The FCC recently released a national report on the state of broadband by technology. They checked out things like does the technology/provider provide access at the speeds advertised based on monitoring 14 of the biggest providers, which serve “well over 80 percent of U.S. residential broadband connections.”
Here are the big lessons learned according to the authors…
- Many ISPs now closely meet or exceed the speeds they advertise, but there continues to be room for improvement.
- New metric this year – Consistency of speeds – also shows significant room for improvement.
- Consumers are continuing to migrate to faster speed tiers.
- Improvements in Speed are not Uniform Across Speed Tiers Tested
- Sharp Differences in Upload Speeds
The big takeaway I think it that all services are not created equal.
The study looks at:
- Fiber
- Cable
- DSL
- Satellite
Fiber and cable look pretty good through the study. Satellite and DSL run into some PR problems. The problem with satellite is latency. This has always been the problem with satellite. The speed of satellite is actually quite good and generally they seem to provide better than advertised speeds. BUT the latency is a problem. Here’s a excerpt on latency from the report…
Fiber-to-the-home, on average, had the best performance in terms of latency, with 24 ms average during the peak period. Cable had 30 ms latency, and DSL had 48 ms latency. The highest average latency in a speed tier for a terrestrial technology was for DSL with 54 ms measured latency. The highest latency recorded for a single ISP using terrestrial technology was 63 ms. Satellite technology, due to the distances between the satellite and terrestrial points, recorded the highest overall latency of 671 ms. 54 While the test results found variance in latencies among technologies, the latencies measured here for all of the terrestrial-based technologies should be adequate for common latency-sensitive Internet applications, such as VoIP.55 As noted, the situation is more complex for satellite, and dependent on a number of factors, including application sensitivity to latency and user perception of latency’s effects.
The problem with DSL is that it’s not getting better in a lot of places. There is an exception, but only useful if you’re in a specific market area…
While the average increase in network speed tier was about 36 percent, the results are not uniform over ISP and technology types. Most notably, those ISPs using DSL technology show little or no improvement in maximum speeds, with the sole exception of Qwest/Centurylink, which this past year doubled its highest download speed within specific market areas. The reason for this may be that DSL, unlike cable and fiber technologies, is strongly dependent upon the length of the copper wire (or “loop”) from the residence to the service provider’s terminating electronic equipment, such that obtaining higher data speeds would require companies to make significant capital investments across a market area to shorten the copper loops. On the other hand, both fiber and cable technologies intrinsically support higher bandwidths, and can support even higher speeds with more incremental investments.
The graphic below really paints the picture. The lowest speeds on the chart are for DSL. It looks as if Frontier has made improvements – but otherwise the speeds are flat-lining and the lowest possible available.
The report mentions that it tests for the most popular speed tiers only; implying that there may be faster tiers that aren’t as popular. But if the towns I visited following Senator Schmit’s tour of Minnesota are an indicator, choice is an issue in many rural communities.
You can also see the footprint of DSL on the Connect MN maps…
Compare that to a map showing which areas have access to only one technology and it’s a pretty good indicator of which areas have access to DSL only (in orange)…
