SBC Communications sued over DSL speeds
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HOUSTON - Mega-telco SBC Communications last week was hit with a class-action lawsuit claiming it's "defrauding" DSL subscribers by limiting promised downstream speeds of at least 384K bit/sec to an actual rate of 128K bit/sec.
The lawsuit, filed by a computer technical support company in Houston and several of its customers, also claims that SBC's DSL service is not "always on" as advertised, but rather times out like an ordinary dial-up connection.
In a statement, SBC said it has to review the suit before responding in detail but noted that "there are many factors that can have an impact on the actual rate at which data is transferred online," including server speeds, protocol overhead factors and public Internet congestion.
But the plaintiffs point to e-mail and newsgroup downloads, where they allege they've noticed the 128K bit/ sec cap. SBC's statement acknowledged that speeds for accessing newsgroup data are maximized at 128K bit/sec "in order to provide a more reliable service for all our customers using the newsgroups," though the plaintiffs claim that hadn't been disclosed.
By contrast, SBC said access to e-mail "and other Internet applications" are not affected by the 128K bit/sec cap. But the plaintiffs claim the network timeout - which allegedly occurs when users stop downloading Internet pages or using e-mail - is a deliberate capacity-saving maneuver by SBC rather than a random fault in the carrier network.
Many DSL proponents have claimed that this kind of potential user competition for bandwidth is only a problem with cable modems sharing a path back to aggregation devices. But that's a myth, says Philip Richards, vice president for Insight Research Corp. in Livingston, N.J. Many initial DSL service providers have indeed had to throttle back port speeds on their DSL access multiplexers (DSLAM) in order to avoid having their DSL networks seize up entirely.
"There is [bandwidth] concentration in the DSLAM, and in many instances, it's significant concentration, even more so than with cable," Richards says. "The rapid growth of demand doesn't give the engineers time to understand how the users are using it. They're still learning what kind of capacity they need."
Richards says he wouldn't be surprised if other DSL carriers are suffering the same learning curve, adding that could even be SBC's defense of the suit. But the plaintiffs point to SBC's Project Pronto, a $6 billion initiative to install asymmetric DSL remote terminals near 80% of SBC's population. The suit claims Pronto publicity has caused hundreds of thousands of customers to sign up for DSL service that SBC is not ready to provision, forcing it to throttle back its network. SBC countered that "SBC is meeting our obligations to our customers."
The complete text of the lawsuit is available at www.bafirm.com/petition.htm.
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