Why It's not about the "G' 's! and the 'b' 's

Every once in a while it happens that my TV is on while Im messing around on the laptop. One of the 'news' items on the last week was that one of the Telco's was launching a broadband service that would guarantee well over 8MegaBytes of data. huh! This was followed by the usual market speak....it will be super fast..yada yada yada!!!

On the same note the papers have all sort's of G's being advertised. 2G,2.5G,3G and next up for your consumption is 4G.....

Sometimes the market speak can be quite hilarious, other times- not so much. On the Kictanet mailing list, a search for complaints, promises, bandwidth, unlimited etc gives an indicator of the kind of confusion marketing a service purely on offered capacity and 'take home bits' without making an attempt at educating the consumer can create. The case linked above helped get out some very interesting issues.

One I thing we (the industry) need to take a keen on is the fact that the more info consumers have, the easier it gets. Information on coverage,regional QOS (site to site latency/jitter) etc shoul d probably be availed. Customers should be allowed a forum to vent and networks use that as a honey pot of sorts. Do we support IPv6? provide the info before its asked for. Network engineers need to collaborate more.

Managing customer expectations/interactions and the role of CCK    as a consumer advocate is also not very clear.

Considering ISP's have been there longer than traditional telco's in the data arena, its funny they still do not have a QOS policy for data. (I take that back, even if they had one I'm not too sure they can enforce it - they can try but ehhh)....It might turn out to be the old Jambonet 'block' all VOIP musical chairs with ISP's...somehow Jambonet used to be left standing....now those were good days!!!

If I am in a coverage hole for 3G, am I right in accusing the vendor of poor service? what if my phone 'hops' from 3G to 2G, If on an unlimited data plan what gives, what is this downgrade my speed (bps) maneno? did I pay for a specific QOS? If I did how do I measure it? can the guy selling it to me even measure it? what of Wimax, LTE when it gets sold...?....