In an astonishingly short time, “broadband” has evolved to mandatory “utility” status for many households – especially those that serve as temporary or permanent “branch offices” for businesses large and small. After electricity and water, the broadband connection is often the next most vital resource. Yet, for all its importance, users have little visibility into it beyond knowing whether it is on or off.
Unfortunately, while this level of knowledge is sufficient for water and electricity, it isn’t for broadband. Most of the time we’ve chosen which level of service to purchase, yet we have absolutely no way of knowing whether we are getting what we pay for.
Put another way – the service provider guarantees to bill us the higher amount if we “upgrade” while simultaneously notifying us that in no way are they obligated to deliver any service level greater than “on.”
Herewith the footnote from my current provider: “Adelphia does not guarantee speeds, as the speed of the Adelphia Broadband Service provided to you at your site will vary depending upon your computer and associated equipment, Internet traffic and associated equipment, and other factors.”
For business users trying to be productive from a small office-home office (SOHO) office these “factors” are too important to be dismissed with a footnote.
While we’ll grant that the service provider can’t be held responsible, if it can’t be held responsible for its part of the edge, who can?
Given that we have alternatives – many U.S. locations can have their pick of DSL or cable modem – it would be nice to have some data about the infrastructure and its performance.
Without such data, I imagine many follow my pattern. I install cable modem service because the installation period is three days instead of three weeks. Then, when I get tired of 15-second response time for loading simple Web pages, I order up DSL to replace cable.
Given that the service-level agreement (SLA) is a non-SLA, my choice appears either to switch providers or acquiesce to “whatever” I happen to get – good, bad or indifferent.
For all I know, my poor response time is because the kid next door is an unwitting high-speed LimeWire file server to the globe. They used to say that users of shared services like cable would see performance degrade when the neighborhood kids got home from school. Now with peer-to-peer, you can experience (perhaps) that same degraded performance 24/7.
So service providers, how about some hard facts? How come cable users can’t find out how many other users they are “sharing” with? Why is it a secret? Are you underprovisioned and don’t want us to find out? Never.
What are you doing to protect us from having incessant, peer-to-peer transfers of mega-files from crushing our SoHo productivity? Given the insidious nature – and massive popularity – of programs such as LimeWire the offending party is likely not even aware that they are causing the problem.
When the water company sees a constant flow of water, it’s smart enough to know that something is not right.
When the data pipe streams, it goes unnoticed. We know that this data exists and even a little data mining could help spot intentional or unintentional bandwidth abuse and, ultimately, improve quality for the overall customer base.
Service providers, set me straight. What am I missing here?
