Internet service providers (ISPs) looking to improve user experiences need to invest in more than just faster speeds, one expert said
According to Dave Page, CEO and co-founder of Actual Experience, a narrow-minded focus on faster speeds alone will lead to a lot of wasted spending, both on the part of ISPs and their customers.
For evidence, Page, whose company has worked with U.K. telecom regulator Ofcom to assess that country’s broadband performance, pointed to Chart 9 in the FCC’s recent “Measuring Broadband America” report.
As broadband speed goes up in the chart’s x-axis, he noted, the average download speed on the chart’s y-axis goes down. The interesting part, Page said, is the point on the chart where the download speeds on the y-axis plateau around one second.
“What is actually quite important in that chart is when you hit about 10-15 mbps the time it takes to download doesn’t really go down anymore,” Page said.
Increasing broadband speeds past this point, he said, is like giving someone a Ferrari and expecting them to be able to get to the store or work faster without accounting for outside forces. Similarly, Page said enabling and offering higher internet speeds alone will result in a big spend with little return.
“Giving you faster and faster and faster is going to be a burden on cost both for the ISPs and for consumers and actually isn’t going to make any difference at all,” Page said. “If the U.S. and U.K. don’t stop their singular focus on speed, a lot of money is going to be wasted and all the real issues that are preventing the us digital infrastructure from being healthy are going to be missed”
Measuring Quality
According to Page, a better measure of an ISP’s broadband success is actual quality of service – that is, does the service suit the needs of a customer in completing their daily Internet activities?
“If its 100 (mbps) into the home but it’s not fit for the purpose I want to use it for, then it’s pointless,” Page said. “Whatever the service is, regardless of the speed, is it fit for banking? Can you shop? There are all these different aspects of quality, whether (the service is) fit for all these different things people do day in and day out.”
Page said a number of factors will determine the quality of service, from the ISP itself to quality of the Wi-Fi, router and other elements in the digital supply chain.
Once the level of quality is assessed using more factors, regulators and Internet companies can better determine where fixes need to be made.
“When you look at it that way, you get a much richer view of where resources need to be allocated,” Page explained. “And if it’s not fit, then our data shows Ofcom where in our national infrastructure we have to make improvements to make digital Britain fit for certain uses.”
With the right data, Page said digital infrastructures could be corrected within three to five years to eliminate many of the frustrations people deal with today.
