Robbery on the information superhighway

Okay. I'd hate to do this but I just had to get this off my chest. So here I go with another complaint:

Our Internet connection here has been positively crawling nowadays. And I'm very frustrated that there can't seem to anything I can do about it.

I've been subscribing to this ISP for more than two years now and have been generally satisfied with the service provided thus far. Being very particular about bandwidth, I've been periodically checking the speed of our Internet connection using bandwidth speedtests available online. (The one I find most appealing is the speedtest at SpeakEasy while the one that is most informative is the MySpeed test by VisualWare.) In the good ol' days so to speak, our download speed would usually clock around 220kbps while "quality of service", as measured at MySpeed, would often be a respectable 50%. Overall, this isn't really too bad considering the usually poor standards of service here in our country. Of course, as expected, the connection would slightly slow down during peak hours (early evening).

But in the past month or so, it's been really very very very bad. Despite the fact that the Internet connection provided is supposed to be "faster than dial-up", I've been finding that our connection has dropped to an atrocious 20-30kbps with a quality of service of just 10-20%. So now, it takes forever to load nearly every webpage. Or else, most webpages nearly never get fully loaded. Even worse, the browser sometimes ends up displaying that page with the "Page failed to load" or "Server not found" message. And this is not just during peak hours mind you. I've been noticing that connection would return to normal (that is, around 220kbps) only for a couple of hours in the early morning nowadays. (I know this because I'm still having problems with my sleeping habits and end up surfing the net during the wee hours of the morning when I'm most wide awake.) Yet, connection speed used to be pretty good starting around 10pm and continuing for most of the day.

I've already complained about it at the main office when I went to pay my bill last time but all I got was apologies and the poor excuse that their subscriber base has grown so large that their existing network resources can't keep up with the demand. I bet many other customers have been complaining as well because soon after that they sent everyone flyers apologizing about the situation. The sad thing is, there isn't anything more that we can do about it. (Such is the sad state here in this country in similar situations.) One can keep on complaining or even go as far as to threaten not to pay the monthly fee but the company can always conveniently hide behind the fact that they have promised to simply provide its customers an Internet connection with a maximum speed of 310kbps or 512kbps (depending on which plan you subscribe to). Nothing in the contract specifies that connection speed is guaranteed not to fall below a given minimum. (Nothing, that is, except for their posters and banners which advertise "faster than dial-up" connections.)

While nothing much can be done, I must say that it's totally unfair for the company to continue accepting new cable Internet subscribers when they can't guarantee quality service to everyone. Imagine, they're collecting monthly fees from everyone and no one is getting the Internet connection they paid for. It's practically highway robbery!