell you a plan for twice your current price for "up to" speed X*2, when I know for a fact that you cannot possibly get speed X*2, and only occasionally even get speed X, then that's fraud. Plain and simple.
Worrying about the "up to"s is beside the point.
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Tuesday 20th February 2018 22:55 GMT The Dogs Meevonks
Please Screw Virgin Media Too
They're no better than 'Charter' in my opinion, over selling services that they know their network can't meet, over subscribing users in the same areas causing massive contention ratios and ridiculously low speeds. Blocking and throttling encrypted traffic such as VPN's and so forth, prioritising traffic to sites like speedtest, but not the Netflix fast.com so you get wildly different results done just seconds apart... and then trying to upsell you to a faster package.
I signed up to the last April.. I've been arguing with them since Nov about the speed issue that went to utter shit... and in some cases the 100mb service was registering just 68kbps... But rarely ever gets above 20Mbps and it crawls to a halt if you attempt to use a VPN at all (required for a lot of work from home types like me).
Contract is up in April, and I'm trying to get out of it early due to the shite service.
They need taking to task and fining heavily to such a degree that it makes it far to costly to do ever again... Because that's the only thing these 'screw the customer' companies understand... Bring them to their knees financially, revoke their licences. Force them to be honest or force them out of business.
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 16:02 GMT travellingman_us
Re: Please Screw Virgin Media Too
yep -- packet shaping/QoS is a huge issue.
I use VPN for work, and also for some personal things (such as region shifting so I can see my LEGAL and PAID FOR subscriptions to european media services)
I'm supposedly on a 200Mbps plan (COMCAST) that speedtest reports as between 120 & 250Mbps (ok
so far -- I recognize that 60% is low, but it's mostly in the 80%+ range).
When I use VPN, that same speedtest returns rates around 10%-20% of the non VPN traffic. I've run speedtest on two computers simultaneously -- one VPN, one not. the difference is stark.
My personal VPN provider is not that slow.
My CORPORATE VPN provider should impose, at worst, a 50% slowdown.
But Comcast denies their packet shaping is at fault and simply shift blame to my VPN providers.
As consumers we can do nothing (our choices are hugely limited). We need our AGs to act, so kudos to Schneiderman and his team for pursuing this to aggresively
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 03:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Oh, how I wish someone would hang Frontier for now claiming 6Mbps DSL when you're lucky to get 2.5Mbps. And that's only at 3 AM in the middle of a very dry August."
You are going to have to get in line behind their creditors, as Frontier has a massive debt and steadily declining revenue. The debt is described by some as "insurmountable": https://seekingalpha.com/article/4088846-frontier-communications-uninvestable
And you'd have to get in line behind the Minnesota AG: http://kstp.com/business/minnesota-public-utilities-commission-asks-attorney-general-and-commerce-department-investigate-frontier-communications/4793980/
You'd better finding a new ISP ASAP.
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 03:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
wrong pig analogy
"A related presentation acknowledged that this approach was similar to 'putting lipstick on a pig.'"
Umm, no cable dudes. The correct analogy would be "selling a pig in a poke". You didn't dress up a pig, you demonstrated one product and then delivered another.
Been going on forever in the industry. We had a local cable ISP many moons ago that was one of the bleeding edge cable ISPs. Their lead cheerleader/salesman talked up how you could get something like 50 Meg service from them (keep in mind, this was back when 38.8K dialup was typical, and 56K was just showing up). We toured their headend during an open house event and noticed that their cable head end box had a single 10 Base-T Ethernet port to connect to the network.
Yes... 10 base-T, as in just a step better than 10 Base-2 coax . I think it even went into an Ethernet hub, not a switch.
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 06:11 GMT Omarosa
AT&T is much worse than Charter and the rest
Two years ago I had AT&T was my ISP to whom I paid monthly for 16 Mb/s (I believe). At peak business hours, I was getting 3 - 4 Mb/s, rarely I would get more than 10 Mb/s internet speed. To make a long story short, AT&T was throttling data speeds. When I complained to the Ohio Attorney General about being ripped off by AT&T, AT&T told the Attorney General's office that "electrical interference" is what causing my data speed to slow down, which was hogwash. The current article - had it been published a few years ago - would have helped me prove the Ohio Attorney General that indeed I was right, AT&T was cheating its customers deliberately.
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 09:55 GMT rh587
Recruited Sam Knows or Games Sam Knows
The ISP even recruited the same company the FCC hires to test internet speeds – Sam Knows – to build out a parallel testing system with the same white boxes ... It had 1,200 such boxes distributed across its network and, according to the lawsuit, specifically manipulated its systems to give faster speeds to testers using readings from these devices.
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"We recommend increasing over-provisioning our modem speeds to around 20 per cent to drive our Sam Knows scores > 100 per cent and then to market that we deliver more than promised speeds," one executive wrote in an email.
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Charter also identified FCC testers, made sure they had the most up-to-date modems, and told its call-center staff to give them the "VIP treatment."
I'm unclear, is El Reg stating that Sam Knows were complicit in the fraud - i.e. selling ratings - or that Charter gamed the Sam Knows system by identifying Sam Knows white boxes/testers and giving preferential service to those users?
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 11:07 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Recruited Sam Knows or Games Sam Knows
Charter gamed the Sam Knows system by identifying Sam Knows white boxes/testers and giving preferential service to those users
This. Sounds amazingly like what the car industry (and the computer games industry) did - detect when performance is being tested and slant the results.
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 16:17 GMT Nimby
putting lipstick on a pig
That is such a derogatory phrase! I cannot believe that Vulture Central would even dare to repeat it! It should definitely be changed to "putting unrequired but socially expected (sigh) visual enhancement on a pig." Because it is important these days to be politically correct.
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 18:12 GMT IGnatius T Foobar
Regulation FAIL
Attempts to regulate connectivity are always doomed to fail because telecom technology moves faster than the regulatory process. This problem could have been solved (in the US) in 1984 with the divestiture of AT&T, if they had done it correctly. They could still do it now if they wanted to.
Made simply:
The only regulation that is needed, is one barring providers of last-mile fiber/copper from providers of *any* service -- voice, data, video, or whatever -- on the network. Then there's no such thing as local or long distance, voice or data, nothing of that sort. Anyone who wants to provide network services simply obtains the last mile of copper or fiber from one of the two or three competing last-mile providers in each service area.
At that point there's no need to police the network operators, since the network operators won't have monopoly lock-in power. Any operator who tries to be "non-neutral" will simply be rejected in the marketplace.
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Wednesday 21st February 2018 21:28 GMT SImon Hobson
Re: Regulation FAIL
Attempts to regulate connectivity are always doomed to fail because telecom technology moves faster than the regulatory process
Except in this case, we see regulation happening without needing rules updated for the latest tech. Specifically, this case isn't about regulating what the provider provides, but simply regulating that they supply what the customer bought.
Ie, much the same as prosecuting a petrol station owner for tweaking the metering screw to over-report what's been delivered - but resetting it to be correct whenever anyone comes to check. Went to a talk a few years ago by a local Trading Standards officer - he said the very first thing they look at when checking a petrol station is to make sure their seals are still intact.
if the political will is there, a lot of "high tech" issues can be dealt without "high tech" laws.
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