The cable company tells you that you’re getting speeds of “up to 1,000Mbps.” The key words there are “up to.” In most cases, and especially when there’s no competition for services, those numbers can be a total lie.
If a cable company were actually to guarantee 1,000Mbps service to every home, they’d need a lot more fiber. Let’s say for example that your average chunk of 15-20 homes is served by a single fiber channel of 10,000Mbps. Of course, your neighborhood may be better and yours may be worse. If everyone’s trying to stream at the same time, and keeping in mind the extra traffic that comes from people searching and tweeting and snapchatting, each home may have as little as 15Mbps available for streaming video. I did a little comparison table in this article a month or so ago. Keep in mind that there may be two or three different streams coming into the house because the kids may not want to watch what mom and dad watch, and all of a sudden your 1,000Mbps service feels like 5Mbps. What happened?
Now arriving at gate 8
What happened is that cable companies stole a strategy from airlines. For decades, airlines have routinely sold about 115% of the seats on busy flights, because believe it or not there are a lot of people who don’t actually fly even though they buy tickets. Personally I have never done this or even met someone who has, but that’s what they tell me. In the same way, cable companies oversell their internet because most of the time, you don’t actually have everyone trying to stream at the same time. In fact if you’re willing to get up at three in the morning you’ll find your internet speed is fabulous. That is, unless others in your neighborhood are reading this article as well.
In cable company parlance, they call this “oversubscribing” and it’s legal. It’s also kind of a drag if you and everyone you know are trying to watch Stranger Things or whatever’s hot and exciting at the same time. You see a lot of buffering and you wonder why you’re paying so much for something that doesn’t work the way they say.
Getting by as best you can
Of course, some providers are better than others, and and some neighborhoods are better than others. Every single provider struggles to keep up with capacity, because the demand for fast internet keeps growing. Even the definition of “fast internet” keeps changing. Just a few years ago, 15Mbps was fast enough for most homes, and today most homes would do well with as little 50Mbps. With 4K streaming and a lot of remote learning, most homes were still doing pretty well over the last several year.. Netflix and Amazon’s “4K” streams don’t need that much bandwidth today, but that’s because their quality is really poor when compared to something like DIRECTV 4K. They’ll have to increase the bitrates of their stuff in order to make it actually look like 4K.
So the bottom line here is that no, your internet speed probably won’t be as fast as they say, but you probably don’t care as much as you think you do.
If you really do care, there’s not much you can do.
In the meantime, there’s really nothing that can be done if you’re in an area where there isn’t any competition. That’s true in some areas yes, but in other areas, the folks at Signal Connect can help. You can learn more about residential internet options here, and there’s a number you can call to get help. Our team will help you look at all the options that are available in your area. They may even be able to suggest options you hadn’t considered, like satellite internet. I’m not talking about Starlink. That may be great in a couple years, but they’re still in a growth phase. There are real, established satellite providers who have been doing satellite internet for decades.
Why not take a few minutes to find out more? You may never get the “as advertised” speed, but does it really matter if you’re happy with what you have?
