Hold on! Wait a second! ISPs never do anything wrong as all Internet problems are caused by gremlins and the ghosts of bad online porn actors. What could your ISP, your very own Internet service provider, be doing to possibly make it so you don’t get the best Internet experience?
Plenty! Many people have Internet problems of some sort because their ISPs know that they can take advantage of a wide portion of the population. This is because most people just want to connect to the Internet and forget about it until they have to pay their bill again. What goes on between you paying your bills is where REAL Internet problems occur. You could be getting cheated out of money and services that you’re paying for right now. Read this article to discover what sort of Internet problems you may have due to your ISP, and how to fix them.
Slow Internet connection problems
The average Internet user will see advertisements from ISPs that talk about how they will give you a 10 Mpbs line – 10 megabits per second. So people pay for it and they get exactly that, right? Wrong. The fine print that many people miss is that they talk about UP TO 10 Mpbs. They make no promise that you’ll ever actually get it.
My current ISP, and the only one in my country, advertised for an uncapped 8 Mbps line. I signed up for this, but I wasn’t naive. I routinely tested the speed of this connection and found that I never got above 4 Mbps! So what did I do? I called them up and downgraded to 4 Mpbs. I still get the same speed as before, but I’m paying almost half as much!
Get around this slow Internet connection problem by regularly testing your speed, recording it, and shoving it in your ISPs face when they vastly fall short of their claims. Get ready to switch if they’re not ready to help.
Slow Internet connections on certain services
I wrote previously about slow connection issues related to Netflix. In that article it was found that ISPs were slowing down connections to Netflix – mostly just to mess with Netflix as these were ISPs owned by cable companies who saw them as competition.
Proving that your ISP is causing Internet problems for you in this manner can be pretty easy. Test your connection speed by recording how often you buffer when connected to Netflix, or time how long it takes a video to load.
Connect to a VPN for Netflix and see how it compares. If you notice that your connection is faster you can be sure that your ISP is slowing down Netflix on purpose. If this is the case you can keep on using your
Paying for more Internet speed than you really need
This is a classic sales technique as old as a person being sold a 5 pound fish when 3 pounds will feed their family. ISPs are relying on the fact that most users don’t know much about connection speeds to upsell them faster connections which they don’t need.
To give you a rough guide of what you’ll be able to do with certain speeds:
- Up to 4 Mbps will cover all casual web browsing easily. Facebook, Twitter, and email your heart out. You can also stream non-HD videos with ease.
- From 4 to 7 Mbps will unlock HD video streaming for you on Netflix, YouTube, the BBC iPlayer, and all others.
- From 7 to 12 Mbps you can do clear Skype conference calls with multiple users, and your online gaming will no longer suffer from lags.
- Anything over 12 Mbps is for those who want to stream on HD content on multiple devices at once.
Are you paying for 12 Mbps but only ever watch videos on YouTube? That’s an Internet problem you should sort out now – unless you like throwing money out the window. I’d rather save that excess money and spend it on new Air Jordans, but to each their own…
It’s cheaper to own than it is to rent
ISPs are so helpful – they let you either rent a modem from them, or outright buy one from them. Isn’t that nice? For just $10/month you too can have your own high speed, state of the art modem. Or you can buy it from them! WOW!
Unless you’re planning on living somewhere for a short time, and can’t take a modem with you when you move, renting your modem is a sucker’s move. A good modem will set you back about $100 at most. And buying the modem directly from the ISP? Are you kidding? They skyrocket the price on those as they’re looking to exploit your naivety. Do some price comparison before you ever buy a modem from an ISP.
If you’re smart you can stretch your dollar and buy your own modem from a reliable electronics store and pay that back in under a year. I bought my last modem over 2 years ago – it paid itself off in 8 months versus renting from my ISP! Out of all your Internet problems that are caused by your ISP, this is the simplest one to solve.
Feature image via alphaspirit / Shutterstock