Sandvine recently posted some high-level findings from our most recent Broadband Phenomena study.  When conducting a study like this, the sheer volume of data is almost overwhelming, and there are endless interesting observations that can be found by peering deeply.  Part of the challenge is to highlight points that are interesting to a broad global audience, new enough to grab attention, and simple enough to be conveyed in a few sentences.  This last point is particularly challenging given the complex and dynamic nature of the Internet and the technologies that enable the worldwide connectivity on which we’ve come to rely.

I’d like to take this space to expand on a few of our high-level findings beyond what was possible in a press release or summary document.

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One of the themes in the Berkman Report is that of the role of government investment in broadband. This post, from Ars Technica, shows how public money can be used as a threat or as an investment floor. In this case, a municipality chose to start building fiber to the home. The local telecom wasn’t too happy about this, dragged their feet, took it to court, but ultimately got some trucks and trenchers together and got to work. Now the consumers have a choice of 2 distinct fibers. That is probably too much cost, and its likely that an open-access policy would have helped… open-access on the municipal fiber.

Now, why might a municipality be able to invest, and a telecom company cannot? The municipality might have a different weighting on factors such as return on investment. Faced with the prospect of 0.01% interest, the local government might feel infrastructure has a better payback. The telecoms company might instead be looking for a 24 month return on capital. The municipality may also be able to weight intangible factors like increase in property tax due to higher income people settling there.

Let’s make transparency meaningful.

Even though you can hazard a guess when you’ve walked a mile or poured a pint, there’s definitely something abstract about downloading a gig for most people. Take the case of a man who was billed $66,000 dollars by his service provider for downloading what amounted to three movies?  “I would leave my PC on all night, believing that all traffic was included,” he noted. Clearly this guy thought he was on an “all you can eat” bandwidth plan when it actually included 600 megabytes per month and every additional kilobyte cost another 2 cents. Sure this is an extremely rare and sensationalized case but brings up a valid question – where do we draw the line on assuming we are dealing with informed consumers when it comes to broadband?  Should the average consumer need to understand the difference between a kilobyte and a gigabyte?

The fact is that most folks understand the quality of their broadband experience in a very application specific way.  Quality is not about bits and bytes, it’s about clear phone calls, lively online gaming, sharp video and yes, speedy downloads.  There’s an excellent opportunity for broadband providers to communicate the value of their monthly package tiers by breaking them down into easily digestible measurements in language everyone can understand. For example: a 100-gigabyte data tier would be suitable for subscribers that send out 20 million e-mails, or upload 10,000 photos or download 50 movies or 25,000 songs. Amazing what 100-gigabytes offers!

In the end, most consumers will be most satisfied when their service provider sends them a monthly bill that helps them understand their individual online usage patterns and gives them the opportunity to move to the plan that best meets their needs.   Most of us can look to the voice plans we have for our mobile phone to know that its not all that far fetched of a dream.