The cable company NTL has been told off by the Advertising Standards Authority for describing one of its services as ‘broadband’ when it runs only twice as fast as a dialup connection.
The ASA said that while the service is technically broadband because it its always on, it is too slow and should be called something else.
Apparently most people think broadband should only be used to describe an always-on internet connection that runs faster than 500kpbs, so the 128kpbs offering from NTL just doesn’t cut it.
I reckon that most net users wouldn’t know a 500kpbs connection if it came up to them and bit them on the leg.
They do know that broadband is ‘faster’ but don’t really know what that would mean when it comes to getting their email, watching videos on their computer or surfing the web.
It’s a sign of how badly the Internet is being sold that we even have to have these discussions at all.
It's in bits
When you talk about the speed of a network you’re really asking how much information it can transfer in a fixed period of time.
Computers store and process information in ones and zeroes, called ‘bits’, and so the speed of a connection is measured in bits per second, or bps.
A thousand bits is a kilobit, so kilobits per second or kpbs, are also used.
Then, just to make things even more confusing, we measure the size of most computer files in chunks of eight bits, or bytes, instead of bits. A thousand bytes is a kilobyte.
So 128,000 bits every second is the same as 16,000 bytes every second. That’s about twice the size of the picture of me at the top of this page.
A typical web page might be fifty or sixty thousand bytes.
So, it would take a second or two to get to your computer over a 128kpbs connection, and a quarter of that over a 512kpbs connection.
If you’ve got the fastest NTL service, it’s twice as fast again.
The main things you notice with a fast connection are that you don’t have to wait for your email, even with large attachments, and you can watch video continuously.
Some web pages load faster, but often the problem is that the site you’re talking to is slow, and so your fast connection doesn’t help.
Everybody hates waiting
Last year some researchers from the Work Foundation spent a few weeks living in the same house as families with broadband.
They found that the always-on bit didn’t seem that important because few real people leave their computers turned on all the time anyway.
They also found that people didn’t really notice how fast the connection was, as long as it was fast enough.
Everybody hates waiting around for a web page, and we all like it when we can get files faster, but generally this wasn’t a big deal.
What really mattered was that the Internet connection was there when you wanted it.
Also, that the charge was the same however much you used it, and that it didn’t keep dropping the connection halfway through copying a big file or when you were sending email.
Maybe NTL shouldn’t call their slow service ‘broadband’, even if it is just the right thing for people who are fed up with dialup but don’t want to spend the extra on a really fast connection.
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