Broadband Speed Not Necessarily as Advertised

[Chris Gohlke]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://techdirt.com/articles/20070806/233904.shtml' target='_blank'>http://techdirt.com/articles/20070806/233904.shtml</a><br /><br /></div><i>"By this point, everyone should know that broadband providers always provide "up to" speeds with the connections they sell. By "up to" they usually mean under perfect conditions that you will never, ever see. But just what kinds of speeds should you actually expect? A new study in the UK found that broadband speeds tend to be about a third of the "up to" speed. The worst speeds were about one-eighth of the promoted speed. As the article linked here notes, is it really any surprise that only 30% of people claim they're satisfied with their broadband?"</i><br /><br />Actually, while I'm sure the above is true, I'd venture to say that most broadband users would have no idea even how to check to see what their connection speed was. On top of that, unless you are downloading large files, the perceptible difference between high-speed connections is negligible. Add in the number of people who connect their broadband to a wireless router which then becomes the bottleneck rather than the broadband connection.

[ptyork]

Add in the number of people who connect their broadband to a wireless router which then becomes the bottleneck rather than the broadband connection.
???

At least here the fastest speed for broadband that I've seen is around 8 Mb/s. The slowest wireless connection is 11 Mb/s. I'd venture that many if not most are running 802.11g now--so 54 Mb/s--and that most are running on broadband connections that average a rating of 3 Mb/s (AT&amp;T's low cost DSL is rated at only 768 Kb/s and I know a LOT of people using this). I've tested it and at least with my good ol' Linksys '54gl I get close to my theorized maximum throughput between wirelessly connected LAN segments, so the 3 Mb/s (6 in my case) broadband connection is still very much the bottleneck unless I'm missing something.

FWIW, I'm fairly satisfied with my BB provider now, but I think for the most part the shared neighborhood bandwidth (for cable) or distance to CO (for DSL), the overburdened/underpowered DNS and mail servers, the equally overburdened central routers, the saturated trunks, and the somewhat higher than desired latency of most BB providers are the things that most consumers will find fault with (even if they don't have a clue what they are). It's not just the raw bandwidth.

[Damion Chaplin]

For a while I paid for the 3MBPS broadband connection, but of course I never saw anything even close to that speed. Servers just don't spit up data that fast. So I downgraded my connection to the 1.5MBPS and haven't noticed a single difference (except the $10 off my bill).