Broadband Speed Checked by Radar

By John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 6/7/2010 12:01:00 AM

Washington -- Could cable operators have to put broadband speed stickers on their service contracts, like those miles-per-gallon stickers on new car windows?

The Federal Communications Commission has not ruled it out.

The FCC last week released a survey that showed most people don’t know what broadband speeds they are getting, though nine out of 10 say whatever they are, they’re satisfied.

But the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Aff airs Bureau isn’t satisfied. It argues that broadband customers need to know that speed information to make informed decisions about their ability to stream video or engage in online gaming, and to choose between competing services.

Bureau chief Joel Gurin said that given that there can be hundreds of dollars of diff erence in cost between different tiers of service, knowing what you are paying for is a “big issue.”

So, along with the survey, the commission put out a call for digital guinea pigs — 10,000 of them — to help them test broadband service for, among other things, delivered speeds, latency, jitter and even the speed at which Web sites load.

That last element might provide some governance on potential ISP mischief in the wake of the April’s BitTorrent decision — in which a U.S. appeals court vacated an FCC order concerning how Comcast managed peer-to-peer filesharing traffic on its network — though ISPs have argued that there won’t be any of that sort of thing to monitor.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association supports the test, in part because the FCC is using it to get better data than the ComScore numbers it used to come up with the figure of a 50% gap between actual and advertised speeds. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association has pointed out, and the FCC concedes, that there are a host of variables that affect that gap that are not in the industry’s control, like the type of computer or router or the number of household members trying to get online at once.