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AT&T’s DSL customers are promised high speed service that can never be delivered thanks to speed caps and dishonest marketing. That is the premise of a lawsuit filed against AT&T way back in 2005 in St. Louis County Circuit Court. After years of languishing, the lawsuit has recently been certified a “class action,” which means it could eventually expose AT&T to thousands of settlements with DSL customers all the way back to 2000 in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas.
An attorney with Gray, Ritter & Graham in St. Louis, which is handling the case, accused AT&T of making speed claims for its DSL service it knew it could never actually deliver to consumers. The suit describes several instances where customers’ modems were artificially locked at speeds far lower than promised in company advertising, often making it impossible to reach even the minimum promised speeds.
“They were being charged for these high speeds that could not be delivered,” said Don Downing, an attorney with the firm.
AT&T admits it does cap DSL speeds, but calls the process “optimization.” That usually refers to the process of identifying the maximum supportable speed a telephone line can handle with minimal errors, and then configuring the modem not to exceed that speed. As DSL speeds will decrease the further away a customer lives from the phone company’s facilities, typically advertised speeds are often achieved only by a select few who live very close to the phone company’s exchange office.
The fine print in AT&T's DSL service terms and conditions
AT&T maintains records of every customer capped, and at what rate. The legal firm handling the case considers that a potential road map of identifying impacted consumers.
AT&T has notified the court it may seek to appeal the class certification, but otherwise does not comment on pending litigation.
Many customers have not been impressed with AT&T’s DSL service.
“We recently left AT&T because our DSL, which worked fine, suddenly stopped working completely and when it was brought back up, it was almost as slow as dial-up. The service guy told me that was as fast as we would ever get with DSL, which was odd because two weeks earlier the speed had been fine,” Anne writes. “Needless to say, we’ve switched to Charter (Cable).”
Another AT&T customer noted getting out of bad AT&T DSL service can be difficult, unless you are willing to pay.
Dano notes, “When you sign up, there’s a one year contract and termination fee on the lowest speed you’d have to deal with if you close your account early. They will get you either way.”
Other stories of interest:
- Californians Launch Class Action Lawsuit Against HughesNet for Slow, Capped Service
- Broadband Speed — It’s All About Where You Live & What Provider You Live With
- Corporate Hypocrisy – Recording Industry Faces $6 Billion Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
- AT&T Broadband: We’re Capping You, But We Won’t Tell You Until After You Sign Up
- Damage Control Technique #1: Increase Speeds in San Antonio
I had this problem with Bell South right before AT&T bought them out. I had a 1.5Mb account and could only get 1.2Mb at most. After arguing with the service reps, it magically fixed itself and I started to get my 1.5Mb. After looking at the modem settings, they had told it to sync up higher than it was before. Well later, they were bought out by AT&T. I switched to AT&T and had the same issue after being with TW cable for awhile. I had the exact same issue except this time AT&T said, “Tough luck, that is the best we can do.” They can give you the advertised speed as seen by my Bell South example. They just don’t want to for some reason.
I see this issue all the time with DSL lines. Even if lines do have plenty of margin to go around in terms of how high they can push the speeds, the providers don’t seem to want to provision the lines high enough to make up for the overhead that comes with ATM/PPPoE/TCP. I see many AT&T lines that are marketed at 3Mbps running at 2400kbps due to this poor provisioning (the modem would be synced at 3048kbps with 20dB of margin left). With Verizon, I know that they provision at least the lower speed packages (the 1Mbps, 1.5Mbps and 5Mbps provisioning) high enough to get a little over your speed in speed tests. Their 3Mbps and 7.1Mbps packages however aren’t set high enough to get the full 3/7.1Mbps service all the time though it does get usually 200kbits away from it’s actual marketed speed. The 7.1Mbps package, that’s more like 400-500kbps. Verizon does turn up 7.1Mbps speed provisioning on lines enabled for “FastPath” mode though, by bumping the sync rate by 200kbps from the 7616 speed to 7840 speed. But none the less, this is one thing I can say Frontier has done great with. They’ve got my modem provisioned so high to the point where I’m pulling more than 3Mbps (3,200kbps all the time). The upload is right where it should be, sometimes 4kbps higher.
The above is all from my personal experience. Then again, Verizon is known to have set up their Juniper Edge routers (between the backbone and the DSL modem) in a weird way to the point where it’s hard to max out your line on a single download unless the RWIN is dead on to where it should be at, not slightly off like everyone else seems to be doing. Of course with Verizon, this issue only seems to show up on speeds faster than 1.5Mbps so it makes me wonder if either the provisioning profile is wrong in the Junipers or if Verizon did do something very wacky. It bugs me as well as the people who I’m helping when I come across a Verizon DSL connection on a Juniper.
With DSL, I always tell people don’t rely on the marketing and what speeds they’ll sell you. Just get hooked up and see what the line can handle and what you’re set up with, and if it doesn’t work out turn it off before the grace period is over. That’s one thing I wish many people would do, as it’d save on the surprise later on when people go cost cutting just to find they’ve not been getting the correct speed all along.
Corporations consider lying to be a virtue
While my experience with AT&T has been very good (highly predictable and highly available), they have YET ANOTHER deceptive speed publishing practice. AT&T knowingly publishes the speed of their product as (for example) 3.0 megabits when they know that their choice of PPPoE transport limits their maximum usable speed to just 2.4 megabits. PPPoE adds an additional 20% of data to data sent over the ‘last mile’. What this means for you and me is that every 1 megabit of REAL internet traffic, gets 200K of additional PPPoE ‘wrappers’ around the data. Therefore a 3 megabit AT&T connection can AT MOST deliver 2.4 megabits.
Naturally there is nothing wrong with using PPPoE, but it is deceptive (and deliberately misleading) to PUBLISH this inflated last mile speed as the product maximum. It would be one thing to say ‘up to 3′ and not be able to deliver the full 3 megabits to SOME people because of their individual circumstances. It’s quite another to say ‘up to 3′ when what they REALLY mean is ‘up to 2.4′ because 3 is technically impossible. As an illustration, imagine AT&T had chosen a last-mile transport technology that sent all of the data TWICE (for redundancy)? Would it be fair to call that a 6 megabit connection? What if AT&T chose to send your data TEN times for super-duper redundancy? Should that be considered a 30 megabit connection just because 30 megabits are traveling over the last mile to bring you the 3 megabits that the internet is sending you?
So in addition to the aforementioned capping shenanigans, AT&T should also be taken to task on publishing false speed metrics (which is contrary to the way other ISP’s publish their speed data) without qualifying those metrics.
[...] not general coverage. Not only that, AT&T is now also the target of a class action suit over alleged “throttling back” of download speeds – the very thing Wilson shills for in the ads! Another slice of Umble pie, [...]