[LINK] defining broadband

[Paul Brooks]

Scott Howard wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Tom Worthington <
> tom.worthington at tomw.net.au> wrote:
>
>   
>> From the article quoted it appears the USA uses 768 kbps. I wonder why
>> they used that figure, as it does not seem to match any technical
>> standard. Perhaps it is the speed which enough marginal voters can get
>> to influence a US election? ;-)
>>     
>
>
> 768Kbps is the normal "slow" or "basic" DSL speed offered by telco's such as
> AT&T in the US.
>
> It's pretty much the equivalent to the 512Mbps which is offered by
> Australian telco's as their entry-level ADSL product. I don't recall ever
> seeing 512Mbps used in the US, and after all they are both basically just
> arbitrary values, based on economic rather than technical reasons.
>   
The US communications system runs on natural multiples of 1.5Mbps - a 
T1.  At a guess, providers settled on 768k (and I've seen 384k 
advertised) because it is a simple division of 1.5Mbps.
In Australia, the natural mulitple is 2.048Mbps - an E1 - so divisions 
of 1024k, 512k and 256k became common.

On the definition of broadband, they should look to their own National 
Research Council report titled "Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits" 
(2002), which defined a broadband service as where "The local access 
link performance should not be the limiting factor in a user's 
capability for running today's applications".

I like this definition as it adapts to changing technology and changing 
demands - the numerical speed it indicates will increase over time as 
new applications and usage patterns put greater demands on the access 
link, and it also applies to characteristics that are not purely related 
to transmission capacity, such as latency and jitter.

The report is a little dated now, being released in 2002, but much of it 
is spot on and thoroughly researched.


links:

full copy available for download for fee online: 
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10235
google books has much of it visible: 
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=KgVs-A8A3CUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false


Paul.