HAMILTON – It’s clear broadband is essential to economic prosperity, quality of life and community development but there is little consensus around what the definition of broadband should be, says Jason Lowe, vice-president of Clearcable Networks.
The CRTC has set its sights on establishing a baseline of universal broadband service across the country that will set criteria for government funding for network infrastructure.
The regulator has defined broadband as 50 Mbps download by 10 Mbps upload and called for every Canadian to have wired and wireless access and unlimited usage. But Lowe told last week’s Clearcable Summit in Hamilton that a complete definition has to include availability, packet loss, latency and jitter and there is no agreement on those parameters with industry stakeholders.
“Initially, the CRTC said a definition would be reached by June 28, 2017. But it’s not even close to consensus. The only consensus is on speed and that’s because the CRTC defined it.”
A definition will determine what network projects will be eligible for the Connect to Innovate fund, which is $500 million for rural and remote communities over five years, and the CRTC’s Universal Service Objective monies, a five-year $750 million local service subsidy.
Internet providers will be required to prove they are meeting the standards but there is no agreement even on how to measure performance, says Lowe. Will measurements be taken from a customer’s home to the geographically nearest internet exchange point or the lowest latency IXP (internet exchange point)?
Will that be on-net or off-net?
Should acceptable latency be less than 100 milliseconds or 50? Should packet loss be less than 1% or less than 0.5%?
What about availability? Is 99.99% good enough? Or should it be 99.999%?
“How fast is fast? When we talk about the internet, what can we measure reliably to explain the customer experience?” said Rob McCann, president of Clearcable Networks in his address to the Summit.
“It’s difficult to measure and the industry disagrees on how it should be done. The metrics have to be useful if funding is built on that.” – Rob McCann, Clearcable
“It’s difficult to measure and the industry disagrees on how it should be done. The metrics have to be useful if funding is built on that.”
When broadband is defined as 5 Mbps or above, 96% of Canadians have access to broadband, says Lowe. He says there doesn’t appear to be any solid data around how many Canadians have access to 50 Mbps service.
What is clear is the definition of broadband has been in constant exponential shift since its emergence in the mid-1990s with speeds of 400 Kbps by 100. Projected top-end network speeds will be 1 Gbps by 100 Mbps by 2020 and it’s not even possible to predict what they’ll be just five years later, says Lowe.
Those jumps in speed have little to do with government definitions. They are driven by emerging technology platforms, starting with Napster in 1999, YouTube in 2005 and Netflix in 2007. And they are often coming at no increased cost for customers.
“The drivers of the future will determine what broadband is. We know that OTT video will be the driver for several years, including 4K and 8K TV content. You can buy a 4K smart TV cheaper today than you could by a 1K TV three or four years ago.”
Phones and tablets will soon ask Netflix and other streaming platforms for 4K content and virtual reality will have a big, but as-yet unknown broadband impact, he says. Cloud services and connected devices within homes will also drive constant traffic on home networks and beyond.
“50 by 10 seems reasonable now but in 10 years it could be completely inadequate. This shift is just going to continue, as crazy as that sounds.”
The exponential growth in IXP traffic, mostly driven by the heavy demands of video, “is driving the need to better interconnect. The more we connect, the more efficient we become,” said McCann.
He says diversity is the answer to handling volume, the demands on download and upload speeds on a fully deployed DOCSIS (expected by 2020), and the ever-growing traffic over wireless.
“There is not one solution for all problems. There needs to be more diverse networks, especially in the context of the internet of things.”
