Sep

24

Broadband Truth in Advertising.

sascha's picture

A new concept from the friendly folks at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative:

    For Immediate Release
    September 24, 2009

    The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative (OTI) is calling for Truth-in-Labeling by our nation's broadband operators. OTI has developed a set of disclosure standards to provide the broadband market-place with a much-needed tool to allow consumers to better understand their broadband subscriptions and compare plans among different operators.

    "As the Federal Communications Commission creates a national broadband policy to drive affordable broadband deployment, a key facet of this plan will be empowering customers with the information they need to make informed choices among Internet service providers," stated Sascha Meinrath, Director of New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. "'Truth in Broadband Advertising' is the key element that ensures that the general public can compare and choose their best broadband options."

    OTI has created a sample Broadband Truth-in-Labeling disclosure, in an effort to establish a standardized label for operators to provide consumers with essential information about their broadband subscriptions, including Internet speed, service guarantees, prices, service limits, and other related elements. The label aims at educating consumers about the contents of broadband services to create transparency in the market and increase competition, innovation and consumer welfare.

    For full text of the proposal: http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/broadband_truth_labeling.
    Please contact Kate Brown with further inquiries at 202-596-3365 or brown@newamerica.net.

    About the New America Foundation
    The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States.

    About the Open Technology Initiative
    The Open Technology Initiative formulates policy and regulatory reforms to support open architectures and open source innovations and facilitates the development and implementation of open technologies and communications networks.

Tags:
»
  1. CraigM (not verified) on Tue, 2009-09-29 19:43

    Sascha - I like the idea of the "Broadband Label". Is there a forum somewhere for discussion, questions, etc.?  Or is your blog here a good place for that?

     I'm interested in discussing things like:

    • Do you have a glossary or definitions?
    • What do you mean by "Minimum speed at the border router"? Do you mean ingress, egress or throughput? Or do you mean all three?
    • Why do you only have a service guarantee box for the border router? Shouldn't there also be service guarantees for the edge router? And what about a service guarantee for the backbone network?  My internet service isn't complete without the first mile (to the edge), middle mile (to the border) and the backbone.
    • And what about companies who provide first mile, middle mile and backbone, (ie. AT&T) what does "Minimum speed at the border router" mean?
    • And how do we express in the label the far end service levels, what our peers, content providers and service providers have? That affects the consumer's service too.
    • Why only have access, speed and capacity in the label? Shouldn't all the other necessary, traditional and customary services of an ISP be included? DNS, DHCP, IP addresses, NAT, PAT, email?
    • Why did you choose "Minimum speed at xxx router" as a criteria? IP networks are (by design) unreliable and the Internet Protocol only provides best effort delivery. Did you mean to put "Typical speed at xxx router" or "Average speed at xxx router" in here?

    I think this is a great idea and would like to understand your design and discuss it more.

    Cheers,
    -Craig-

    2. Post new comment

    The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
    • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

    More information about formatting options