Speed Isn’t Everything

The marketing arm of the broadband industry spends a lot of time convincing folks that the most important part of a broadband product is download speed. This makes sense if fiber of cable are competing in a market against slower technologies. But it seems like most advertising about speed is to convince existing customers to upgrade to faster speeds. While download speed is performance, the industry doesn’t spend much time talking about the other important aspects of broadband:

• Upload Speed: Households that make multiple simultaneous upload connections like video calls, gaming, or connecting to a work or school server quickly come to understand the importance of upload speeds if they don’t have enough. This was the primary problem that millions of households subscribed to cable companies encountered during the pandemic when they suddenly were using a lot of upload.
• Oversubscription: Home broadband connections are served by technologies that share bandwidth across multiple customers. Your internet services provider is very unlikely to tell you the number of people sharing your node or the amount of bandwidth feeding your node. The Federal Communications Commission’s broadband labels require ISPs to disclose their network practices, but nobody tells you statistics like this that would help you compare the ISPs competing for your business.
• Reliability. If operated properly, fiber networks tend to be the most reliable. But there are exceptions, and it all boils down to the quality of your local ISP as it does to the technology. It’s hard to say that any factor is more important than reliability if your ISP regularly has network outages when you want to use broadband.