FCC Report Shows ISPs Delivering on Speed, Promises, Bennett Says
Broadband providers are delivering both faster speeds and on advertising promises, but the end-user experience is subject to other variables, said Richard Bennett, network architect and founder of the High Tech Forum, commenting on the FCC’s recent Measuring Broadband America…
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report on fixed services (see 1512300037). He said cable/telco ISPs had been basically delivering on the advertised speeds for several years. “So if MBA was intended to embarrass US ISPs (as many believe), it’s a failure," he said in a recent blog post. Bennett compared the FCC report with an Akamai State of the Internet report, the “only other data set” on U.S. broadband speed: “Akamai says speed increased by 2.9 times between Q1 2011 and Q3 2014, and the FCC says the average rose by 3.6 times. Akamai says the baseline in 2011 was 17 Mbps, while the FCC says it was 9 Mbps. And Akamai says the average download speed rose to 48.8 Mbps by Q3 2014, vs 32 Mbps for the FCC. The measurement techniques are different, the sampling criteria are different, but we see the same general trend line, a tripling in speed over a 3.5 year period.” Bennett said the FCC did a good job of explaining how Internet applications have different network needs, which affects performance. The report focused on three performance metrics: speed, latency and packet loss. He cited a “very interesting finding” in the report: “Web surfing hits its sweet spot at 15 Mbps and doesn’t improve much at higher speeds.” He noted the last MBA report found Web speeds didn’t improve much with broadband pipes offering above 10 Mbps. “So it appears that web servers are getting faster, even though they lag broadband networks by a staggering degree. If we want faster web surfing, we need web servers that can keep up with broadband networks, which they obviously aren’t doing today. This is not something we can blame on the ISPs.”