The term broadband commonly refers to high-speed Internet access that is always on and faster than the traditional dial-up access. Broadband includes several high-speed transmission technologies such as:
The broadband technology you choose will depend on a number of factors. These may include whether you are located in an urban or rural area, how broadband Internet access is packaged with other services (such as voice telephone and home entertainment), price, and availability.
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Subscribers can access their cable modem service by simply turning on their computers, without dialing-up an ISP. You can still watch cable TV while using it. Transmission speeds vary depending on the type of cable modem, cable network, and traffic load. Speeds are comparable to DSL.
BPL is the delivery of broadband over the existing low- and medium-voltage electric power distribution network. BPL speeds are comparable to DSL and cable modem speeds. BPL can be provided to homes using existing electrical connections and outlets. BPL is an emerging technology that is available in very limited areas. It has significant potential because power lines are installed virtually everywhere, alleviating the need to build new broadband facilities for every customer.
In telecommunications, cable Internet access, shortened to cable Internet, is a form of broadband Internet access which uses the same infrastructure as a cable television. Like digital subscriber line and fiber to the premises services, cable Internet access provides network edge connectivity (last mile access) from the Internet service provider to an end user. It is integrated into the cable television infrastructure analogously to DSL which uses the existing telephone network. Cable TV networks and telecommunications networks are the two predominant forms of residential Internet access. Recently, both have seen increased competition from fiber deployments, wireless, and mobile networks.
Broadband cable Internet access requires a cable modem at the customer's premises and a cable modem termination system (CMTS) at a cable operator facility, typically a cable television headend. The two are connected via coaxial cable or a hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) plant. While access networks are referred to as last-mile technologies, cable Internet systems can typically operate where the distance between the modem and the termination system is up to 160 kilometres (99 mi). If the HFC network is large, the cable modem termination system can be grouped into hubs for efficient management.
Most Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) cable modems restrict upload and download rates, with customizable limits. These limits are set in configuration files which are downloaded to the modem using the Trivial File Transfer Protocol, when the modem first establishes a connection to the provider's equipment.[2] Some users[specify] have attempted to override the bandwidth cap and gain access to the full bandwidth of the system, by uploading their own configuration file to the cable modem - a process called uncapping.
In most residential broadband technologies, such as cable Internet, DSL, satellite internet, or wireless broadband, a population of users share the available bandwidth. Some technologies share only their core network, while some including cable internet and passive optical network (PON) also share the access network. This arrangement allows the network operator to take advantage of statistical multiplexing, a bandwidth sharing technique which is employed to distribute bandwidth fairly, in order to provide an adequate level of service at an acceptable price. However, the operator has to monitor usage patterns and scale the network appropriately, to ensure that customers receive adequate service even during peak-usage times. If the network operator does not provide enough bandwidth for a particular neighborhood, the connection would become saturated and speeds would drop if many people are using the service at the same time, or drop out completely. Operators have been known to use a bandwidth cap, or other bandwidth throttling technique; users' download speed is limited during peak times, if they have downloaded a large amount of data that day.[3]
The initial Measuring Broadband America Fixed Broadband Report was published in August 2011[3] and presented the first broad-scale study of directly measured consumer broadband performance throughout the United States. Including this current Report, eleven reports have now been issued.[4] These reports provide a snapshot of fixed broadband Internet access service performance in the United States utilizing a comprehensive set of performance metrics. As part of an open data program, all methodologies used in the program are fully documented, and all collected data is published for public use without any restrictions. The collected performance data can be used for various additional studies and analysis.
The Internet continually evolves in its architecture, performance, and services. Accordingly, we will continue to adapt our measurement and analysis methodologies to further improve the collective understanding of performance characteristics of broadband Internet access. By doing so we aim to help the community of interest across the board, including consumers, technologists, service providers, and regulators.
As can be seen in Chart 1.1, there is considerable difference between the offered average weighted speed tier by technology. Chart 2 plots the weighted average of the top 80% ISP tiers by technology for the last four years.[13] All technologies showed increases in the set of advertised download speeds by ISPs. For the September-October 2020 period, the weighted mean advertised speeds for DSL technology was 21 Mbps, which lagged considerably behind the weighted mean advertised download speeds for cable and fiber technologies of 178 Mbps and 447 Mbps, respectively. DSL technology speed increased from 13 Mbps to 21 Mbps from 2019 to 2020, a 60% increase. In comparison, cable technology showed an 15% increase in weighted mean advertised download speed from 2019 to 2020. The largest increase in weighted average advertised speeds, however, was for Fiber technology, which showed a 114% increase from 2019 to 2020.
As can be seen in Chart 6, cable and fiber ISPs performed better than DSL ISPs with respect to their provision of consistent speeds. Customers of Charter, Comcast, Cox, Mediacom, Optimum, Frontier Fiber, and Verizon, for example, experienced median download speeds that were very consistent; i.e., they provided greater than 95% of the advertised speed during peak usage period to more than 80% of panelists for more than 80% of the time. In particular, Charter, Comcast, Cox and Mediacom provided 100% or greater than their advertised speed during the peak usage period to more than 80% of their panelists for more than 80% of the time. In contrast, the 80/80 consistent download speed for Cincinnati Bell DSL was 46% of the advertised speed.
Chart 8 shows that ISPs using fiber technology have the lowest packet loss, and that ISPs using DSL technology tend to have the highest packet loss. As shown in this chart, 4% to 8% of DSL subscribers experience 1% or greater packet loss. The corresponding numbers for cable and fiber are 0% to 5% and 0% to 0.6%, respectively. Within a given technology class, packet loss also varies among ISPs. It should be noted that most ISPs use fiber for their backbone irrespective of the access technology they may deploy.
Chart 1.1 above summarizes the weighted average of the advertised download speed offerings[31] for each participating ISP for the last 4 years (September 2017 to September-October 2020), where the weighting is based upon the number of subscribers to each tier, grouped by the access technology used to offer the broadband Internet access service (DSL, cable, or fiber). Only the top 80% tiers (by subscriber number) of each participating ISP were included. Chart 10 below shows the corresponding weighted average of the advertised upload speeds among the measured ISPs. The computed weighted average of the advertised upload speed of all the ISPs is 56.6 Mbps; this is a 85% increase from 30.5 Mbps in 2019 and a 332% increase from 13.1 Mbps in 2017.[32]
Chart 17.1 illustrates information concerning 80/80 consistent upload speeds. While all the upload 80/80 speeds were slightly lower than the median speed, the differences were more marked in DSL. Charts 6 and 17.1 reflect that cable and fiber technologies behaved more consistently than DSL technology both for download as well as upload speeds.
Chart 18 below shows the weighted median latencies, by technology and by advertised download speed, for terrestrial technologies. For all terrestrial technologies, latency varied little with advertised download speed. DSL service typically had higher latencies, and lower latency for DSL correlated more closely to achieving advertised download speed, compared to lower latency correlation to advertised download speed for either cable or fiber. Cable latencies ranged between 13 ms to 26 ms, fiber latencies between 9 ms to 13 ms, and DSL between 21 ms to 65 ms.
In Section 3.C above, we present complementary cumulative distributions for each ISP based on test results across all service tiers. Below, we provide tables showing selected points on these distributions by each individual ISP. In general, DSL technology showed performance between 0% and 44% of advertised speed for at least 95% of their subscribers. Among cable-based companies, the average download speeds experienced by at least 95% of subscribers were between 75% and 98% of advertised rates. Fiber-based services provided a range from 93% to 99% of advertised download speeds for at least 95% of subscribers.
Availability of Internet access was once limited, but has grown rapidly. In 1995, only 0.04 percent of the world's population had access, with well over half of those living in the United States,[1] and consumer use was through dial-up. By the first decade of the 21st century, many consumers in developed nations used faster broadband technology, and by 2014, 41 percent of the world's population had access,[2] broadband was almost ubiquitous worldwide, and global average connection speeds exceeded one megabit per second.[3] 2ff7e9595c
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