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.

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.

A speakeasy speedtest returned the results that I was expecting.

Is AT&T trying to scam consumers by telling them that the internet speeds they’re receiving are actually much faster than they are?