What Broadband Speed Can Do - and Can’t

[Commentary] A decade ago, Verizon laid the groundwork for gigabit networks when we first started architecting FiOS, our top-rated fiber-to-the-home service. We committed over $23 billion to deploy a fiber network that would one day deliver Gigabit speeds. At the time, 10 Mbps was considered ridiculously fast, and when we introduced FiOS with a top speed of 30 Mbps (much faster than anything available at the time), our technicians actually had to tweak customer PCs to make sure they could handle that speed. But offering a high speed connection to the home does not tell the full story when it comes to delivering the best possible and most capable broadband service. A high number of bits-per-second-connection alone isn't sufficient, because other factors aside from speed affect the quality and capability of a connection. Internet traffic usually has to “hop” through many points in the “network of networks” to reach its final destination. As a result, latency (or the lag in how long it takes for packets to reach a destination) and jitter (how “smoothly” packets arrive at their destination) matter a lot when it comes to quality and performance. So do a number of network architecture issues, like the development and adoption of video delivery protocols. Bandwidth doesn’t cure all problems, and sometimes even with lots of bandwidth, other factors can significantly affect how well services work.