There’s a recent article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Your Internet Provider Likely Juiced It’s Official Speed Scores.” Not flattering for the ISPs. We’re not going to elaborate on the article, the headline says it all. If you want to read it, here’s the link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-hard-to-trust-the-numbers-internet-providers-inflate-official-speed-results-11576171855?mod=flipboard.

The article was based on a government “report card” published by the FCC. Needless to say, the providers were not happy with their grades.

This makes us wonder. Are the ISPs inflating their speed scores? Is the FCC wrong in their analysis? Hard to tell. Unless you have a Network Performance Monitor tracking and trending your network 24/7, you’ll never know whose right.

JitterWorks recently received an email announcing a “Deal of the Decade” from an ISP. Half price for Internet access at 500 Mbps bandwidth. If you’ve been following our blog, you know Mbps, you know bandwidth and you know bandwidth isn’t the be all and end all that ISPs claim.

What’s your latency? How many outages do you experience and for how long? What’s your actual throughput speed? What is your bandwidth utilization? These are the questions to which you need to know the answers. And if you are satisfied, then you don’t need to upgrade your network. Even when it’s a deal you just can’t pass up.

Because we monitor our network performance, we know that, regardless of the “deal,” we don’t need to upgrade our bandwidth. 

So when you’re ISP sends you a “special offer” for more bandwidth at a fantastic price, take pause. A “Deal of the Decade” (which really doesn’t mean much with two weeks left in the decade) might seem like a bargain, but if you don’t need any more bandwidth than you already have, even a couple bucks more than your paying now is too much.

Like the car dealer who wants to sell you the upgrade package on the truck you have your heart set on because it can tow a two-ton sailboat up a steep grade to the lake when you don’t own a boat and there’s not a lake anywhere to be found.

Outside entities that monitor, and report on network performance, like the Wall Street Journal and the FCC might be the worst thing to happen to the ISPs we depend on to help run our businesses and keep sanity in our homes when the kids are screaming that their devices are running too slow (usually due to high latency).

It might seem, because you are reading this blog in a website that is promoting network performance monitoring services, that we have an agenda. You’re right. But we’re not out to get your ISP, we just want to give you the information you need to hold your service provider accountable and make sure they (pardon the juxtaposition) provide the service they promise.