My internet company (shaw) has been throttling my P2P traffic. When i called them they tell me that I should upgrade my sevice to mega extreme and that will fix the problem. Well i upgraded and it made it 10x worse. I was on the old system for 3 years and the shaping was bad but tolerable. The new system is flat out horrible. I have called them 5x and i always get a different answer. 1 shaw does not throttle/2 we do throttle just not much/3 we throttle alot4 we dont throttle it is your setting/5 shaw does not permit us (the tech staff) to admit we throttle. this last time i called they told me I should buy the 300$ a month and it will be fine. I went from $50month getting 60kbs speeeds to $90 and a horrible 1kbs max. Now going to 300$ a month and my speeds will be better but not great(exact words i was told) Seems like they took me off the terion(old system) to the new modem just to throttle me more. I got one really cool rep(got his name and #) and he filled me in on everything with a phonecall from home. I find this is a question of free speech and lying about speeds. Can someone bring up a lawsuit(even if i dont win) to bring up awareness?
7 responses to Can you sue an internet company for lying about speeds when they throttle p2p trafic?
Been wondering that myself.
you can sue anyone for anything in a civil court. whether the judge will find just cause to hear the case, and whether or not you have any chance of winning, is another story altogether. in fact, the judge may charge you with contempt or another charge for frivolous lawsuit.
read the contract you signed carefully…. an ISP is not required to provide the general consumer with anything but infrastructure and access to the network. corporate ISP contracts are a bit different because network security could be compromised by what is essentially a denial of service attack.
furthermore…. SDSL providers often “guarantee” a certain up and down speed, as do ADSL. cable providers often claim “up to xxxx speed” the difference is that with cable you are essentially sharing a vlan with others in your area that are fed from the same drop. with DSL, T-1,2,3, etc… you are given a dedicated line. if you are not getting speed on a dedicated line, something may be wrong with your TCP/IP settings, bottleneck with your gateway/switch/router, or even a cable that has been terminated poorly- i.e. some jack-leg put the RJ end on improperly, ran the cable near RF interference source, did not splice fiber properly, or you may even have defective NIC.
Can you sue an internet company for lying about speeds when they throttle p2p trafic?
I don’t think so because don’t they say “UP TO x speed” rather than guarantee a certain speed? I know back in the way with dialup they used to promote 9600 and 14.4 modems and then 56k but you never actually got that much. It was always snail’s pace.
The first thing you need to do is stop phoning and do all your correspondance in writing.
People will tell you anything over the phone and it cannot be used if you go to court because you will have no proof of who said what.
There is your first and most important piece of advice. But good luck getting a reply….
And by writing I mean through the post, NOT email.
you can try.
first read the small print and verify that they have not written in “best effort” “shared data line” “% of uptime on full bandwidth” or any of that escape legal jargon crap. If they have it written that way, you will just waste your time and money filing the lawsuit.
But if you can – go for it. maybe you can get a little public attention on it.
you can sue anyone for anything if u have a compelling argument and lots of cash
Yes, And the city of Los Angeles is currently suing Time Warner Cable!
If a company is not provided service require in their contract then yes you can sue them. You know they would go after you if you didn’t pay the bill.
I’m with you, my Internet cable company is awful. My service has really gone down since spring and I want to sue them too!
Good luck.
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