The study was geared toward finding what broadband consumers experience "in the wild" as opposed to what companies advertise. It used data from eight million tests done in May by Speedtest.net, the largest of many free connection-testing services on the web.

After debating with a group of experts about how consumers use the net today and how they would define "quality," the authors gave a heavy weighting toward download speed, but also considered upload speeds and "latency," a rough measure of response time.

"It's a first stab at coming up with country broadband quality scores," said professor Alastair Nicholson, who oversaw the students carrying out the study. He was presenting the findings at the start of the International Broadcasting Conference.

"You could have questions like, was eight million samples enough, were the searches for expert advice appropriate, were they biased? All scoring or indexing is subject to bias. But it's a first attempt at objectivity."

He said experts believe uploading speeds will become more important in the future as users will send more video data, and Japan is well-placed to take advantage of that trend.

The study found no correlation between consumer prices and national performance, said Fernando Gil de Bernabe y Varela, a consultant for Cisco, which commissioned it.

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Posted at 06:11AM Sep 15, 2008 by Kevin P McAuliffe in Inform  |  Comments[0]