What is the definition of broadband?
In some of the international forums in which I am taking part the question has been asked if we want to develop government policies that will lead to broadband infrastructure being used for digital social and economic developments.
Should we then define what we actually believe broadband to be?
I would like to say upfront that I wouldn’t support this move. I think broadband is a concept and I believe each country will have to develop its own National Broadband Plan, based on its own political, social, economic, historical, technological and geographic situation. What might apply to Australia will most certainly not apply to Rwanda, and what applies to the USA will not apply to China.
However, conceptually, we all have a range of broadband features in common, which we can share with each other on a pick-and-choose basis. The report we are preparing for the UN will actually be something of a guidebook for this..
In our discussion on this topic one of my American colleagues, Frank Coluccio, sent me the following:
There is no authoritative definition for ‘broadband’ – at least not as the word is used today in its many different contexts – regardless of which country is being discussed or how fast the aggregate data signaling rate (speed) of a line or wireless link may be.
I’ve read the replies to this question asked by Paul and it appears that the only criteria that have been considered by anyone to characterize broadband (as opposed to providing a definitive description of it) are the number of potential bits per second (link speed) that can be sent over a medium, and the boundaries of individual states, i.e., quantitative and geographic. Some mention has also been made with respect to the type of ‘applications’ that are carried over links, e.g., telemedicine, gaming, e-government, and so forth, but as applications they are for the most part all equal in weight, since bits do not discriminate over applications.
The term ‘broadband’ has been usurped, leveraged, co-opted, shaped and reshaped again and again, and then stepped upon in a dozen different ways by Telco, Cable TV and vendor marketing departments the world over, in order to describe their various products, bundles, biz-models, and so on, which everyone seems to have no problem accepting, but instead erroneously equate the word with a single monolithic set of qualities and characteristics, that are at best chimeric, leaving to question only the quantitative and geographic criteria as the ones that matter. I submit that none of the definitions offered even vaguely resemble what we should really be seeking to define: connectivity.
A few words on the history of ‘broadband’ follow. I welcome input from the usual suspects in return. I’m making an issue of this because it’s the elephant in virtually everyone’s blind spot that finally has to be aired.
During the telephone industry’s middle-aged years (from approximately the 1940s through the 1970s) television and radio transmission lines, called broadband lines, were installed between studios and antenna sites and over cross-country routes using coaxial and various types of radio links that were described as ‘broad’-band, to differentiate them from ‘voice’-band technologies. At the same time, perhaps beginning in the late 1930s, various forms of common carrier analog multiplexing systems used non-loaded twisted pairs, such as N-carrier, ON-carrier, K-carrier, J-carrier, and later L-carrier, which employed coaxial systems, and, at about the same time, R-carrier systems were being used over microwave systems that employed amplitude modulation and frequency modulation techniques. The common thread shared by all of the above was that they each employed some form of analog modulation and frequency division multiplexing technique, as opposed to what would later be introduced in the late sixties in the form of digital transmission techniques.
Similarly, during the late forties and early fifties the facilities that supported early cable TV deployments also employed RF-type technologies, along with coaxial and microwave systems, and later satellite as well. All of these were likewise referred to as broadband.
The word ‘broadband’ in its earliest iterations was used as a comparative term, signifying ‘broader than’ or greater in bandwidth than, and in the latter case it could easily be seen meaning broader than voice-band, since voice services had been, since the late nineteenth century, the industry’s primary service and focus. Broadband also connoted a channel of sufficient width to encompass multiple narrower-band channels; hence a broadband TV system would carry many narrower band video channels.
The highest modem-produced bit-rate data services of the sixties and early seventies, which were exclusively used by businesses, governments and the Telcos for their own internal purposes, topped out at 200 kbps over specially-conditioned twisted pair and coaxial systems (sometimes achieved by utilizing facilities comparable to T-1 spans and converting them to analog media for AM/FDM forms of transmission). The latter, too, were known as ‘broadband’, in comparison to earlier the limitation that was set at 50 kbps over analog radio and coaxial systems.
Later, commencing circa 1976, when DDS (digital data services) and T-1 digital services began emerging as public offerings (the T1/E1 had already been in use by telephone companies for interoffice trunking purposes since the early 1960s), the term broadband lost much (but not all) of its relevance in the telephony sphere, but continued to describe the underlying technologies supporting TV transmission in that segment instead. The reason it lost its significance in telephony was in deference to the new paradigm that was being shaped around ‘digital’ transmission and switching platforms. At the time, both the N.A. and European digital hierarchies evolved using denominations of capacity such as T1, E1, T3, E3, etc., and later SONET/SDH container sizes as well. ‘Broadband’, however, remained a legacy term that soon began to wain even in the telephony sector. For example, Broadband ISDN, or B-ISD, was a term that was initially used to describe a proposed successor framework designed to supersede the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and it was predicated on asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM, which during the nineteen nineties yielded to Internet protocols, thus reference is seldom if ever made to B-ISDN anymore.
Moving forward to the 1990s, you may recall my mentioning that VDSL was first called BDSL (Broadband Digital Subscriber Line), in recognition of the fact that 90 Mbps and 100 Mbps utilizing twisted copper pair DSL technologies were comparatively much ‘higher than’ ADSL, which was at the time limited to 1.5 Mbps. Again, ‘broadband’ connoted a ‘higher than’ capability, even here, where one form of DSL was being compared to another, irrespective of what type of content was being carried, and equally interestingly, irrespective of the type of modulation and line-coding scheme employed.
If one wants to analyze and list the qualities that make today’s broadband offerings different, when applied to the residential bundled service offerings of six providers whose HSI capabilities are the same, say 10down/2up, it’s easy enough to do. All you need do is compare their non-bit-rate-related attributes, such as their program TV guides and cable channel line-ups and add-ons such as VoD, OOT, etc. and the type of VoIP services made available, and of course the price, as well.
However, such an approach would have nothing to do with the word broadband’s use as a means of establishing a quantitative comparison, but would be relegated to one of listing commercial products in the way of ‘services’ that are made available over the underlying medium’s non-discretionary portion of its overall bit-carrying capability. If we use the original criteria for using the term broadband, then the high-speed Internet (HSI) allocation would necessarily have to be comparatively much higher than the norm, or a speed on the order of 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps for HSI, which would be a relevant grading only for as long a period as it would take for the rest of the pack to catch up. By then it would no longer be considered a comparatively higher bit rate, and so it goes, ad infinity.
Focus on connectivity, not broadband. Connectivity bubbles over with choice and opportunities. Connectivity is generative, not restrictive. On the other hand, broadband, as it’s been popularized today, thwarts choice and limits innovation to the narrowest of “permissible” possibilities as defined by the operator In any case, most of what is now considered the ‘service bundle’ that is carried by broadband today will soon be subsumed by plain vanilla connectivity capabilities before long, anyway, and that will occur in the form of IP-based telephony, where it hasn’t already, Web-TV, and continued access to the vaster richness and other future possibilities enabled by the World Wide Web, as well.
Framing discussions around faux broadband is good business for some, but portends a road to insanity, per Einstein’s definition, and mainly bad for others.
Broadband or Straightaway Connectivity. Choose for yourself.
Frank A. Coluccio
See also:
- Global – Infrastructure – National Broadband Networks (NBN)
- Global – Infrastructure – National Broadband Rollouts Design and Deployment Strategies
- Global – Infrastructure – Next Generation Telecoms
- Global – Infrastructure – The Broadband Commission for Development
Tagged in: Broadband, Global, infrastructure
August 13th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
I agree that broadband is now a concept rather than a specific telecoms service, but surely we still need to define it?
When broadband first appeared, it was characterised by two things: it was always on, allowing customers to surf the internet and make phone calls at the same time, and the speed of data transfer was faster than that of dial-up modems.
In my opinion the term “broadband” has now become synonymous with always-on access to the internet, regardless of the technology that is used to access the network. The idea that the new service will be faster than a previous-generation service can be taken as a given.
What most people are now debating is broadband *performance* (bits per second). Performance targets will be set, they need to be adequate for the tasks to be carried out, and the requirements will change over time. Performance is affected by many different variables in the network, and pinning this down is going to be hard.
On the other hand, the basic concept – always-on access to the internet – is very simple and is likely to remain constant. We do need to define broadband and this short, simple definition is all we need. Life doesn’t have to be complicated.