How ISPs Suck You In!

Tune on to cable TV and there are a host of advertisements asking you to switch Internet Service Providers. Most of them boast of providing a range of good quality services at down to earth prices. Some even claim of an award winning track record. But you’ve got to take their claims with a pinch of salt, most often. Here are ways in which the ISPs take you on a ride.

Slashing Bandwidth

One of the ways in which the ISP might fool you due to increased subscriber usage is to cut your quota of bandwidth during peal hours. They might also cut your bandwidth if you do certain online tasks that they do not approve of. They might promise you a certain bandwidth at the time of registering for the service but they do not live up to the promised amount.

Lower Speeds than Promised

Most internet service providers promise a speed of “upto 10 MBPs”. That’s where the catch lies. The speeds at which you browse the internet is rarely close to the promised 10 MBPs in most cases. For example, in UK the internet surfers don’t even know that they are browsing the internet at speeds lower than half of the speeds mentioned on the information brochure that you get when registering for the service.

Target Advertising

Many ISPs, in order to gain an extra buck from internet advertising, have invaded the privacy of the user by tracking web activity and inserting advertisements that are most relevant to the subjects upon which they surfed the most. For example, Charter which sold the concept under the name of ‘enhancement of online experience of user’. The subscribers were, of course, given the option to regain privacy by downloading a privacy cookie, but the process was more cumbersome than compromising with your privacy.

Web Spying

In 2007, Communication’s Assistance for Law Enforcement Act has made it compulsory for the ISPs to allow the federal authorities to wire tap the internet to keep a track of the user behavior. This is obviously a move in the direction of increasing security but it needs one to thoroughly compromise on his/her security. This Web Spying is not taken in very well by many internet companies and users.

Ads on Error Pages

Many times a website does not load well or is non existent. In such cases, ‘the website not found’ message comes on those pages. Advertisements are placed on those pages by some ISPs to make money from its viewer/subscriber database.

Forging Bandwidths

Some ISPs deliberately interfere with the P2P bandwidth speeds and prevent any downloading from happening. Comcast in 2007 engaged in packet spoofing/forgery by deliberately inserting bogus packets into a P2P file transfer, virtually stopping the entire download process.

Virus/ Spyware Protection Not Adequate

Good ISPs provide adequate virus/spyware protection, but some other service providers are not able to protect the computers of their users from spyware and malware. They do not take the responsibility of paying up for the virus clean up process even though they have committed to protect the subscribers’ computer from viral attack at the time of registration.