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MORE ON WIRELESS BROADBAND Today we published a Stock Brief discussing wireless broadband's creeping arrival on the scene. We have received a lot of emails today regarding the issue of what technology will win the broadband high speed internet delivery war. One of the fuzziest issues is exactly how fast is fast, and which technology is actually faster. On that subject, we thought it might be good to point out a recent released study by Keynote Systems, a performance testing company. They tested actual page downloads from 40 different web sites over the course of a month using a straight T-1 connection to the internet backbone, @Home's cable modem delivery, and Pacific Bell's ASDL phone service. The results are not what you might expect.
Interestingly enough, the @Home cable modem system has the highest rated throughput, but it is the slowest in the "evening" hours. Most likely this indicates actual saturation due to multiple users on the system at the same time. The report is interesting in that it shows that investment decisions based upon feature-versus-feature comparisons of technology can be misleading, especially if you take a company's claims at face value. We wish that Keynote had included some kind of wireless broadband system in their testing, but wireless broadband is only just emerging, as today's Brief discusses. In the long run, the technology which is rolled out the fastest is likely to be the one that wins, not the technology that is the fastest, no matter what the performance measurements are. |
