[LINK] Advertised NBN plan speeds impossible to achieve: ACCC

[Glen Turner]

Tom Worthington wrote:
> 
> The term may be understood in the industry, but what is needed is a 
> measure of network performance the general public can understand.

Hi Tom

It *is* widely understood by the general public. That's why the
definition has retained its popularity.

At the moment if you buy a 100Mbps service and you want to distribute
that around your house you go to OfficeWorks and buy a 100Mbps "Fast
Ethernet" switch (or access point, but let's use switch for this
exposition).

It's readily understandable that if you want to buy a 300Mbps service
and want to distribute that around your office you go to OfficeWorks
and buy a 1000Mbps "Gigabit Ethernet" switch.  If people have issues
with SI units then that's well within the capabilities of OfficeWork's
staff.

Now let's say the ACCC alter the definition of the Internet service
speeds, and the client buys a 1.1Mbps service (the description of a
100Mbps service which meets the definition of "worst case transport
layer throughput across the link" which ACCC is proposing, although
they don't realise it). That OfficeWorks worker would be wholly excused
when they sold that customer a 10Mbps "Ethernet" switch.  A switch
which is ten times too slow.

In short, the ACCC is acting suboptimally. Viewing only a small part of
the consumer experience with networking.

I view the current definition of bandwidth as the "single useful
rating" which you seek.  It's independent of traffic mix. It informs
the customer of which matching products they should purchase.  That it
misstates achievable throughput by a small amount is readily
understood. A site's technical staff can measure their site's packet
size distribution and easily calculate the transport-layer throughput
across the link, should those few percent matter.

-glen