AT&T Speedtest Scam
My DSL connection has been getting slow and slower over the past year. It was so slow at one point that I went out and bought a Clearwire modem and set up my router to load balance between the two. I would have switched to Clear completely but their modem (actually a full router) is not able to pass along its public IP address to use on a seperate router. This caused VPN connection issues to work.
When looking at my DSL modem connection information it appears that i’m only connecting at 768Kbps despite paying for 6Mb service.
![](wp-content/uploads/2011/07/dsl-connection-information.png)
This is definitely a problem that AT&T needs to fix. I started looking for a support phone number on their website and ended up in some kind of connection troubleshooter. One step was to run a speedtest on the AT&T website (http://www.att.com/speedtest/). The results were astonishing. Even though my modem was only connected at 768Kbps, I was getting almost 5Mbps download speed.
![](wp-content/uploads/2011/07/att-speedtest.png)
A speakeasy speedtest returned the results that I was expecting.
![](wp-content/uploads/2011/07/speakeasy-speedtest.png)
Is AT&T trying to scam consumers by telling them that the internet speeds they’re receiving are actually much faster than they are?