[1st-mile-nm] Is Faster not always better ?

[Doug Dawson]

This is a topic I've been giving a lot of thought to lately, because this seem to be one of the new arguments that opponents of funding rural broadband are now using.

It takes pages to write a full response to the question (and luckily for me I have a blog where I can do that), but here are a few ideas that are part of the response to refute this concept:
- 2/3 of the broadband customers in the country are now served by the big cable companies, and those companies all now have set the minimum speeds of broadband for new customers between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. They didn't do this in a vacuum and the big companies unilaterally increase speeds every 3-5 years as a way to cut down on customer complaints about speed. I think there is a strong argument that these companies have established the 'market' speeds that customers want. Nobody made the cable companies increase speeds and this is one of those examples of the marketplace at work. 
- Like with everything in this world, the users of broadband run the gamut on the spectrum from homes that barely use it to homes that will use everything they can get. It's really easy to talk to folks along the bottom half of that spectrum and assume that homes don't need faster speeds. This raises the really interesting policy question: do you set speeds based upon the average customer, upon the 10% biggest users, or something else? There is no automatic answer to that question, although I point to the answer above where the cable companies seem to have decided to cater to the top half of the spectrum. 
- There is a huge difference in homes with school-age students and those without. In my opinion any discussion of the right amount of bandwidth needs to consider homes with students - other homes just come along for the ride. 
- We know that the need for bandwidth and speed increases every year. If the policy is to build broadband that takes care of today's needs, such a network will be inadequate in five years and obsolete in ten years. 

Doug Dawson
President
CCG Consulting
202 255-7689 

Check out my blog at http://potsandpansbyccg.com 



-----Original Message-----
From: 1st-mile-nm <1st-mile-nm-bounces at mailman.dcn.org> On Behalf Of John Brown
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2019 10:18 PM
To: 1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org
Subject: [1st-mile-nm] Is Faster not always better ?

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/

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Respectfully,

John Brown, CISSP
Managing Member, CityLink Telecommunications NM, LLC _______________________________________________
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