It’s another example of universal stupidity of the civil servants. The Federal Communication Commission has decided to “educate” the Americans about broadband. It’s fine with informing the consumers about megabits-per-second. How about telling people about latency, jitter, peak-hour performance, and short-term speed increases? Mitchell Lazarus observes:
Broadband service has become a utility, like electricity, gas, water, telephone, or cable. The average consumer has no interest in how many gallons per minute his water service can deliver. The water either works, or it doesn’t. Ditto for electricity, gas, and so on. We care mightily when any of these fails, including broadband service. But as long as it stays on, and more or less meets our needs, the technical details are of little concern.
We do have a couple of suggestions for the FCC. Although to most people reliability matters more than latency or jitter, it is not in the FCC’s proposed list of disclosures. It should be, with significant rate rebates when outages go over the advertised limit. We also want to see an absolute, unconditional ban on the phrase “up to” in ads for broadband speeds. Providers can specify a minimum, or a range, or a guaranteed average, but claiming speeds “up to” some number is just an exercise in creative writing.
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