Every month, throngs of people are connecting to the Internet via broadband for the first time ever. And according to Dave Caputo, CEO of Sandvine, about half of them call their provider that first month to report that their connection “seems slow.” Providers don’t know what to tell them, Caputo said at a panel discussion this week. It’s a subjective assessment, perhaps fueled by advertising that promises lightning-fast speeds sure to blow consumers away. But problems like these linger in part because consumers lack an adequate vocabulary to describe the increasing diversity of broadband offerings. (How fast is fast?)
And the problem is going to get worse.
New equipment from Alcatel-Lucent this month is designed to give consumers more choice in their performance level. As the speed gap between, say, hard-core gamers and best-effort emailers widens, will we continue to use the word broadband to describe both offerings? At some point, if you’re at a friend’s house and want to use a particular rich Internet app, it won’t be enough to ask if your friend has broadband. We could distinguish these tiers by referring to the megabit-per-second numbers that designate different tiers, but those numbers are notoriously inaccurate. And of course, speed isn’t the only criterion that matters. When the bottom line is the quality of your experience, latency and jitter are important too.
In addressing net neutrality concerns, one of the first actions the FCC is likely to take is a mandate of transparency among broadband providers. But whatever information they are forced to disclose to users about the quality of their service isn’t likely to make much sense to users, said Blair Levin, managing director of Stifel Nicolaus, in another panel discussion this week.
“God knows what consumers are going to read about the reset protocol of…whatever,” he said.
Broadband providers might ease that situation — and reduce the number of calls they get each month about service that “seems slow” — if they helped to develop and convey a new consumer vocabulary for broadband offerings that isn’t based on exaggerated promises, proprietary marketing brands or technical jargon. Or something like that.
Any suggestions?
E-mail me at ed.gubbins@penton.com.
A reader sent the following response to me via email (and in case you’re wondering, no, it wasn’t Jack Nicholson):
What a concept, I think it is called truth in advertising and unfortunately, it is discouraged by everyone from the FCC to the former President of the United States. What? Tell the truth? With words that are unambiguous?
If you do that, the marketing hype that surrounds the products could not be maintained. Without the hype, how could you market the endless specials that both sound and are too good to be true? How would you protect the profit margins or the jobs of the countless advertising and marketing people who design the endless ads and spin associated with the hyped product of the day?
I certainly believe that what you are calling for would be in the best interests of smaller providers and certainly in the best interest of the consumer. However, neither of these groups has a particularly effective lobby in the places that matter, the FCC nor the halls of congress. Without changes to regulations or laws, this may well be an impossible hill to climb. With the FCC just finally getting around to noticing that 200kbits is not broadband, is it any wonder that no one understands what is going on?
All sarcasm aside, the effort to define the services and definitions is not particularly difficult. It is done all of the time by both small and large providers to business customers in both SLA (Service Level Agreements) and QoS (Quality of Service Agreements). The problem with extending this to the consumer product is that the consumer wants the biggest, fastest, prettiest, expensive car for the price of a Yugo. This pushes providers to use puffery to entice the consumer to buy, thereby leading to disappointment. As long as people are allowed to advertise with partial truths and even outright non-truths (lies is such an ugly word, isn’t it?) such as statements that cable is faster than DSL, well it might be but that is certainly not an absolute and the 3-7 Megs that they tout are in reality much slower than the 20-25 Megs achievable with ADSL2+. Of course, all of the disclaimers that are either read really fast or in such small print that they are unreadable may approach the truth, but who ever hears or reads that?
The truth is hard, people want easy, people want cheap. The truth? They don’t want to handle the truth.