A Defining Moment for Broadband

Reader dismisses the FCC's definition of "broadband."

[Response to Large DSL Operators Do Fine from June 17, 2002.]

[July 12, 2002]

Dear Editors:

In this article, there are two references that I feel must be addressed:

• "As more people find out about broadband, more want it. That's why DSL more than doubled during 2001."
• "In the U.S., Qwest and Covad have both been spending cautiously on broadband, and this produced slow DSL growth over the last quarter."

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) defines broadband service as:

"A service requiring transmission channels capable of supporting faster than 1.5 Mbps or the primary rate in ISDN or T1 or DS1 in digital terminology. In European version it is called E1 or 2.048 Mbps."
— Broadband Communications, Balaji Kumar,
McGraw-Hill, 1998

DSL in the manner that the huge majority of subscribers use the service is not "broadband". Out of all those customers, how many actually have equal-to greater-than 1.54Mbps access?

Ralph Sims, CEO
Accel Net, Inc.

Hello Ralph:

Because we're U.S. centric, ISP-Planet utilizes the Federal Communications Commission's definition of broadband. That is, the FCC defines broadband as an information service with a carrying capacity in excess of 200 kbps upstream and downstream.

Quite a difference between the two definitions, don't you agree? It would be nice to have one universal definition. I guess we can file that underthe caption, "In a perfect world ... "

Regards,

Patricia Fusco, Managing Editor
ISP-Planet