Calm down, speed is not everything

WIRED:I'VE JUST received a speed upgrade for my home bandwidth in San Francisco: from 4Mbit/sec to 16Mbit/sec. In theory that lets me download movies and MP3s in seconds, writes Danny O'Brien

Those of you struggling to get by with no DSL access have permission to fume: those of you long accustomed to 9Mbits on cable may feel free to grind your teeth.

To be honest, my 16Mbits is an anomaly, even in supposedly high-tech Silicon Valley. That 4Mbits is much more the usual rate, here and across all of the United States. That is, if you can get broadband at all.

Last year, the OECD demoted the US to 15th place in broadband penetration (Ireland is 20th, Britain 11th), and there's been much wailing here about the poor quality and access to high-speed internet connections.

How did I luck out? Well, the same reason that many Irish net users managed to get lucky: my part of the city is wired for cable television, and providing faster net connection is not quite as expensive for cable companies as it is for phone companies.

In Ireland, cable companies are offering 10Mbits when most DSL is still frequently advertised for 4Mbits. Nor does offering faster internet eat into their other profits as it does for DSL providers. Phone companies deny it, but providing fast, flat-rate internet gives their customers a way of bypassing their traditional profit centres - long-distance phone calls.

The other reason, though, is competition. My corner of the city is unusual in having three broadband ISPs - ATT, Comcast (my current provider), and Astound, another competing cable service. When Astound started offering 10Mbits, Comcast upped the ante. Similarly, in Ireland, BT Ireland's offer of 24Mbits for some exchanges appears to be in direct response to Eircom's 12Mbits service offering.

Competition is currently barely available in the broadband market, which favours those with built-out infrastructure: but when it is present, speeds quickly go up.

Or do they? If you take a visit to SpeedTest, a site run by the ex-chief executive of one of the better US DSL providers, Speakeasy, you can check out the real speeds of internet users, from Bahrain to Ballaghaderreen.

I think one of the biggest surprises is that, despite the apparent large gaps between broadband roll-out speed figures, the average seems to boil down to about 1-4Mbits for anyone who has DSL; faster (about 8Mbits) for cable; and a little faster still for fibre (about 10Mbits).

Those figures seem to hold around the world, despite the promises of 24Mbits for DSL and cable, and 100Mbits for fibre. Part of it is simply that not every consumer pays for the highest speed.

It also reflects the gap that all of us notice between what we are promised, and the practical speeds we gain from the internet.

The internet is so named because it's the "network of networks" - and not all of those networks are equally speedy.

It doesn't matter how fast your immediate ISP connection is - if the speeds are slower on one of those other networks, you'll never reach top speed. If you'd had a DSL connection in 1995, you would never have reached even 3Mbits when reaching American sites, because the chances are the transatlantic lines would have been too slow.

As it is, the "middle" of the modern net is usually engineered to handle even the fastest connections, but the networks on each end - your ISP, and the website you're trying to reach - are often the choke points.

Your ISP may have banked on not everyone using their full net capacity simultaneously; the webserver you're visiting may be dealing with many other customers, or have paid for only a limited amount of bandwidth itself.

That can lead to some injustices - and some unexpected fairness. Fast net users are often blamed for hogging all the bandwidth on websites or local connections, but they can also expect to have to wait until the rest of the network reaches their speeds before they can take advantage of their extra abilities. My 16Mbits usually drops to 10Mbits or far, far lower for most American sites, because somewhere, someone along the line isn't equipped to deal with anything faster.

Elsewhere in this town, there are fibre users with 100Mbits connections who could theoretically use it to play high-definition TV - except that because no one else is doing it, those services just aren't available.

There are still many cities without broadband, and vast swathes of rural areas are dial-up only, even in 2008. That means that for now, the internet is at best a system designed for 1-2Mbits users.

That doesn't mean that you don't get a faster experience if you pay for more bandwidth. But it does mean that the difference between a middle-range DSL line and a top-of-the-line fibre connection isn't quite as stark as you'd imagine.

So if you're waving your fist in anger because you haven't got DSL in your town, continue to fight for your right to download. But if you're green because you've only got 10Mbits on cable and you hear that Dublin or Galway is getting 24Mbits, don't worry.

Until you (and the rest of the net, and American consumers) get that extra speed, the chances are those 24Mbits aren't going to get more services, or much further than your 10Mbits.