Broadband is becoming the favourite utility of rants. As more and more of the population upgrade to fast always-on Internet connections, we are starting to see more problems arising indicating that the market is maturing. In the late nineties, we had the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications that pushed for changes from “per minute” charges to unmetered, so called ‘flat rate’ plans. Broadband has changed all this, and whilst ‘unlimited’ plans exist, there is an increasing move to limits, not in the form of charging but more ways to limit the ability of a small number of individuals to abuse the concept of unlimited.

The reason why unlimited broadband is a problem is rooted in human nature. When there is no cost to an activity, users start behaving in the optimal way which maximises their personal benefit which sometimes translates to ‘downloading the entire Internet’ to their PC (metaphorically speaking). In most other unlimited offers there are some kinds of restrictions. So, if you have an ‘all you can eat’ deal in a restaurant, you are limited by the fact you physically can’t eat more than a certain amount. Unlimited entry to an attraction is also limited by the fact you only have so much leisure time. But, what about broadband? You can leave it downloading whilst you’re at work and asleep.

Say you have ten cars and take up all the parking on the road outside your house.. Your neighbours would start giving you strange looks.. But, do they know that you’re the person hogging the Internet pipes? Bear in mind your ‘broadband neighbours’ aren’t necessarily physically that close to you anyway.

On his Blog, Ashley Highfield argues that we need a Broadband Charter which among other things sets out arguments that service providers should guarantee minimum speeds, not ‘up to’ speeds.

One suggestion Ashley makes is a standard of “high definition broadband” or HD broadband which would help to unify standards. This is something we (I and my colleagues at thinkbroadband.com) have thought about in the context of providing effective comparisons between different packages. The problem is, it’s not easy to come up with specifications which you can’t, as a service provider, work around to drop the cost (and level of service).

I think there is a significant misunderstanding in the general population that broadband is just about speed with suggestions like connection speeds should be 8 meg or higher.. Previously, users used to look just at price.. now it’s price and headline speed. This is just as bad as those shopping for cameras looking just at “how many megapixels will it do?”.

An Internet connection is about a number of factors including actual speeds , latency, packet loss, connection reliability, support all at various times of the week/day as well as financial stability of the operator and much more. Most users could not begin to understand the complexities of what it takes to provide a good service. Someone could offer you an 8 meg service which seems fast, but if you start running VoIP applications through it, you might find the quality isn’t up to it because latency is too high.

My biggest gripe is with those calling for unlimited broadband.. because it shows the clear lack of understanding that costs of providing a service are very much based on how fast you want the service to be and how much it’s used (by time and amount of use).. Why should service providers subsidise some users who want to use 100 times more than the average user? Shouldn’t that cost be borne by the user who does the downloading?

Service providers can do more (admittedly only with help from wholesale operators) to tackle the issue of making users aware of what they are getting, but demanding they provide a financially unsustainable service is no different to expecting to pay £30 a month at BP and receive unlimited fuel.