In a written statement mailed to Springfield's local phone company, Vermontel, Comcast senior counsel Alycia Horn states that VTEL is making "false and misleading claims regarding its high-speed internet service."
ttp://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=12086154 # # # # VTEL takes on Comcast • Springfield, Vermont - March 4, 2010 • The Vermont Telephone Company's President and CEO, Michel Guité, proudly shows one of the company's latest television advertisements. The ad boasts the speed of service that VTEL offers its subscribers. • "The customers seemed to like it. It was on the Super Bowl so it was a lot of fun, we were very pleased with it," Guité said. "But one unexpected reaction was that it caught the attention of Comcast." • The Springfield-based company got the attention of the cable giant Comcast with the line "VTEL's service is 20 times faster than cable." • In a written statement mailed to VTEL, Comcast senior counsel Alycia Horn states that VTEL is making "false and misleading claims regarding its high-speed internet service." • But Guité does not seem to be intimated by Comcast's letter. • "It brightened up my day because there is always a concern that gosh, maybe nobody is seeing my ad," he said. "And so an ad that gets all the way to Comcast at their head office at their giant skyscraper in Philadelphia is a good ad." • Comcast acknowledges in the letter that the ad does not name Comcast directly. However, the letter sent a message to the Vermont company that if it does NOT "cease and desist using the claim" the company will "proceed accordingly." • Guité says that Comcast's reaction to the ad is disconcerting because he says that nothing in the ad is false. • "You are allowed to say what is truthful and you are not allowed to say what isn't truthful, so we are really quite confident that if the speeds we are running at are 700, 800, 900 million bits per second, that's vastly more than 20 times their speed and we think we are on very firm ground," Guité said. • Guité says that his company is not trying to start a battle with Comcast and that he hopes the entire ordeal ends peacefully. • Thursday, a spokesperson from Comcast confirmed the company's position regarding the ad, but declined to comment further saying the letter speaks for itself. • That fiber service Guité referenced is only available to a small percentage of the approximately 18,000 homes and businesses that VTEL services. • Adam Sullivan - WCAX News
I have owned VTel for some time now. Their company boasts a fiber gigabit service and they deliver just that - with some pitfalls.
ReplyDeleteI received a PACE, now ARRIS, router with my service installation. In tests such as ookla - the bit rates were satisfactory, on the order of 800-900 Mb/s. In an actual file download, however, my connection was capped at exactly 50 Mb/s or roughly 6MB/s. I spoke with tech support several times voicing my grievances and they, at first, denied that there was anything wrong and the servers that I was downloading from were not able to serve the file to me at a decent rate. These servers are made to test gigabit connects and provide terabit speeds. I download from three different servers at an individual speed of 6.0 MB/s each and then from all of them at once, concurrently they all totaled to an accumulative speed of 6.0 MB/s. They told me I should send in screenshots as proof. That email was ignored for several days until I made a follow up call.
I insisted again and again that my connection was being capped to several of the technical representatives, whom were often rude or cocky, until one tech actually began to troubleshoot my issue - the only one that was nice and professional. He had me direct connect from the WAN Ethernet that comes straight from the fiber box and all was well. I was seeing 70-90 MB/s throughout all of the file transfers services.
He had me pick up another PACE router because he thought my current was faulty. The new router had the same issue. I eventually configured the router as a bridge over one of the Ethernet ports which served, as a temporary fix which gave me the file transfer speeds I had been looking for but no access to DMZ, port forwarding, or a firewall. I then ordered an ASUS RT-N66U for $90 off of newegg, it arrived in two days.
The new ASUS router is superior in every way and has alleviated all of my headaches. It has a plethora GUI toys with all of the QOS, Firewall, Port Forwarding, Parent Controls, Transmission monitoring, and charts that you would ever want. It is dual band wifi and supports both 2.4 and 5ghz. It comes with a built in USB support for file serving on LAN and the capability of offline downloading. It was a dream come true.
If you own a PACE router and are not seeing the correct HTTP file transfers or the speeds that you would expect to see through a service such as steam(I can now download at 80MB/s through steam), PLEASE go to this website: http://speedof.me/ and test your connection, you should be seeing results on the order of 300 to 500 Mb/s - this is a real world file transfer test unlike ookla(speedtest.net) which is multithreaded and proves more of an estimate of theoretical speed which means literally nothing in the real world as actual large packets travel through your router.
I would suggest to anyone to ditch that garbage PACE router and buy an ASUS RT-N66U because it is cheap and delivers.
At the end of the day I had to spend $90 from pocket to actually get the speeds advertised, however, they are very good speeds and I could not be any happier with their service. Just do not use that PACE router and do not expect the tech support to know anything about that router or be anywhere near helpful (In exemption of that one guy - he was super helpful). During my troubleshooting, I even contacted ARRIS and they said they could not help me because by contract ISPs were supposed to handle tech support.