On Rad�s Radar

Don't Be Like House Hunters

By Peter Radizeski, RAD-INFO Inc.  |  June 17, 2014

I’m watching House Hunters where the buyers looked at 15 homes in their budget and complain about each of them. I can relate. Due to broadband marketing and pricing, buyers get shell-shocked with the price of dedicated Internet bandwidth.

Buyers hear 10mbps of Internet for less than $200. However, what they don’t hear is that broadband is best effort service with up to 10mbps, which experiences congestion due to oversubscription of the service. In an article about ConnectNYC, there is a reference to Verizon FiOS (News - Alert) having “a load factor that causes it to perform like a DSL connection.”

Broadband also means that over the top services like VoIP or cloud services may experience unexpected hiccups. With dedicated Internet circuits, there aren’t any restrictions on the access to the whole Internet. There’s no port blocking or oversubscription. Dedicated Internet is your own unrestricted pipe to the Internet.

Sometimes the construction time and cost for fiber optic pipes throw the buyers off. Construction can be as quick as 90 days and as long as a year. The uncertainty is a challenge. Buyer expectations have to be managed; the project itself also has to be supervised.

In the article about ConnectNYC, the NYC Economic Development Corp. pays out $50,000 to connect businesses to dedicated fiber connections to the Internet. Construction costs can easily reach that. Also, there is some hardware and preparation required at the buyer’s premises to terminate the fiber optic circuit.

Once fiber is connected though, there isn’t a limit on the speed of access. Buyers can receive anywhere from 10 MB to 1 gigabit to 100 gigabits of access. And this is symmetric access – 10 x 10 or 1 GB x 1 GB. Broadband is asymmetric, with the upload speed usually a fraction of the download speed. This primarily will affect data backup, large file uploads, real-time communications, and VPN connection.

Like the Realtor explaining to the buyers the comparables and home value, agents should be painting a picture of the reality of broadband Internet access vs. dedicated Internet access –  especially for a company that is leveraging cloud services and real-time communications.

Peter Radizeski is head of telecom consulting agency RAD-INFO (News - Alert) Inc. (http://rad-info.net/).




Edited by Stefania Viscusi