Yes, another politically-slanted post.  I’ll try to keep them to a minimum, I promise.

There has been much discussion lately on the subject of broadband deployment in the United States.  I fall on the side of the fence that says that our broadband deployment yardstick is long out of date.  I am happy to see the new administration seeking to update our broadband standards.  Regardless of this, though, I had some thoughts on broadband in general that I wanted to share.

First of all, I have been quite frustrated with ISPs for some time in the area of what was considered quality broadband connectivity.  This frustration stems from unimpressive download speeds, absolutely laughable upload speeds, quality of service issues, and even anti-competitive practices that have sparked the debate on Net Neutrality.  One of my largest frustrations, though, is that the American people, for the most part, don’t seem to mind.  Why is this?  My personal opinion is that they don’t know any better.  Call it patriotism, call it pride, call it whatever you want, but most people in this country tend to think that, because we’re America, what we have must be the best.  Is this the best I can get in the way of Internet connectivity?  Well, we’re America, what we have must be the best right?  WRONG.  While most households in the US contend with sub-5Mbps connections, many of the so-called broadband connections still being sub-1.5Mbps connections, users in places like Japan are enjoying 100Mbps to their residences.

It is my opinion that, since most users in America have not experienced what real, true, high-speed broadband connectivity feels like, they are content to enjoy their current sub-par speeds, naively believing that this is as good as it gets.  Were these users to experience what true fast broadband felt like, even for a short time, they would begin to clammer for that level of service from American broadband providers.  As it is now, those providers are perfectly content to sit on their laurels, not having any driving force for real innovation.  Some ISPs have begun to come around recently.  Verizon, for the most part, started by rolling out its FiOS fiber optice service, the service that I use and love.  This service began offering not only higher speeds, but higher quality.  Connections that didn’t cut out at all times of the day and the capability to actually sustain a download at or near the full speed of the connection were a welcome change for these users.  One other feature of the service that was unheard of at the time, but extremely welcome by people like me, were much higher upload speeds.  Even now, it’s not uncommon to find the uplink speed of a broadband connection set at 512Kbps or worse.  FiOS offered an uplink speed of 2Mbps or better.

Other ISPs are starting to come around, but the going is slow.  Comcast, for instance, is rolling out speed increases to many of its users.  Prior thinking on speed must be rethought.  Previously, uplink speeds were kept low.  Some of this dates back to the A in ADSL, or asynchronous, meaning the uplink speed was lower than the downlink speed by design.  For newer broadband technologies, though, the speeds really need to become more synchronous.  We as a society are changing how we use our connections.  More and more of our lives and our businesses are online.  More importantly, more of our data is living in the cloud.  Cloud services are great for end users since they provide for more efficient use of available resources.  For cloud services to work, though, users must be able to upload their data to the cloud in a fast and efficient manner.  The success of cloud services really does depend on better broadband deployment.  As more of our communcations depend on broadband connectivity, that connectivity simply must become better, faster, and more stable, and ISPs’ feet must be held to the fire to provide users with the level of service expected of a utility service.