It has become so bad here, the government agency responsible for communication companies has created an application to officially test your connection speed, which you can use for proving your provider is cheating you. Has already resulted in the first successful contract violation processes.
That's actually quite epic, provided there isn't a monopoly on ISPs in the area. Even the fear of bad publicity might make them to rethink their strategy..
In my experience, the mobile providers usually say that you're probably in an area with patchy signals (which might well be the case, but it doesn't stop them from selling you the high speed offers). Their signal maps are at best a rough estimate and at worst just wrong. I'm having doubts that they bother doing at least some quick field checks in every area. And , as always, their best advice is "have you tried it outside"? Sure, for mobile phone internet, bad signal is an assumed risk. But if they sell you a "box" which is basically for home internet (some even advertise TV capability), a minimal signal check should be common sense.
I wonder if the sharing of mobile telephony infrastructure isn't partly to blame for this. AFAIK, for quite some time, any network could use another company's cell tower if they didn't have any within range (perhaps some limiting factors still aply). In theory, it means you should have a decent signal on any network pretty much anywhere. In practice, it might have led to too many networks hogging the existing infrastructure, instead of expanding for themselves. As far as I've noticed, it doesn't really work. In urban areas you do usually get a signal, albeit not always a good one, and in rural areas it's pretty much guess work.
As for the cable provider, well, when I did have issues, the answer I got was that the contract doesn't specify a minimum speed, so they're not obligated to always respect the speeds they charge me for. Meaning that all I got was quick-ish internet, which got fast only sometimes, presumably when the planets aligned and the Probe smiled joyously down from the skies. Until I got the chance to change the provider, I still didn't downgrade, since I was afraid it would be even slower...
I proposed him to pay him extra for the registration and he replied that he just wouldn't have the time for this.
