Hey I've been a pissed of AOL customer for a little over a year now. Today i find out, that 2 weeks ago a nice asian man has convinced my mum into another 1 year contract. :doh: I would be that bothered if i actually got the speeds they advertise. Yes i am on silver but it also states up to 1 meg. I am downloading from sites like microsoft at the very max of 100kb. I have been putting up with this for a year now but as i will be with them for another year, is there anything i can do? I have also had problems with them for the last 4 months over a constant loss of connection every 10 minutes. After literally 31 phone calls, it got fixed. Just though id mention that :dry: So is there anything i can do apart from storming the building armed? Thanks
you could try Cablenut[ot]i have 512mb/s service (half the speed of yours) and on average i get arond 50 - 60kb/s download, & i use linux[/ot]
It is good to bear in mind that however aufull AOL are, speed is not always down to your ISP. It could effected be a number of factors. However, if you are not happy with the service itself, as in - rude customer support etc, you can contact your local citizen advice beuro to see if you have a case to break the contract. Unfortunately connectivity speed is a massive grey area. They can say that they are providing the service. You will have a hard time proving your hardware and location can support the speeds offered.... By the way I am with Sky on a 16Mbps service. On a direct download from, lets say, a linux mirror my max download is 420Kbps. When I test the speed via speednet, my results corresponds to just over 3Mbps connection....
Two things I'd like to comment on. First of that chronic2005 you should complain that since you re-newed your contract that you should be entitiled 2Mbps since that it what they are currently selling as standard. Secondly you say that you download from Microsoft a max. of 100kb - I'll assume that you mean 100KB/s right? Have you tested your download speed from another site - also 100KB/s is not that bad strictly speaking as you would expect from a 1Mbps connection a download speed of no more than 120KB/s. P.S. I'd just like to note that Windows Explorer (IE7) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE6) calculate the download speed as averages at that particular time. If you are on i.e. wireless you may experiance some frequent line dropouts momentarily and this will interupt your average which IE shows. If you want to find out your exact you may wish to use another browser (such as Mozilla) or install a programme that monitors your bandwidth.
Yeah try checking your speed with a site that calculates your d/l speed. And also, to explain what CLGW said more fully, are you sure you're not confusing bytes with bits? D/L speeds are always advertised in bits, like in your 1 Mbps connection (it's a marketing thing, of course). But 1 byte = 8 bits, so if what your browser is reporting is 100 kilobytes per second (kB/s -- that is, capital B not lower case b), then you're getting 800 kbps, which is indeed close to 1 Mbps (1000 kbps).
