Broadband providers (and their networks) often do a number of things that can reduce the quality of your connection. The three most common are
• Making your upload speed significantly slower than your download speed;
• Making you share you capacity with other network users;
• Networks can vary considerably in the time lag between the signal leaving its point of origin and arriving at its destination.
These three factors known in “techno speak” respectively as synchronicity (I know! As in the Police album from the 80’s), contention and latency and all can have a significant impact on your broadband performance regardless of the headline speeds that you’re offered.
• Synchronicity (in particular low upload speeds) can make certain types of broadband useless for cloud type applications;
• Contention can mean that service quality varies wildly at differing points in time whilst like the roads traffic can grind to a halt at peak times;
• Latency has real impact on real time application such as voice and video, often making them unusable.
You’ll be glad to read that operators aren’t doing this just to rip you off; they are dealing with real challenges presented by their network architecture, in particular with the access layer or last mile. The last mile of most networks is generally a wireless or a copper connection. Both these access technologies have been developed significantly over the past number of years but both suffer physical limits that severely restrict their capacity as the number of users and the capacity they require increases – and these three “tricks” are used to deal with this issue.
The best way of dealing with these issues is to deploy a technology which does not suffer any of the physical limits that impede copper and wireless technologies. Fibre broadband is based on totally different physics – optics. By deploying fibre into the last mile or as close to the last mile as possible you remove the need to contend, to reduce upload speeds and you eliminate any latency issues. Any other solution versus fibre is a compromise that will, at some point, create problems.
To put this in some sort of context, the FCC have made a comparison between copper and fibre and according to them, a single twisted copper pair can deal with 6 simultaneous phone calls. However, a single fibre pair can handle 2.5 million! To my mind, this simple example (without the “techno-speak”) highlights the fact that one is a legacy technology reaching capacity and the other is cutting edge and future proofed.
As we all know, access to high capacity broadband can have a considerably positive effect on our daily lives but in a commercial environment, the technology supporting and delivering the broadband becomes even more critical than it would in a domestic setting. Everyone needs to understand what’s capable over the various technologies and what’s not.
