Is it just me, or has there been a significant decline in broadband capacity lately? Shouldn’t it be getting faster, not slower? I started to think it was just my network or possibly an issue in my area, however, I have spoken to other people on different ISP’s in different areas, experiencing similar issues.

There is a common misconception about broadband connectivity. Your connection is like a pipe, this is generally static, the size of the pipe won’t change. If you get 2mbps downstream and 500kbps upstream, that is fairly static, with ADSL, which most home users have, it will change when you restart your router. For connections like fibre or DDS, it is absolutely fixed. ADSL does vary, and there can be a number of factors that affect the actual bandwidth you get, including distance of your connection from the local exchange, other broadband connections in your area (we all still sharing the same copper), local lines issues, and a host of others.

The size of your pipe though, does not determine the performance you get. It is a factor. Chances are, you have plenty of capacity on your "pipe" between you and the ISP’s equipment in the local telco exchange. The problem with the Internet, is that it will only be as fast as the slowest part of the connection. The weakest link in the chain if you will. If there is a major bottleneck in part of the core ISP’s infrastructure, for example, they have a router or switch that is completely at capacity, then this will determine the actual upload and download speed you get. Don’t get me wrong, if we could all have fibre into our houses, that is absolutely the best option, but it is not the entire solution. Wellington has wide availability of fibre optic cable connections for nearly over 10 years, but there are customers I know on that type of connection with major performance issues because whilst fibre is a very high capacity connectivity option, it is now, at capacity.

It could be that you are connecting to a server in the US somewhere, in which case, it might have nothing to do with your ISP at all. It could be the data centre where the web server is hosted has network capacity issues, or any hop along the route. All you can expect from your ISP is that they take all reasonable measures to ensure no bottlenecks on their domestic network, and they should be able to get you out through the international gateway to the major International destinations, particularly the West Coast of the USA as many, many services will be hosted there.

I eliminated the possibility of a local network issue and I checked my router and the actual connection between my house and exchange is fine. So next I did some testing on my actual throughput at Speedtest.net. Here are the results:

Auckland to Auckland

This is very disappointing. With XADSL connections, which is what we all have now, you should not really have a connection less then 2mbps. The upstream is even more disappointing. If all you want to do is download, then it is not such an issue, but I have many applications where I need fast connectivity in both directions.

Auckland to San Francisco

This is even worse. The further away you are going, the slower it will be, but any way you look at it, this is not good.

The Dirty Little Secret of ISPs

I used to work for an Internet Service Provider years ago, and so I know a lot about how that type of business works. This is how it breaks down:

• As an ISP you are basically buying big "pipes" and then looking to sell usage of that pipe to lots of customers
• So you start out by buying a pipe big enough for 1000 customers to use it concurrently
• When you have 100 customers, you are losing money, but the performance for those 100 customers is unbelievable.
• Based on this, you actually get a great name in the marketplace and get more customers
• When you get to say customer 500, you are starting to make a small profit because you are now more than covering the costs of your big fat pipe
• The performance is not quite as good though, but still good enough that the customers are happy
• Once you get to customer 1000, you are making good profit. You count on not all 1000 customers using the pipe at the same time, so that you can maximise profitability. The problem though, is that when they are all using it, the performance is not good.
• Once to get to customer 1500, you are making mad money, because your costs haven’t really increased, as you’ve still got the same pipe. This is where it gets tricky, and some ISP’s can choose to just keep costs low and monitor the churn rate (the rate at which customers leave versus new customers signing up). You tell the help desk to tell the customers it is their router, the telco, their WiFi network, anything other than the truth, which is that they just don’t want to pay for extra capacity because it will screw their profit margins.

Now this isn’t necessarily true of all ISPs, however, my personal experience has been that when new companies enter the market, their performance is fantastic, but as they obviously gain more traction and market share it seems to decline. This has been the case 3 times in the last 6 years that I can recall.

Therefore, the best thing to do is to keep moving to the newest ISP in the market and once performance starts to decline, move on to the next new one.