The big bandwidth lie

Perhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. On a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts stood on stage and wowed the bleary-eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabyte collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries in just a shade under four minutes. Or maybe it all started in the heady days after the Telecom Act, when Roberts gave a similar demonstration using photos in a Web browser. Or perhaps it started with the first Verizon FiOS ad promising ultra-fast downloads compared to cable modems.

Regardless of its origination, it all boils down to this: It's a lie. Not a big, insert your most-hated politician-type of lie, but a lie nonetheless. It's been happening for years, and it's about to get a lot worse.

When a cable operator, telco or wireless company advertises a data service promising up to 10 Mb/s downloads, we all know “up to” are the key words. You know it and I know it because we deal with these things every day. We know that the actual speeds will vary, just as every diet pill manufacturer and buyer knows that “actual results may vary.”

We know that actual speeds depend on a lot of factors that simply are out of the control of the service provider. Say that gambling site you place your bets on is located in Aruba and suddenly has a surge in traffic. You might hang on for a while, knowing that broadband speed can be limited by server traffic and a multitude of other issues.

Now take a consumer whose only contact with our industry is paying a bill every month or calling to complain about the service. That same scenario yields a transaction that is likely to be slow, aggravating and potentially abandoned by the end user — the same end user who thinks everything from the Internet should be delivered to the PC at promised speeds. Such users have no clue what 10 Mb/s really means, but they know it's supposed to be really fast.

DSL providers always could hide behind the fact that they can guarantee speeds on at least a portion of the network, therefore slow speeds really aren't all their fault. That's changing, though, with the rapid adoption of passive optical network technologies. Certainly there are significant benefits to such a move, but ironically, the move to PON puts everyone in the “shared bandwidth” group.

Verizon has started rolling out 50 Mb/s service in select FiOS markets, and Vidéotron has offered up 50 Mb/s service in parts of Montreal, but how many customers actually will get 50 Mb/s? Based on past experience, probably none. Oh, they'll get fast service. Faster than their neighbors at whom they can snicker. But not the full throttle for which they're paying.

It smacks of car buyers who put undue importance on the advertised top speeds of specific models. A car that can go over 200 mph may be impressive but is generally useless in most real-world scenarios.

Who's up for 100 Mb/s?

Vince Vittore is program manager of Yankee Group's enabling technologies service provider group with an expertise in broadband solutions.