IP Communications

The Federal Communications Commission has been calling for transparency in service provider broadband services marketing. And a report released this week by the FCC (News - Alert) may help demonstrate why. The report indicates that actual download speeds are about half those advertised by service providers, according to a story on the matter.

The median advertised download speed of broadband offers last year was 7mbps to 8mbps, according to the piece. But the reality was that subscribers to these services got connections more in the range of 3mbps to 4mbps.

The report apparently attributes the gap to service providers’ failure to figure in network congestion, performance-challenged computers and routers, and less than optimal websites and applications.

But the FCC is on a mission to bring advertised broadband speeds more in line with actual end user experiences.

The thinking behind this may best be exemplified by the comments from Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, who was a panelist at one of the FCC’s events about The National Broadband Plan. During the Broadband Consumer Context workshop several months ago, Meinrath said service providers in the United States are intentionally keeping consumers in the dark about their broadband options.“Imagine if every gas station in the country didn’t have a sign about what it cost and what the octane on it was and you were told ‘Look, just start pumping gas and we’ll tell you what you’re going to pay for that gas, and we’ll tell you what your octane is post-op,’” said Meinrath. “That’s kind of the environment we’re in with broadband connectivity.”That’s not allowed in Europe, he added, where rules require an open book policy around the cost, availability, contention and competition for broadband.“You can’t make an informed decision on what your broadband service options are if you don’t have access to that information,” he added.

“These are mandates that would just be excruciatingly easy to implement – maybe unpopular, but easy to implement,” he continued.