North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Acceptable DSL Speeds (ms based)

  • From: Andrew Lee
  • Date: Wed May 04 12:24:30 2005



I have found that "acceptable speeds" for residential users will vary widely from one area of the country to another. To a large degree it is a perception issue rather than an empirical one (ie www.cnn.com loads "too slowly"). The best metric for the happiness of a DSL customer base seems to be simply how many complaints you get and how many switch to cable modem. Granted, there are always a silent majority who are unhappy and will never let you know until they cancel, but the number of complaints you do get can usually be used to extrapolate the rest.

That being said, I think it would be a useful thing for a provider to have a local way to measure speed from the customer to some relatively close point in the network, and then you as a company can evaluate if your upstreams suckiness more accurately than a customer could. I think it would be reasonable to expect that a customer should get near line rate across your network and to the first hop of your upstream. After that, it depends on the suckiness factor.

Luke Parrish wrote:

Does anyone have a good resource for acceptable speeds for home DSL customers?

I would like to see acceptable speeds from the customer CPE to the first layer 3 hop, the hop to the upstream and the hop that leaves the upstream network.

Thanks
luke


Luke Parrish
Centurytel Internet Operations
318-330-6661