Qwest DSL--Throttling?

You may be aware that there's quite a bit of discussion reflecting concern and actual problems with true available bandwidth for the end users of various broadband delivery systems, including cable, satellite and DSL. I have Qwest DSL (ADSL), which I recently upgraded from 1.5 Mbps (download) to 7.0 Mbps. The key reason I upgraded was because I was seeing quite a bit of lag time with streaming video ("buffering") from various news websites as well as YouTube. The idea I had was that the basic bandwidth being received might have been so close to the edge that any kind of internet load could cause such delays. In addition, as past posts will reveal, I added MagicJack internet calling this spring, further consuming bandwidth on my DSL line. So it seemed like a good idea and the cost was actually a wash if I switched from my local ISP to Qwest's preferred ISP, MSN.

The switchover was very smooth and I went so far as to even buy Qwest's ActionTec PK5000 modem (rather than a 3rd party modem). So I was lined up with Qwest's preferred equipment and ISP, the change was very efficient and there I was one fine day, running at 7Mbps and enjoying it. By the way, no faster DSL speed is available at my location or I may have tried for something like 20Mbps.

But the honeymoon was fairly short lived. Although the interruptions were fewer, I started noticing that there was still quite a bit of streaming video buffering going on. The typical time of day was during the work week between 6pm and 10pm CT with virtually no problems during the daytime unless it was a holiday or, occasionally, on weekends. I started capturing bandwidth data from 3 main online (and free) speed measuring sites: bandwithplace.com, speedtest.net and pcpitstop.com. Sure enough, I was seeing download speeds of well under Qwest's requirement (80% of 7Mbps, or 5.6Mbps). Often speeds were in the under 2Mbps range with the lowest reading to date being .77Mbps (on December 9, 2010 at 7:44pm CT) ... and, yes, these are download readings, *not* upload (which is spec'd at about .75Mbps and is consistently around .65 to .72Mbps).

So I called Qwest and immediately learned a very interesting fact. Their performance criteria of 80% of 7Mbps applies *only* to the data link (in the midwest) from Qwest's servers in Kansas City or Minneapolis (take your pick) to your residence (for example, I'm here in Iowa). So if you want to verify that Qwest is contractually compliant with their requirement on their DSL delivery bandwidth, the only way to check it out is to run their test at http://kansas-city.speedtest.qwest.net/ ... what that means is that your overall performance is not their concern at all (yes, I was told those very words). The only thing they are obligated to provide is whatever bandwidth you're paying for from their server(s) to your residence.

This is new stuff to me and I've not seen it described this way in the forums and blogs I've been reading on the subject. The fact that my performance is good except when it seems that a much larger part of the population is probably logging on to the internet could mean that the internet is just busy and everyone is slowing down ... or not. I have a theory that says it's possible for Qwest to throttle the "input* side of their servers based on total data transfer requests (which will obviously go up during high usage times like the evening) but still provide the full bandwidth paid for on their servers' output side (which is the input to residences). In my case, I typically do see about 6Mbps and, since it should never be lower than 5.6Mbps (.8 * 7), it's certainly acceptable. But why is it that there are many times when I'm seeing 6Mbps from Qwest but at the same time only, say, 1.58Mbps from a measuring site like bandwidthplace.com or speedtest.net?

When Qwest actually came out to my home, they verified that the modem was properly installed, the wiring was all good and everything in my local network was working fine. But I have also actually seen bandwidth data from Qwest showing download speeds as low as 2.1 to 2.7Mbps. It's quite rare, but did give me the reason for a no-cost visit from them while they checked it out. They had no answers for me but when the problem occurs (and I'm keeping the measurements in a spreadsheet) they also want me to verify the internal modem status on my LAN at 192.168.0.1. It always has shown 7168Kbps for download and 896Kbps for upload but I'm also now collecting that data.

So the bottom line here is that it looks suspicious to me that I can get excellent performance from Qwest but dismal overall bandwidth when loading actual internet data. And, after all, it's overall performance that counts. If I'm getting throttled 1Mbps data over a "bigger pipe" (i.e. 7Mbps DSL), it's still only 1Mbps to my system. And what I'm wondering is if there are other folks out there that see similar performance, particularly Qwest DSL customers. Any 20Mbps customers out there that have similar issues? It's discouraging to me to think that I could probably go back to 1.5Mbps service and have everything work just as well ... but that's about where I am today, based on what I see at my computer and the data I've collected regarding this issue.

To be "fair and balanced", I do see where it makes sense for Qwest to have contractual terms that limit their performance liability to something they can control (i.e., Kansas City or Minneapolis to you). Otherwise, they'd probably be getting hammered by folks about every underpowered server system on the internet where the output bandwidth may be 1/2 Meg or so. But the performance hits I regularly see (pretty much every day) are enough to at least make me think that DSL might be a poor choice, at least from Qwest, for consistent download bandwidth operation. Wish there were some alternatives, like fiber optic ... but cable is my only other choice and it's more expensive, plus there seem to be similar bandwidth issues there, according to some comments I've heard and read.

Please comment if you have more information on this. Thanks everyone!