“The first casualty in war is the truth”.
If we reverse the causality we can conclude that telecom and broadband are a warzone. Apparently there is such much at stake that there is enough money and energy available to spin a series of half-truths, near-lies, rigged statistics and outright propaganda in the press. This week we could witness at least 2 good examples.
In the USA Scott Cleland has created a big row by claiming in The Register and his blog that Google is reponsible for 20 % of the Internet traffic and should therefore pay for 20 % of the cost of Internet. A false but fiendishly clever argument. Why is it false?
All the internet traffic is generated by people like us making the choice to request a reponse from Googles/Youtubes servers. We pay already for the transportation costs through our broadband subscriptions. Google pays for the servers and the bandwidth from its servers to the net. So Mr Cleland is fundamentally wrong. But for telco’s the idea of billing both Google and customers by the “tick” sounds great. Proponents of “Net Neutrality” argue that this would kill the Internet as we know it and destroy a lot of the value for society. Mr Cleland writes for a socalled “astroturf” organization, organized lobbying posing as a spontaneous “grassroots” movement.
In the Netherlands Telecompaper has released a review together with Iping of developments in broadband speeds. The article states that cable outperforms DSL. Close reading of the report and reviewing testresults produced by a fiber user in Amsterdam running the Iping testtool Nuria produce quite a different picture. Telecompaper and Iping look only at maximum downloadspeeds and rate connections on the ratio between maximum speed and measured average speed. The independent testresults show that fiber connections outperform everything else by far, but most spectacularly in uploadspeeds and latency (gaming). DSL performs great and at least as good as cable when surfing responses and gaming are considered.
So they have taken an approach where fiber (the biggest threat to cable) is ignored. The rating is chosen in such a way that it makes cable look good against DSL.
Beware: the first casualty in discussions over broadband is the truth.
