What is broadband?
Views on what constitutes a good definition varied, often quite dramatically, in the feedback from the different ADSL stakeholders.
Telkom went into defensive mode in its feedback and dug up a 2004 Ofcom definition of broadband which says that broadband means a service proving bandwidth greater than 128 kbps.
This is interestingly enough a much lower figure than what Steve Lewis, Telkom’s executive for technical product development, gave in the beginning of 2005.
At the company’s broadband press briefing he said that Telkom viewed broadband as a service with a minimum speed of 192 Kbps.
MWeb followed Telkom’s speed requirements and asked for broadband to be defined as a service which is “consistently faster than dual channel basic rate Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) (128kbps)”.
When one starts to move more towards the consumer side of the spectrum the feeling towards ICASA’s broadband definition changes.
Both MyADSL and ISOC-ZA welcomed the stipulation of broadband as having a minimum download speed of 256 kbps, forcing broadband service providers to offer the minimum speed if they want to punt their product as broadband.
While 256 kbps is a relatively low figure as pointed out by ISOC-ZA, ICASA has left this definition open for amendment from time to time.
Internationally accepted definitions of broadband lift the bar and make the stipulation of 128 kbps look pathetic.
Axis defines broadband as a “high-speed transmission, used to define the speed of communication lines or services and most commonly refers to T1 (1.544 Mbit/s) rates or better”.
Answers.com supports the view that the T1 line is widely considered the starting point for broadband.
An objective and well researched view comes from the International Telecommunication Union Standardization Sector (ITU-T), which has defined broadband as a transmission capacity that is faster than primary rate ISDN, at 1.5 to 2 Mbit/s.
Without an accepted definition the term broadband is open to abuse in South Africa, and as Winston Smith, product manager of Sentech MyWireless, pointed out at last years’ broadband shootout, ‘currently broadband is what you say it is’.
While ICASA’s 256 Kbps is much lower than most international definitions, it is a good starting point and will give bodies like the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa a foundation on which to evaluate false broadband claims.
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