Broadband Internet Speed test

The Communications Workers of America released a new policy paper as part of its “Speed Matters” campaign, a multi-million-dollar, strategic effort to help bring affordable, high speed Internet to all Americans.

The newest policy paper is available at speedmatters.org, in the “to learn more” box. Also on that site is a speed test, to measure individual Internet speed, and other breaking news and information.

The report spotlights the critical need for a comprehensive national high speed broadband policy if the United States is to bring the benefits of the telecommunications revolution to all.

The United States, the country that invented the Internet, has fallen to 16th in the world in terms of access to high speed broadband. “This is not surprising since we spend relatively less as a nation on telecommunications investment and we spend relatively more as consumers for slower speeds,” the report noted.

“High speed networks are the infrastructure of the 21st century and the U.S. needs a national policy to get all of us there,” said CWA President Larry Cohen. “This is a critical public good and where markets are slow to deliver, we need to find ways to create financial incentives to speed up private sector build out. In addition, we need to ensure that all regions of the country have access to service — including rural areas and urban communities. That’s why we need a national public policy that will make sure that all Americans can benefit from high speed Internet and other 21st century advances.”

Cohen noted that the recent announcement of the sale of Verizon land lines in northern New England was a step backward in terms of providing universal high speed Internet access for all. Consumers in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire have, in effect, been abandoned in terms of gaining access to true high speed Internet and future technological advances, because only companies with a substantial rate of capitalization have the ability to provide such services.

CWA is advocating some bold, specific steps that the United States should take to ensure that all residents have access to high speed Internet networks. These include:

* An increase in the Federal Communication Commission’s definition of high speed, which now is just 200 kilobits per second, a fraction of what the rest of the world uses. * Accurate mapping and data collection of exactly where we are in terms of broadband availability and speed, so we know who does and who does not have access to high speed Internet today. * Support for public/private partnerships to promote build out and to generate demand. * Extending universal service requirements that now apply only to voice telephony to Internet services. * Preserving an open Internet, so that all consumers can go where they want, when they want.

The report also points to ways that government can create financial incentives to speed up the build out of high speed networks, including accelerated depreciation of investments and making low interest loans available to carriers in order to go forward with build out.

CWA’s campaign involves working with policymakers in Congress and at the state and local levels and is building support among other public interest groups and organizations for ensuring universal access to high speed broadband networks.

CWA also believes that building high capacity networks — making bandwidth readily available — is the best way to resolve issues and concerns about maintaining an open Internet.

CWA represents 700,000 workers in communications and information technology, media and cable, public service, health care and higher education, airlines and manufacturing.

From PR Newswire.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has issued a warning to Australia ISPs to come clean about their broadband speeds and stop using the “up to” marketing term, or face possible litigation. “Most consumers won’t understand what ‘up to’ means and then they are significantly disappointed when they don’t achieve those speeds,” says ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel. “We know all the technicians know that in most cases the speeds that you are claiming as the headline speeds are not achievable,” he warns.

There’s been a similar debate here in the States. While technicians and informed users know that an “up to 3Mbps” connection means under optimal conditions (line quality, CO distance), less informed consumers are repeatedly surprised when they perform their first speed test and notice they’re getting significantly less. While some have suggested regulator-enforced speed tests to ensure customers are getting what they pay for, there’s too many factors to consider (trojan infection? poor home wiring?) to make proper enforcement practical.

Our resident ISP techs will be the first to tell you that residential broadband is a “best effort” service, and users desiring guaranteed speed and reliability should look toward business class lines with SLAs. Users on the other side of the fence argue you don’t pay for “up to” a gallon of gasoline, with the gas station saying .7 gallons was their “best effort” in getting it from the ground to your tank. Either way, if there’s a problem with the “up to” tag, it’s a marketing department issue. Is the “up to” tag misleading? Is it something regulators should squash?

From BroadbandReports.com

On a day that Internet connection in Asia slowed to a crawl because of damaged undersea cables, StarHub launched Singapore’s fastest wired broadband Internet service.

It offers subscribers a 100 megabits per second (Mbps) connection — three times faster than current services.

Mr Mike Reynolds, StarHub’s head of integrated products and marketing, said: “Singapore will become the first country in the world to have a 100Mbps broadband service commercially available nationwide.”

The only catch is that subscribers need to purchase a 100Mbps-ready cable modem at $525 and subscribe to its $121.80 per month MaxOnline Ultimate plan to reach the advertised speeds.

Asked about this, Mr Thomas Ee, StarHub’s senior vice-president for IP services, said it wanted to differentiate this premium service from other packages, in which modems are usually bundled free.

As the second largest telco, StarHub has 308,000 customers for its broadband services.

Currently, all its subscribers can access local content and services at speeds of up to 32Mbps, regardless of their service plan or modem. But under the new plan and modem, they’ll be able to access local and international websites at 100Mbps.

Its competitor, SingTel, offers a 10Mbps service that comes bundled with a modem if subscribers sign up for a contract.

It had already started a trial in July on a wired broadband service that utilises a fibre-optic based technology currently capable of reaching speeds of up to 80Mbps. The technology can theoretically scale up to 1000Mbps.

A SingTel spokesperson said that it plans to launch the fibre-optic based broadband service next year, along with other high-speed broadband services.

Technology industry experts meeting in Silicon Valley recently said broadband Internet access in the U.S. needs to improve for the “YouTube generation” to really flourish. An improved broadband network will better serve users of sites such as YouTube.com, at which millions of videos from the general public are shared online.

Although the U.S. broadband penetration rate topped 75 percent of households in September and is expected to reach 80 percent by the end of 2006, according to WebSiteOptimization.com, China is expected to surpass the U.S. as its broadband base grows rapidly. But more importantly, says Mossberg, U.S. broadband networks are generally slower than those in other countries. Faster connections will be needed to deliver full-motion video to portable devices. Services that deliver as little as 768 kilobits per second (Kbps) are considered broadband in the U.S., while services in Europe and elsewhere are much faster. “I was in a pub in Dublin, Ireland, and I was getting 30 megabits per second (Mbps), wireless. And it was free,” said Greg Harper, a strategic adviser for Trans World Entertainment Inc., which operates retail music and video entertainment stores in malls and online.

As the world’s internet traffic grows relentlessly, faster data transmission will logically become crucial. To enable telecommunications networks to cope with the phenomenal surge in data traffic as the internet population moves past a billion users, researchers are focusing on new systems to increase data transmission rates and it’s not surprising that the world data transmission record is continually under threat. Unlike records where human physical capabilities limit new records to incremental growth, when human ingenuity is the deciding factor, extraordinary gains are possible. German and Japanese scientists recently collaborated to achieve just such a quantum leap in obliterating the world record for data transmission. By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower.

“You transmit data at various wavelengths simultaneously in the fiber-optic networks. For organizational and economic reasons each wavelength signal is assigned a data rate as high as possible”, explains Prof. Hans-Georg Weber from the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut HHI in Berlin, who heads a project under the MultiTeraNet program funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

A few weeks ago the scientist and his team established a new world record together with colleagues from Fujitsu. Data is transmitted in fiber-optic cables using ultrashort pulses of light and is normally encoded by switching the laser on and off. A pulse gives the binary 1, off the 0. You therefore have two light intensity states to transmit the data. The Fraunhofer researchers have now managed to squeeze more data into a single pulse by packing four, instead of the previous two, binary data states in a light pulse using phase modulation.”

“Faster data rates are hugely important for tomorrow’s telecommunications”, explains Weber. The researcher assumes the transmission capacity on the large transoceanic traffic links will need to increase to between 50 and 100 terabits per second in ten to 20 years. “This kind of capacity will only be feasible with the new high-performance systems.”

From GizMag