Out of Control®

Do you ever really get the advertised bandwidth from your ISP? Read on to see how far off Videotron's advertised bandwidth was compared to what I actually got.

Three weeks ago, my ISP Videotron called one day as a courtesy call, to see if everything was okay. I told him over all yes, I am happy with their service. While I was on the phone with them I treated myself to an early present and got the Extreme High Speed Internet connection from Videotron which is listed as being 10Mbps/900Kbps for $64.95 a month with unlimited bandwidth. Currently I had what Videotron called High-Speed Internet which is listed as being 7Mbps/820Kbps for $54.95 a month with a cap of 20GB/10GB. Having checked my usage online, I saw that I never came too close to my cap so bandwidth was not an issue here.

During the week between Christmas and New Years, I like to take a few days to clean up my office and test a few things out, that normally I would not pay any attention to. One such item that popped up was about the actual throughput of my connection to the internet. Especially now since I was paying for Extreme High Speed. A friend on iChat told me a little story about how he just realized after two years, that even though his connection to the Internet was supposed to be 8Mbps he was only getting 5Mbps because his router was capped his throughput. He removed his router and poof, he suddenly started to get what he was paying for. This is where my fun begins.

Hmm, I thought. I am paying for 10Mbps from Videotron in Montreal, let me check what I am actually getting. I hopped on over to SpeakEasy's speed test and tried all the cities they list. Not one went over 5700Kbps. Well I thought, they are from different cities, perhaps it is a slow day, or perhaps my router was limiting me. With a few small changes in wiring, I quickly connected my computer directly to my Videotron modem, and for good measure, restarted my modem and computer. I then went back to SpeakEasy to see my incredible jump in speed which I had been missing out on. Strangely enough, there was no speed improvement. The fastest connection I could get was New York at around 5700Kbps... again. To get a better idea of my true speed I figure it was best to try Videotron's own speed test. For sure I should be able to get closer to my promised 10Mbps speeds. Once again, I could only obtain around 5500Kbps top speed.

At this point I figured Videotron had just not switched whatever they were supposed to switch, to allow me to get my true speed improvements. So I called up technical support at Videotron. Being a holiday I did have to wait a few minutes for a tech to come online. I explained my problem and was told he could verify everything right away. After about a minute technical support came back online and said everything looked fine and that I could just be experiencing a slow Internet day. I told him of the tests that I had performed including using Videotron's own speed test. The tech found this a little unusual and asked me to download a 10MB file from their own FTP server. Supposedly this file should download at close to the full 10Mbps speed I was promised with this Extreme High Speed Internet package. I pointed my browser at their FTP site and downloaded the 10MB file. The tech was correct, it was downloading faster. I was now able to get a full 7300Mbps top speed. But this was still not close to the 10Mbps or 10240Kbps top speed I was promised. The tech sounded a but stumped and asked me to wait while he asked a level 2 tech if there were any issues with the internet in my area. After about 2 minutes the Videotron tech came back and told me everything was normal in my area. As a side note, in those two minutes I had changed my ethernet cable just to be sure I was not experiencing a bad cable. No difference.

At this point the tech told me that there was really nothing more he could do, and that my top speed was pretty typical for my type of connection. Pretty typical I thought? So I said "So you are telling me that with Extreme High Speed Interent which is supposed to be 10Mbps, I will only be able to get around 5Mbps?" The tech responded with, "It looks like it." I explained to the tech that I saw no point in paying for the Extreme High Speed Internet connection when I got the same thing from the High Speed connection. The techs only answer was "But you do get unlimited bandwidth from the Exteme High speed."

Anyhow, to wrap the rest of the story up, I asked to be transferred to Videotron's Customer Support where I quickly explained the situation to them, and downgraded my account to the regular High Speed Internet package.

Before posting my story I wanted to wait a day and try my speed tests again. Strangely enough, now that I am back on the normal High Speed Internet package, my speeds are exactly the same as they were when I was on the Extreme High Speed package. With the exception of my uploads, they have dropped from around 802Kbps down to 790Kbps, so no great loss here.

The whole point of me writing this, is to get you to check your High Speed or Extreme High speed connection and see if you are really getting what you are paying for. If you are paying for Extreme High Speed then you should actually get that Extreme High Speed, and not fifty percent of the cap. These tests will also help you to ensure that you don't have a router sitting between you and your cable modem that is slowing you down unnecessarily.

Something that pops to mind right now is: Is there any type of check in place to ensure that ISP's give you what they tell you in their ads? That is, if they tell you that you will get 10Mbps, is there any legal body that will check that they are actually giving you that speed? Perhaps the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) checks those things here in Canada? Or maybe the Competition Bureau of Canada covers this?

Here is my most recent results from my speed test from Videotron's own test server: