<aside> 💡 This document discusses the benefits of choosing a local ISP over incumbent providers. It emphasizes the limitations of DSL and other legacy systems, the availability of local support, and the economic and employment benefits of keeping money and opportunities within the community. While customers may be able to "make do" with DSL or other providers, they will sacrifice significant benefits that a local ISP can provide.
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When selling service from your new local ISP there will always be many questions to answer from perspective customers as well as a certain amount of apprehension that will have to be overcome simply from being a new organization that customers are going to have a certain amount of skepticism that they will recieve the same (let alone better) quality of service than the provider they’ve used for decades (even if they are disatissified with that provider).
When introducing the service, marketing, and selling the service to portential customers there are several areas that should be emphasized and particular ways to emphasize the value this service provides that are not only better but qualities no other provider can or ever will provide.
First let’s understand what the term “broadband” means, as the term is something that changes over time. Broadband is used as a term used to refer to a class of internet connection that meets certain modern standards of connection speed capable of supporting current and common applications, user activities, and technologies. In the United States, “Broadband” (as it is defined by the FCC) must meet the minimum speeds of 25mb/s download and 3mb/s upload(which many argue itself is an outdated standard; there are concerted efforts to update that standard definition in the United States to 100mb/s down / 100mb/s up “symmetric” speeds which several countries have already adopted as a minimum connection standard).
The first and more important differentiation to make is that DSL service is not broadband. DSL is a fully outdated and obsolete technology incapable of meeting the demands of modern internet activities.
DSL provides an average speeds of 6mb/s download and 1mb/s upload (during peak times those speeds will typically drop even lower to 2mb/s down and 256kb/s upload). If the customer is close enough to the DMARC (or DSL “hub”) those speeds can occasionally appear to peak to 12mb/s download and 2mb/s upload using data compression and speedtest servers located on the ISP’s network (i.e. not running a speedtest out to the actual internet).
The same is true of other legacy systems like high altitude satelite internet services provided by carriers like ViaSat and HugesNet. These services provide average speeds in the range of 10mb/s download and 1mb/s (or less) upload speeds. These services also imply a significant increase in connection latency, as each packet must first travel 22,000 miles up to a sattelite, another 22,000m miles down to an earth station, then to the connections destination, and then back again. With the speed of light being 186,000mph that means it takes an average of 0.236 seconds (or 236ms) just to make the trip up to a sattelite and back. This added latency makes real-time streaming or gaming effectively impossible, or at best provide a very poor end-user experience*.* These services are also notorious high cost of service, extremely low data caps, and very expensive overage charges.
This means that DSL and high altitude satellite service will never be capable of providing even simple services like zoom video calls, which requires at least 2mb/s download and uplaod speeds for a 1:1 person call, or provide 4K quality video streaming which requires as much as an average of 25-30mb/s of download bandwidth.
Video conferencing applications like zoom are particularly good examples to use when explaining why receiving actual broadband level service is crucial as it is something integral to remote learning, telemedicine, and job interviews, among other examples. As this is something that DSL service will never be capable of supporting it leaves customers at a severe disadvantage to the point of being 2nd class citizens in an increasily digital world.
Broadband service is crucial for individuals and families now, and increasingly more so with each passing day. Reguardless of if a user is spending regular time in video conference calls, or regularly using more bandwidth-intensive tasks, being relagated to DSL service where they can’t participate in is significantly limiting socially, educationally, and (perhaps most importantly) economically.
At best DSL may appear “adequate” to customers who have never had any other service availible because they have not been exposed to the advantages that even minimum broadband speeds open up to the average household.
Even in the pilot phase the network the service that will be provided to all customers is well above the minimum requirements to qualify as broadband service. Using the current Starlink service customers will recieve an average speeds of 100-200mb/s download, and 10-20mb/s upload or better.
Once the network has fiber connectivity speeds will be capable of increasing customer speeds up to 500mb/s+ symmetric speeds (depending on customer hardware). For customers even even the base-level hardware they will be capable of receiving speeds of 100-150mb/s symmetric speeds.
This means even with the base-level hardware package even a large family will be capable of utilizing bandwidth intensive tasks simultaneously without impacting eachothers activities or causing the service to become congested to the point of impacting usability.