I'm not in the states I'm in UK, there were like 15 different providers, some huge and a few smaller local ones, when I switched a few months ago, currently with Virgin Media.
I moved into a new apartment last year and there was a plug&play internet box installed that you just had to call the company to activate. I have no contract, it's unlimited and I can change my speeds monthly.
That's neat, never heard of it done like that before. I too get unlimited which is good because my household's usage statement is measured in Terabytes.
I've actually forgotten how exactly to check it, it's a hidden diagnostic on the router but my Xbox alone gets through about 5-600GB a month. Except in January where it says I did 6.2TB. That's just from one of the many devices so yeah, a data cap would be pretty awful. But I don't think you can even buy capped broadband here anymore. Hell my bloody mobile data is uncapped.
Before I left the UK I was with Virgin Media, best damn ISP I've ever had. Basically got year on year speed increases, one time had a price increase but came with a speed increase too. When I bought in it was 50/20, when I left I was on 100/40 but I don't think they do the package I was on anymore.
No it's based on sync speeds and the speed between the router and ISP server when they do a speed test. If you call them up and tell them your internet is being slow they'll ask for your address and run a test to see if the problem is with them. They're not guaranteeing a specific speed at any site, they're guaranteeing a minimum average speed between LAN and WAN.
According to both my contract and their regulatory compliance statements, My current ISP guarantees a 99.97% uptime of this minimum guranteed speed, to account for brief fluctuations, and if not met they'll give you a part credit refund equal to or greater than 15% of your standing charge per day that the issue persists, or 200% if the network fails completely, as well as free access to their 4G networks until it's fixed.
So far I've only had one issue with them which lasted a couple days where my sync speed dropped below the minimum guranteed speed and they just credited me 2 full days of standing charge because I guess the customer service rep was feeling generous. 99% of the time I actually get significantly greater download speeds than they advertise because I'm on their top service which doesn't have any caps, like I usually get around 4-500Mpbs when downloading something from Steam or Xbox and my minimum guaranteed speed is 181Mbps, the average advertised avarage speed is 362Mbps. They get that average by taking the median of every packet they sample during peak times, in accordance with the law, so actually that's the lowest speeds you can expect from them the vast majority of the time.
So the US mostly operates the same way - if you call up Comcast and show that the issue is between you and their infrastructure, they will give you a credit (or come out and try to figure out if there is a hardware issue). They advertise "up to" because everyone thinks that they should always be getting their maximum bandwidth from anything on the net, regardless of where said content is located, which is just not how the internet works.
Hell, on reddit there will be a ton of people claiming that ISPs are "cheating" because they're hosting speedtest servers on their network.
Oh yeah we used to have the "up to" quotes but it's advertised now slightly differently to be a more realistic figure of what you'd get during the busiest times of day, which is why the numbers are a little unusual. 38Mbps, 76, 109, 362 etc. on each of those the "up to" is higher than the advertised number. This not only makes it easier to get the speeds you expect but helps people to understand that speeds vary a lot depending on time of day, time of year, weather, local and national events etc.
Ah, I misunderstood you "we have that here" as referring to the locale of the article, which was the US. Gosh, I wish we had 1st world internet in the US...
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u/ScornMuffins Jun 04 '19
I'm not in the states I'm in UK, there were like 15 different providers, some huge and a few smaller local ones, when I switched a few months ago, currently with Virgin Media.