Is Your ISP Evil?
MuniWireless has a post called Find out if your ISP is a bad ISP with Glasnost in which author Esme Vos asks if your ISP is “playing funny games” with your Internet connection. She urges inquiry:
Simply go to Glasnost (appropriate name as it refers to a period in the 1980s in the USSR when there was a bit more openness and transparency). Glasnost is but one weapon in your arsenal for finding out the TRUTH about your broadband connection and your ISP. It is a product of Measurement Lab, founded by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc. and academic researchers: “M-Lab was developed in 2008 after Vint Cerf and others at Google initiated conversations with network researchers to learn more about challenges to the effective study of broadband networks.”
Vos reported that her ISP came out clean. I can report (finally, after days of busy servers) that my ISP is doing well as of this post. However, all ISPs will not have such good reports.
As a matter of business ISPs will remind us that there are two sides to every story, in this case the service users and the service providers. To their credit, they will need to take steps to understand the user-side demand and manage their resources to provide the best services possible. I’d give them this credit if they didn’t “play funny games” in the process.
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